2024 Reads: Sun Wolf by David C. Jeffrey 📚

I like this guy’s ideas, and the sort of grand scope of his universe. His story just needs a better writer to really make it amazing.

Today’s challenge in adulting: paying attention at the tail end of a 3-day class when it’s getting pretty slow. It’s been a good class, but we’ve got diminishing returns at 3:30 on day 3.

Mandatory post.

Gah, Cody Bellinger has a cracked rib. This is not the way I hoped to see Pete Crow-Armstrong in the bigs this season. #Cubs #MLB

I was cleaning up old blog posts here and found this that I wrote back in 2012:

I think it may take the American evangelical church another decade or so to really realize how closely intertwined they are with the Republican party, but my prayer is that the realization hits sooner rather than later. What compounds the issue is that our view of American exceptionalism makes us prideful enough that we are resistant to learn from our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world on the topic.

Little did I expect that, a decade later, the evangelical church would, see it, realize it, and embrace it. God help us.

“Tom Cotton has never seen a left-wing protest he didn’t want crushed at gunpoint.”. Brutal and accurate assessment from Adam Serwer.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/columbia-national-guard-tom-cotton/678163/

Well, this is a fascinating perspective: medievalist Dr. Eleanor Johnson writes on Literary Hub about medieval Christians' view on climate change:

The Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming opens by saying, “We believe the Earth and its ecosystems—created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence—are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing.”

As a scholar of medieval religion, culture, and literature, I am utterly perplexed by this belief, because I study a period and region of history where people were, if anything more devoutly and observantly Christian, and I’m here to tell you: medieval English people had no problem believing in climate change and ecosystemic collapse.

Like contemporary Christians, medieval Christians did believe in a providential God. They also believed Nature’s functionality was guaranteed by His will. But they did not believe that, since Nature was underwritten by divine will, Nature would automatically take care of them.

Instead, they assumed that climate change and ecological disasters were divine punishment for human malfeasance. They believed this, first, because they were living through the Little Ice Age, and everyone could feel its effects; nobody bothered to deny it, because it was obviously happening.

A fascinating contrast to today…

Well, hard to see how this could start worse for the #Stars. Gave up a power play goal in the first 2 minutes, got a goal overturned on an offside review, then gave up a second goal.

Vegas up 2-0 within the first 10 minutes of the game. Ugh.

Great: the Dallas Stars are the #1 seed in the Western Conference.

Not so great: their first round matchup is against Las Vegas, who they failed to beat in any of their 3 opportunities this season.

Here goes nothin’, I guess!

So on a whim I reactivated my micro.blog site and threw 1275 markdown files at it - the entire contents of 20 years of blogging, first on Wordpress, then last year in 11ty. So far, I’m super-impressed. Micro.blog handled the imports and redirects pretty smoothly, has auto-posting to Mastodon and Bluesky, supports emailing, responses, ActivityPub integration… very slick.

I mean, if a week from now I decide it’s not a good fit, I just go change my DNS and point it back at my old domain. But at the moment, this looks like a thing I’ll stick with.

I’m visiting the UK for work this week - my first visit ever. A few thoughts:

• Having a public transit system that seems to work: awesome. I landed at London Heathrow, took a subway, a bus, and a regional train and four hours later had arrived in York, some 200 miles away.
• For my Iowa friends, this would be like flying into Chicago O’Hare and being able to get to Cedar Rapids via public transit. Nifty.
• In-room electric teakettle: delightful, and quick. Why don’t we have them in the US? Oh, because the UK wall voltage is 240v and in the US they would work much more slowly.
• York is a lovely place so far.
• Antique shop here has the same ugly glass display cases that our antique shops in the US have.
• “Antiques” here include tags that say things like ‘Roman, probably 400 BC’.
• Felt like the authentic British experience last night when I spent my dinner in a pub next to three guys at the bar who were enjoying after-work pints and arguing about football.
• Assuming my arranged cab shows up in 30 minutes, now I have to go actually do some work.

More later.

I got to know Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition when I was in high school and my piano teacher assigned me The Gnome. I never got it mastered as much as I wanted, but it was such a fun suite to hack my way through. I listened to the orchestral version of it, and love the gong at the end, but overall I still prefer the piano version.

This video, though, has me reconsidering my opinion. Guitarist Kazuhito Yamashita has arranged the entire Pictures suite for guitar and it is amazing. He has captured both the feel and almost all the notes from the piano version. He varies playing techniques to create lovely textures of sound. And while I’m not up on all the modern classical guitarists, I think it’s safe to say that Yamashita has amazing skill.

I just finished up reading Sarah McCammon’s new book The Exvangelicals and I need to take the time to recommend it here. McCammon, a 40-something NPR journalist, has written a book that’s part memoir and part explainer on where Exvangelicals have come from over the past decade, and, more importantly, why.

When I reviewed Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory earlier this year, I noted at the time that he was joining a list of kindred spirits who I found online or by reading their books, and who turned out to be fellow devout homeschooled kids who grew into adults questioning evangelical distinctives and dismayed by the devolution of white American evangelicalism into Fox News-watching Republican sheep. I named McCammon at this point as another one of those people. Little did I know how familiar her story would be.

I first encountered Sarah McCammon when she was a host on Iowa Public Radio. Eventually I followed her on Twitter, and continued to read and occasionally interact with her as she moved from Iowa to the east coast, eventually to work directly for NPR. Her reporting during the 2016 presidential campaign was nuanced and insightful. In hindsight, I should’ve known why.

