That quote, you might remember, is from the late New York hotel mogul Leona Helmsley — also known as the Queen of Mean — who enjoyed pointing out that only saps and losers pay taxes. Mrs. Helmsley has now been dead for 20 years (she left $12 million to her dog), but today’s superrich have certainly taken her counsel to heart. They are far more effective than she ever was in evading and outwitting the tax man.

In honor of Tax Day last week, podcaster Ezra Klein interviewed tax expert Ray Madoff on just how bad it is. Read it — or listen — and weep. Madoff echoes Leona Helmsley in noting that “salaries are for suckers” when it comes to the tax code. That’s because immensely rich people--people like Jeff Bezos, whose reported salary is only $82,000 — get most of their actual money from profits on investments, which they get to call “carried interest” and which are taxed at a much lower rate than salary income. According to Madoff, the superrich live by another set of rules. They pay taxes on a tiny proportion of their actual incomes, and some avoid paying the income tax and the payroll tax entirely. That payroll tax is capped at $165k anyway, meaning that even when the rich do pay it, they pay a far smaller share of their total income than working people.

If members of the “wealth class” — as Madoff calls this group — ever have to sell assets they will pay an ever-lower capital gains rate (thanks to friends in Congress). Some will never need to sell assets at all, because banks and private credit firms will lend them money at favorable rates using the wealth as collateral. As long as the earnings from wealth outstrip the interest on the loans, they can grow fat while the government gets starved for needed revenue. The Epstein files reveal much more than lurid details of sexual exploitation; they reveal how Epstein helped his rich buddies to live luxuriously by minimizing their taxes.

The icing on the plutocrat cake is how they can now pass the gelt on to their heirs tax-free (again, thanks to their wealth-friendly friends in Congress), thus expanding the class of arrogant aristocrats that the founders of this country warned against. Justice Louis Brandeis said it well: we can have concentrations of great wealth, or we can have democracy, but we can’t have both.

What’s the result of the gross disparity between the effective tax rates paid by those in the “wealth class” vs. the rates the rest of us pay?

Today, according to the Wall Street Journal, the top ten percent of households account for 49.7% of all consumer spending, whereas the bottom 60% account for just 25% of spending and have to watch every penny as prices rise. And it’s not just the billionaires who are prospering while others struggle. In 1979, just ten percent of the population could be considered upper middle class, whereas now that affluent share of the population has more than tripled, causing housing prices in urban areas to rise sharply and hurting everyone who is not upper middle class or plain old rich.

But the effects of The Great Wealth Divide are far worse than just these bitter outcomes. That’s because today the billionaires are tightening their grip on the politics of both political parties. They make all of the big donations that fuel our moneyball version of politics. What this means, of course, is that they can short-circuit efforts to reform this sorry mess through the political process.

What’s especially interesting — and appalling — is how today’s superrich treat all attempts to get them to pay a fair share as mortal threats, e.g., private equity king Stephen Schwartzman (who “earned” more than $1.2 billion last year) once comparing a proposal to raise the rate on carried interest to the Nazi invasion of Poland. Defenders of the current system bray loudly that the top one percent of income earners pay 40% of all income taxes, conveniently ignoring the payroll tax loophole and the fact that most of their income isn’t even subject to the graduated income tax.

Yes, friends, the pigs at the trough have made it really hard to dislodge them. In this country’s past, major tax changes in the direction of fairness have only come about as the result of wars and depressions. In other countries, revolutions have done the trick. Let’s hope it won’t take a catastrophe or a complete upheaval to get things fixed here, but if it does, so be it.

We know the sons of bitches will never render unto God what belongs to God. But they might at least render unto Caesar.

~ Peter

Apart from the national embarrassment factor, what are we to make of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s mandatory Christian prayer meetings, his invocation of divine blessing for an unprovoked war against Iran, his many references to the medieval Crusades, and his claim during Easter week that the successful extraction of a stranded U.S. pilot was a miraculous resurrection like that of Jesus Christ?

Could there be any connection between this Christian posturing and Hegseth’s relentless campaign to deny honors and promotions to military officers of color and women officers, to remove such leaders from key positions, and to return several U.S. military bases to their old Confederacy-linked names? Could there be a connection between the assault on Iran and J.D. Vance’s concurrent campaigning for Hungary’s christofascist leader, Viktor Orban?

These are questions worth exploring. As to the first, it’s clear that Hegseth, J.D. Vance, and others in positions of power are entirely sincere in believing the attack on Iran to be a righteous, God-approved action. These men have drunk deeply at the poisoned well of Christian nationalism, with Hegseth belonging to an especially virulent church body. They see the struggle with the Islamic Republic as a civilizational struggle: the Christian West vs. Muslim Intruders who humiliated us decades ago by overthrowing our puppet shah and then taking our people hostage.

I want to peel back the onion of Crusader consciousness a little bit, because I believe it’s there that we will find the connection to Hegseth’s hostility to people of color and women in leadership and even to Vance’s embrace of a repellent Viktor Orban.

The specter of a robust and expanding Islamic civilization haunted Western Europe for a very long time. It infuriated Western Christian popes and monarchs to see Jerusalem and other holy sites in Palestine controlled by Islamic leaders, even though those leaders allowed Christian observances to continue. It was even more infuriating — infuriating and humiliating — to have Islamic forces encroaching on bits of European territory, as in parts of Spain. The Muslim lands vastly surpassed the benighted Christian places in respect to art, science, and material prosperity: another sharp blow to Christian self-esteem.

In this context the Crusades taking place between 1095 and 1291 reflected an armed and organized Christian payback effort: a kind of desperation play. But those campaigns also had the effect of consolidating monarchial power and distracting the lower orders from focusing too much on their own misery under feudalism: a nice bonus for oppressive Christian rulers. Crusading fueled not only anti-Islamic fervor but also Jew hatred, and Crusading armies wiped out numerous Jewish settlements as they marched. What we know today as Christian nationalism was birthed way back then.

Now fast forward two hundred years, from 1291 to 1492. That same Crusades-birthed xenophobia, islamophobia, and antisemitism was still in the air when Ferdinand and Isabella unified Spain behind what was called the Reconquista: a military campaign to end five hundred years of Muslim presence there. At the very same moment, and acting as the agent of Catholic Spain, Columbus took the crusading spirit into the New World. Citing the authority of the church’s Doctrine of Discovery, Columbus and his successors — the conquistadors — could seize New World lands and kill off or enslave indigenous peoples with absolute impunity. “Purity of the blood” — limpieza de sangre — was built into the European colonization project: you couldn’t be part of the community, you could not truly belong, unless you were a “pure” Christian, uncontaminated by Muslim or Jewish blood.

You see where this is going. The Pete Hegseths and J.D. Vances continue to operate within a Crusader mentality, where violence — even apocalyptic violence — directed against infidel foes is seen as entirely legitimate. White Christian men were meant to rule the world. God has anointed them for this role. A corollary is that any claim to legitimacy or equality made by people of color, women, or (God forbid) queer people must be steadfastly resisted. These lessers don’t belong; one might say their blood is insufficiently pure.

