Good theology / bad theology - from the pen of Ron Rolheiser

Apologize for the length of this entry but not for its content. It is the classic good theology / bad theology summary that is worth re-visiting daily. From the email pen of Ron Rolheiser:

Mercy, Truth, and Pastoral Practice

Recently a student I’d taught decades ago made this comment to me: “It’s been more than twenty years since I took your class and I’ve forgotten most everything you taught. What I do remember from your class is that we’re supposed to always try not to make God look stupid.”

I hope that’s true. I hope that’s something people take away from my lectures and writings because I believe that the first task of any Christian apologetics is to rescue God from stupidity, arbitrariness, narrowness, legalism, rigidity, tribalism, and everything else that’s bad but gets associated with God. A healthy theology of God must underwrite all our apologetics and pastoral practices. Anything we do in the name of God should reflect God.

It’s no accident that atheism, anti-clericalism, and the many diatribes leveled against the church and religion today can always point to some bad theology or church practice on which to base their skepticism and anger. Atheism is always a parasite, feeding off bad religion. So too is much of the negativity towards the churches which is so common today. An anti-church attitude feeds on bad religion and so we who believe in God and church should be examining ourselves more than defending ourselves.

Moreover more important than the criticism of atheists are the many people who have been hurt by their churches. A huge number of persons today no longer go to church or have a very strained relationship to their churches because what they’ve met in their churches doesn’t speak well of God.

I say this in sympathy. It’s not easy to do God adequately, let alone well. But we must try, and so all of our sacramental and pastoral practices need to reflect a healthy theology of God, that is, reflect the God whom Jesus incarnated and revealed. What did Jesus reveal about God?

First, that God has no favourites and that there must be full equality among races, among rich and poor, among slave and free, and among male and female. No one person, race, gender, or nation is more favoured than others by God. Nobody is first. All are privileged.

Next, Jesus taught that God is especially compassionate and understanding towards the weak and towards sinners. Jesus scandalized his religious contemporaries by sitting down with public sinners without first asking them to repent. He welcomed everyone in ways that often offended the religious propriety of the time and he sometimes went against the religious sensitivity of his contemporaries, as we see from his conversation with the Samaritan woman or when he grants a healing to the daughter of a Syro-Phoenician woman.

Moreover he asks us to be compassionate in the same way and immediately spells out what that means by telling us the God loves sinners and saints in exactly the same way. God does not have preferential love for the virtuous.

Shocking to us too is the fact that Jesus never defends himself when attacked. Moreover he is critical of those who, whatever their sincerity, try to block access to him. He surrenders himself to die rather than defend himself. He never meets hatred with hatred and dies loving and forgiving those who are killing him.

Jesus is also clear that it’s not necessarily those who explicitly profess God and religion who are his true followers, but rather those, irrespective of their explicit faith or church practice, who do the will of God on earth.

Finally, and centrally, Jesus is clear that his message is, first of all, good news for the poor, that any preaching in his name that isn’t good news for the poor is not his gospel.
We need to keep these things in mind even as we recognize the validity and importance of the ongoing debates among and within our churches about whom and what makes for true discipleship and true sacrament. It is important to ask what makes for a true sacrament and what conditions make for a valid and licit minister of a sacrament. It is important too to ask who should be admitted to the Eucharist and it is important to set forth certain norms be followed in preparation for baptism, Eucharist, and marriage.

Difficult pastoral questions arise around these issues, among other issues, and this is not suggesting that they should always be resolved in a way that most immediately and simplistically reflects God’s universal will for salvation and God’s infinite understanding and mercy.

Admittedly, sometimes the long-term benefit of living a hard truth can override the short-range need to more quickly take away the pain and the heartache. But, even so, a theology of God that reflects the compassion and mercy of God should always be reflected in every pastoral decision we make. Otherwise we make God look stupid - arbitrary, tribal, cruel, and antithetical to church practice.

Marilynne Robinson says Christianity is too great a narrative to be underwritten by any lesser tale and that should forbid in particular its being subordinated to narrowness, legalism, and lack of compassion.

Ron Rolheiser
Cedara, South Africa
May 27, 2018
Website: www.ronrolheiser.com

Jay Rosen - The challenges facing Journalism in the Age of Trump

notes from a talk given by Jay Rosen at Chautauqua on Tuesday August 15th, 2017 - from the Chautauquan Daily - Brain Contreras, Staff writer

When someone visits the doctor these days, they don’t just take the diagnosis at face value — they go online and get a second opinion.

