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

Trevor Potter - the financing of Elections

Heard Trevor Potter speak at Chautauqua in July 2013

• Money and Politics
• Former chair of the Election Process
• Campaign Finance Law
• Delinquent intersection between money and politics
• Chief counsel to Stephen Colbert
• Just remember he's the funny one
• Lower the tone on money and politics
• Where are we in the financing of elections
• Corporations have the same right to contribute to political campaigns as do private individuals
• $100s of millions donated from non traceable sources
• $7 Billion spent on the last election
• 337% increase in 20 years
• 2008 less than half that
• $85 Million Senate race
• The Supreme Court has ruled that spending limits on elections is unconstitutional 
• The government can only appeal that candidates spend less
• No legal limit on campaign spending
• The Buckley decision
• No limits on self-funded candidates
• First Amendment was written to prevent restriction of free speech even if that speech was against the government
• But what does this have to do with restricting campaign spending
• 1904 - one robber baron said when Teddy Roosevelt was elected - 'we bought his election, he just didn't continue as though he had been bought'
• 1907 corporations were limited to what they could contribute
• Citizens United in 2010, the majority of the Supreme Court agreed that corporations had the legal status of persons an therefore shouldn't be restricted in terms of campaign contributions
• Where are we?
• Corporate money? Yes
• Foreign money? No
• It is now the Supreme Court and not Congress who determines who can contribute and who cannot
• The huge jump in campaign contributions because of the Citizens United 
• Dark Money - you don't know where the money is coming from
• Justice Anthony Kennedy - what was he smoking? To think that all corporate campaign money could be traced 
• Gutting of the disclosure provisions
• Names like Americans for a better America
• Corporations like these veiled contributions, don't have to answer for their campaign spending to the public or to their shareholders
• Congress could change this but they are deadlocked
• It is not clear how they thought that the process wouldn't be corrupted?
• The court was simply wrong in thinking that this would be independent
• Wholly independent turns out not to be!
• Where does the money come from?
• Average Americans - lowest recordable level $200
• What percentage 1/3 of 1% of Americans donate at the
• Minimum donation
• 163 people gave over 50% of total Superpac donations
• Worried that it will be limited to a couple of guys in a room
• The rich being left out by the super rich
• Most donors are men
• 222 Obama 2012
• Total number of fundraisers attended for his reelection campaign
• 9 Reagan 1984
• Total number of fundraisers for his reelection campaign 
• 4 hours - daily congressional schedule making fundraising calls for a safe seat, more for a contested seat
• Corporate Spending - hasn't changed in terms of union contribution but significant increases for private corporations
• SuperPacs may be bad for America but they are good for CBS
• Negative ads are effective, they undermine confidence in a candidate
• Motivation - Justice Kennedy - making profits, corporations can be sued for poor returns
• When a corporation enters a political race it is with the intent of supporting the short term profit interests of the company
• This entrenches the status quo
• I am not a US company and I don't make decisions based on what's good for the US - former CEO Mobile Exxon Lee Raymomd
• It is important exposé the ugliness of political fundraising Chris Murphy -   recently elected Senator
• What constitutes the greatest threat to US democracy - campaign spending -
• Members of congress are spending 1/2 their time dialing for dollars
• If you have money you have a leg up on the competition
• American Anti- corruption act
• PAC / Superpac / secretly
• PAC is a political action committee
• It is an organization, opening a bank account having a treasurer registered with the government
• Candidate can have a pact - a candidate action pac
• Super PAC - no limit on amounts
• Regular pacs have a $5,000 limit
• As long as the group is only doing independent expenditures 
• It has unlimited resources independent of candidates - so called independent ads
• The anonymity of the donor? What is the argument for anonymity - they ought to be disclosed
• Requiring people to declare who I am is forcing or compelling speech
• Is there any chilling affect on contributions if names are revealed?
• The story of Target and Minnesota 
• Target contributed $500,000 to a candidate who was pro business but who was subsequently a anti-gay candidate
• Target took a real hit because of anti-gay legislation
• Bain capital - super PAC tried to hide under the radar
• The values of full disclosure help uphold democracy - people need to know who the speaker is - 

Ali Veshi

Ali Velshi spoke at Chautauqua in July 2013.