Among conventional politicians and pundits, it’s not uncommon to hear such views characterized as “extreme.” But we should understand that the underlying idea of a perpetual civilizational conflict — the Christian West vs. the Rotten Rest — has been with us for a very long time, and most of the liberal establishment has accepted the basic premise. The only difference is that, right now, the liberals wish we were focusing on China, not Iran. They worry that we’re wasting the firepower we need for the Final Conflict.

There won’t be any chance for peace and shared prosperity unless this mentality is finally rooted out. U.S. Christians who are horrified by what’s happening now under the sign of the cross have a special responsibility to step up and even shout from the rooftops, “No! Jesus was the one crucified; he was not the crucifier! No to violence! No to state terrorism! No to patriarchy! And No to the white supremacist poison that will kill us all if it isn’t stopped.”

You think that’s asking a lot? Tell it to the Crucified One.

~ Peter

» This week’s art features the Anastasis fresco in Istanbul’s Kariye Mosque/Chora Church.

Decades ago, when I had the privilege of serving in leadership at New York’s Judson Memorial Church, I quickly learned that this was a singing church (you really don’t want any other kind of church) in large part because of the ginormous musical and spiritual gifts of a minister who had been there during the 1960s and 1970s. Rev. Al Carmines left behind a songbook that you might say was inscribed in the hearts of the older congregants, who could sing his anthems and meditations from memory. In those days we didn’t have the musical notation for the benefit of newcomers (including me at the time), but if people stuck around, they too would soon have the Carmines songbook embedded in their hearts.

One of the community’s favorites at Eastertime was a Carmine’s riff on Matthew 28:10, where the angel at the tomb and then the resurrected Jesus himself tell the women to tell the men not to be afraid but to go to Galilee. Galilee is where the community will see him again. That’s where they followed him at the beginning; they must follow him there now.

If you think about the bewildered and terrified community that Jesus left behind — those who still longed for a standard triumphal narrative in which Caesar and Pilate bite the dust — you can understand why the conviction that “he is still with us” could be so powerful. It is powerful, still. For my part, I firmly believe that Jesus is with us still, and in us still, whenever we walk and act in the Jesus way.

Ubi caritas: Where charity and love are, God is there. Love of Christ has gathered us into one. Let us be glad and rejoice.

To my mind a resurrection faith — however you choose to frame it — is vital in reminding us that death shall have no dominion; that death is swallowed up in love. Going back to last week’s reflection on Palm Sunday, that is Christ’s victory — the victory of love over death. It’s not about marching into Jerusalem to achieve and celebrate victory by force of arms.

This past Sunday — this Easter 2026 — I had the pleasure of worshipping again at Judson where a superb new leadership team, led by Senior Minister Micah Bucey, is bringing new light and energy to what is still a singing church. Micah’s rafter-rattling Easter sermon — titled “Stuck on Saturday” — centered on radical and needed new reading of the so-called Sermon on the Mount as an injunction to rise up and make trouble — to rise up and resist the depredations of a violent empire and the rule of wealth. Micah also declared a preference (which I share) for Mark’s original version of the empty tomb story. In Mark’s gospel there are no “sightings” of the resurrected leader, no Emmaus Road encounter, no having breakfast with him by the seashore, no “Doubting Thomas” feeling him up, and no Great Commission. Mark’s account — before it was retouched by later hands — ends with only loss, fear, and grief. Yet from that devastation a survivors’ community begins to build a movement that says to empire, “you can kill and torture us, but we have seen a better way than the way of power and domination — and we are not going back.”

Rising together in that movement — being birthed again now in our own experience of what Naomi Klein calls “end-time fascism” — is the only resurrection that matters.

Alleluia! WE are risen!!

~ Peter

» This week’s art features the Anastasis fresco in Istanbul’s Kariye Mosque/Chora Church.

These Letters don’t normally follow the liturgical calendar, but in this case the conjunction of No Kings Day and Palm Sunday got hold of me and wouldn’t let go.

If you will join a local No Kings Day protest on Saturday, you are among the many millions of Americans who feel nothing but disgust at the pretensions of a would-be king and tin-horn dictator. But there is also a tiny part within us--and a large within the hearts of other millions who remain committed to the MAGA movement--that warms to the idea of a strongman who will make decisions for us and make the trains run on time. Palm Sunday reminds us that we’re not alone in this. There has always been that impulse to say, “maybe this one really IS anointed to lead and set things right.” Alas, this is a temptation we should always resist. We should say “No Kings!” and really mean it.

The way it is usually celebrated in our churches, Palm Sunday sends conflicting signals. Our celebrations and the New Testament texts don’t align. We sing thumping hymns with words like “open the gates of the Temple — strew palms on the Conqueror’s way,” when we know full well that the so-called conqueror did not come to Jerusalem riding a white charger in triumph but came rather as an itinerant troublemaker, riding on a donkey. His week ended in crucifixion, not coronation. But we really want that coronation. We want it so much that we carry the crowning impulse through to the events referred to by the church as Resurrection and Ascension.

It’s all a bit weird, because recall that this outsider, this preacher of radical love enters Jerusalem during Passover, a time when every Jew and certainly Jesus himself feels intensely the strong anti-monarchial bent of the Exodus story. Recall that after the Pharaoh experience, God invites the Israelites to live without a monarchy, or rather with only God as their monarch — no earthly king. That plan ultimately doesn’t work out, and the people do get their kings. But then that doesn’t work out very well, either. You can read all about it in books titled, oddly enough, I Kings and II Kings (and don’t forget the Chronicles).

And still, and still, and still: we want our Jesus to be that world-bestriding all-conquering king. I get it. I feel it myself. We want good power to crush bad power. But we might consider how Jesus himself treats the issue of power. When he is tempted in the wilderness at the start of his journey, the devil offers him kingdoms and thrones. Jesus quotes scripture in reply: “worship the Lord your God and serve only him.” Monarchy is not for him. Jesus is tempted to seize power again at the very end, but again he resists, ordering Peter to put back his sword and reminding Peter and the others that he could summon twelve legions of angels if it’s a matter of using military power to crush unjust state power. But that is not the way it’s supposed to go for him. Instead, he will accept a humiliating death at the hands of an unjust state.

Jesus doesn’t ask us to worship him, but he does ask us to follow him. Like him, we need to summon a different kind of power to create a different kind of reign: the reign of love and justice and inclusion for all.

Servant leadership, not Caesarism, must be our path. No one said it would be easy, but it’s the only way.

~ Peter

Pete Hegseth and Eric Metaxas and Nick Fuentes might be the current paladins of a Militant Christian Manhood, but God knows we’ve had lots of others, with this country having more than its share. Didn’t Mark Twain write about a “civilized” Christian America that entered the world stage at the turn of the 20^th century with “the banner of the Prince of Peace in one hand and its loot-basket and its butcher-knife in the other”?