The doctor has not lost authority, but the terms of that authority have certainly shifted.

This in and of itself need not be a problem.

But now imagine if the president of the United States engaged in an active and deliberate campaign, day after day, to undermine doctors. Medical professionals, he claimed, don’t know what they’re talking about, and in some cases intentionally make their patients sicker.

This would be a crisis. And yet, not for doctors but for a different professional class, it’s no hypothetical.

“That is what’s happening to the American press,” Jay Rosen said. “There is an organized campaign to discredit the mainstream press in this country going on right now. And it is working.”

Rosen is an associate professor of journalism at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University and writes about journalism at PressThink.org. Speaking Monday morning in the Amphitheater as part of Week Eight: “Media and the News: Ethics in the Digital Age,” he explored this trend in a lecture titled “Why is the President Trying to Discredit the American Press?”

“When journalists get to their desks in the morning, between 20 and 30 percent of the public, the electorate, is already lost to them before they even log on,” Rosen said. “Meaning they don’t trust them, they don’t listen to them, they’re not there in the audience or they are actively hostile.”

Part of this, Rosen noted, is due to opacity about “where (journalists are) coming from.”

In that spirit, he clarified exactly what his personal biases are.

“I’m not a journalist, but a critic of the press and a scholar of media,” Rosen said.

Politically, he’s liberal — an “Upper West Side Jewish intellectual-type,” for that matter — and no fan of President Donald Trump.

His relationship with the press can also be fractious, but it comes from a place of support.

“I’m a critic, but I’m a loyal critic; I think we need the press,” Rosen said. “I think we need it to be better than it is. I think we need it to be stronger than it is.”

So, he is concerned — not only because there exists an “organized campaign to discredit (the) free press,” but because it seems to be working.

Gallup polling, he said, reveals decreasing trust in American mass media. Between 1998 and 2016, Independents went from 53 percent to 30 percent and Democrats went from 59 percent to 51 percent. Between 1998 and 2015, Republicans went from 52 percent to 32 percent.

And for Republicans, the trend is accelerating; in a single year, from 2015 to 2016, their trust dropped to only 14 percent.

“That doesn’t happen in polling very often,” Rosen said. “Things like that, long-term trends like that, don’t plunge within one year.”

But with Trump leading a deliberate, structured effort to undermine journalists, it is.

“At the top is President Trump, routinely labeling the press ‘enemies of the people,’ calling news he doesn’t like not just ‘biased’ or ‘incomplete’ but ‘fake’ … (claiming) that it makes up its sources or they have no sources; promoting not a healthy skepticism but rejection and dismissal of what journalists do,” Rosen said. “It’s extreme. We’ve never seen anything like it.”

Even President Richard Nixon, renowned for his hatred of the press, did not air his criticisms in public.

“Then, at the bottom of the pyramid,” Rosen continued, “there’s an army of online trolls and activists who shout down stories they object (to), dismiss the institutions of the press as corrupt (and) harass journalists individually.”

The relationship between the president and his base is mediated by institutions like “talk radio, Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, Breitbart and, of course, Fox News.”

This infrastructure has roots 48 years old, stretching back to a series of speeches Vice President Spiro Agnew delivered in 1969 decrying television punditry as overtly biased.

Not every contributing factor emanates from the Oval Office, though.

“Local newspapers, which once were the breeding ground for trust in journalism … are in decline in many ways,” Rosen said.

Additionally, “there’s a larger economic crisis that has to do with the erosion of advertising, most of which now, in the digital era, has been captured by Facebook and Google.”

And with institutional trust declining elsewhere, too — not just in media, but in politics and government — it’s harder for coverage of those entities to retain credibility.

Journalists themselves aren’t free from blame, either.

“Then there’s the homogeneity and coastal concentration of American journalists in a few large cities, which is another way of saying that the American press is not very diverse,” Rosen said. “It tends to be quite uniform in the cultural backgrounds and assumptions of its practitioners.”

The focus of political journalism on political insiders like strategists, handlers and pollsters, he said, has further created a media environment where partisan spin replaces authentic voices.

The president does play a big part in eroding the press from the top down, though.

“There’s also the increasingly dim prospect that we can have a fact-based debate when the leader of the free world feels free to broadcast false claims and make stuff up,” Rosen said.

Politicians have always lied, but rejecting the notion that truth matters at all is a new issue. And through “verification in reverse” — Rosen’s term for when leaders introduce doubt into previously agreed-upon truths, as with Trump and birtherism — they empower “anti-journalistic” political movements.

