Midlife Meditation

Let's start with the disclaimer: roads are for cars. That's why they're paved and marked the way they are. Engineers design roads to accommodate drivers, not walkers, runners, or cyclists. Now for the rant. This morning at 7 a.m., I headed out the door of my suburban home for a summer run. Amy and I live at the far north end of Bethany, an unincorporated area within the Beaverton School District. Running or cycling, it takes me just a minute to leave the spec houses of my neighborhood and be on a lovely country road, looking out across pastures, fields, and valleys to the hills beyond. This morning I surprised a trio of young bucks, and snapped pictures of one before continuing my run. My runner's high was kicking in early as I breathed the fresh air, drank in the long sunrise shadows, and celebrated all the best things about rural life. I was planning a run around the "block," a loop that includes Kaiser Road, Germantown Road, NW 185th, and f...

Biblically Based Bigotry A new book by Stephen Eric Bronner presents the argument that homophobes are bigots, nothing more, nothing less ; and that, as bigots, there is no way to talk them out of their rejection of gay rights, gay marriage, gay ordination, gay anything. Refute an argument--point out, for example, that the passage from Leviticus in the picture above is surrounded by other laws presenting equivalent condemnations of eating shellfish, wearing mixed fiber clothing, and being sassy to one's parents--and they simply shift to a different argument, refusing to even acknowledge that the previous one has been deflated. This is the experience I've had with homophobes for as long as I've attempted to deal with them. For a time, principally in the 1990s when I was serving as a United Methodist pastor, my approach to the homophobes I occasionally encountered in my congregations, much more frequently encountered in ecumenical settings, was to be patient and eva...

Shotgun mass wedding? Happy ending? Sexist cliches turned on their heads? It's all this, and more. If you read the screed I posted yesterday about James Bond movies, you may be of the opinion that I've become a humorless political corrector with no tolerance for fantasy, satire, or simple battle-between-the-sexes fun. If you are of that opinion, this post should dispel those concerns. To rehash, briefly: to my dismay, I found when settling down to a classic James Bond film that the blatant sexism and misogyny of the franchise were trumping the fun for me, and had to turn it off. I fumed about it for a day or two, then wrote up all the problems I saw in the disposable "Bond girls" and the hero's nonchalant attitude toward their frequent deaths, and why I have lost my tolerance for such plot devices. "But it's a fantasy!" someone commented, and she's right: it no more depicts the real world of espionage than Star Wars  is an accurate portra...

Is this an action movie, or an excuse for putting scantily clad sexy women in sexy situations while men in tuxedos look on approvingly? I used to love James Bond. I don't remember not knowing about James Bond, or at least about agent 007 and his cool gadgets. I'm not sure how I knew about him, as throughout my childhood my parents were as disapproving of violence as they were of smoking, drinking, and sexual references, so the only movies we went to were either cartoons or musicals. We did watch a lot of TV, and there may well have been ads for James Bond movies, and one of our favorite shows was the Mel Brooks spy spoof, Get Smart , which was as appealing to me for the coolness of the gadgets as the humor, which often went over my head. Whatever the source, by the time I was six I already knew the James Bond theme and knew that 007 was a spy, and was eager to experience some entertainment in that vein. Twelve years later, I finally saw my first Bond movies. ...

Why do we kill people who kill people to prove that killing people is wrong? --Holly Near I know you've seen it, probably on a bumper sticker, possibly on a button, perhaps a banner, a sign, a poster. I've seen it many times, on all those things, but not until tonight did I, thanks to the magic of the internet, learn that the words I quoted came from a folk singer named Holly Near. Now you can attribute them, too. I've seen it so many times they strike me as a cliche, but even so, every time I encounter this quote, I nod. It's so obvious, so plainly true, that I'm stunned the most democratic nation in the world hasn't figured it out. If murder is wrong, then so is killing murderers. And yet we keep doing it. There's a strong possibility, though, that capital punishment may finally be coming to an end. Not because of the dozens of exonerated prisoners, innocent people who could have been put to death for someone else's crimes if not for the...