The unprovoked assault on Iran marks the latest upsurge of this kind of civilizing mission on the part of powerful white Christians, this time using sophisticated high-tech weaponry instead of the spears and maces and longbows of the Crusaders whom Hegseth longingly evokes for having done the right thing in their era. None of it is going to make the world safer, needless to say, and these buffoons don’t even pretend that it will. They are all into the risk (”high tolerance for risk,” says Trump) and all into the sheer fun of blowing things up.

Whereas the Crusaders of old wiped out multiple European Jewish enclaves on their way to liberate the Holy Land, this time our Christian Crusaders march in lockstep with an expansionist Jewish State that will not tolerate a second nuclear power in the neighborhood. This time the Jews and the Christians are blood brothers united against the Muslims. Not that Islam is in any way free of the same militant poison, which to my mind has to do with the fundamental mistake of envisioning divinity in the wrong kind of masculine terms.

All three Abrahamic faiths will be dangerous to human and planetary life until the foundational madness of centering an angry and militant masculinity is rooted out. Because Christians still exercise the most lethal power in global terms, the Christian problem is most acute. And we know the source of the problem. The reign of peace idea and the nonviolent core of the Jesus way could never really take hold once the infant faith got swept up into Roman imperial ambitions, with Emperor Constantine painting the cross on his legions’ banners essentially as a good luck charm. All evidence that the early Jesus community was significantly nurtured and organized by women was effectively obliterated, with only Marian Christianity hanging on as a faint counterpoint to the main drumbeat of a violence-laden all-conquering faith.

For decades now, feminist and womanist theologians and ordinary female and queer Christians have been chipping away at hyper-masculinist Christianity in this country and in Europe. We’ve made some real gains, but it’s not been nearly enough to turn the tide. The poison runs so deep. If given a choice, most American Christians would prefer a Raging Yahweh image of divinity to the Nazarene/Magdalene version, let alone the gentle Sophia version. They might say “God is love” in their formal professions, but deep in their hearts they enjoy a God who can really hate and smite with maximum force.

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That said, now is not the time to give up the struggle for the only God worth revering (a.k.a., the only God). Just as I think the current exaltation of the “man’s man” in popular culture is rapidly approaching its sell-by date, so do I also believe that the brutality and swagger and sheer stupidity of the Muscular Christians who wield government power will be their undoing. Dan Bongino and Dan Bovino: they’re already gone. Kristi Noem, doing her best to butch it up in military gear: she’s gone, too. Hegseth will soon be out the door if Iran proves as big a fiasco as it looks to be now.

But we can’t expect the larger problem to solve itself. We need to go after poisonous religious masculinism with a root-and-branch thoroughness. Transformation within the religious space would reverberate widely in the larger cultural space. And we won’t win the contest in our houses of worship just by seizing the high intellectual ground. This is a spiritual struggle to be waged at the ground level; it can only be won when we change the spiritual chemistry within our churches and temples and mosques, flushing away the taints and toxins of an often unacknowledged but still lethal masculinism.

If we do our work well, our children and grandchildren might yet see a world where people can sleep at night with no fear of hearing the shriek of an incoming missile.

~ Peter

Members of the Atlantic-reading university-educated set still tend to experience mild shock when someone they view as a “serious” thinker comes out of the closet as a religious person, and more specifically as a supernaturalist believer. The crowd I’m thinking about may view some past religious leaders (Jesus, Gandhi, MLK) with a degree of admiration, may even want their kids to pick up a little religious education along the way, but really, believing in God?! That’s a bridge too far. Which is why anyone with ambition and pretension to intelligence who crosses that bridge needs to proceed with care.

Because he shared his journey toward faith and linked that journey to an unfolding ethical sensibility, journalist/author David Brooks executed his own coming out quite deftly. Safely ensconced at Yale these days, Brooks is unlikely to be barred from the faculty club because he has dipped his toe into supernaturalism.

Now comes Christopher Beha, a former editor of Harper’s and a full-on intellectual’s intellectual (e.g., a previous book — The Whole Five Feet — discusses every single work in the Harvard Classics), who takes a less subtle approach to revealing his religiosity. Beha’s new book, Why I Am Not an Atheist, opens with a full-throated take-down of the so-called New Atheists of a few years back: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, et al. But he also engages with the much greater metaphysical minds that have wrestled with questions of belief: Kant, Nietzsche, Camus, Mill, Locke, Descartes: that whole dead white guy pantheon. The reviews I’ve seen to date have been positive: the reviewers respect Beha for his rigor but also for his modesty and sense of humor.

I’m not unhappy to see some Big Thinkers making a bit of space in their heads for the Almighty. Bully for them! But this hairsplitting has been kind of a white man’s game since forever. The new believers who impress me far more than these endlessly expatiating eggheads are the serious-minded and spirit-filled young leaders who are coming at it the other way: through their feet and even through their hearts as they act in solidarity with the victims of injustice and violence both locally and globally.

Through my participation in the National Council of Elders, I have had the very great privilege of meeting some of these Youngers (as Elders call them). Most of the young freedom fighters come from backgrounds of oppression themselves. They have tasted the bitter tears of marginalization and exclusion and dehumanization in white supremacist America. The ones who don’t share this background are in the struggle with no less passion. Their eyes have seen the coming of the glory of the Lord in that they crave nothing less — their souls crave nothing less — than the radical revolution of values that Dr. King called for many decades ago. They are struggling toward the land that “never has been yet — and yet must be,” in the words of Langston Hughes.

Don’t get me wrong: I am not claiming that these Youngers are becoming religious in the traditional sense, although some are. I’m saying that their hunger and thirst for righteousness is itself a mark of the Spirit and that many feel a deep need for spiritual grounding, which may or may not land them in traditional religious practice. And because many are in regular contact with many Elders whose great souls were shaped in a Black Church tradition where spirit and struggle are everything, they feel the attraction of walking the freedom road while being held and led by a divinity walking with them. They want to be able to shout and sing in a circle of belonging and to know with transcendent certainty that the ancestors are singing and shouting along with them in that sacred space where joy and pain are mixed.

THIS is the religion that counts, obviously. It’s feeling, acting, doing, moving. It’s not compiling theses or splitting hairs; it’s certainly not doing battle with doubters.

Long ago Jewish philosopher and mystic Martin Buber emphasized the vital difference between a religion of ideation — identified by Buber with the Greek term pistis that Paul uses repeatedly in the New Testament — and a more animated faith that walks toward justice and healing in intimate relation with a God who IS justice. For this second lifegiving form of faith Buber used the Hebrew term emunah, taking as his examples Abraham, Isaiah, and Jesus.

It’s this second kind of faith that matters now. In my view, it’s the only kind of faith that has ever mattered. For the truly faithful, it’s never been “believe in the Lord and YOU shall be saved,” it’s always been “walk with the children, walk in the Spirit, and WE shall be saved.”