And with a former television personality as president, the boundaries of entertainment are seeping into the real world, Rosen added.

Larger trends are at play, too. The rise of web platforms as news distributors and the lack of institutional oversight for journalism at large reduce accountability for important moderators of public dialogue.

“The institution of the press is not much of an institution,” Rosen said. “It’s very hard for it to change. It’s hard for it to reflect on itself.”

Finally, in a broader sense, the division of political belief in America is realigning from a left/right split to an open/closed split.

“Journalism is kind of in the crosshairs because … (it’s) part of that open society,” Rosen said.

Journalists aren’t the only ones, he added. In the Department of State, for instance, foreign service staff vacancies and the shutting out of  Secretary of State Rex Tillerson from the policymaking process speak to the same trends.

“The attacks on journalists are actually part of a larger problem in which academics, civil servants, cosmopolitans, experts, globalists (and) professionals of different kinds are all slowly being brought under this category: ‘enemies of the people,’ ” Rosen said. “Disturbing.”

How can trust be restored amid all these conflicting factors?

“I don’t think there is a solution to this,” Rosen said. “These developments I’m talking about today are deep-seated; many of them have been building for almost 50 years. They’re cultural in addition to being political. They’re becoming part of the fabric of American society.”

“So it’s not going to be easy to change this,” he added.

But there are certain strategies that journalists should consider adopting if they hope to restore the credibility of the press.

For instance, as Rosen demonstrated when he aired his own political leanings at the start of the lecture, he thinks “journalists should start telling us, routinely, where they’re coming from.”

“The whole doctrine of objectivity in journalism has become part of the problem,” Rosen said. “In that, when you say to people, ‘Look: you should trust what I’m telling you because I don’t have a philosophy, I don’t have ideology, I don’t have an agenda, I don’t have any beliefs, I don’t have any starting points, I don’t have any assumptions, so trust me, because this is just the facts’ — there’s something about that claim that makes people mistrust (you).”

Media organizations should also start making their editorial priorities clear to readers, Rosen said, as well as how much money they spend on unearthing major stories.

The way the press interacts with outsiders is also key.

“When somebody in power says, ‘You are fake news’ or ‘You got this completely wrong’ or ‘You made that up’ or ‘You don’t have any sources,’ I think (journalists) should respond forcefully and argue back,” Rosen said.

And beyond just responding to criticism, journalists should also ask skeptics to check for themselves by providing access to the data, studies, transcripts and other evidence from which conclusions are drawn.

Reaching out to readers (or viewers) for help developing stories, like ProPublica did when investigating patient harm in hospitals, is also a practical mechanism for building not just coverage, but trust.

“Now, are any of these things going to work to solve the problem?” Rosen asked. “No. They might help, but the problems are too deep-rooted. Maybe they will have an effect in the long-term, but for the short-term, I think the campaign to discredit the mainstream press … will go on.”

But it is a fight worth having, he said, because at stake is “the whole idea of a common world of fact.”

As the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) once said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

A significant number of people now, though, do seem to feel entitled to their own facts, too.

“And one of them is (the) president of the United States,” Rosen said. “That’s a problem.”

Emmaus O'Herlihy

Painting of the Merciful Fathher by Emmaus O'Herlihy

Painting of the Prodigal Son by Emmaus O'Herlihy

The paintings above were done by Emmaus O'Herlihy, the current artist in residence at the Dominican Institute of Toronto.

I took down these hasty notes from the artist's remarks, the most memorable of which was his concept of sacred space.

• paintings require space, space to be seen, space which give place to 'the human gaze'
• the postmodern world is impacting sacred art
• theology is the connection between religion and culture, it is faith seeking understanding
• theory of the human gaze - bold enough to discover new words and new expression
• postmodernism demands that we retrieve the sacred in the contemporary, seek out new forms of subtler languages
• sacred art acting on our senses for a contemporary spirituality creating sacred space between the viewer and the painting
• the prodigal is the struggle of human nature, the refugee, the migrant crossing into lands not his
• emphasize on the gaze
• our wealth is the gaze of the Father's welcome, the face of Christ on us his prodigals
• viewer becomes involved in the dynamic of God's mercy, the loss and the regaining of the prodigal's identity

Sister Joan Chittister and Daisy Khan

photo of Sister Joan Chittister with Jimmy Carter from her website

We do not need

to practice prayer.

We need

to become a prayer.