• Are Markets Moral?
• Worked for Lee Hamilton
• Give me my money back
• Honoured to be here
• I am here as a story teller
• My job is to pass stories around
• Al Jazeera America
• Markets and Morality
• Question? Are the markets moral?
• Are markets moral, immoral, amoral,
• Or value neutral?
• Audience split between immoral and amoral
• Twitter - fruit markets?
• Human nature means limits have to be imposed
• Where does morality come from?
• The ethical glue that holds us together
• What is considered right and wrong?
• Commerce - some exchange involved, structure regarded
• Markets are amoral, the less regulated the greater efficiency but the greater discrepancy the more immoral markets become
• How should markets be governed?
• It has brought wealth to many but today the markets are terrifying
• The buccaneer days of the Robber Barons - systems which pointed to fascism, dictatorship
• Roosevelt thwarted that
• Many blame Roosevelt for creating obstacles
• The backlash against the markets is still on the rise
• The market - the institution of trade
• Protesters say that CEOs shouldn't be making many times what the lowest paid employees make
• Gordon Brown argues the market should be regulated
• We are an economically bifurcated society
• These problems are not new, there have been times where great polarization also existed
• The corrupting influence of money itself
• Ruskin 150 years ago - mandate for corporate leaders 
• Should provide for the nation, can provide jobs for all
• Good pay for all
• Honesty is the best policy
• Honesty begets trust
• Strong leadership for those who can implement change
• Those who have wealth use it for good
• Markets should be servants for the people
• Is the market itself the problem?
• It can be tough to be heard
• Markets tend to follow mathematics rather than the social good
• The ongoing challenge of the right balance between the individual and society
• Group interest or individual - what is more important?
• Socially responsible funds - help the environment
• Morals - how do they impact investment returns - investing in guns produces high returns
• Principles aren't principles until they cost you
• Stopped doing business in South Africa - impacted apartheid
• Immorality in the markets - is the evil the market itself or those who abuse it? Like athletes who take performance enhancing drugs - is the fault the sport or the athlete?
• The mortgage crisis - packaging debts by Banks and farming them out meant the banks were no longer on the hook
• Cigarette and drug companies - horrible instances of malfeasance only indicate that dishonesty is rampant
• We want fairness and transparency
• The fracking debate
• Regulation if applied fairly is acceptable
• Small businesses are perceived as friendly because their owners are like those around them - neighbours
• We are our brothers' keeper first
• Some corporations try to act morally
• Markets are moral even if they don't know they are
• Markets can generate prosperity which when used by people generate great good
• An effective tool
• Market is a like a cat // doesn't matter if it's black or white just as long as it catches mice
• Shakespeare in the Park - free with long lines but when some get ahead without the wait 
• Line standers - no longer a public good; homeless people standing in line for Supreme Court hearings
• Scalping tickets - used to be an issue, stubhub -
• Market makes no comment re: morality 
• A longing for corporate decency
• Technology flattens the buying process
• Designers may get 100% of the proceeds through an Internet sale but the cost is much less
• Unions in the 1950s was 3 in 10 workers
• Systems inefficiencies get weeded out but the loss of good fair wages is part of the outcome
• Personal responsibilities exceed regulatory things
• Benefit corporations enlightened way to go
• Sub-prime lending crisis immoral even though not breaking the law
• Everyone is on high alert
• We have had a culture of maligning regulation, public service - 
• Implementing social audits
• We will be the best effectors of market change if we exercise ourselves
• Stocks go up despite layoffs
• We have got to find a way for people to be fully employed and profitable
• Sell your desks and chairs before you lay off
• Move employees to 4 days rather than lay one of them off
• How can we redeploy employees?
• Layoffs impact so many not just the people laid off but the ancillary industries like restaurants are also affected 
• If it bleeds it leads - is CNN moral?
• Give the news that is most important before the news that is juiciest
• Too big to fail - companies have to submit a living will 

