Bruenig: Dignity in work, dignity in rest

Washington Post columnist Elizabeth Bruenig makes an important point today when she says that we should consider not only the dignity and virtue of having a job and working hard, but also the virtue of having time for rest and pursuit of one’s own interests.

There’s a balance to be struck where it comes to work and rest, but in the United States, values and laws are already slanted drastically in favor of work. I would advise those concerned about Americans’ dignity, freedom and independence to not focus on compelling work for benefits or otherwise trying to marshal people into jobs when what they really need are health care, housing assistance, unemployment benefits and so forth. Instead, we should focus more of our political energies on making sure that American workers have the dignity of rest, the freedom to enjoy their lives outside of labor and independence from the whims of their employers.

Worth a read.

-- America is obsessed with the virtue of work. What about the virtue of rest?

Fun with time signatures

Because who doesn’t want to play an etude that switches between 7/8 and 4/4 every measure?

(Philip Glass, Etude #2. Book of Glass’s etudes arrived from Amazon yesterday. This will be fun.)

It's a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps

This little two-minute snippet of interview from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. summarizes an explanation of racist systems and a case for systemic reparations better than pretty much anything else I’ve heard. Worth considering.

“Now I believe we ought to do all we can and seek to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps… but it’s a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. And many negroes, by the thousands and millions, have been left bootless as a result of all of these years of oppression…”

Wow, I’ve seen/heard a lot of MLK footage but this is the first time I’ve seen this interview. How profound this is. pic.twitter.com/Lm8SR2z3bT

— Justinfication (@Justinfication) April 4, 2018

What will happen with the children of post-evangelicals?

Richard Beck has an insightful piece up on a topic that’s had me thinking. While he’s a decade older and from a different denominational background than I am, he and I have traveled a similar path from a strict conservative Christianity into a progressive post-evangelicalism. But what impact, he asks, does this have on our children?

Anyway, we were talking about how our kids now view the church. We’ve become liberal in our views and so we’ve raised our kids as liberals. We’ve preached messages of tolerance and inclusion. And we’ve been successful. Our kids don’t look on the world with judgment and suspicion. They welcome difference. But we’ve noticed that this comes with a price. Our kids don’t have the same loyalty to the church as we do. We were raised conservatively, so going and being loyal to a local church is hardwired into us. We can’t imagine not going to church. It’s who we are. But our kids weren’t raised by conservatives, they were raised by us, post-evangelical liberals. Consequently, our kids don’t have that same loyalty toward the church. So we were talking about this paradox in our small group, how our kids weren’t raised by our parents, they were raised by us, and how that’s made our kids unlike us. Especially when it comes to how we feel about church. Basically, our kids aren’t post-evangelicals. They are liberals.

He goes on to say that he doesn’t mean that being a liberal is a bad thing, but that he wonders if his children will have a rootedness in a community and deep sense of belonging that he experienced growing up in a more conservative environment.

I’ve had similar questions about raising my own children. While I consider myself pretty solidly post-evangelical, as a family we have spent the last decade as committed members of a fairly conservative evangelical church. My kids attend Sunday School and youth group and get taught many of the same things I did when I was their age. Then they come home and I feel the tension keenly when we have discussions about hot topics that have come up - things like evolution, gender roles, religious tolerance, and historical and textual criticism of the Bible.

Maybe my willingness to stay committed to a conservative church gives lie to the claim that I’m post-evangelical. I guess that’s ok with me - it’s not like post-evangelicalism is a club for which I need to establish my bona fides. What I’m really hoping for my kids is that we can find a sweet spot in the middle - one that doesn’t view orthodox doctrine and social responsibility as an either/or proposition but rather a both/and, one that sees questions as a sign of a strong faith rather than a weak one about to shatter.

Maybe it’s truly the journey that has shaped my theology and Christian outlook into what it is today, but I’m holding onto hope that my children can find their path to a confident faith even through being raised by a meandering post-evangelical.