—Joan Chittister

So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, 
for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 
There is neither Jew nor Gentile, 
neither slave nor free, 
nor is there male and female, 
for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 
Galatians 3:26-28

Sr. Joan Chittister, O.S.B., is Catholic. Daisy Khan is Muslim.

When they met at Chautauqua Institution, they had an immediate connection — both are advocates for the rights of religious women around the world.

After their first meeting, Khan invited Chittister to speak at the launch of her organization: Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality (WISE).

At first, no one in the room knew what an elderly Catholic lady was doing at their launch, or even who Chittister was. But Khan said once Chittister began to speak to the women, something changed. Loud and confident, she spoke of the responsibility and meaning behind “being a rebel.” Khan said the whole room went into “thunderous applause.”

“I brought a Catholic perspective into a Muslim meeting, and found that we share more in common than we have that divides us, meaning women in every major tradition are struggling to be seen as full human beings. None of the male imams, bishops, cardinals [or] pastors will admit that,” Chittister said. “I saw Daisy [doing] … what Catholic women have been doing for centuries, and that is studying both the theology, the philosophy and the sociology of women’s roles and finding them lacking.” Madison Rossi, The Chautauquan Daily, July 14th, 2016

Both Daisy Khan and Sister Joan Chittister spoke at an outdoor event at Chautauqua on July 15th, 2016, on the topic of Women and Leadership.

Below are very abbreviated notes from what they shared from their religious experience, Daisy being a leader in the Islamic community and Joan an outspoken Catholic for over 35 years, as a leader within the Benedictine community.

Daisy Khan - Muslim

• Each of you is a shepherd - Mohammed
• Servant leaders, deep sense of ethics, willingness to be introspective and the need to convey uncertainty
• Carving out a path - the story of the Prophet, receiving a lot of revelations, liked what he was saying
• A woman once approached the Prophet and asked him: 'Why are all the revelations being addressed to men?'
• Mohammed didn't have an answer at the time but later replied (35:35) that God speaks to both men and women without restriction

Joan Chittister - Benedictine Sister

• If a woman tries to advance the woman's question she is seen as the enemy, she is rejected or ignored whether the issue is daycare or occupational opportunity,
• When a woman stands to question the way things are, the questioner is questioned
• They are dismissed with 'well you know how women are...'
• In Morocco - a woman is raped and she has to marry her rapist
• In the US - a college student who reports she has been raped is told to be quiet
• The problem is systemic
• In Mexico a woman is expected to carry water up the mountains, in the US men executive can get their corporations to cover their golf course memberships but women can't get day care
• The question is: how can society benefit from governance that taps into only one eye which can see, only one ear that can hear and only one mouth that can speak?
• No wonder our society is suffering so badly!

• There is a limit where forbearance ceases to be a virtue
• Increasing lip service to women in leadership featuring the token women
• and yet 7 out of every 10 business start ups by women
• The theology of male domination in early Christian theology in conjunction with the divination of the subordination of women
• "I suffer not a woman to teach" St Paul
• "I fail to see the use of a woman other than to bear children, a second species...' Augustine 
• "If they become tired or die in child-birth, it is no loss." Martin Luther
• It affects our entire social system adversely when women are deemed a derivative of men
• The word that is translated as 'helper' or 'help-meet' in Genesis 2:20 appears 30 times in the Old Testament. In all but this verse the Hebrew word is translated as a 'power equal to'' but not here
• Eve was created as a power equal to Adam, which is more than just a helper
• These old ideas must go, they are on a collision crisis with the world at large
• Leadership studies indicate that women are more likely to collaborate rather than pontificate as men are inclined to do
• that for the 16 competencies that make for good leaders, women outscore men in 10 of these categories, are equal to men in 4 others with men scoring higher than women in only 2 categories
• and yet only 3% to 4% of leaders today are women

Jim Wallis

photo of Jim Wallis from Sojourners

Jim Wallis spoke at Chautauqua at a Conference on 'Moral Leadership.' 
Below are the bullet notes I made of his remarks entitled 'The Bridge to a New America':

