Midlife Meditation

It seems I'm not the first person to think of this. Just so you know, I think bullfighting is an abomination.  I also think this year's three Presidential "debates" were an abomination. So there's some resonance there. Reading up just now about bullfighting (that's called "research"), I learned that a bullfight is a highly ritualized spectacle, most of which involves goading, torturing, and weakening the bull to render the final, fatal sword thrust more effective. Bulls intended for the ring are raised in conditions that render them more wild than domesticated. The bullfight itself is extremely hazardous, frequently leading to injury and even death for the humans and horses involved in the ritual. Of course, the bull is almost always dead at the end of the show, so maybe there's some justice in that risk. Back to the debates: each reinforced the impression that what I was watching was a ritualized spectacle, a confrontation be...

Not just this guy. Really? This is what it takes? Donald Trump's campaign has been off at least one of its rails as long as it's been running. Trump was never interested in being respectable, civil, eloquent, diplomatic, statesmanlike, or even coherent. He was always a loud, bellicose, attention-demanding incarnation of masculine id, with a dog-and-pony show that was irresistible to a large enough plurality of Republican voters that it overcome all the shallow business-as-usual candidates--as well as a few other wingnuts who lacked his eye-catching vulgar appeal--to bequeath him with a nomination to become the world's most dangerous head of state. His rhetoric was scattershot when it came to positions on any of the issues the serious candidates were debating, but consistent in one regard: he hated the same people as that large plurality of voters, and cared not a farthing for how his targets felt about that hatred. The size of his following, while not large en...

All-staff selfie, taken by Principal Matt. I'm not sure where I'm sitting. For the first time in my life, I'm coming home happy every day. At 55, I've had many jobs. Some I liked, a few I even loved. And some were miserable. Looking back on four decades of work, I'm sure of this: none of those jobs even approached being as consistently satisfying as this one. What makes teaching music at Byrom so wonderful? It's hard to pin down. It's not that my fellow staff members are exceptional: like every other school I've worked in, they're mostly enthusiastic dedicated educators, most of whom are on time to drop off and pick up their classes. Nor is it that my teaching space is spectacular: it's just the right size, and mostly well-equipped, but the Orff instrumentarium needs some major investment and the room is both windowless and chronically dusty. The building is a relic of the 1970s open classroom philosophy and, like most schools built...

One of the places I've been--though not in the last month... It's been awhile. Thirty days, to be exact. Thirty days ago, I wrote a piece about Hillary Clinton, and why I think her wonkishness is exactly what we need in he Oval Office. Soon after I wrote it, Amy, two of our kids, and I spent a day flying to New Hampshire, where we met up with most of the rest of the Anderson family, and laid our father's ashes to rest in our mother's family plot. Claremont, New Hampshire, was not my father's home town--but then, nowhere else was, either. My father's childhood was divided up among three locations: Shanghai, China; McMinnville, Oregon; and Redlands, California. As an adult, he lived in many other places, finally retiring to McMinnville, where he spent the final quarter century of his life. But the community never really embraced him. Like my grandfather, who also led an itinerant life, Dad asked that he be buried with his wife's family. We honor...

"The difference between a good band and a great band is attention to detail." Martin Behnke, Director of Bands, Willamette University, c. 1980 I can still hear him saying it to us. Willamette was (and is) a small college, too small to front a full-blown concert band, too small even to fill every chair of a wind ensemble with highly skilled musicians. There were no auditions; Dr. Behnke assigned chairs based on how well we played during rehearsal, and liked to move people from chair to chair depending on which piece we were playing, which parts he thought needed to be doubled, which players excelled at a certain kind of playing, and whatever other subjective criterion might apply. If, during rehearsal, he saw us growing impatient with his meticulous attention to nailing a certain phrase, he'd remind us in his warm baritone that details matter: intonation, articulation, uniformity of unison playing, balance, precision all figure in the overall excellence of a per...

Bishop Karen Oliveto kneels during her consecration at the Western Jurisdictional Conference of the United Methodist Church. And some of the Pharisees in the multitude said to [Jesus], “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.”  He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.” (Luke 16:39-40) Who knew the last straw would be a study commission? The United Methodist Church has been struggling with sexual diversity in the ministry since 1972. In that year, the General Conference (the quadrennial meeting that decides all matters of polity for the denomination) first amended the Discipline (the denominational rule book) to forbid ordination of "self-avowed, practicing homosexuals." Since then, generations of gay and lesbian candidates for ministry have been forced to remain closeted for their entire careers; to lie to to their congregations, superintendents, and bishops; to carefully avoid using certain terminology with church officials wh...

Richmond, California, Police Chief Chris Magnus attending a rally in 2014. It's a philosophical controversy at the heart of the American experiment, running back to the foundations of Christian theology and, before that, Jewish identity. Christian theologians have called it the Scandal of Particularity; liberation theologians call it the Preferential Option. I can put it in a non-religious frame of reference by calling it Focus. What it comes down to is simply this: In the grand scheme of things, does one life matter? Do I? How about you? How about your partner, your parent, your child? Black Lives Matter is a movement founded in the need to translate generalisms into particulars. White American people have been callously killing Black men for centuries. Until the 1960s, hardly any of these murders were prosecuted. The reason: Black lives didn't matter. Collectively, persons of color were given little or no value by the dominant culture. That began to change wi...