This is a faith that has moved mountains in the past. It’s a faith that can move mountains still. God knows they need moving.

~ Peter

» Photo-illustration contains: “Leaf from a Gospel Book with Four Standing Evangelists,” an image by an 13th or 14th century Armenian artist, available via the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Open Access online collection.

I wasn’t going to write about the Epstein mess, but Anand made me do it. That’s Anand Giridharadas (extra points if you can pronounce the name), whose The.Ink newsletter has been running an excellent special series on what Anand calls the Epstein Class.

The way in which the always-witty Mr. G approaches the Epstein problem seems exactly right to me, and it also makes me think about the Hebrew prophets.

When I studied my Bible as a kid in Wisconsin, I was always puzzled and even a bit disturbed by the way in which those prophets would almost invariably shmoosh together what seemed to me like very different offenses: sexual immorality, worship of false gods, and economic oppression. Is God equally pissed off about all these things? I asked myself: how very strange that God can’t focus His anger a little more precisely. Or maybe God enjoys being pissed off in general. As I say, it was all rather confusing to a teenaged farm boy.

Now that I am in my eighth decade, I think I understand these things a little better. In the first place, I understand that “God is angry” is the prophets’ way of saying something is deeply wrong. In other words, you don’t have to believe in an angry God in order to appreciate prophetic critique. And second, I understand that grouping together sexual violation, religious profanation, and economic exploitation is exactly the right way to frame moral rot at the heart of any nation, as these three forms of oppression usually run together.

What we have in the United States now is a bipartisan power elite that plays by its own rules, or rather its lack of rules. This elite class has only contempt for non-powerful people, whom it can exploit at will for fun and profit. Predatory lending, predatory treatment of low-wage workers, predatory destruction of small businesses through private equity vehicles, predatory violation of young girls and boys: it’s all part of the same lawless romp for these high-flying folks. They are smart, oh yes: they are very smart. They are smart enough to know they need to let a smattering of politicians and academicians and high-end lawyers in on the fun, provided these fellow travelers agree not to talk about it.

Members of the Epstein Class and their professional attendants and enablers for the most part do not pay taxes: that’s also part of their conspiracy against the public.

And where, you ask, does religious profanation come into it? Well, that’s the best part. From the prophetic perspective, stealing from the commons, “grinding the faces” of the commoners, and “laying snares” in order to exploit those commoners is by definition offensive to a God who wants and expects a righteous people to live in a commonwealth: sharing earth’s abundance and forgiving debts rather than using debt peonage to expand one’s own wealth.

Isaiah 58 could not make this link between showing contempt for the poor and the weak and showing contempt for Almighty God any clearer. Idolatry and greed and unbridled lust: these are all faces of the same corruption, the same arrogance, the same stinking rot that needs to be called out and finally rooted out if we are to have any chance of living in a moral universe.

And so I thank Mr. G for taking me back to the Bible. The real Epstein issue isn’t “Who knew about this and didn’t tell?” or even “What other names are they holding back?”; the issue is “What are we going to do about our unaccountable and parasitic overlords?”

~ Peter

PS - for what it’s worth: I personally don’t think God is angry all the time; I do suspect that God is deeply frustrated — and probably deeply sad as well — to see that we’ve let it come to this.

» Please also check out Anand Giridharadas’ Substack The.Ink

The news of the United States attack on Tehran should leave us all with gnawing anxiety in the pits of our stomachs. Iran is not Venezuela or Greenland; this is a country of 90 million people in the very center of the world’s most volatile region. The mayhem and violence are going to spread, and U.S. military and diplomatic personnel throughout the region will be directly exposed to lethal blowback.

But suppose that not a single additional U.S. service member or U.S. citizen is touched by such blowback. Would this mean that Trump’s action was warranted? Consider that there was and is no imminent threat to U.S. interests. Recall that there had been a negotiated plan in place to scale back Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Trump blew that up. Then he blew up the enrichment facilities with those bunker bombs. Now he’s blown up the most recent negotiations.

A president who thinks he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize has lately come to treat our military forces as his private plaything. And what he is really doing now is lavishing yet another undeserved gift on Israel. This is Israel’s war, only we are fighting it and paying for it. Benjamin Netanyahu’s foremost ambition is to be the leader who finally eliminated Iran as a credible threat to his country and its own expansionist agenda. A decisive victory over Iran would also achieve Bibi’s next foremost ambition, which is to stay out of jail.

What neither Trump nor Netanyahu wants to face is the practical question of whether massive aerial bombardment and elimination of the top tier of the Islamic Republic’s leadership can somehow produce “liberation” or even much pacification. Generally speaking, bombing a country causes even those who deeply despise their government to rally ‘round the flag. Suppose Iran were able to bomb the White House and “decapitate” top U.S. leadership through targeted air strikes like those we just inflicted. Would this administration simply fold and make way for sweeping democratic reforms? The question answers itself.

Everyone knows that the repressive regime in Iran is very deeply entrenched. Members of the Revolutionary Guard control all key sectors and industries. Short of a massive ground invasion and a prolonged occupation, which Trump is clearly not prepared to undertake, the Iranian regime will survive, and things will end up still worse for the internal resistance.

Leaving all such practical questions aside, however, for us there are finally the moral questions: Just how much more war can this planet stand, as it already stands at the ecological tipping point? Just how much more war can humanity stand, as we start losing ground against famine, epidemic disease, and massive population displacements?

We can say it’s not “our” war; it’s just Dear Leader’s war. But that is not how the world sees it. We may not have wanted it or started it, but once again it’s up to us to do our best to end it. And may we live long enough to see the day when this country no longer feels the need to impose its will by force of arms. Because unless we finally choose a better way, no one else will, either. We must begin again.

~ Peter

At the overripe age of 250, this United States of ours is hanging itself through hate. I don’t need to convince you. They call it “polarization,” but the deeper source of the problem is mobilized hatred. And because the ugliness coming at us from the white supremacist Right is so unrelenting, hideous, and (yes) hateful, we now hear voices on the Left calling on us to fight fire with fire, even to take up arms against the MAGA forces.

This way madness lies! The 20^th century’s foremost apostle of Christian love — Martin Luther King, Jr. — warned us that “darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

The National Council of Elders, which I am proud to support and serve, believes that what Dr. King called a “radical revolution of values” remains the only path forward. Inner transformation and outer transformation must go hand in hand in order for us to survive and thrive. We won’t overcome the culture of violence without unless we can also overcome the culture of violence within.

Starting now and continuing through April of next year, the National Council and its King & Breaking Silence project is inviting and promoting deeply serious conversation about where we go from here and how we go from here. Quoting King again, will it be chaos or community?

For the inspiration and hope you need in these times, please register for the Begin Again programming that begins this Thursday. Scholar-activists Eddie Glaude, Jr. and Norma Wong will share their wisdom, and musical host Melanie DeMore will have you up and singing before the evening ends.