In The Exvangelicals, McCammon unpacks her own story and uses it to illustrate the Exvangelical movement. She’s a few years younger than I am, but our stories run parallel tracks: growing up in the Midwest, a devout churchgoing family, culturally sheltered, homeschooled, evangelical youth groups, marrying young, eventually finding her own faith torn as she experienced the wider world. Eventually she left the church and faith fervor of her youth, getting divorced, becoming an Episcopalian, marrying a Jewish man. Despite so much Evangelical rhetoric saying the Exvangelicals are only leaving because they want to be free to enjoy sin, McCammon recognizes that it’s actually really painful:

Leaving conservative evangelicalism means giving up the security of silencing some of life’s most vexing and anxiety-inducing questions with a set of “answers” - about the purpose of life, human origins, and what happens after death. It also means losing an entire community of people who could once be relied on to help celebrate weddings and new babies, organize meal trains when you’re sick or bereaved, and provide a built-in network of support and socialization around a shared set of expectations and ideals.

It’s often felt, for me, like a choice between denying my deepest instincts about truth and morality to preserve that community, or being honest with myself and the rest of the world and risking that loss.

She has summed up there in a single sentence my experience of the last dozen years.

It was interesting reading this book back-to-back with Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife. Lyz is another exvangelical, though I don’t know she’d describe herself that way, who writes with an acerbic fire about coming through her evangelical upbringing and a troubled marriage. (Lyz actually provides one of the blurbs on the back of McCammon’s book.) McCammon’s prose is more NPR, Lyz is more shock jock. McCammon makes me comfortably say “yes, this! Exactly this!”. Lyz makes me uncomfortably say “well, she’s not wrong…” They are both important voices whose words should be read and wrestled with.

The Exvangelicals is a book I would recommend for anyone outside the evangelical experience trying to understand where us weirdos are coming from, and for any one of us Exvangelical weirdos who wants to feel less alone.

Crisanne Werner has a lovely essay up on Substack today about her changing understanding of how the experience of music, and specifically playing music, relates to her spirituality as she goes through a sort of deconstruction.

I, too, have had music be a core part of my spiritual experience for most all of my life. As a worship leader in evangelical churches, I have far too many times heard (and probably used) the “audience of One” phrase that Crisanne wrestles with in her essay. But I love where she lands with it:

…music can, and should, bring glory to God. It shouldn’t be manipulated by false humility; it should have an altruistic motivation. But something that didn’t occur to me as a teen/young adult, was that bringing joy to people is bringing glory to God. Using music to evoke emotions that people otherwise wouldn’t have access to is a gift to them. A gift of love. It falls firmly under the umbrella of loving God and loving others. Other people’s music is that same sort of gift to me- my life, especially my spiritual life, is parched without music. And, despite the proliferation of electronic recordings, nothing moves the soul more than an in-person experience. … On that church stage this weekend, I was fully at peace with my motivation of helping the congregation enter beauty and joy. I was at peace with my audience being One plus three hundred.

I met Crisanne at a retreat last fall and quickly learned that beneath her quiet veneer was a depth of brave wisdom just waiting to come out. I’ve so enjoyed reading her Substack this year. What a treat.

Dr. Chris Green shared part of an essay today on a theology of disagreement. There’s a ton of good stuff in it. For example, early on:

Truth be told, what seem to be theological disagreements very often arise from and are borne along by other conflicts rooted deeply in hidden personal and interpersonal anxieties and ambitions. But at least some of our theological disagreements, I want to insist, are in fact the upshot of the Spirit’s transforming work taking shape in our as-yet-unperfected lives, moving us toward the “fullness of Christ” in which we find shalom.

This represents a beautiful freedom that I never found in my life in the American evangelical church.

But further, I want to commend to your thinking what he says about orthodoxy. In the evangelical and fundamentalist church, “orthodoxy” tends to be a cudgel used to keep unwanted questions and questioners away, and to scare the flock away from being tempted toward theological ideas that stray from the party line. Green, though, quotes Rowan Williams to suggest a different approach:

[W]e must reimagine the nature and purpose of orthodoxy. Instead of conceiving of it as a wholly-realized, already-perfected system of thought, we need to recognize it as a fullness of meaning toward which we strive, knowing full well we cannot master it even when in the End we know as we are known. Because the Church’s integrity is gift, not achievement, we can never know in advance “what will be drawn out of us by the pressure of Christ’s reality, what the full shape of a future orthodoxy might be.”

He continues, quoting Williams further:

Orthodoxy is not a system first and foremost of things you’ve got to believe, things you’ve got to tick off, but is a fullness, a richness of understanding. Orthodox is less an attempt just to make sure everybody thinks the same, and more like an attempt to keep Christian language as rich, as comprehensive as possible. Not comprehensive in the sense of getting everything in somehow, but comprehensive in the sense of keeping a vision of the whole universe in God’s purpose and action together.

A lot to chew on there, but I love the vision of orthodoxy as a commitment to keeping a vision for God’s continuing purpose and action to which we are only slowly understanding. Beautiful stuff.

I have hacked through the Chopin Ballades for years now. I started learning the first one in high school, and in adulthood I played through #3 and #4 often enough that I can, well, hack through them. I never spent the time working everything out and polishing; I just kept sight reading until I could blaze through it.

This past week I decided it was time to actually sit down with #4 and work it out more carefully. Today I got to this pictured section which, when sight reading, had always thrown me for a loop. Practicing the right hand by itself, I finally realized what makes it such a pain.

It’s 6/8 time. On the first line, the bass has gone to triplets in each eighth note. Then on the second line, the right hand picks up triplets per eighth, while the left switches to sixteenths. Ok, that’s 3 against 2, no big deal.