EJ Donne

EJ Donne - heard him speak at Chautauqua in July 2013

• Our divided political heart
• Justice, morals, the equal dignity of every person regardless of who they are
• Justice we assume can't be bought or sold
• Wealthy people can buy their way out of the draft
• The writ of money and the rule of the economy
• Health care a market proposition
• Why should children hopelessly snared in poverty which is no choice of their own be denied the necessities of life including healthcare?
• The need to temper markets with morals 
• Does this land or my way best represent American values?
• 'Americans can be relied to the right thing after they have exhausted all the possibilities' - Churchill 
• Our arc bends toward justice
• From the very beginning we have both an individual and community entities 
• We, the people - Declaration assumes community
• Pledging to each other mutual care, working together
• The first negative political ad - the Declaration of Independence
• They were not anti- government
• First version of socialized medical plan was in 1790 to care for seamen
• One nation birthed in disagreement - born out of competing values
• Made compromises rooted in the idea of being ruled by the people
• A refutation of laissez faire economics
• The radical individualism 35 years in the late 1800's
• The power of high finance over government in the 1920's
• Restored by government - limits on business
• Markets worth it only when under moral leadership 
• The language of the market place dominates public discourse 
• We used to talk about immunizing young children - now we talk about investing in our children 
• Strengthening family values are worth doing whether they justify economic calculations or not
• Poverty - does it make economic sense to address the problem in solely economic terms?
• The questions of economic concern are moral when it is about what food access, housing
• The Market is in dire need of criticism
• The market can't be credited with solving all problems
• It is very good with measuring profit
• But not good at creating universal health care
• Market depends on the notion of Common good, on trust depending on virtues 
• Insiders and outsiders - pollute our economics
• Economics our politics
• A capitalist society relies on non-capitalist values 
• We must see each other as members of the same body
• Whenever this flag is flown, we take care of our own
• Bruce Springsteen - Building a nation where we can survive depends on our making conditions where we can survive
• Talking Fair Trade
• What effect will this have on people
• Free trade can't be used to undermine good jobs
• How economies can be governed?
• I will believe Texas believes corporations are people when they execute one
• A call to take care of more than their own
• Remarkable tweet from Tampa Bay - "How cool would it have been had Robert Zimmerman offered to drive Traynor a ride home?"
• Religious opinion 
• Where does Jesus call for a cut in the capital gains tax?
• When family values are used to bash gays and lesbians it is wrong
• But when it is used to take issue with inequality, the incarceration of 2 million black men in prison
• Door to door is still the best way to address the real issues
• Health care is complicated 
• 60% of employers cover health care down from 85% after the 2nd world war

Chris Hedges

from quotesgram.com

Rise up lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you --
Ye are many, they are few!         Percy Bysshe Shelley

Why do you stand
they were asked, and
Why do you walk?

Because of the children, they said, and
because of the heart, and
because of the bread.                 Daniel Berrigan

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places - and there are so many - where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory. Howard Zinn

My notes from a session with Chris Hedges when he spoke at Chautauqua in July, 2013.