- Peter

» » » Be sure to check out Eddie Glaude Jr.’s Substack A Native Son

Last week a NY Times essay by Christopher Beha got my attention, as Beha — a self-described skeptical Christian — observed that Ash Wednesday is for everybody, not just for confessing Christians. And it’s true. Receiving a smudge of ashes on the first day of Lent originated as a churchly ritual, obviously. But these days the ashes are on offer to everyone in city squares and thoroughfares. In New York several progressive congregations will get together this week to offer ashes in Sheridan Square, at the site of the Stonewall Memorial that the Trump Administrations seeks to degrade and destroy. Their intent is not to degrade but to dignify the decades-long struggle of queer people for recognition and full equality.

Ash Wednesday reminds us that we humans are truly one in both our mortality and our everlasting glory as children of a living God. We are one blood. In my view, a vivid sense of our radical oneness is what we desperately need in these times when the powers seek to divide us yet again in terms of who’s “in” and who’s “out,” who belongs and who doesn’t. Because that, of course, is what the regime’s ethnic cleansing project — and its unrelenting efforts to whitewash American history — is all about. The project is about white supremacy, and specifically white patriarchal supremacy, reasserting itself with a vengeance.

It seems to me that Americans, broadly speaking, aren’t buying it. In fact, I am convinced that many in this country are now prepared to stand and fight under the banner of radical oneness: of everyone belonging. I see the sense of radical oneness awakening not only in the streets of Minneapolis but in other cities large and small throughout the country. I even see it among the farmers and ranchers — white men — who are showing up to support people of color under threat of deportation in their communities: people whom they’ve come to know and respect as hard workers. Yes, these farmers are also defending their economic interests; they rely on those workers. But I believe it’s more than that. It’s common decency kicking in, and it may also reflect the vital insight everyone on God’s green earth is sacred and therefore inviolate.

I am reluctant to flog the dead horse of Media Topic Number One, but are we not also witnessing a rising against the forces of domination and division in the still-rising rage about the world of Jeffrey Epstein: rising fury at the arrogance and the impunity of all these elite abusers? So many in Epstein’s circle — Bill Gates, Larry Summers, et al — desperately wanted us to see them as the best and the brightest. We see now that they are the lowest and vilest among us.

None of this is to say that the patriarchal white supremacy so deeply inscribed in American culture will be easy to scrub out. After all, it has always garbed itself in its own aura of holiness, regularly receiving the blessing of the church. In the Western Hemisphere, from 1492 right down to today, it has not just valorized a brutal European colonization but has also sought to colonize everyone’s consciousness. It shadowed the 1776 moment despite the lofty “created equal” rhetoric of Mr. Jefferson. It successfully repelled both the first and second efforts at Radical Reconstruction. And now for the past fifty years it’s been working overtime to undo other liberationist achievements of the 1960s: women’s rights, queer rights, and the claims of all living things to live free of commodification. But somehow and some way, a vigorous non serviam resistance still rises, showing us that soulless dominators can never fully succeed in achieving their villainous designs.

So yes, I will receive ashes on Wednesday. And I will once more dedicate myself to the holy work of turning the ever-bright vision of radical oneness into a lived reality for all.

We must begin again.

- Peter

For my money, the most important recent theological work on institutional sin comes from the two Walters — Brueggemann and Wink — both sadly now gone from us. Brueggemann focused on wealth extraction by the powerful, throwing into vivid relief the Bible’s stinging and consistent critique of debt peonage. Wink went even deeper, developing the full implications of the biblical idea that there are superhuman powers threatening human flourishing and thereby also impinging on divinity’s reach here on earth. Wink and his successors have made it impossible to read Luke’s gospel as anything but dramatic rendering of contesting powers at play during Jesus’ lifetime.

While these theological giants were at work unlocking vital insights, other theological giants with names like Lawson and Nash and King and Hamer and Baker were in the streets confronting the evil power of white supremacy in this country. They were drawing strength and inspiration from generations of Black Social Gospel tradition. They were showing the whole world how disciplined nonviolence is a force more powerful than even a lethal and long-established Jim Crow regime.

When people ask me whether a justice-centered Christian witness will ever return, my answer is always “just look around: it’s already returning.” Because the label is now so tainted by the abuses of false prophets, many contemporary manifestations of just community-building activity would never dream of advertising themselves as Christian, and their leaders will never be found in conventional churches. But you can plainly sense the spirit of the revolutionary Jesus at work in their grassroots movement-making.

The evil triplets that Dr. King identified back in 1967 — militarism, racism, materialism — are still very much with us, and these are now joined by the toxic fusion of highly concentrated wealth and artificial intelligence. Violent patriarchy and colonialism likewise continue to hold their evil sway. Our first task in confronting these powers is naming them correctly and understanding the common features within a many-tentacled culture of violence. Only then can we build a mass movement with enough unity and depth to turn the tide.

But we will turn the tide. You don’t have to take it from me. You can take it directly from Jesus: “Behold, I make all things new.” We can, and we will, begin again.

- Peter

I wish I could say that the idea of blood sacrifice for sin makes up just a small sliver of the biblical testimony. Alas, it does not. It’s all over the Hebrew Scriptures. It shows up as well in New Testament passages representing the crucified Jesus as the Paschal Lamb. Nonetheless, I am going to say without hesitation that this ancient idea needs to go, or at least needs to be understood in a new light. The blood part certainly has to go. As for sacrifice, it all comes down to whether the sacrifice is imposed or freely chosen.

Throughout many Christian centuries there have been multiple takes on the theme of substitutionary atonement — also called propitiation or expiation or “blood ransom” — all of which presuppose that God is so enraged by sin that He (and it’s always a He) requires blood sacrifice in order to have His honor satisfied. That’s the twelfth century version.

The notion that God is this kind of touchy tyrant is foreshadowed in the Hebrew Bible’s horrific Akedah passage (Gen. 22), in which God demands that Abraham sacrifice his only son, Isaac. But (ha!) in this case it’s only a test. According to substitutionary atonement theology, in the case of Jesus on the cross, God actually goes through with it. Charming.

Do I need to spell out how the idea of an alpha male God who gets to sacrifice others gets filtered down into powerful men doing the very same thing? Do I need to spell out how this has affected women and sexual minorities through many centuries of suffering and death?

Sane Christian thinkers — including a much-derided John Calvin — have understood that Incarnation alone manifests God’s gracious goodwill toward humans and that blood sacrifice is not required. We are already reconciled without the necessity of a cross.

This of course does not rule out the noble idea of living sacrificially for the sake of bringing God’s great Shalom into existence. To my mind, that is what Jesus’ call to “follow me” is about. But that’s very different from having suffering imposed on us from the outside.

For wonderful tour-de-force treatment of freely chosen sacrifice in a just cause, you might wish to check out Terry Eagleton’s book, Radical Sacrifice. But never think for a moment that bullies who enjoy imposing sacrifice on others are doing godly work. In fact, next week’s Letter will take up the arrant sinfulness of oppressive social systems. Stay tuned.