I loved this when I was in junior high. But I never imagined I would BE this. Half my mouth is still number from this morning's dental ordeal. The occasion: whittling down a problem tooth to a nub so an artificial replacement can be glued onto it. This will be my fourth crown, making a complete set for the fifth tooth back in each quadrant. Last month, I visited my audiologist to get my hearing aids tuned up, the better to distinguish what people were saying to me when I was in Ghana. I also had the last of my pre-Africa vaccinations, and picked up my malaria prophylaxis, making me immune to all sorts of creepy crawlies. And, of course, in January space age lasers reshaped my corneas so that, for the first time in almost half a century, I can see the world with my own eyes. Add to this the portable computer I carry around in my pocket, and you can see that I really have become bionic, which, according to Dictionary.com, means "utilizing electronic devices an...

James Garner is dead at 86. As an actor, Garner played wise rascals who got out of fixes using their wits. In his iconic television roles as Brett Maverick, a gambler in the Old West, and Jim Rockford, a private investigator in 1970s Los Angeles, Garner created characters who preferred charm to gunfire. Rockford pointedly left his gun at home. Reminiscing about The Rockford Files , I found myself nostalgic for another icon of my childhood: the G.I. Joe Explorer line. As the Vietnam War heated up, Hasbro found demand for military action figures was dropping off, and revamped its most famous toy line. G.I. Joe toys no longer wore uniforms, and the names of the toys emphasized the adventures in which they and their lifelike hair were engaged. I had the space explorer, which came with a scale model Mercury capsule my silver-suited astronaut Joe could ride in. My brother Stephen had (appropriately) a sea explorer, with red hair and beard, knit cap, and inflatable raft. Jim ...

News from the world of science: conservatives (and liberals too, let's be inclusive here) are hard-wired to hold their political beliefs. According to the research quoted in this article, conservatives have a much higher "negativity bias": stimuli that they find annoying, disgusting, threatening cause them to shrink away. The article speculates on possible evolutionary roots to this tendency, notes that this distaste for the other actually creates happier people who are more content with the status quo, while liberals tend to be more neurotic, and conclude with a plea for liberals and conservatives to stop trying to convert each other and make peace so Congress can go back to getting things done. My first reaction to these ideas was simply this: Vindication! I've been saying something like this for decades. My experience of butting heads with conservatives long ago taught me that arguments are only persuasive to people who are already sympathetic to the ideas bein...

For a single parent with a low income, summer is hell. My first stint of single parenting was from 1995-96. I was a rural pastor, on minimum salary, with very few resources to drawn on, and my children were very small: 2 and 5 at the beginning of the divorce, 4 and 7 by the time I remarried almost two years later. During the school year, they were with me weekends and holidays. During the summer, I alternated entire weeks. Early on, I discovered a painful reality: on my parenting weeks, I had no freedom. I could only visit people who enjoyed children. I had to do all my office work from home. And I could forget about exercising. They were just too small to be by themselves, and I didn't know my new congregation well enough to ask for babysitting help. Fortunately, rural ministers enjoy far greater flexibility than practitioners of almost any other trade or profession I'm aware of. I survived my first summer largely unscathed, and by the second, I had gained enough experie...

Fearless blogger to the rescue! All twenty of my followers will, no doubt, rise to the occasion to turn back this scourge! In the latest bald-faced evil Republican plot to steal the White House from the popular vote, Tim Draper, a Californian billionaire, has gathered over a million signatures on a petition to divide the state of California into six smaller states, thus diluting the impact of the huge liberal urban vote and tipping the balance of the US Senate solidly in the direction of the GOP. It's gerrymandering on a macro scale, and it's hard to imagine anyone but the petition signers and the handful of conservative billionaires living in California voting for it,  not to mention the challenge of getting it through Congress, which has to approve changes in state borders by much larger majorities than the Republican party can generate, but even so, one has to give a nod of respect to the sheer audacity of the scheme. Claiming that this is in the best interests of Cal...