• my Dad was a Presbyterian Minister
• An outspoken supporter of the Civil Rights
• GBLT rights supporter from the late 60's
• Church harsh on him for his GBLT activism
• in one of his last services he conducted Easter service for the GBLT community
• he believed marriage is a sacrament between two committed people who love each other
• All liberal institutions have collapsed
• What happened?
• How was it that progressive forces have been destroyed?
• More people died for labour rights in the US than any other country!
• WW1 broke out - the collapse of the Eastern Front - no support in the US for the war
• the first instance of mass communication being used to win Americans over to a position they initially resisted. It reconfigured American society persuading people by emotional appeal rather than using logic or reason
• The effectiveness of mass communication - very few are able to resist - even intellectuals have succumbed
• The proliferation of mass communication - the creation of black publicity
• has instituted the psychosis of permanent war where the dreaded Hun becomes the dreaded red
• Severe repression of criticism, for one - the Swedish-American labour activist Joe Hill hung on trumped up charges
• Madison Avenue inculcates consumer mentality, American society is contaminated by a culture of lies
• The systematic destruction of radical forces, reducing change to mere incremental reform
• Howard Zinn's History of America, birthed of his awareness of 'the voices never heard!' 
• In our day people like Noam Chomsky shut out from the mainline media streams
• Numerous mechanisms to shut people out
• All of the openings in American history were radical - the suffrage movement, the labour movement, the civil rights movement
• and yet now the Civil Rights movement has been gutted with the recent Supreme Court decision
• Predatory class has no impediment
• No self imposed limits on capitalism - everything is a commodity
• We live in a global system of Neo-feudalism
• We moved from an empire of production to an empire of consumption
• Clinton /Obama - politicians who 'feel your hurt but instigated NAFTA; the deregulation of the media, the gross civil violations of NSA'
• Once in the street - you are worth nothing
• In prison prisoners paid $1 an hour - an economic commodity
• Corporate funding equal in Democratic as in Republican
• We have undergone a corporate coup d'état  - and they have won
• Democratic Party would be on the far right in Europe
• The systematic killing of descent
• There is no way to vote against Goldman Sacks
• Global oligarchy
• Drones, privatized armies. Night raids in our own cities
• Don't play the game
• We must recapture the moral imperative of radical movements
• The question is not how do you get the right people to rule, the matter is how do you get the people who rule to be afraid
• America is a deeply violent culture
• The Christian Right - fundamentalists once reluctant to become political - the celebration of grasping the cross with the gun - target the vulnerable, blame the demise of society on gays, trade unionists, feminists,
• Bankrupt liberalism
• We have systematically killed radicalism
• Occupy movement gave expression to the majority
• Health care should be a million miles from capitalism, but in the US we are trying to marry the two. It is a moral degeneration where private insurance companies hold young sick children hostage
• Richestan - where the rich live separate from America and yet rule America
• Corporations are systems of death - formal mechanism; our formal channels of governments can't stop them.
• Corporations are colour blind
• Speaking truth to power - a faith responsibility
• We have nothing else less than civil disobedience to defend us
• Faith that the good draws the good - the essence of faith
• The power of the powerless is that truth can be recognized when it takes to the streets
• We must stand up for what is right; it is not impractical - it is a very lonely walk
• Like Martin Luther King we must 'take non-violence as my lawfully wedded wife'
• The poor have been abandoned by the liberal class
• We cannot go back to where we were
• A material diminishing is not a spiritual diminishing
• The government is frightened
• The government doesn't even trust the police to protect them
• They trust private corporations like NSA
• Keep doing the good you are doing
• Draw the good to the good
• The truth we speak is accessible to the frontline defenders - ie the police
• MSNBC the same as FOX except with a different spin
• The voices are there, hidden but out there
• Read Cicero, don't tune out the voices like Jeremiah Wright, Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader

Esther de Waal - On Henri Nouwen and Rembrandt's painting of The Prodigal Son

Notes from Esther de Waal's opening talk at the Henri Nouwen Society's 'Way of the Heart Conference' - June 10, 2016.
Her comments were based on Nouwen's book 'The Return of the Prodigal', which in turn were his reflections on Rembrandt's masterpiece.

• We are even more lost
• Coming home and staying there, where true love is to be found
• It is the gift that we are to lay claim to
• Where do you dwell?
• Christ's answer is 'come and see.'
• How does Henri go beyond his deep searching?
• The new monasticism - to keep the still centre in our lives
• If you are looking for theology in Wales, look for the poets
• The visual was very important for Henri
• When I am too tired to read, to tired to do or to pray, I can still look at art
• Looking at a painting with my heart's eye
• Quite deliberate steps - battered by mission and vision statements
• The need to look with long and prayerful attention
• The need to enter into art
• June 19, 1983 - Henri first encounters the Return of the Prodigal
• Just completed a 6 month tour of the US, overwhelmed by his own neediness
• In July 26, 1986 he goes to St. Peterburg's to see the painting
• It is a huge painting 6 feet by 8 feet
• He sees the feet of the prodigal
• Luther called the parable the gospel within the gospel
• Picasso drew a painting of the prodigal before he comes home
• Illusion - to play with words
• The story of the prodigal are the root of the 3 Benedictine rules
• Listening quietly, listening intently
• To change, to move forward,
• To come home, staying in the loving embrace of the father
• We are lost, we have lost the key to our heart, profound and inescapable journey
• Henri sat for hours in front of the painting in the Hermitage, there day after day
• The feet - the bare feet which has experienced the harshness of the earth
• The duality of the two hands
• One hand tender and the other strong, two diverse voices both speaking the words of truth
• Eyes that go into our innermost self, one so compassionate
• Neither of those eyes were judging looks
• How do you see?
• You can glance, you can look but only for what you want to see
• Look, stay still, gaze into the innermost being of your subject
• Holding himself still before the haze of God; that gaze without judgment, and this the gaze we are to look with at others
• It means you see Easter in the other
• You forget the labels, you gaze with the eyes of the resurrection
• The eyes of the elder son, are the eyes of judgment, frozen anger, resentment - he has worked hard and has done everything expected of him
• Look at him leaning on his staff, fashionable head gear, very, very scary
• Contrary to the generous master who invites labourers to come and be pay regardless of how long they work
• Figures are frozen in time