- Peter

Last week I mentioned liberal Christianity’s great gift to humanity in downplaying Original Sin. Needless to say, this was bound to produce a powerful counterreaction: not just early 20^th century Fundamentalism in the United States but also Swiss theologian Karl Barth’s relentless and voluminous re-articulation of a doom-laden view of things. Barth taught that human depravity might not be quite as total as Calvin thought, but it was still pretty bad.

Allow me to have a bit of fun at Barth’s expense as I cite a different core idea in Calvin’s theology: God’s “gracious goodwill.” Take that, and just that, and then add the essential belief that God so loved the world as to seek a cosmic reconciliation through Jesus, and it’s hard to keep fixating on sin and damnation all the damned time. The Good Shepherd goes looking for the sheep who have gone astray, not to condemn and punish them but to lead them back into the fold. This most basic Sunday School concept is still the gospel truth.

For a refreshing rethinking of what salvation means, I recommend spending some time with Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire, by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker. Reviewing early Christian imagery and practice, these gifted and nimble theologians demolish the notion that sacrificial or substitutionary atonement was all that gripped the imaginations of the first Christians.

Their book’s subtitle also anticipates what critics operating in the Barthian mode will always throw in the faces of the liberals: “What about the cross?” Yeah, what about it?

I will deal more specifically with the idea of blood sacrifice next week, but for now I invite us to consider Roman crucifixion for what it actually was: a savage punishment meted out to persons who were deemed to be threats to the Empire. In experiencing this kind of death, Jesus cannot possibly have been recommending it, let alone suggesting that God willed it for him. His anguished cry from the cross — My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? — hardly sounds to me like an endorsement of blood sacrifice.

Could it be that the Crucified One is telling us that “redemption” through violence is in fact irredeemable — that the way of violence must be abandoned once and for all? Stay tuned.

- Peter

No question about it: liberal Christianity did us all a major service by downplaying the doctrine of Original Sin. Unitarianism did away with sin altogether. All well and good, but maybe also an overreaction to a sin-centered evangelicalism? That’s the premise here.

I want to begin this series of four linked Letters by pleading the case for sin as a real thing. It’s just not what most folks have been told that it is. We might start with the classic notion that sin is separation from God. If we take our incarnational theology seriously, this means that we humans can easily become estranged from the divine that lives within us. That estrangement certainly feels real enough to most people: that sense of alienation, that sense of being stuck in negativity. No one is compelled to call this “stuck” feeling sin, of course, but bear with me.

Taken in this sense, it becomes clear that the experience of sin is almost always also an experience of suffering. Suffering gets woefully multiplied when the chronically estranged and confused get together to create and perpetuate systems of oppression that make others miserable. Which is what they inevitably do, misery loving company and all that.

I will end this series by focusing on social sin. But in this starter piece it’s important for me to state what personal sin is not. It is emphatically not “carnality,” the church’s catch-all term for our fleshly nature. For sex. Taking this anti-flesh direction clearly flies in the face of deeper incarnational thinking. If God has chosen to dwell with us and in us, becoming flesh of our flesh, how can our bodily selves be treated as nothing more than vessels of sin? Yet that is what the nasty and poisonous doctrine of Original Sin teaches.

Saints Paul and Augustine are primarily responsible for afflicting us with this hot mess. These unhappy and sexually conflicted men bought into Plato’s division between higher and lower selves and added their own dash of contempt for the flesh. Their conflation of sin and sex has meant that the truly grave sins involving violence — envy, greed, malicious treatment of one’s neighbor, and actual murder — have tended to get an outrageous pass from platoons of sex-obsessed Christian moralizers through too many ages.

But they won’t get a pass from me. Stay tuned.

- Peter

Of the two bookended feast days marking the sweet short life of Jesus, who does not prefer Christmas to Easter? For many, Easter is both shadowed and shadowy: shadowed by the grief of Good Friday and also shadowy on account of the way the idea of physical resurrection strains credulity.

Let us acknowledge, however, that some of the same shadows also hang over Christmas.

The substitutionary atonement view of what salvation means inevitably leads to the thought that Jesus was “born to suffer and to die,” as an old hymn puts it. Born to save us, yes, but save us by way of unspeakable suffering. Vast quantities of Western Christian art and music from the Middle Ages forward carry this mixed message about Christmas: a time of great joy that is already tinged by anticipatory sorrow.

In January I will offer Letters on the many problems with substitutionary atonement theology and its sin-centered view of salvation. Right now I simply invite us to yield our imaginations to an incarnational understanding that does not include blood sacrifice as its necessary end point. To savor a time of unalloyed rejoicing, in other words.

Let us approach Christmas this year with the eyes of a child beholding another child — small and vulnerable and bathed in a young mother’s love and light. Consider how very precious it is that every year we get to go back to Bethlehem, to that humble manger with the donkeys and oxen and sheep standing by, struck with wonder and reverence themselves. To those sleepy shepherds watching over their flocks by night — peasants stuck in the same old routine — when suddenly there was with the angels a vast heavenly chorus singing out a wondrous proclamation. To the coming of the Magi from the East, following the star and bearing gifts worthy of a newborn prince of peace.

Light, love, warmth, grace, and song: these are the gifts we all desperately need right now. Actual lambs, not a blood-drenched sacrificial Lamb.

I need not add that God’s desire and decision to dwell with us, and in us, means that no vulnerable child should ever be exposed to abduction, incarceration, or deportation. The idea of Immanuel — God with us — carries reverberations that go far beyond the celebration of this one birth in Palestine long ago.

I hope your personal Christmas will rekindle joy and wonder at the thought of divine love dwelling deep inside you. May we together end this awful year singing out our thanks for all of the good gifts that remain, despite the oppressors’ best efforts to crush our spirits. And may we vow never to rest until the blessings of freedom, safety, love, and dignity are everyone’s portion.

Glory to God in the highest — and peace on earth.

- Peter

Bear with me, dear friends, as I wrestle with one of the more fraught words in our language.

Possibly because of Mr. Lincoln still sitting on his marble throne down in DC, we tend too often to think of emancipation as something given or granted to the oppressed. This narrow meaning is reinforced by the contemporary application of the word to describe what happens when someone in foster care turns 18: they are “emancipated” at that age and are thus no longer legally under the thumb of foster parents or other guardians.

The narrow and juridical sense of what it means to be “emancipated” relates directly to what freedom is commonly understood to be in this country: freedom from some form of entrapment or oppression. Sir Isaiah Berlin contrasted the vital difference between freedom from and freedom for back in 1958, but the distinction never really sunk in here in an American culture where a narrow notion of what freedom means has always held sway.

I don’t want to suggest that gaining freedom from outward oppression is unimportant; it is of cardinal importance and indispensable for any possibility of full human flourishing. Just ask the millions of unjustly incarcerated persons in this country. But so is gaining inner freedom important. Inner emancipation is something no one ever really gets enough of. There is always more to offer if we care to reach for it. We both achieve it though mindful living but also receive it as a divine gift. And it turns out that the best way to keep this precious gift alive is to work for the emancipation of others. The most alive people I’ve ever known have been the fearless freedom fighters.

