A little music nerdery: 'God of our Fathers' and 'O Canada'

This morning before church I was listening to the organist practice, and while I knew from reading the bulletin ahead of time that the processional was God of our Fathers, when I heard the organ music my brain wanted to run with it instead as O Canada. At the time I was puzzled why, but then when I actually sang the hymn while processing, I realized what it is: the second line of both songs is nearly identical in melody and harmonic progression.

I dug up sheet music for both of them in the same key just to belabor the illustration. Here’s God of our Fathers:

And here’s O Canada:

My music theory is rusty, but in the second line (“Leads forth in beauty all the starry band” and “True patriot love in all of us command”, respectively), they start on the I, hit the iii, and then the V - V/V - V cadence with almost the same melody. The Canadian anthem does sneak a transitional V/iii chord in as some passing snazziness, but on the whole: I will forgive my brain for mentally continuing on “with glowing hearts we see…” rather than “of shining worlds in splendor…”.

Thus endeth the music nerdery.

(“Thanks be to God!”)

Fifth Season 5k

This morning I got back to an event I haven’t participated in for several years: the Fifth Season 5k. This was the 40th anniversary race - every 4th of July in the morning hundreds of runners assemble and compete over either the 5k or 8k distance. It was a hot morning - 78F and humid - but that didn’t keep almost 1000 runners from racing today.

My chip time finish was 25:59, which is a PR for me, and 9th in my age group. (If I were 2 years older I would’ve been first in that age group!) Definitely feel like if it had been cooler I would’ve been able to shave another 30 seconds off that; guess I’ll have to sign up for a fall run and see how it goes. Regardless, it’s a fun event to have this many folks out on a hot holiday morning.

Hey, it's another book club (of sorts)...

Spent 90 minutes tonight on a Zoom call with a (mostly) local “Christophany group” - a collection of 15 or so who are currently discussing The Not-Yet God by Ilia Delio at the (quite reasonable) pace of one chapter per month. The group appears to come from a variety of religious backgrounds, but is united in the goal of communal reflection on the insights of Teilhard de Chardin, Ilia Delio and similar thinkers.

As someone who’s been fascinated by Delio’s work for the past few years, this group is a godsend. Thoroughly enjoyed the discussion, already looking forward to next month.

Bullet Points for a (very warm) Monday Morning

Hey, it’s Monday.

  • Spent Sunday afternoon supporting my wife’s cast iron business at a local farmers market. 90F felt like 99F when we set up. Oof.
  • Living life on the wild side Monday morning by upgrading my Debian install on my Emby server PC.
  • Sunday morning Books & Donuts at church is fun and sometimes surprising; Senior Warden on our Vestry has taken up Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot books at my recommendation.
  • Farmers Market yesterday was a dud; shoppers were as put off by the heat as the vendors were. Good dry run for us though, I guess.
  • Just signed up for my second race of the summer. Have a 5k coming up on July 4th; added a 10k on Labor Day weekend.
  • Having lost a bunch of weight and now getting active this year there’s a renewed sense of physicality that I love - feeling your body tired, sore, healing - feels more alive somehow.
  • Planning to attend a conference in Vegas in August for work. That’ll be my first time in Nevada, leaving me with 3 states left unvisited: Vermont, Wyoming, and Hawaii.
  • Middle kid is in Hawaii right now. Jealous.
  • One of these years I wanna do a road trip across the Nebraska sandhills and get to Wyoming. Have extended family that run a candy shop in Casper. That’s worth a visit.
  • And just like that my Debian upgrade is done. Quick and easy and came back up perfectly.

Stay safe and stay cool, friends.

We are slowly becoming the Elders

I loved this thought from Wil Wheaton’s blog yesterday:

A friend of mine observed that we are slowly becoming the Elders, and that’s just really weird. I have been thinking about that, and it turns out there is a lot about that I’m not really ready to embrace, like accepting that people I love, who mean so much to me, are getting older (and elderly) with all that implies. It’s just … it’s really weird. At the same time, it feels really good and … gentle? … to embrace a position in life that allows me to be a kind, patient, supportive, and encouraging person in the world for anyone who needs it.