But while the right hand is in triplets, the pattern written (as indicated by the eighth notes on the up stems) is a four-note pattern, almost an Alberti pattern. So, you have what is by pattern a four-beat pattern, played as triplets against two in the bass. My brain wants to interpret that as four against two, which is very simple. But it’s not - rhythmically, it’s 3 against 2, but the 3s are logically and musically grouped in sets of four. This one is gonna take my brain a while to work out.

This morning a headline came across my social media feed, with a link to a remarkable interview with actor Sir Patrick Stewart, best known for playing Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation for seven seasons. In this interview with NPR reporter Rachel Martin, Stewart describes his time playing Picard with strong religious tones. When Martin noted that many Star Trek fans treat the show with almost a religious reverence, Stewart said this:

Yes. I see it very, very clearly and very strongly. It was about truth and fairness and honesty and respect for others, no matter who they were or what strange alien creature they looked like. That was immaterial. They were alive. And if they needed help, Jean Luc Picard and his crew, his team, were there to give it.

In a sense, we were ministers. And I have heard now so many times from individuals who have been honest enough and brave enough to tell me aspects of their life, of their health, of their mental health. And how it was all saved and improved by watching every week.

I came to ST:TNG right about the time it finished airing, and eventually caught up via VHS recordings. And while I may not be a full-blown Trekkie, TNG is my comfort watch. At its best, the Star Trek series—and especially TNG—portrayed an optimistic future where technology and diplomacy had taken care of systemic social issues; where the leading adults were grown-ups who behaved responsibly, admitted their faults, and worked for the greater good.

None was better in this regard than Stewart’s Captain Picard. He was the best of what you as a man might want to be - an accomplished leader, an artist, a man who put his crew’s needs before his own and held to his principles even when it cost him dearly. In a world of entertainment where so many actors turn out to be real scuzzballs in their personal lives, seeing Stewart reach old age and maintain, by all accounts, his reputation as a man of integrity, it’s hard not to feel his real-life person and his onscreen role merge just a little bit. It warms my heart to see this acclaimed example of a good man.

Whether Stewart attracted good people or just rubbed off on them I don’t know, but the men who acted around Stewart have also continued to display honorable attributes long after the show was done. Wil Wheaton, who played the teenager Wesley Crusher on the show, recounts in his memoir how Stewart and Jonathan Frakes (Commander Will Riker) were men who showed him what a real father should be like after Wheaton’s own parents abused him. And then there’s Levar Burton, who for the seven years of ST:TNG, and for 16 more years around it, hosted Reading Rainbow, encouraging a love of books and reading to children via public television.

None of these men went on to build great empires; none needed to play (or try to be, in real life) overly macho men. And yet here, decades later, they are beloved by so many simply because they have maintained integrity in their lives as men of gentleness and humility.

These led me to think about another humble, gentle man who I’ve written about before who fits the same mold, and who spent decades on television in a similar way. I’m talking, of course, about Fred Rogers. Again we have a man who in most ways wouldn’t live up to the expectations of American masculinity, but who portrayed love, care, generosity, and humility in a way that was as fully genuine in person as it was on the screen.

I can almost hear the response pieces being written at Christian outlets like The Gospel Coalition already. Clearly, they’d say, that as nice as Stewart seems, his “ministry” is some sort of false gospel since, well, he doesn’t believe in God. They’d say all his righteousness is false. They’d say he supports liberal social causes and calls himself a feminist, so clearly he’s problematic.

I have been out of evangelicalism long enough to not care what TGC says any more, but having steeped in it for so long, and having had so many people dear to me who embrace that kind of thinking, I want to offer an alternate take. It goes like this:

We don’t need to put scare quotes around “good” when we talk about men like Stewart, Frakes, or Burton. We recognize admirable characteristics in them because they are there. I might even crib a list that includes things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self control…

Now here’s where I’m gonna get all heretical. If these men (or other people like them) are demonstrating the characteristics that Christians know as “fruit of the Spirit”, I’m gonna say that this is evidence of God’s spirit working in them and through them. They may not acknowledge it as such, or even that such a thing exists. But if God is “over all and in all and through all” (Ephesians 4), then does it have to be a big stretch to acknowledge people who model the virtues and priorities that Jesus taught, even if they ascribe them to somewhere else?

The freedom of seeing that God is truly reconciling the whole world has led to a glorious freedom to recognize, admire, and love the good in others without feeling the need to nit pick their theological beliefs. Those who practice the fruit of the Spirit, who do justly and love mercy, who cry out for the poor and oppressed—they will find entering the fulness of the kingdom of God to only be a gentle step from (to borrow Paul’s words) worshiping in ignorance to worshiping in knowledge. Those who carefully articulate a theological line while modeling arrogance, hostility, and gracelessness, though, may find the kingdom to be a bit more of an adjustment.

This old concert recording of Rich Mullins at a Wheaton College chapel service in 1997 is an internet classic, but listening through it again today I was struck by his wisdom about the love of God:

I am at an academic place so I need to speak highly of serious stuff. Although I have trouble with serious stuff, I have to admit, because I just think life’s too short to get too heavy about everything. And I think there are easier ways to lose money than by farming, and I think there are easier ways to become boring than by becoming academic. And I think, you know, the thing everybody really wants to know anyway is not what the Theory of Relativity is. But I think what we all really want to know anyway is whether we are loved or not. And that’s why I like the Scriptures, because you get the feeling from reading them that we might be. And if we were able to really know that, we wouldn’t worry about the rest of the stuff. The rest of it would be more fun, I think. Cause right now we take it so seriously, I think, because of our basic insecurity about whether we are loved are not.