So much of our thinking in a violent oppressive culture is deeply corrupted to the point that our hearts are also corrupted and deadened. I discussed this in last week’s Letter in relation to the ostensibly “enlightened” people who were entirely comfortable with chattel slavery, not to mention colonial plunder of indigenous lands, across centuries. And if I seemed to dismiss Mr. Lincoln earlier, let me at least give the man credit for insight and eloquence. He understood that a great civil war must necessarily result in a fundamental change. The blunt words he used in a short 1862 message to Congress still apply to us now: “As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” We can sense here that Lincoln was spiritually preparing himself to deliver the fateful proclamation of Jan. 1, 1863.

William Wordsworth likewise chafed under the spiritual poverty and moral blindness of an England wracked by multiple forms of oppression and corruption. The crucial word he uses in a 1794 poem of great force is “chartered,” i.e. circumscribed.

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. 
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear... 

Mind-forged manacles: they afflict us all. God invites us to shed them, but we resist. We must disenthrall ourselves. Paul says it well in Galatians: “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” Paul was specifically naming the inclination to think that obeying the law and sticking to the old ways and keeping our heads down is somehow going to save us.

Nope, no way. That’s not how it works. We are invited to step away, to begin again. We are invited to experience a spiritual freedom that might indeed be terrifying if it did not also involve belonging to a beloved community made up of those who have likewise been emancipated from blind obedience and blind submission thanks to a love and a grace we can’t fully explain. Joined hand to hand and heart to heart, we are finally free to serve and free to work on opening the freedom road for others.

What the truly emancipated feel is hard to capture in words. Possibly the words of Clara Ward’s great gospel hymn come closest: “My soul looks back in wonder: how I got over.”

- Peter

Last week LA Progressive published a long essay of mine on the problem of “enlightened” people — individuals brimming with brainpower — who are sorely lacking in moral sensibility. To underscore the problem, I went all the way back to Europe’s Age of Enlightenment, when the world’s most celebrated philosophers — Hume, Kant, Voltaire, and others — turned a blind eye to the slave trade and the unimaginable suffering of the millions of enslaved Africans transported to New World colonies for the purpose of enriching the colonizers. In fact, as wealth from African slavery accumulated, an anti-Black racist ideology grew up right alongside of it within “enlightened” Continental and North American circles. Making Black people out to be less than fully human made it so much easier to rationalize monstrous crimes.

Ostensibly enlightened religious leaders likewise treated chattel slavery as unexceptional, even morally justified. For most, including colonial America’s foremost theologian, Jonathan Edwards, slavery was simply part of the natural order. John Wesley’s passionate condemnation of the slave trade and of slavery itself was the exception, not the rule.

And yet, for reasons no historian has been able to explain, seeds of Abolition were planted in the heart of the British Empire during the 1780s and 1790s. Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharpe, and William Wilberforce may have been the thought leaders and instigators, but theirs was a movement that swept through the whole nation in fairly rapid order, leading to parliamentary abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and to parliamentary abolition of slavery itself in 1833. John Wesley’s outlier position quite swiftly became a powerful shared viewpoint. In short, this first movement for Abolition was enlightened in a different way, lighting up hearts and not just brains and reminding masses of English people — and not a few Americans — that in the end we are one flesh, all of us made in God’s image.

With a soulless technocratic capitalism appearing to hold all the cards, and with the multiplying cruelties of the detention/deportation regime on full display, it may sometimes seem as though there is precious little hope for the human future. But real hope never dies. Real hope shows up again and again in the form of active engagement. It might be true that our white Christian nationalists continue to cheerlead madly for the dominators and demonizers. But they are not the only Christians in the mix. The cries of the human heart will still be heard by those with ears to hear, and a God-given hunger and thirst for justice will still insist on being answered.

Seventy years ago this month, a well-prepared and incredibly determined Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus. She, and all the others who committed themselves to the Montgomery Bus Boycott — not to mention the tens of thousands who would thereafter take part in the great 20^th century Freedom Movement — were possessed of a force more powerful than all of the brute force that a vicious Jim Crow regime could muster. They carried soul force with them as they marched into the phalanxes of violent armed haters they would later confront in Selma and Birmingham. Their achievement demonstrated how organized everyday people filled with the divine spirit can always “make a way where there is no way.”

Soulful witness — and radical nonviolence — has not lost any of its potency in this new century. It’s just that for a long time we didn’t think it was necessary to revive it. We are most assuredly in the depths of an evil time today. Dr. King’s longed-for “radical revolution of values” will most assuredly not arrive overnight. But it’s coming. Wait and see.

- Peter

I never feel more interested in the Jesus story than when the Advent season comes around. I like it because of the drumroll effect of the scriptures assigned to the different Advent Sundays across a four-to-six-week period, depending on when December 25 falls.

Who actually selected these texts is anyone’s guess. Putting together the Common Lectionary was quite obviously a complicated and wonky business. There are three cycles of readings distributed across Years A, B, and C. At this moment we have finished Year C and are plunging back into Year A, for those of you who care.

What I care about is the text themselves. While I am not preaching regularly these days, I still like to track what’s going on, and I especially look forward to the texts of judgment that invariably show up in the mix. Why judgment? Because Jesus is coming to put things right. That’s the whole point. God did not take the trouble to get incarnated just so Jesus could go around shaking hands and patting people on the back. No, God joins humanity on the ground, so to speak, for the purpose of shaking things up. Handshakes can come later.

This year we had a lovely array of judgment texts for the First Sunday in Advent (Nov. 30), We started off with Isaiah 2, where the prophet proclaims, “Out of Zion shall go forth instruction...He shall judge between the nations and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nations shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

Wow, you say, so are they linking the Jesus event to the longed-for arrival of a reign of peace? Yes, that’s exactly what those sly lectionary peeps are doing, and more power to them.

Peace shows up in the second reading, too, from Psalm 122: “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: ‘May they prosper who love you. Peace be within your walls and security within your towers.’ “ And in the third reading, from Romans 13, good old Paul tells Jesus followers in the heart of decadent Rome that it’s time to rouse themselves and prepare for something big: “You know what time it is, how it is already the moment to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone; the day is near. Let us then throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.”

Judgment returns in the fourth reading from Matthew 24, which, like Paul’s warning to the Romans, is actually pointing toward a second coming of the Son of Man, a return that is bound up with the idea of judgment: “Keep awake, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming...you must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.”

Can you feel the electricity in these texts? I can, and it makes me tingle. The message is plain: God dwelling in the midst of us will always mean radical change. Things will start shaking.

We hear the same distant rumbling in the libretto to Handel’s Messiah. Redemption begins with clarification and with judgment.

First air: “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill laid low; the crooked straight and the rough places plain.”