• The narrative needs to change
• The safety of our sons and daughters
• Trayvon Martin was the inspiration for Jim's latest book, 'America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America'
• Black boys in America are assumed to be violent
• Time to get real about where we are
• America's original sin
• Still we are not cleansed of this
• The sin wasn't just slavery
• Centuries ago we threw away the orthodox beleif that we are all created in the image of God (Imago Deo) and acquiesced to a doctrine insisting that blacks were 3/5 human
• BLM is the latest movement which challenges that doctrine
• The need to see every person as fully human with the right to go home
• The need for repentance - the need for turning around and going into a whole new direction
• What is white privilege? If you don't see it then you've got it
• The framework / the rightness of whiteness
• The whole idea of whiteness is a lie, a justification of what we were doing to native and black people
• If white Christians were to act more Christian than white, the blacks would be less fearful
• Whiteness is an idol and like all idols, it creates division
• The end of white Christian America
• 72% of white Christians believe the shooting of blacks is the result of circumstances rather than race
• The intent within America to not hear each other's stories has to be reversed  - we need to know the other
• Every black kid has had the parental talk with their kids about how to behave when talking to police
• The need for white parents to say to their kids 'your black team-mates are in danger of being shot'
• 11 million undocumented people in the US - separated from their families
• What are they afraid of?
• They are afraid of you.
• Why? 
• The bridge to a new America - from a white America to an America which allow full humanity to all non-whites
• 2035 the United States will be a majority of minorities
• The old donkeys that are dying kick the hardest
• The Moral Monday event is one movement challenging the status quo
• Master James Crow Esquire - whites are admitting that they can't change the changing demographic but they are fighting hard to resist the change
• Examples include: 
• the legalizing of workers but not as citizens
• The drug war - mass incarceration means mass disenfranchised voters
• The Matthew 25 voter suppression 
• by elevating a White Nationalist candidate to be President of the United States
• I don't believe that Trump has the conviction to be a racist
• we must help vulnerable voters to vote
• Galatians 3 - race, class and gender - read at every baptism - the 3 great societal divides are according to the gospel not to happen among us
• for a democracy to work, privilege and punishment cannot be a factor of skin colour
• You are lucky this time - this is intolerable
• From warriors to guardians
• Community policing 
• Campaign Zero - we don't need allies, we need accomplishes
• Talk to your kids, talk to your police
• To save black and blue lives
• Trying to sustain ourselves, the need for healing
• Our own healing is tied to justice
• To find our own healing is connected to the healing of others the repairing of broker breaches and restorer of streets to live in (see Isaiah 58)
• The biggest enemy is cynicism and hopelessness 
• Hope is believing despite the evidence and watching the evidence change
• The message of sin is rooted in the dynamic to repent, to change
• What do BLM want - schooling, a job and a family
• Gerry-meandering, there are pushbacks because there have been advances - white supremacists don't die easily
• We don't live in a post racial society
• Washington DC is the last place where change happens, change happens when the wind changes, we have to be attentive to the wind of God's spirit

Tony Campolo - what love requires

Heard Tony Campolo speak at Chautauqua in July, 2013

• Love requires that you look into a person and not at a person
• The need to connect into the deep recesses of a person's life
• Story of Tony's praying for someone who ultimately died 
• The story of the inner transformation
• He wasn't cured but he was healed.
• When you enter into people's sufferings you are exhausted
• Eyeball to eyeball contact
• Love is about connecting with people deeply. So deeply that it is draining
• Story of Guy Doad, teacher - despised as a young boy, ridiculed by his classmates, uplifted by a teacher who said that he was a poet
• Jesus - I felt power to flow out of me
• There is an energy that flows from God through you to other people 
• Blessed are those who are poor and willingly become poor
• The story of Schlinder's list - I could be doing so much more
• Going door to door offering to pray with people
• The programs are already in place, but you have to go door to door to find the needy to connect them with the services
• I want you to become poor people materially, spiritually
• For these are my people says Jesus

David Brooks - Moral Geniuses

David Brooks is a writer for the New York Times. For more go to:

• Moral geniuses 
• Public broadcasting 
• Catholics from Boston
• The moral side
• Teaching at Yale - raised by über moms, weigh less than their infants
• Flashing mandarin cards at their infants
• Cashiers on loan from Amnesty International
• Seaweed snacks
• I want a snack that will prevent colio rectal cancer

Frances Perkins

• Reading poetry to lepers
• Totally dominate classroom discussion even though they haven't read the books
• University of Chicago - atheistic students being taught by Jewish professors
• Teaching books that authors gave their lives for
• I feel drained and exhausted in delivering stories
• Students don't have time to read books that are transformative
• They read to learn but not internalize
• Lost opportunity cost
• Faith in science and not developed in the moral categories
• Giving people moral instruction
• Asked young people what moral dilemmas they faced