I think you should study because your folks have probably sunk a lot of money into this, and it’d be ungrateful not to. But your life doesn’t depend on it. That was what I loved about being a student in my 40s as opposed to in my 20s is I had the great knowledge that you could live for at least half a century and not know a thing and get along pretty well.

We have attended an Episcopal church now for a few months, enough times at least to get sucked into volunteering for small roles on a Sunday morning. A month ago Becky and I served as greeters/ushers for the service, which she noted might be the first time we’ve ever signed up for a service task that we did together. (Usually I’m the musician and she’s working in the kitchen somewhere.)

Then a couple weeks ago I did the musician thing and played the piano for a service. But we have a regular pianist on the payroll who’s not me (which is a good thing!) so this upcoming Sunday I’m trying something else: I’m gonna be a reader.

I have been assigned the Old Testament reading and the Psalm. I will be practicing ahead of time so that we can avoid any “banana” moments.

One of the fun things about attending a church in a new and unfamiliar tradition is that things that may be common, old hat, or even tiredly predictable to lifelong participants in the tradition are new and can bring delight to us newbs.

Current example: yesterday morning I thumbed through the worship booklet before the service and saw that the gospel hymn was familiar: Eternal Father, Strong to Save. I know this one primarily as “The Navy Hymn”, could probably sing the first verse from memory, but I’m not sure I’ve ever sung it in church before. A bit of an odd choice, I thought, but it’s at least fun to sing.

And it was, indeed, fun to sing. It’s in a good range, it’s got some fun harmonic progressions, and for being a small and older congregation, there are still some good harmony singers belting it out.

Then the deacon started into the gospel reading and suddenly the reason for the song selection became very clear.

Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, “It is a ghost!” And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

Matthew 14:22-33

Well played, Father Brian. Well played.

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; Who can know it?” – Jeremiah 17:9, NKJV

I had someone play the Jeremiah 17:9 card on me the other day. We were winding up a long email conversation wherein I finally was able to make clear that the standard evangelical hermeneutical approach to the Scriptures isn’t particularly appealing to me any more - that there are other approaches I find more compelling. (Brian Zahnd’s post Jesus Is What God Has To Say captures it pretty well for me right now at a high level.)

Once I got that message across, the message from my conversation partner was simple: beware your motives and understanding, because, after all, the heart is deceitful above all things!

In the evangelical circles I’ve spent my life in, Jeremiah 17:9 is used as a sort of ultimate trump card. If a discussion starts to go sideways, if someone comes to a logical conclusion that something they’ve been taught just can’t be correct, if someone questions how God could possibly be in the right for, say, ordering the murder of innocent children, this is the fallback. Of course your heart rebels against that thought. Your heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked! You need to accept that what we are teaching you is correct and ignore any prompting inside you that says otherwise!

There are problems, thought, with the Jeremiah 17:9 card.

Logical Coherence

First: playing the Jeremiah 17:9 card is logically incoherent. How did the card player become convinced of the rightness of their position in the first place? Undoubtedly through some combination of study, reasoning, and internal desire (even if subconscious) to hold that position. So how does the card player know that it isn’t his own heart that is deceiving him rather than yours deceiving you? If our heart (i.e. our reasoning as supplemented and powered by our instincts) is deceitful, what basis do you have for claiming that yours is so much less deceitful than mine that your conclusion is right and mine is wrong?

Other Bible Verses

I don’t recommend pulling single verses from their context and using them to justify positions. It’s a bad way to understand the Bible. But if you’re going to play that game, there is a broad selection of other verses about the heart that might provide an alternative perspective to Jeremiah 17:9.

Proverbs 4:23: “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it." - This sounds like your heart has something good in it that needs to be protected!

Psalm 51:10: “Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me." - The psalmist sure seems to think that purity of heart is a goal worth asking for and attaining to.

Proverbs 3:3: “Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart." - We can have love and faithfulness written on our heart!

Ezekiel 36:26: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh." - If God gives me a new heart and a new spirit, maybe that new heart is good?

2 Corinthians 9:7: “Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver." - This one is kinda fun… decide in your heart what to give! God will be happy with this!

Psalm 119:11: “I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you." - This one speaks directly to the effects of discipleship upon the heart - the heart is improved and the result is less sinning!

Hebrews 3:12: “See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God." - The existence of a “sinful, unbelieving heart” implies the existence of a holy, believing heart that is turned toward God.

Proverbs 23:15: “My son, if your heart is wise, then my heart will be glad indeed." - Solomon suggests that a heart can be wise!

I hope the point here is clear - if you want to play the game of cherry picking to proof-text your point, why is the Jeremiah 17:9 card a more valid and applicable cherry than any of these verses?

Potential for Gaslighting and Abuse

Gaslighting is a strategy in which a perpetrator bends another person’s sense of reality and belief system, making that person second-guess themselves in a way that is beneficial to the perpetrator. Typical gaslighting phrases include things like this:

• “Do you really think I’d make that up?”

• “I did that because I love you.”

• “You’re too sensitive.”

• “It’s not that bad. Other people have it much worse.”

• “I don’t know why you’re making such a big deal out of this.”

It’s not hard to see how “the heart is deceitful above all things” could fit right in to a gaslighting strategy. A spiritual leader abuses a person in some way. That person responds with a concern. This doesn’t feel right. Something is off here. The leader points right to Jeremiah. Your heart is deceitful and desperately wicked. Don’t trust it. And the abuse continues as the victim is further confused between the truth of the matter clear to their conscience and the deception and malpractice of their abuser.

Finally

A robust examination of discernment - how it works, how we integrate our instinctual “gut feelings”, how we experience the influence of the Holy Spirit, how we come to understand God’s Word and leading through the wisdom of community - would require far more words than I could write here. Whatever discernment is, though, it’s certainly not so simply summed up as “your heart is deceitful, don’t trust it”.