Good news for atheists wanting to preside over weddings in Indiana: you no longer have to get ordained in a fake internet church before you can sign the papers! I'm thrilled by this development for a variety of reasons, which I will tick off with bullet points: Contrary to popular belief, weddings have not always been the province of the church. Prior to the middle ages, in fact, weddings in the Roman Empire and its successor states were civil events. In ancient Judaism, there was no priestly role at all: the wedding was consummated--made official--in the marriage bed. Only with the decline of literacy did marriage come into the church, and it did so literally through the back door. Typically the only person in town who could read and write, and thus keep records, was the parish priest. This led to the back door of the church being a place where announcements were made, contracts sealed, and any other business else requiring a notary was conducted. Once marriage vows had been...

"Not our children, not our problem." The sign was seen at a protest in Murrieta, California, according to reporter Bob Ortega, speaking with Brooke Gladstone on NPR's  On the Media  program last Friday. The moment I heard those words, I knew I had to write about them, that they would haunt me until I did. So here I am. The occasion for that sign was a blockade. Three buses of undocumented children were on their way to a Border Patrol processing station in Murrieta. The demonstrators managed to keep the buses out of Murrieta, but not out of the United States: the buses were simply diverted to a different processing station in Chula Vista. One other accomplishment of the protesters was giving Murrieta a black eye, as the publicity led the town's mayor to write an open letter to the White House apologizing on behalf of his community.  It also delivered a message to the children on the buses, the message of the sign Bob Ortega saw (full disclosure: I Googled that si...

In the wake of the Hobby Lobby ruling, which permits corporations to deny health benefits to employees if providing those benefits conflicts with the religious beliefs of the owners, "religious exemption" has become the strategie du jour of the radical right to justify bad behaviors for which American society no longer has patience. While the wedge issue is health care, specifically contraception, it's easy to see why LGBTQ activists are nervous about the ruling. Don't want gay people working for you? Claim religious exemption from non-discrimination laws. Don't want to sell your services or rent an apartment to gay people? Religious exemption to the rescue! Want to keep gay people from visiting their partners in the hospital, or having a say in their care? Again, religious exemption. These two words put at risk every gain in civil rights that sexual minorities have eked out of a cluelessly bigoted culture over the last half century. The US Constitution prov...

Things are falling apart. The end of World War I saw the establishment, across Africa, Asia, and even Europe, of new nations created by treaties drawn up by the winners of that conflict. Many of these nations functioned as colonies until the 1950s, when they began declaring independence. The superpowers drawing up their borders paid little or no attention to the territories of ethnic groups, and thus throughout Africa ancient nations like the Ewe found themselves living in multiple nations, often with borders running down the middle of villages. It also brought together groups of people who would not, of their own accord, have formed a state with each other: Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians in Yugoslavia; Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Lebanon; and, in Iraq, Shia, Sunni, and Kurds. Some of these nations were able to establish unity governments, and even to have democratic elections, but for the most part, they stayed intact as long as they did because of the presence of a strongman in...

First the shocker: until I was 23, I considered myself a Republican. You probably find that hard to believe. If you've ever read this blog or had a conversation with me, even if it was when I was in high school or college, you'll knit your brow at this confession. Funny, you never seemed like a Republican. And certainly since graduate school, when I abandoned the party once and for all and started calling myself an independent (I only officially affiliated with the Democratic party in 1991), there's been no question about my political persuasion. Even in college, while still clinging to the GOP label, I found myself leaning socialist. I blame my parents. In fact, most young people I know adhere to their parents' political ideals up to the point when they are developmentally motivated to declare independence. In the 1970s, my parents were a variety of Republican that no longer exists: socially progressive, really New Deal Democrats at heart. Theirs was the party of...