15th Century 'Holy Trinity' (Troiksa) Icon by St. Andrei Rublev

• 15th Century icon - 3 people sitting in a circle
• They are all relating
• Feet happily on the ground
• The cup among them - the cup of suffering
• The unity of the trinity bring relief to the suffering of the Russian people
• Holding things together
• The box holding the bones of the Martyrs
• We are drawn in to that table, that circle of
• Love,  the hands united pointing to the cup
• They can listen to one another, it is a circle of love that we are being called to
• Can't tell who is the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit - the deep communion among the free
• The listening eyes, the gift of the gaze

• The prodigal can't remain kneeling forever
• His heart has been pierced by the love of his father, you are re-energized, full of love to express itself in love and action
• The need to revisit his forgiveness
• Forgiveness is the greatest gift for freedom and healing
• Being the beloved - are you going to receive it?
• The way you look at someone can transform them
• Can you see the resurrected person? Isn't this the gift of L'Arche, this household of love?

Esther de Waal - 2 - The Only Question Worth Asking

photo of Esther de Waal from 'Spirituality and Practice'

Notes from Esther de Waal's 2nd talk at the Henri Nouwen Society's 'Way of the Heart Conference' - June 11, 2016.
Her comments were based on Nouwen's 'The Genesee Diary', the diary of his 7 month sabbatical at a Trappist Monastery in upstate New York in 1974.

• Henri's Spiritual journey - familiar with the rule of St. Benedict
• An entry point for knowing God
• Celtic spirituality - a fruitful resource cultivating unity in the midst of division
• Henri Nouwen's writings combined art and spirituality
• Helps us to pause in the threshold
• Locked in time as we are, desiring the timeless
• To live with the door of transcendence left open
• Weaving a tapestry
• Listening, beauty, the role of the visual
• Seeking and searching all our lives
• Where are you rooted?
• The search for home, how do we come home, how are we centred?
• How can we live in the forgiving love of God?
• I live with fear - God speaks through Henri
• What a complex man he was
• I don't mind if it doesn't all add up
• Mystery - Henri wrote as though he was holding something back
• Being part of a group for a short time and then returning to a place of solitude
• Shared experiences of homecoming - Genesee - the Trappists
• The Benedictines by the 12th Century had become influential
• Some of them went back to its origins, reclaiming the roots of the monastic life
• How have I become at the end of the day any more loving? The only question worth asking regardless of one's vocation
• To read is one thing, but to create an experience makes it living
• Carrying a rhythm throughout life
• The Genesee Diary a great introduction to the Benedictine monastic life is all about
• Struggling with a divided heart - Henri found solace in the uncluttered - the cloisters - the spring of living water, the fountain, the living stream of God's word
• At first Henri is resistant, resents that while there no one sends him letters
• Resents the work, totally inept with technology, breaks the bread machine, dragging stones from the river from which a chapel is built
• I came to love those stones, he wrote at the end of his diary, where he worked
• Stirring the soup and memorizing the psalms
• Learns the rhythms
• 'I was very impressed with the discerning ear of Father John'
• Go and try and be more alone
• Confessions grow out of his meditations 
• the deeper you go into God, the deeper you enter into loving others
• The road ahead isn't going to get any easier, but my love for God is going to run deeper which changes everything
• Reaching out - the book written in Genesee - he had learned the Psalms
• 3 extracts from his Trappist time 
• listen to your struggles, the answer to your question is hidden in your heart
• protecting each other's uniqueness
• silence opens up in us a space where the word can be heard

Ron Rolheiser - the spirituality of Henri Nouwen

photo from Ron Rolheiser.com

Notes from Ron Rolheiser's first talk at the Henri Nouwen Society's 'Way of the Heart Conference' - June 10, 2016.