Instead of living in a constant spirit of fear, Christians should live in a spirit of confidence that God is guiding them. If you’ve made it this far, you’ll forgive me one proof-text for this that also suggests God wants us to use our minds, too.

For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.

2 Timothy 1:7, NKJV

_Playing card illustration via the Redemption CCG Fandom wiki._

If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.

But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.

–The Apostle Paul, Letter to the Philippians

I have many times read this passage and heard it taught with the message “your family history and good works don’t matter, only giving up everything and serving Jesus matters”. As I read it today, though, where I am in my Christian journey, it hits a little bit different.

My own personal Philippians 3

If anyone thinks they have confidence in their evangelical Christian credentials, I have more.

I prayed to ask Jesus into my heart when I was 3. I was baptized by immersion at a Christian & Missionary Alliance church after giving testimony to my faith when I was 7 or 8.

My church started AWANA clubs when I was in first grade. I completed 3 years worth of Sparks club in 2 years to get the associated trophy. I completed every year of AWANA after that, all the way through high school, memorizing hundreds of Bible verses. I was given the AWANA Citation Award at AWANA national Bible Quizzing and Olympics. My team didn’t win the Olympics, but won the sportsmanship award, which is probably even more meritorious.

I was homeschooled in a Christian homeschool grades 1 through 12. I learned from the best Christian curricula. I soaked up Ken Ham’s creation science videos in Sunday School and youth group. As a 7th grader I sent a letter to my best friend, aghast that he entertained the possibility of “long-day” creation. I quoted 2 Timothy 4 to him and said I would be one of the ones who stood up when others were going wobbly.

I attended an IBLP Basic Seminar when I was in high school. I bought and took home a cassette tape of their Gothard-blessed choir arrangements of hymns, excited to have Godly music to listen to. I attended a church with the authors of a Quiverfull book and the midwife who reported in Gothard’s newsletter that a Cabbage Patch Kids doll was being used by the devil to prevent a healthy home birth.

I was fully invested in the political implications of my evangelical faith. I speed-dialed Rush Limbaugh and tried to convince his call screener that I should talk to Rush about the dangers of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. I bought a constitutional law overview book written by Michael Farris and was jittery with excitement when I got to hear him speak and shake his hand. I marched in a parade carrying a campaign sign for a Republican Senate candidate.

I sat in years of adult “precept by precept, line by line” Bible study. I went through Evangelism Explosion training, memorized all the cards, and went door-to-door asking people “if you died tonight, and God asked ‘why should I let you into my heaven?’, what would you say?”.

I passed up full-ride scholarship offers to public universities and instead took out loans to attend a Christian university. I lived in a dormitory that only allowed opposite-gender visits for 3 hours on Friday nights and 3 hours on Sunday afternoons under supervision. I took 15 credits of Bible and Christian ethics along with my engineering classes in order to graduate.

I started leading worship in church when I was in high school. I led worship at church and in college chapel during my college years. I joined a Baptist church within the first month of moving to Iowa and within the first year was leading worship there. I formed the team, led practices, led the music at multiple services every week for years. I met weekly with the church staff to evaluate the previous week’s services and plan for the upcoming week.

I became a deacon at that Baptist church before the age of 30. Then I became an elder. I attended the Emmaus Bible College pastor’s conference, the Moody Bible Institute pastor’s conference, and the Desiring God pastor’s conference. I led Bible studies, did in-home pastoral care visits, tracked giving and sent out yearly giving receipts.

I was part of an elder team that planted a new church in an under-churched neighborhood near downtown in our city. I did tech setup and tear-down and led worship there every week for two years.

I moved to a larger Evangelical Free church. I served on the worship team there and became the interim music ministry leader when the staff worship pastor left. For multiple years we did three-service weekends spanning Saturday night and Sunday morning with full band and tech team.

I read hundreds of books on theology and the church. I read John Piper, Tim Keller, Don Carson, Francis Schaeffer, Mark Driscoll, Russell Moore, and N. T. Wright. I led book discussions, wrote blog posts about them, and bought extra copies to give away to others.

I had three children and raised them in the church. I pushed for us to homeschool them. I dragged them to church every time we went. I did read-alouds of the Jesus Storybook Bible and all the Chronicles of Narnia with them. I drove them to youth group, encouraged them to volunteer, taught them instruments or got them lessons so they could join the worship team themselves.

But Jesus

Somewhere in all those years, Jesus stepped in.

Jesus opened my eyes to his love for every person. Even and especially for those who didn’t look like me or believe the way I did.

Jesus made it clear to me that all my book learning and ability to argue people into a corner was a harsh cacophony if I didn’t actually love those people and want their best.

Jesus showed me that God loves my loved ones even more than I do, and that God’s love is the same in kind, and infinitely greater in quality and quantity, as my own love for family is.

Jesus made it clear to me that so much of the memorization and learning and doctrine we were so proud of as evangelicals manifested as unloving, judgmental, manipulative gate-keeping to those who weren’t in our little club.

Jesus helped me see that God’s plan for the universe is so much greater and more redemptive than rescuing a small fraction of holy humans out of a burning earth into an ethereal heavenly plane.

Jesus made it clear to me that his desire is for followers who love God and love their neighbor rather than those who cling to power through politics, nationalism, racism, and misogyny.

Jesus showed me that loving my neighbor might actually mean directly caring for my literal next-door neighbors more than it means laboring to support church programs while I hold good intentions in my heart for others and invite them to those programs.

Whatever my accomplishments were to me, I now count them as nothing compared to knowing the freedom and confidence that Jesus has given me as I now know him as the true representation of God, a God who fully knows, loves, and embraces each one of us just as we are.

