“Give Up All the Other Worlds” (Learning to Hope)

        How you feel about hope likely depends on your own experiences and circumstances. It’s been portrayed as both salvation and delusion, and many things in between. An important criticism is that passive hope may give us the excuse to just stand idly by, waiting for others to do something. Meanwhile, we can get lost in an imaginary future, postponing our personal and collective wellbeing to some other time. We can even use hope as an excuse to avoid confronting difficulties, from places in ourselves that need healing to unhealthy situations that need to be addressed. This “pie in the sky” kind of hope can too easily just become a practice of accommodating injustice and oppression. As Joe Hill observed, it also makes you an easy mark for religious hucksters looking to get your money and your labor. 

Reflections on the UN Convention on The Rights of the Child

I didn’t learn about the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child until I was living in Cambodia, where it was an important framework for helping us address family violence, human trafficking, and community development. Maybe this isn’t too surprising, since the Convention is still young. It was adopted on this day (November 20) in 1989 by the UN General Assembly and became effective on September 2, 1990, after it was ratified by the required number of members. It is a very basic commitment to honoring and protecting the dignity and humanity of children, and 196 nations, including every member of the United Nations except one, has made that commitment. The one UN member that is still holding out, three decades later, is the USA. 

“Even Where We Mean to Mend Her”: Transforming Culture in an Age of Catastrophic Climate Change

In 1879, Gerard Manley Hopkins celebrated a row of trees and grieved that they had been cut down. His grief expanded from those trees to the hubris of humanity, elegantly and painfully describing how quickly we alter the living world of which we are a part – often to its (and our own) devastation. The result was "Binsey Poplars": 

 My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
    Of a fresh and following folded rank
            Not spared, not one
            That dandled a sandalled
            Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

From Coercion to Connection

Several times in the last months, I have been unexpectedly called upon to discuss my commitment to nonviolence. This used to be a regular occurrence, but it hadn’t happened in some time. Still, I wasn’t exactly caught off guard; it turns out that sharing my experiences and aspirations regarding nonviolence and non-harming are a bit like remembering how to ride a bike. What did surprise me was the realization of how I had become accustomed to not talking about nonviolence. A few weeks ago, I sat in a park with a good friend, someone who has shared similar convictions and experiences, and we reflected together on how our own relationship with nonviolence has grown and changed over the years, and what the role of nonviolence might be now, in a world that is both the same and different from the one we grew up embracing nonviolence. 

Creating a Culture of Care

One of the great gifts my parents gave to me was a commitment to caring for one another. I watched them, and grew up helping out, as they would mow lawns, pick up groceries, provide transportation, babysit, and otherwise provide a helping hand to both family and friends. This was especially the case as people faced sickness and grew close to death. It was an expression of generosity and love, and (most of the time!) it was given without complaint. So, it wasn’t a surprise that, within months of the day I moved away to attend university, my childhood bedroom was converted into what became my grandmother’s hospice room. I would travel home on weekends to visit her and my family, often spending hours sitting on what used to be my bedroom floor, playing guitar and sharing stories with my grandma, and sleeping on the couch, before heading back for class. After her death, that room became the temporary residence of a series of other loved ones, who needed a combination of care, supervision, or just some extra help dealing with the ups and downs of life. 

Guns, Race, and Public Health

As a native Missourian, I have been around gun culture most of my life. We never had guns in my home, but I still took the hunter education gun safety course and learned to shoot. That seemed to be the bare minimum, and many of my friends and family hunted, shot for sport, had a rifle rack in their pickup truck, or carried a pistol in the glove compartment of their car. Eventually, both concealed and open carry became increasingly popular and common. You probably know the stats: in the 2018 Small Arms Survey, the US outpaced the world in the “estimated number of firearms per 100 residents,” with 120.5 civilian-owned guns for every 100 people. For comparison, Yemen had 52.8 and Canada 34.7 guns per 100 people. (“America's gun culture - in seven charts”)

Facing Conspiracies & Reimagining Community

My Personal Roots

       I grew up in the 1980s in a Southern Baptist church, home, and community, but I was not exposed to creationism until my sophomore year of high school. And it was not at church. It was in my AP Biology 2 class at a public school. Our teacher had announced that, to avoid arguments about evolution, we would just be skipping that topic – you know, a topic essential to understanding biology. However, a few students saw an opportunity and brought creationist literature from home. They talked about them during breaks, loaned them out, and encouraged us to go to events and book studies at their churches.