• Henri taught theology for 16 years
• He had an intelligence to challenge the heart
• His unique stunning popularity
• His cadence, his writing, his formula for writing
• His was a very gentle voice
• Most popular writer in terms of spirituality in the last 70 years
• Academic legacy - stunning popularity
• He purged himself of the language of academia
• He'd distill ideas like wine from grapes
• Simple rather than complex
• It takes a great mind to be simple
• He was an artist, he could turn a phrase
• He developed a new language for spirituality
• He opened the field of spirituality to Protestants
• At Harvard and Yale he made spirituality topical, he brought it into the mainstream
• Humiliation brings about depth
• He was a deeply wounded and a hushed soul
• He couldn't hide his weakness
• His wound opened him up
• Henri wrote spirituality rather than write about spirituality
• He sought to find the language of the heart
• He wrote a new language about how God has touched our lives
• He tries to be direct
• He wrote about Jesus, intimacy about Jesus - not about Jesus Christ
• He tried to write as a human being not as a priest
• His formula for writing - work hard to reach simplicity
• Worked at it for hours and hours
• He worked at his craft for hours
• Radically simple without being simplistic
• He would take his own pains and break them open for everyone to read
• To be a saint it is to will the one thing (Kierkegaard)
• Life a trial - wanted poverty and luxury
• Devotional without being pious
• The liberals can't pious and the pious can't be liberal
• Dorothy Day and Henri Nouwen could be both
• He was a pacifist but he didn't alienate people with the language
• He was an iconoclast without being alienating
• Always left you with hope, without abandoning struggle
• Language sensitive to human weakness even as it moves us to the sublime
• Put on the big mind and believe the good news
• Metanoia is the opposite of paranoia
• Metanoia is the Greek word for 'Repent'
• There are no righteous people
• It is not a question of whether your family is dysfunctional but how much
• He is the saint for the complex
• Prior to 1970 there was no word 'spirituality'
• Struggle to get your life together
• Puberty is God's gift to drive you out of the house
• Trying to give your life away - how can I be more helpful? How can I give my life away?
• How can I live so my dying will be a gift?
• Mourn my people mourn
• Mourn for the absence of warmth
• Mourn for absence of love, the dark force of evil - cry for redemption for freedom

Ron Rolheiser - 'Henri Nouwen - a Saint for the complex'

Notes from Ron Rolheiser's 2nd talk at the Henri Nouwen Society's 'Way of the Heart Conference' - June 11, 2016. An interesting take on artistic genius, spirituality and struggle...

• Henri Nouwen - a saint for the complex
• Seeing Henri as an artist, rather than as a theologian
• He was a struggling artist
• Yet faith-filled genius
• Janis Joplin once said "It is hard to be a rock star - making love with 20,000 people and then coming home to sleep alone."
• Paul Tillich "I should have never been married - if you can't sleep with everyone, you shouldn't sleep with anyone."
• Genius born out of anxiety
• I don't know if life always welcomes me
• His neediness, he demanded that his friends be there for him
• Ordinary life is difficult for the rock star
• You only remember the one who rejects you rather than the many who praise you
• Henri had a natural insight into the human psyche
• He was a natural mystic
• As humans, we struggle with certain 'primal' energies
• The deepest thing of all - we are made in the image and likeness of God
• There is divine fire within us
• There is never enough - God has put timelessness in the human heart and therefore we never fit in to the natural rhythm of the world
• We have this powerful fire in us - the source of all that is good in us yet mired in all our addictions
• We have this superficial concept of ego - ego is good, Mother Theresa had an ego - but for her the ego was from God
• She had a huge ego but she was not an egotist
• These deep energies are dangerous - be careful with it; that energy can kill you
• The struggles - the image of God within us - deep struggles with grandiosity or depression, narcissism, rage or boredom
• Most of us won't write a great book because we are too sane
• Doris Lessing - submitted herself to various experiences - artists try it first, letting their sanity slip
• Artists pay the price - Nouwen didn't have a robust sanity
• Robert L Moore - the struggle between depression and inflation
• We cap ourselves, we get depressed because we do cap our creative energies
• Too bruised to be touched
• When you are affirmed you are re-fueled
• In ministry - you get over-stimulated either being inflated or being depressed, makes you prone to a lot of weaknesses, hurt
• When spiritual growth happens, the spirit falls into the senses and we struggle with strong obsessions
• sexuality is deeply connected to creativity
• When you say 'this energy is me' it will kill you
• Mistaking the icon with reality
• Godly appetites must be subject to disciplines
• Henri struggled to want the one thing
• He was a wounded healer
• The deepest pain is the inarticulate art, the sense of beauty that we can't draw, the story that we can't write, words underneath the threshold of consciousness
• To be a saint is to will the one thing - from Kierkegaard
• Struggling at a very deep level - Mother Theresa's diary - her relationship with the Lord was dark...
• Essential desire for God makes Henri a saint, a struggling saint who is a saint for our time - because we live in an age of excessive over-stimulation
• It is better to cry than to worry
• Are you taking your wounds to your head or your heart?
• Your heart is greater than your wounds
• Faith - some days we walk on water and other days we sink like a stone
• Default - you are not a restful person who sometimes experience restlessness; you are a restless person who sometimes experienced rest
• Sex is what is meant to take you home
• Irrigating the problem or eradicating problem