Amen.

“You’ve got a fast car, I want a ticket to anywhere…”

If you’ve been a pop music fan at some point in the last 35 years, you’re probably now hearing an acoustic guitar riff in your head. Tracy Chapman’s song Fast Car came out in 1988 and was a Top 10 hit. It’s a wonderful song.

I heard Fast Car for the first time about 3 months ago when a social media post linking to a YouTube of Chapman playing the song in front of a restless crowd at Wembley Stadium came across my feed.

I listened to it, mostly impressed at a 24-year-old enthralling a huge crowd with nothing but an acoustic guitar and a microphone. I was probably doing something else at my desk at the time, and didn’t really listen to the words.

Fast forward to a couple weeks ago when my wife and I were out for a weekend and had dinner on a bar patio listening to a guy play acoustic covers. He played Fast Car. I mentioned to my wife that I’d never really heard the song before a month or two ago. She was incredulous. “You don’t know this song?” It’s about that time in any such conversation that my insecurity and shame creeps in.

I grew up in a fundamentalist homeschooling household where we weren’t allowed to listen to “secular music”. Classical was OK, and the Christian radio station was fine when it played softer stuff (and tolerated when it played “rockier” stuff), but other than that, nope. By the time I was 17 or 18 and had my own car I could turn on whatever radio station I wanted, but by that time the legalism was pretty well engrained in my young soul and my only comfortable dalliance with “secular music” was the old-time country music I played on the piano as part of the impromptu band at Rinky Tink’s ice cream shop during open mic nights.

If you’re my age (mid-40s), all that music you grew up hearing in the late 80s and early 90s? I know none of it. Michael Jackson may as well not exist for me. I was scandalized by my cousin’s U2 Achtung Baby poster, both because it was a “secular” rock band (joke’s on me: they’re probably the most Christian rock band of the last 40 years) and because it had the word “baby” on the poster, which undoubtedly referred to some girl they were interested in, and being interested in girls was wrong until you were old enough to get married.

I was a lonely 12-year-old, and 13-year-old, and heck was just without friends and pretty lonely for a lot of my teenage years. I was 12 years old and desperate enough for help that I called in to donate my own hard-earned funds to the Christian radio pledge drive when the reward premium was Charles Stanley’s book How to Handle Adversity. I anxiously waited for the book to show up, convinced it’d have answers for me. When it finally did, I read what the good reverend from Atlanta suggested: 1) Pray. (Check, been doing that lots.) 2) Lean on friends for support. Well… shit.

I still looked to music to soothe my soul, but the music I listened to as that angsty just-barely-a-teen was music that told me everything would be OK and you shouldn’t really feel sad because God. (Glad’s song Be Ye Glad and Steve Camp’s Love That Will Not Let Me Go come to mind.) There was eventually some CCM music that hinted at it being OK to be angsty - Michael W Smith sang Emily (“on the wire/balancing your dreams/hoping ends will meet their means/but you feel alone/uninspired/but does it help you to/know that I believe in you?") and then later on a duet with Amy Grant on Somewhere, Somehow (“somehow far beyond today/I will find a way to find you”) - but I felt ashamed to listen to them and feel that way. (They’re still guilty pleasures.)

I signed up for Columbia House Music Club when I was 17 and somehow snuck in a Bryan Adams best of CD. I presume I only knew his name because his Everything I Do (I Do It For You) song was a big enough hit it got played at my (apparently not quite so fundamentalist but still fundy enough we sang Christianized lyrics to Friends in Low Places in chapel) summer camp. Adams' songs rocked (which I loved) but shocked me and had me feeling bad about listening to them. OK, a song like Kids Wanna Rock was ok because it was just about restless kids. But Run To You was about… sex. We can’t be talking about that, now. Nope. Skip the track.

It took me well into my 20s to finally let myself listen more broadly to “secular” music, my fundamentalist self surprised to find that Bono was a Christian and U2 was singing amazing stuff, that Win Butler was wrestling with his own spiritual ghosts in his songs for Arcade Fire, that it was OK to just enjoy music that wasn’t written about God because it was good music. And in some ways it was fun to have so much music backlog to discover, since aside from Simon and Garfunkel I didn’t really know much of anything of pop music.

But it also means that, for a music guy, I’ve got these big gaps of music knowledge that I’m ashamed of. I try to soak in as much information as I can so I don’t appear to be uninformed, but that façade only lasts so long.

Part of me doesn’t really want to hit publish on this post, because eventually my Dad will read it, and he’ll apologize again. As he’s realized the past couple years how much damage that fundamentalism did to all of us he’s been really broken by it, and apologized over and over. I’ve forgiven him. I’m a dad, too, and have already had to apologize to my kids for the damage that kind of Christianity did to them before I came to my own realization. (I am glad, though, that they’ve grown up with Coldplay and Adele and Arcade Fire and then felt the freedom to find their own music regardless of what genre label it falls under. We’re slowly undoing that mess.) But aside from guilt and forgiveness, I am finding that to start to heal I have to acknowledge the pain of that teenage boy. It was real. It shaped who I am today in a ton of ways.

You got a fast car
I got a plan to get us outta here
I been working at the convenience store
Managed to save just a little bit of money
Won’t have to drive too far
Just ‘cross the border and into the city
You and I can both get jobs
And finally see what it means to be living

You got a fast car
Is it fast enough so we can fly away?
We gotta make a decision
Leave tonight or live and die this way

So I remember when we were driving, driving in your car
Speed so fast it felt like I was drunk
City lights lay out before us
And your arm felt nice wrapped ‘round my shoulder
And I-I had a feeling that I belonged
I-I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone

Lyrics from Fast Car by Tracy Chapman

13-year-old Chris would’ve felt every word of this song. Would’ve felt less alone, knowing that other people experienced the same ache. But Chris didn’t get to listen to that song when he was 13. And Chris didn’t stop and really listen to this song until this morning. Which is why 46-year-old grown man Chris is sitting at his desk this morning in tears, listening to Fast Car on repeat.