I’m thinking a lot about how I can talk about things from a place of experience, in a way that younger me would have been able to hear and internalize. I want to be a Helper so much, y’all.

Wil is such a lovely example of someone who has been through Hell, has labored - and continues to labor - at the work of healing, and who recognizes the call to care for the people around him in the ways he was never cared for. I want to become that kind of Elder, too.

If humans hadn't sinned, would Christ have still come?

I love this bit from Ilia Delio in The Not-Yet God, summarizing a thought from Franciscan theologian Duns Scotus:

The reason for the incarnation, then, is not sin but love. Christ is first in God’s intention to love. The incarnation is the unrepeatable, unique, and single defining act of God’s love. Thus, even if sin had not entered the universe through the human person, Christ would have come.

That’s good news, my friends.

Chris Arnade on American vs European values and "the good life"

Highly recommend Chris Arnade’s latest Substack discussion of the legitimate difference in human values between Europe and America and how that plays out in cultural priorities and what we think of as “the good life”.

An excerpt:

There is a genuine comprehension gap between the US and Europe. There really are two different minds with two different understandings of what it means to be a human, and that manifests in different rules, regulations, and priorities, since policy is a result of a society’s cultural preferences….

While the US and Europe share a broad commitment to classical Liberalism, and Democracy, we have very different definitions of the Public Good, which means different views of what we want out of life, and what we consider fulfilling. In broad and simplistic terms, the US emphasizes material wealth, opportunity, and individual liberty while Europe values community health, a shared common good, and a sense of place.

From the European perspective the US has a cult of the individual, and that’s why it has too many guns, obscenely large cars, can’t build a public transportation system, and has dysfunctional public spaces. From the US perspective Europeans are unmotivated unproductive slackers who would rather sip coffee all day than work, and their idea of a shared common good means stealing from the successful to give to the losers.

This difference isn’t simply about things such as tax policy, health care, and worker rights (although those matter), but about how we understand the good life, and how our built environment reflects that.

As with any of Arnade’s posts, the associated photographs really are a must-view to fully appreciate his perspective. Worth reading and subscribing.

My talks at Christ Episcopal Church Adult Forum, May 2025

The past two Sundays I had the opportunity to talk at my church’s Sunday morning Adult Forum. The first Sunday I spent most of an hour just telling my story of growing up in Evangelicalism and eventually leaving it and becoming Episcopal. It’s a long talk, but was good to tell my story and to feel like I finally have enough space and distance from it to start to be able to tell it clearly and fairly.

Week 1 Video on Youtube

As I was writing my story for week 1, I had multiple topics that came up where I thought “that’s an important thing about Evangelicalism, and if you didn’t live in it for a while it might not be obvious at all”. So I compiled those into a short list and spent Week 2 talking about them. These topics included:

  • Biblicism
  • Congregational independence
  • Entrepreneurialism
  • Gender hierarchy
  • Insular cultural environment and the influence of Christian media
  • Opposition to Christian Tradition

Week 2 Video on YouTube

One of the folks who attended week 1 sent me a link to an Ann Patchett interview with the hope that I’d respond to some comments near the end (starting about 26:20 in the link) where she asks whether what religion you pick really matters at all. It was a perfect final question to respond to and tie off my two weeks of discussion. I won’t give away my answer but I’m happy with where it landed.

State champ!

Super proud of our youngest daughter, Katie, who earlier today won first place for National History Day in the Senior Individual Presentation category at the Iowa state-level competition. To accomplish this she spent months researching her chosen topic and then wrote a 10-minute monologue portraying different historical perspectives on the topic.

It was a timely topic: “Watergate: Presidential Right to Confidentiality v. Responsibility for Justice”.

Next up: the national competition at the University of Maryland (just outside Washington, DC) in June.

Wanting to be anti-Trump while disavowing culpability

Twice this week now I have run across columns from anti-Trump Republican Christians who are doing their darnedest to disavow the role that the Christian Right they were involved in has played in getting us to our current fascist regime. One is a sample, two is approaching a pattern. Let’s review.