Saint Augustine

• Augustine - born to a very strong mother
• Wanted to get ahead, left to go to Carthage; the cauldron of love
• Lashed by the hot stripes of passion
• Married for 15 years with a commoner, dumped her for someone of the same class
• Painful process - lusty guy
• Confessions - 16 year old stole some pears, wasn't hungry, wanted to fit in, deep within wanted to do bad
• Bound by an iron of my own choice 
• Habit for which there was no resistance
• Murphy's Law at stake
• Along comes Mom, but he can't give up lust - battle self against self
• The sound of a little girl's verse
• Make no provision for the flesh
• No conversion more famous
• You have to look outside yourself
• 5 days before her death, they have a conversation - forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to the things ahead - into the realm of pure spirit
• The word repeated - HUSH - the world, the self and the mind is hushed 
• His mom dies at 57, Augustine is 33
• Had to connect with students 
• Lonely man of faith - two accounts of creation - we are made of dust and ashes, the first more agenda driven and the second more built for silence
• Adam 1 and Adam 2 
• Adam wants to conquer the world
• Adam 2 wants to rest
• These two sides in permanent confrontation - operating with different mindsets
• The first lives by an economic logic the 2nd lives by a sacrificial logic
• We live in a world which emphasizes Adam 1 and rebuts and denies Adam 2
• France's Perkins - born in Maine
• There my dear is my hat, get a hat which is wider than your cheek bones
• No way with getting away with BS
• Made her do chemistry and Latin
• Mount Holy Oak - 1902 - sent around the world
• Sent them everywhere alone
• Go where nobody else wants to go
• Went to a settlement house, the arithmetic of compassion, falls in love in New York City in Greenwich Village
• Sees a fire that is devastating 
• Takes up a cause of workers rights
• What does history want me to do?
• 1920's - notes on the male mind
• Guys will only listen if she dresses like their mothers
• Mother Perkins - tremendously impact full - works for Franklin Roosevelt
• Her private life was a mess, but publicly was instrumental to social welfare legislation
• Her late life was happier - filled with purpose 

Dorothy Day

• One other example - Dorothy Day - lived through the San Francisco earthquake 
• That little event - very self critical
• The long lonliness
• I became pious and smug
• Moved to Greenwich Village
• Modeled the books she was reading
• Reading Dovstovetaky
• Had sex a lot, one of her protests she was arrested, one suicide attempt
• Suffragette arrest
• Like Augustine - hits the bottom with her 2nd imprisonment - thought it was an indictment of her lifestyle
• Lives with a guy, has a kid - with the kid came the ambition to worship and adore led to her becoming a Catholic - started soup kitchens, life of incredible service - their gratitude became my absorption
• Delicious moment in her life
• Robert Coles - interviewed her - my great love was I had theirs this long in my life
• Adam 1 bowed down to Adam 2

• There are 2 ways of doing goodness
• Some commonalities like
• We are divided creatures
• We are self-centred
• That pride is the central vice
• Humility is the chief virtue, seeing yourself accurately
• Sin is the central battle
• No person can survive on their own
• Defeating weakness only comes by becoming silent
• Living by a code
• Only save yourself by sacrificing yourself
• God is you as you truly are - e Gilbert - Dorothy Day would not agree
• For he shall have judgment without mercy, that hath shewed no mercy; and mercy rejoiceth against judgment. If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, And one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit? Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone. (James 2:13, 15-17 KJV)
• An ethos of self distrust
• The heart can not be taught to students who are there to advance
• Caring and digging in
• Never forget the message is the person
• Life is much bigger than we think
• Teacher finding an inner guiding presence 
• Journalism - writing during the day and drink at night
• My responsibility - if someone committed suicide I had to get quotes from the family 
• From there to work for William F Buckley
• 5 people of moral geniuses
• Jim Lehrer
• George Schultz
• The central challenge of our time is the widening gap between rich and poor
• Whole menu of things that need to be done 
• The choice you are making is not just for today
• Every little decision moves your soul in one or another direction
• Try to be hard on yourself 
• What gives me hope?
• Lack of moral direction 
• Crime rates down, teenage pregnancies, abortions are down, socially we are in good shape
• Social movements work from the bottom up
• Disasters - light bulb memory and then the process of interpreting it
• How we interpret events is as much the shaper of action 
• Unions - students have no collective conscience 
• You remember the teacher more than the course
• Balance between Adam 1 and Adam 2 - two ways - habits, small acts of kindness , remember the name of people you meet; copying good people, we are wired to mimicking good people