I re-posted a meme to Facebook the other day which suggested that billionaires are “hoarders”, likening them to a “human dragon sleeping on their piles of rubies and gold”. Someone popped up to dispute this characterization, making the following assertions:

1. “Billionaires are quite philanthropic. Sure, this is a general statement, but check it out.”
2. “The reason billionaires are billionaires is that, generally, they work extraordinarily hard to invest their capital using wisdom while calculating risks.”

Now, there were other assertions and comments, but these two were enough to not pass my smell test. My immediate inclination was that (a) most billionaires aren’t particularly charitable, and (b) most of them have gotten that rich by running exploitive companies - either exploiting natural resources or human beings, or both.

Rather than just go with the smell test, though, I decided to do a first-level investigation and summarize what I found. To do this, I took the Top 10 off the current Forbes 400 list. These guys (and they’re all guys) are all household names, each worth $60B or more. (Yes, that’s billion with a B.) To put $60B in context, if you got $80,000 per day, every day, since Jesus was born, neglecting any inflation or earnings on that money, you would just have gotten to $60B this year. That’s a staggering amount of money.

For each one of these guys I am summarizing their current net worth, reported charitable giving, and how they made their fortune. Spoiler alert: it’s not a pretty picture. Let’s go.

#1: Elon Musk

2022 net worth: $167.6B

Charitable giving: in 2022 he donated $160M, the most ever! Fortune also reports he gave $5.7B to a foundation, but it’s under his control and hasn’t actually been disbursed anywhere yet. That $160M is less than 0.01% of his net worth. Even the $5.7B is only 3% of his net worth… seems unimpressive.

How he made his money: mostly from Tesla. How much his own work and skills contributed to the company’s growth is up for debate, but Tesla and Musk have been sued for running a toxic, discriminatory, abusive workplace on multiple occasions.

#2: Jeff Bezos

2022 net worth: $120B

Bezos has in theory pledged to give his money away, but reports say it’s unclear whether he is actually doing that. The biggest documented donation I saw reported was $100M to Dolly Parton’s foundation. Which, to be fair, is a noble cause, but $100M is only 0.08% of Bezos’ net worth.

How he made his money: Amazon, of course. You don’t have to search far to find multitudes of reports of Amazon’s abusive practices to their employees. Maybe not such a good guy, either.

#3: Bill Gates

2022 net worth: $106B

Credit where credit is due: Gates has already given more than $50B of his fortune to the Gates Foundation, and that Foundation is doing significant work around the world in important causes. Bravo, sir.

How he made his money: Microsoft. As in, he wrote the original MS-DOS, and just managed to hit the wave of computers in an unprecedented and unrepeatable way.

#4: Larry Ellison

2022 net worth: $101B

Ellison reportedly is struggling to figure out how to give his money away. So far his reported donations are all in the $100 - $200M range (0.1% - 0.2% of his net worth). (He apparently found it easier to spend $300M to buy an entire Hawaiian island.)

How he made his money: Oracle databases. And then a lot of big finance and investing.

#5: Warren Buffett

2022 net worth: $97B

Here’s the other bright light on this list. Lifetime Buffett has given away almost $50B, largely to the Gates Foundation. However, his wealth is growing “faster than he can give it away”.

How he made his money: investments. If there’s one guy on this list who meets the “a lot of hard work and wise investing” criteria that my interlocutor set out, Buffett is probably that guy.

#6: Larry Page

2022 net worth: $93B

It is reported that he has funded his foundation to $6B, but most of it is in donor-advised funds for later donation, and while the tax breaks have kicked in now, the money hasn’t actually gone to any good use yet. That same article is touting donations to actual charities in the $100k (yes, that’s a K) range, which is, oh, 0.0001% of his net worth. Color me unimpressed.

How did he make his money: he co-founded a little company called Google. So some of that I’m willing to attribute to just hitting the right tech at the right time, similar to Gates and Ellison. But Google’s money-making methods continue to get nastier every time you look - the incessant ads, the deep user tracking, the toxic YouTube algorithms that are happy to feed you fascist content if it’s what keeps you watching… not particularly honorable.

#7: Sergey Brin

2022 net worth: $89B

Brin has given maybe $1B over the past 10 years to his own foundation (which is beneficial for tax purposes), and of that billion, the biggest chunk, almost $200M has gone to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s research. A noble cause, yes… but only donating 1% of his net worth over the past 10 years? Peanuts.

How he made his money: He’s the other half of Google. (See #6.)

#8: Steve Ballmer

Net worth: $83B

Ballmer’s foundation breathlessly announced a $217M donation in 2022, which is to say they are going to offer grants on the topic of climate change. That appears to be the biggest chunk Steve has donated anywhere. That’s 0.25% of his net worth, which I guess is a little more than Sergey Brin gave to the Fox Foundation, but still… it ain’t much.

How he made his money: Ballmer was in early following Bill Gates into Microsoft. If only he were so quick to follow in Gates’ footsteps when it comes to giving his money away.

#9: Michael Bloomberg

2022 net worth: $78B

Bloomberg also deserves some credit here. He has donated as much as $14.4 B lifetime (18% of his current net worth) to his personal foundation, and that foundation has actually dispersed significant funds, including $1.7B in 2022. He has also given nearly $3B in donations to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University.