Second air: “But who may abide the day of his coming, and who shall stand when he appeareth? For he is like a refiner’s fire.”

Second chorus: “And he shall purify the sons of Levi, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness.”

If we take Advent seriously, even if only as a pattern for how God wills things to be, the flow is always from a time of judgment to a reign of peace. No justice, no peace! Which is exactly what many of us have chanted again and again in city streets throughout our years protesting police violence, wage theft, payday lending, and other abominations of the unjust.

And yes, in the streets of the city — even in the streets of the cities where masked ICE agents are now doing their worst — you can be sure that God has something other than flamboyant brutality and bottomless cruelty in mind. Judgment is coming. Justice may be delayed, but it will not be denied. Why? Because God reigns.

- Peter

Forget the turkey, the travel angst, the football, and the Black Friday deals. Forget even more the self-serving fairy tale about grateful Pilgrims entertaining the same helpful natives whom they would soon commence to exterminate. The real deal about gratitude is how it opens to a world of wonder and generosity.

When my mother passed on, we sang “For the Beauty of the Earth” at her simple graveside service. An odd choice, you might think, yet her children thought it would be appropriate for someone who loved the change of seasons and who lived close to the earth on our small farm. My dear mother was a believer, but you don’t have to believe in a Creator to believe that Earth itself is generous in unexpected and marvelous ways, bringing forth every good thing in its season, not to mention all of the bonus delights.

Among those delights: many in North America were filled with awe and wonder recently as we got to experience multiple nights lit up by the aurora borealis. When I put my little community garden plot “to bed” last weekend, cleaning out the last of the plants, turning the soil, and covering it with marsh hay for the winter, I was both thankful for the joy of tending it all summer, for the goodies stashed away in the freezer that will extend its bounty, and for the pleasure of anticipating what it might yield next year. And although I foolishly dropped the practice of mealtime prayers for most decades of this short life, in my seventh decade I’ve gone back to bowing my head briefly before eating my dinner when I am alone. It’s not that I feel compelled to say grace; it’s that I receive grace from doing it.

Just as Earth gives us every good thing, so Jesus urged us to bring forth good things from our inner depths — from our inner treasure. An attitude of gratitude comprises a major part of that treasure. But Jesus was far from alone in inviting us to understand how indispensable it is to live our lives out of gratitude.

The African concept of ubuntu, taught and used so effectively by moral giants like Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, reminds us that we do not find happiness or any healthy sense of self apart from the community we are part of. In its simplest form, ubuntu awakens us to the reality that “I am because you are.” In its strongest form, ubuntu gives us the strength — the soul force — to struggle for the wellbeing of the community, which is so much more admirable than narrowly seeking to get “what’s ours.”

As this Thanksgiving approaches, please do yourself the favor of naming the things you are most deeply grateful for. You will quickly realize that they are the very same things everyone else needs and everyone else deserves. And as this realization grows, you will be growing into the ubuntu space and preparing yourself to make your own contribution to the in-breaking of God’s great Shalom.

- Peter

Apart from appreciating their entertainment value, we usually need not pay much attention to the random ruminations of the current Commander-in-Chief. But his candid admission last month that he is unlikely to pass through the pearly gates (“I don’t think there’s anything that’s going to get me into Heaven. I think I’m not maybe Heaven-bound”) — a comment that he tried to walk back last week on account of a sharply negative reaction among many Christians in his base — is just too revealing to be ignored or dismissed.

It’s revealing, first of all, that such a normally self-regarding person would say “I hear I’m not doing well. I’m really at the bottom of the totem pole” in relation to his prospects for eternal felicity. It’s not that this president shows no interest at all in immortality. On the contrary, Trump wants the Treasury to issue a commemorative dollar coin for the 250^th anniversary of U.S. independence that will feature his image on both sides. This is the sort of thing that kings and emperors of old did in making their bids for immortality. For all I know, Trump may yet ask to have a gold sarcophagus made up for the purpose of displaying his remains in an alcove of the new gilded ballroom.

My theory is that Trump knows full well that he is radically unfit for Heaven, especially with new Epstein connection details still coming out. He also knows that he would be unhappy and kind of lost up there. As Mark Twain wrote in his long-suppressed and highly sarcastic Letters from the Earth, it’s hard to imagine that someone who has exhibited a robust interest in sex while inhabiting this mortal coil could be very happy in a sexless Heaven. Plucking a harp all day and singing hymns in a white robe isn’t exactly Donald J. Trump’s idea of fun, even if the streets are paved in gold.

Whereas it seems to me that the Other Place may be of considerable interest to Trump, who is more than capable of giving the Father of Lies a run for his money in the duplicity department. It’s hard not to think of Trump’s ingrained habit of charging others with the crimes he himself commits as anything less than supremely satanic (e.g., he pardons actual insurrectionists who are close to him while prosecuting defenders of the rule of law as terrorists and enemies of the state — and this convicted fraudster is bent on jailing others for alleged and much less serious infractions of tax laws than his own massive violations).

In short, Trump might be itching to displace the Devil himself as King of the Underworld. He does have that all-or-nothing kind of drive.

But the other reason Trump’s thoughts about Heaven are so revealing lies in their theological crudeness. Heaven or Hell: a binary choice. Not that we should expect the man who clutched the Bible upside-down during the George Floyd protests to know all that much about the Good Book’s contents. But suffice it to say that the scriptures are sketchy on the subject of post-mortem destinations. There are plenty of suggestions here and there that we are making our own heavens or hells by how we behave in the here and now.

I want to tread carefully here, and I lack space to fully develop the idea, but it seems pretty clear that the reference to “a great gulf fixed” in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16) is a rhetorical device to underscore the self-damnation of the miserly rich man. As for the separation of the sheep and goats in Matthew 25, again I detect an effective rhetoric designed to drive home the point that the uncharitable and unjust have fatally separated themselves from God.

The crude picture of a strict division of real estate in the hereafter comes mainly from medieval churchly thought (although the church also came up with a way station called Purgatory). The division is made especially vivid in the great epic poem of Dante Alighieri: “The Divine Comedy.” But even in Dante’s Inferno, there is a very strong suggestion that the damned in those various circles prepared their own hells through the way they lived: the sinners are all shown to be getting an intensive dose of their own poisons.

The converse is also true, of course: the virtuous are building up a heaven, even as the malefactors are outfitting a hell. If we take the Lord’s Prayer seriously, we are invited to bring heaven to earth by doing justice and loving mercy (”thy will be done on earth, even as it is in heaven”). The single most evocative and moving picture of heavenly rest in the Hebrew Scriptures — in Isaiah 35 — also clearly points to a realm in which justice finally comes to prevail: this is an earthly paradise where “sorrow and sighing will flee away.”

Again, I do not expect Mr. Trump to know anything about subtleties like these. And if a bit of apprehension about meeting his Maker causes this president to tremble now and again, it can’t be an altogether bad thing, can it?

~ Peter