Opening Day 2018

Some of my favorite words: Opening Day for Major League Baseball. The Cubs started on the road but started the season right with a win!

Is it the beard?

I’ve written before about my Swedish Doppelganger - the botanist Carl Skottsberg in his younger years, at least according to my sister-in-law. Yesterday I was alerted to another one.

Information on this alleged doppelganger comes to me from an older lady at church. She approached me yesterday to say that she watches the Jimmy Swaggart (eek!) TV program, gave me the DISH Network channel that she sees it on, and that Jimmy has a pianist who looks “just like” me and plays the piano “just as well” as I do.

I had to know more.

It turns out the pianist and band leader at Jimmy Swaggart Ministries is a guy named Brian Haney. And, well… I see the resemblance.

Brian:

Me:

Brian again:

Me again:

If I had the time to dig up a few more pictures I’m sure I could find one of me at a piano that has eerie similarities to that one of Brian. I get that the white guy with the shaved head and beard is probably enough to trigger the churchgoing lady’s awareness, but I think there’s a little more than that.

I watched a few of Brian’s YouTube videos and the dude is a talented musician. I might be able to match his Southern Gospel piano riffs, but he’s got a voice that I sure don’t.

He does seem to have a tendency for unfortunately-named songs, though… “I Found The Lily In My Valley” and “When God Dips His Pen Of Love In My Heart” make me realize CCM doesn’t have an exclusive on unintended innuendo.

If you know of other doppelgangers of mine feel free to mention them… but really, the world probably has enough guys that look like me already. We don’t need to overdo it.

Found Tonight

The Hamilton / Dear Evan Hanson mashup we didn’t know we needed until it came out… so good.

Finished reading: 2018, part two

Books I’ve read over the past month or so:

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles An utterly charming novel about a Russian nobleman confined to hotel “house arrest” after the 1917 revolution. His adventures interacting with hotel staff (which he soon becomes) and guests are full of wit and grace and humor. I don’t recall who recommended this one to me but I owe them my thanks.

The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage by Jared Yates Sexton A memoir from a liberal writer who covered the 2016 US presidential election. Heartfelt, but not as interesting or memorable as I had hoped it might be.

House of Spies by Daniel Silva OK, the Gabriel Allon series is getting old. I probably should’ve figured that out seeing as this is book #17 in the series.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami I first became acquainted with Murakami through his Absolutely on Music book that I read a couple months ago. Having discovered he was a novelist I figured it was worth reading one. 1Q84 was just interesting enough to keep me going through its 900 pages. I guess it’s a love story at heart, albeit one with some odd and unexplained sci-fi twists.

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon A YA sci-fi novel with strong race / slavery / gender themes. Interesting in that it tried hard to represent a lot of racial and gender diversity. Managed to do it while only a little bit heavy-handed with the message.

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler Heard about this one on an episode of NPR’s Fresh Air. Fascinating (to me, a bit of a con law nerd) history of how American law has treated corporations with regard to rights and freedoms. Some cases, it seems, have had unintended consequences as the years went by; Ralph Nader’s efforts to win corporate speech rights back in the 1970’s seemed meant to benefit ordinary people by freeing up information that the government had restricted. Those same rights were used as the basis 30 years later for deciding in Citizens United that corporations could dump unlimited money into political campaigns.

Crimes of the Father by Thomas Keneally The author of the novel Schindler’s List takes on the Catholic church abuse scandal. Pleasant yet forgettable prose.

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable Realized I didn’t know much about Malcolm X, and this particular biography was recommended by Ta-Nehisi Coates somewhere. A very readable picture of a fascinating man.

Birthday week!

Today at our house we enter Birthday Week: three of the five of our family members celebrate a birthday between now and next Tuesday. Today it’s Addie entering her last pre-teen year. Tomorrow it’s me leaving 40 behind. Next week KP starts her last year with a single digit age.

Man oh man, time flies.