How he made his money: he started in investing, and then jumped on the integration of computers and investing in the early 1980s. He branched out into other areas of financial market reporting, but then has also taken detours into politics, serving as the mayor of New York City from 2002 - 2013.

#10: Jim Walton

2022 net worth: $58B

In 2019 Walton made his first significant donation to charity - $1.2B to (naturally) the Walton Family Foundation. That Foundation has done some good stuff in Arkansas, so credit where credit is due there. But $1.2B on a net worth of $58B is still only 2% as a donation, which feels paltry.

How he made his money: he inherited it. (As did his siblings, who are #12 and #15 on the Forbes 400 list.) And how does Walmart continue to turn profits? Well, among other things, by mistreating their employees. Wages below the poverty level. Poor working conditions. Unlawful termination. Union busting. Maybe $1B for art and education in Arkansas can assuage your conscience? Jim can only hope so.

Let’s sum up

So, the Top 10. “Quite philanthropic”. “Work very hard” and made admirable business decisions. Really?

“Quite philanthropic” - I think we can safely put that label on Gates, Buffett, and Bloomberg. Many of the others have made pledges that their money will be given away before or at their death, but that isn’t doing anybody any good now. So, 3 out of 10. Not great, Bob!

“Work very hard and made wise business decisions” - I mean, at some level if you want to lionize people playing the capitalism game to come out ahead, by definition these guys have all done that. But if you want to put some sort of moral filter on it, asking whether their gains are well-gotten or not, I think we could safely chalk up Musk, Bezos, Page, Brin, and Walton in the exploitive category. I can’t say I’m very impressed with Ballmer, either, but Microsoft isn’t ugly and predatory in quite the same way that Walmart, Amazon, and Google are.

You do you, Facebook friend, but to my eyes, it’s not a stretch to see these guys as dragons sleeping on piles of gold and gems while 10% of the world lives in extreme poverty.

A little more back-of-the-envelope math

Just for fun, let’s imagine the top income tax bracket from the 1950s (by all accounts, a wonderful time that a lot of people want to go back to) was in place for these guys. That bracket was 91%. And let’s just do the math on their current net worth. All up the wealth of the Top 10 here and it comes out to $994B. Take that times 91% and you come up with $904.5B which would be in the US Treasury. Now, we can quibble about how wisely the US Government spends its money… that’s for another time. But the US budget deficit last year was $1.4T. So, a tax on just the top 10 wealthiest men in the country would take care of more than two-thirds of the deficit. Yes, that’s just for one year. Adjustments still need to be made. But the wealth of these privileged few, even in the scope of the national economy, is, to quote a famous cartoon moose, “antihistamine money”: not to be sneezed at.

Geoffrey Franklin Morris, 43, of Madison, Alabama, died today at Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville. He is survived by his wife Danielle, his parents, his brother Doug, his dog Lucky, and hundreds of friends around the world.

Geof was born in Knoxville, TN in 1978. The younger son in a military family, Geof spent time in San Antonio, Texas and Beavercreek, Ohio before eventually settling in Forest, Mississippi in 1990 after his father retired from the Air Force. He attended high school at The Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science, where his love for engineering and science led him not only to pursue a career focused on outer space, but also led him into the early days of social communities on the internet. Geof attended the University of Alabama Huntsville and graduated with a degree in Aerospace Engineering and an undying love for UAH Chargers ice hockey.

Geof’s career started at Teledyne Brown Engineering (TBE) where he designed equipment and managed projects building science equipment destined for the International Space Station. After a brief hiatus from the aerospace world to work for Wordpress, Geof got a job at NASA where he eventually became a flight controller for the ISS. One of Geof’s great joys in life was being on comms with astronauts and walking them through daily procedures.

Geof had an amazing passion for online community. In high school he frequented online bulletin board discussions. He was fond of reminding friends that he had interacted directly with Tom Clancy in bulletin board discussions about Clancy’s novels. Later on, Geof’s love of the band Caedmon’s Call and their tight-knit fan community would prompt him to create and administer an online forum for them. “Rocksmyfaceoff.net” (RMFO to its regulars) was an active community for more than a decade in the early 2000s, and continues to this day in nooks and crannies of the social internet. Geof embraced Twitter when it was a new service and had posted over 100,000 tweets before many others were even aware of what Twitter was. He was a prolific blogger who was always looking to support the online communities he benefitted from. His website is full of thoughts on social sharing, technical advice, and concert bootleg recordings.

Geof was just as generous and gregarious in person as he was online. Whether you had known him for years or were just meeting him for the first time, he would put you at ease with his friendly conversation. He seemingly knew everyone, and would quickly introduce and connect you to others who he thought you should know. His meticulously-managed contact list included award-winning musicians, astronauts, internet tech royalty, an NHL goalie, and a whole bunch of normal mundane people. No matter who you were he would pay attention to personal details and important dates; mention your anniversary on Twitter one year and the next year he would wish you a happy anniversary, having captured that info about you the year before.

Along with wanting to work on space projects, Geof not so quietly wanted to fall in love with a pretty girl and get married. If she were a redhead, that would be a bonus. That wish came true for him in 2014 when he met a young red-headed NASA engineer named Danielle. Geof and Danielle married in 2015 and lived happily at their home near Huntsville until his passing.

Geof loved UAH hockey, the Boston Celtics and Bruins, Wilco, Radiohead, Caedmon’s Call, and The Big Lebowski. But mostly Geof loved people. Whether you were an astronaut or a random college kid, Geof treated you with respect and as an equal. He is mourned today by hundreds of friends and communities that are the product of his life-long labors of love.