Sue Mosteller - We are God's beloved

Sister Sue Mosteller

Abbreviated notes from Sister Sue Mosteller's talk at the Henri Nouwen 'Way of the Heart Conference' - June 9th, 2016

• My life is one shaped by relationships
• To learn to forgive is essential
• The power of the gospel is Jesus vulnerability
• My gift is to be powerless, to suffer with, to lay down your life for others
• Jesus and the widow of Nain. He so shared her vulnerability and anguish, he loved deeply, to be able to share loss, he felt her pain out of his gut
• Jesus isn't scandalized by our weakness and failure
• Finding home on the way home
• The daily news is filled with images of homelessness. 60 million refugees with no home
• Need to find others on their way home
• The journey of Jesus home
• The moment of his baptism, to be among us and not over us - ' you are my beloved son'
• That voice penetrated deep into his gut
• 'I am unconditionally loved' is what Jesus heard from his Father at his baptism and the nourishment of those words sustain him throughout his ministry
• Jesus lead into the wilderness to be confirmed by those words
• Every temptation is resisted by the One who called Jesus 'beloved'
• Jesus and the blind man - do you want to be healed?
• Jesus doesn't have to perform, he is the beloved and out of that belovedness he loves others...
• He wants us all to be forgiven
• He was so patient with the disciples who never get it
• Our mission Jesus spells out plainly, is to find its resource in these words: 'As the Father has loved me, so I love you'
• You will receive power to love others
• The parable of the prodigal son assures us: "I will bless you when you leave and when you come home"
• The Father allows us to leave



with Jean Vanier

• Our journey home - a sacred centre in each one of us, to be truly who we are

Jim Antal - laying it on the line for Climate Change

Jim Antal alongside some other advocates for the planet

Notes from Jim Antal's talk at the Henri Nouwen 'Way of the Heart Conference' - June 10, 2016