First up

Example 1 comes from Jake Meador over at Mere Orthodoxy. In his essay titled “Evangelical Political Life after the Religious Right”, Jake boldly claims that “the religious right is dead”. To those of us who look around and see an evangelical Speaker of the House, a conservative Catholic VP, a President who claims Christianity, and an Attorney General who is running a task force to root out “anti-Christian bias” whose first witness is Michael Farris from Patrick Henry College and Scott Hicks from Liberty University might be surprised at Jake’s claim. Turns out that there are only two Religious Right life signs that Jake is looking for: abortion ban language in the Republican platform, and language in favor of “natural marriage”, by which he means opposition to anything LGBTQ+.

Jake says that the “understandable” conclusion that the new Christian Nationalist movement is a successor and continuation of the Religious Right is wrong, but his only apparent support for that assertion is that lack of explicit platform language against abortion and gay people. (We’ll ignore for the moment the fact that the entire Republican Party platform back in 2020 was just “whatever Trump wants”.) He then says that “the Christian influence on actual Republican policy items… is going to be exceedingly negligible going forward”. Again I would like to inquire what reality Mr. Meador is living in.

When you have people like Speaker Johnson and Christopher Rufo driving Republican political approaches, to make Meador’s statement true, you either need to redefine “Christian” or redefine “negligible”. Clearly there are Christians influencing Republican politics these days. A lot of them. Many of them largely ideologically aligned with positions Meador and Mere O have historically taken. That Meador now wants to disavow it is farcical. I’ll stop there for now.

Batting second…

Example 2 comes today from David French in the New York Times. In his column “The Anti-Woke Right Has a Lot to Answer For”, French recounts his initial support and hopes for “the Anti-Woke Right” - that they would contend for broader freedom of speech and expression and combat what he saw were the anti-liberal tendencies of Left-leaning ideology. But then he sounds completely surprised about where the Republican Party has landed:

It turns out that when they said, “Let us speak,” they weren’t embracing free speech as a universal value, but rather as an instrumental value — free speech is important only so long as they get to say what they think. The left? It’s too dangerous to be heard.

Throughout the column French wants to continue to blame this move on something he calls “the authoritarian right”. Again, this appears to be a convenient way to distance himself from a movement that he strongly supported for the past two decades. French has consistently championed Christian religious liberty and free speech, but apparently let his optimism blind him to the warning signs of impending authoritarianism. The same powers at play in the Republican Party were also at play in the conservative resurgence in the Baptist and Presbyterian churches that French has associated with. It’s all the same game. So he can claim to be surprised and disappointed now that we’re here, but God forbid he acknowledge any of his own responsibility.

There is a profound difference between liberty and power. When you have power, you certainly experience it as freedom. You can do what you want to do. Liberty, by contrast, protects people against power. Liberty is what grants you freedom of action even when you are not in control. The anti-woke right spoke the language of liberty when its freedom was under threat, but now we know the terrible truth: The movement was about power all along.

Let me find my shocked face.

Is Anybody Actually Responsible?

On one hand I am happy to see David French use his NYT platform to acknowledge that the right wing is just after power and willing to trample all our liberties to get it and keep it. And I’m happy to see Jake Meador acknowledge that the current regime is Christian Nationalist. But when Jake’s solution is that we need a slightly different flavor of Christianity to influence government, and David’s is just to say they’ve got some explaining to do, it all falls short.

If members of the Religious Right have a change of heart and want to help improve things, it has to start by acknowledging their own complicity in how we got here. And some introspection to realize that preferring and embedding specifically Christian tenets into our laws will inevitably again march us toward either oppressive, government-enforced religious fundamentalism (think Iran) or Christian Nationalist fascism.

Tim Walz recently put it this way: “If you say you love freedom, but you don’t believe it is for everyone, the thing you love is not freedom, it’s privilege.” Myself, I want freedom. I think David French does, but he hasn’t found the right direction yet. To read Meador, I suspect he really wants privilege. For those who want freedom, we must be willing to understand and acknowledge the ways we (and the systems we supported) contributed to us getting to this point. And then we need to change.