• Be not afraid
• Henri's attitude towards the environment
• After Yale, ambivalence about academia
• Then Harvard - Henri was the most popular among lecturers
• As someone who sought accolades, he left Harvard even though he was one the the school's most popular professors
• Supported protest by FOR and Sojourners
• Jailed for 3 days - anti-nuclear protests
• Henri did one act plays on Vincent Van Gogh, played Chopin, fearlessly lived life
• Laid bare his fears, vulnerabilities
• Henri's unresolved anxiety would last at times for days. Pain expressed in anxiety rather than grief
• Henri had the courage to name his and our fears
• he repeatedly encouraged us to move from the house of fear to the house of love
• Fear has no ultimate power - 
• Only Love has power and with Love comes the power of the Holy Spirit
• Henri to Jim 'God needs you to be a minister
• Do not be afraid'
• And when Jim announced his engagement, Henri insisted: 'we are called to be generative' despite the nuclear threat
• Fear not / Jesus most repeated advice
• We need this courage
• Courage coming from unceasing prayer
• Prayer is an antidote to fear
• Connecting the life of prayer with the life of activism
• Prayer is a very dangerous and subversive act that threatens the powers of the world
• 1978 - writing from Assisi, Henri reflecting on the witness of St. Francis wrote: 'From here the world is different, the world is upside done, totally...'
• Everything has to be asked again
• St Francis speaks from every stone
• Not allowing the stones of Rome silence me
• Being deaf is the opposite of obedience
• Feb 1982 - love casts out fear and how powerful we are when we move beyond fear - how love moves mountains
• Writing about the day of the Lord - can't go there, it feels like touching the sun
• Only as a deep lover can you risk your life!
• To speak out is to be keenly aware of the world's homelessness
• While I was exhausting myself resisting war, the appetite for war around me was increasing
• When we radiate the peace of Christ, we radiate a peace that is transformative
• otherwise we can be expressions of war even while advocating for peace
• Stay aligned with God through prayers - resisting the world's anger by prayer

Contemporary advocates for God's creation

• Nuns on the bus
• Climate change is the ultimate cause on which all other causes are hedged
• Creation is the expression of God's hospitality
• The continuity of creation is over
• In our time, the fact that creation is hospitable is no longer true
• If creation becomes inhospitable the question of God's hospitality is in question, even though the cause for the planet's degradation is us and not God
• We are harmed the home of our host
• Species extinction is 1000 times faster than 50 years ago
• How frequently are you preaching on climate change?
• We are letting God's creation go
• If we don't preach this, the next generation of the church will be nothing other than processing the grief of having let the world be destroyed
• We need a transition to a circular economy, to censure greed
• The doctrine of the public trust must be restored
• No one should be able to own nature
• Reclaim fiduciary responsibilities
• It has become perfectly legal to invest in the very investments that destroy the environment we, including the investors, live in
• Capacitating the church to turn the tide for climate change
• 1978 Exxon hired the best climate change scientists in the world only to subsequently bury what these scientists discovered
• The US and specifically Exxon buried the reports about climate change - the US is the only place where climate change is denied
• Encourage our faith communities to submit to various authorities an appeal for the earth
• The rug has been pulled from the assumptions themselves
• We are responsible to stand up for creation
• Peter and Paul spend more time in jail after the resurrection than out
• Make civil disobedience a matter of discipleship as much as prayer, a matter that we should make normative
• Civil disobedience should be normative to us as Christians
• Breaking a law intentionally to question the legitimacy of the law

Shane Claiborne - What it looks like when Jesus lives in us

Notes from Shane Claiborne's initial talk at the Henri Nouwen 'Way of the Heart Conference' - June 10, 2016

• Learning that comes to life
• The whole point of receiving information is transformation
• To re-educate is why Jesus came
• Teach us how to use our hands that brings to life what we are learning
• Challenge the status quo, to take the words of Jesus seriously
• Grew up in East Tennessee
• Prom King
• Still recovering from my conversion
• In my early days in church, there wasn't the fire
• Then I went to a wild charismatic church
• I chose Jesus because he is beautiful
• Jesus became someone he knew and loved
• We have stopped talking about Jesus
• We need to rekindle our love for Jesus
• Jesus born in the midst of a genocide, soon a refugee
• God entering into the crap
• The kingdom compels us in a different direction
• Prayer is our getting acclimatized to being used of God
• Seeing Jesus in his most distressing disguises
• What it looks like when Jesus lives in me
• The holy one in me honours the holy one in you
• Calcuttas are everywhere
• As Mother Theresa encouraged us: We must do small things with great love
• We have grown out of proximity with the hurting and the poor
• More fashionable to talk about the poor rather than talk to the poor
• Everything in the world is pulling us away from the poor
• We must reverse this to be in relationship with the poor
• What is in question is our laws
• As Christians we are to live in ways that don't compute
• We are maladjusted people in a world which has become adjusted to injustice
• All of us are beloved
• The world is looking for honest Christians
• Owning our brokenness
• Come from a place of confession
• God works through the cracks
• Saul more like ISIS
• God prefers broken vessels
• A stuttering man becomes a prophet
• Our bruises and scars are our credentials