Yesterday I finished reading Michael Medved’s The 10 Big Lies about America: Combating Destructive Distortions about Our Nation’s Past and Present. I gave the book a two star rating on Goodreads (you are a member of Goodreads, right?), and my feelings about the book really are captured in Goodreads’s description of its two star rating: “It was ok.”

I read this book because it is an important book to someone I love. I wanted to dialogue with the book, and I wanted to have the book in common with that relative as a foundation for future conversations. While it’s true I disagreed with much of the book, there were some things I did agree with, and much more I realized I still need to learn.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the reason I don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, or even some of the worst talk radio hosts on the far left, is that they come across as hateful and fear-mongering. Michael Medved doesn’t strike me the same way – in fact, Medved is highly critical of Savage in 10 Big Lies – though he does sometimes slip into a mode of self-righteousness. Anyone who can’t see the truth right in front of Medved’s face is absurd or maniacal. My biggest criticism of Medved, which I also mentioned in a previous post, is his uncomplicated patriotism. Stephen Decatur, the early American naval hero, once gave the famous toast, “Our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!” (Somebody later shortened this to “My country, right or wrong.”) Medved quotes Decatur appreciatively, and it seems to describe his position succinctly.

My own position is summed up in the title of a book by Donald Shriver, President Emeritus of Union Theological Seminary: Honest Patriots: Loving a Country Enough to Remember Its Misdeeds. Or as G.K. Chesteron put it in The Defendant:

To one who loves his fatherland…our boasted indifference to the ethics of a national war is mere mysterious gibberism. It is like telling a man that a boy has committed murder, but that he need not mind because it is only his son. Here clearly the word ‘love’ is used unmeaningly. It is the essence of love to be sensitive, it is a part of its doom; and anyone who objects to the one must certainly get rid of the other. This sensitiveness, rising sometimes to an almost morbid sensitiveness, was the mark of all great lovers like Dante and all great patriots like Chatham. ‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’ No doubt if a decent man’s mother took to drink he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery. (Emphasis mine)

The idea of the current crop of “conservatives” – that government can cater to greed and leave charity to volunteers – is vicious and it can’t work. The “liberal” idea – that the failures of a greedy and wasteful economy can be effectively patched by government services and regulations – is also hopeless. There is no way to get a good result from an economy that institutionalizes greed as an honorable motive and excuses waste and destruction as “acceptable costs.”

- Wendell Berry in a 2005 interview with Preservation Magazine

Food for thought from Mark Twain’s Notebook:

Talking of patriotism what humbug it is; it is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn’t a foot of land in the world which doesn’t represent the ousting and re-ousting of a long line of successive “owners,” who each in turn, as “patriots” …defended it against the next gang of “robbers” who came to steal it and did – and became swelling-hearted patriots in their turn.

I’m listening to the audiobook of Michael Medved’s The 10 Big Lies About America: Combating Destructive Distortions About Our Nation. (This is the audiobook I mentioned in an earlier post.) Medved uses that Mark Twain quote – or a version of it that I can’t track back to an original source, since Medved’s version is inverted (with the first sentence last) and missing a bracket and an ellipsis – in a chapter called “Big Lie #1: America Was Founded on Genocide Against Native Americans.” Medved uses this quote to support his claim that early U.S. policies toward Native Americans replicated “age-old patterns” of “encounters between peoples at vastly different stages of development,” including the Ainu/Utari in Japan, the Aborigines in Australia, and “other isolated, primitive groups forced to confront modernity.”

The thing is, that passage from Mark Twain’s Notebook goes further than Medved’s quote. Twain was writing about his time in Transvaal (South African Republic), just a few years before the Second Boer War that pitted the British against the Afrikaans-speaking Dutch settlers. Twain writes,

Talking of patriotism what humbug it is; it is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn’t a foot of land in the world which doesn’t represent the ousting and re-ousting of a long line of successive “owners,” who each in turn, as “patriots” …defended it against the next gang of “robbers” who came to steal it and did – and became swelling-hearted patriots in their turn. And this Transvaal, now, is full of patriots, who by the help of God, who is always interested in these things, stole the land from the feeble blacks…

Ron Powers, in his Mark Twain: A Life, says Twain’s “ultimate sympathies in this conflict…were clear, and they lay with neither the Boers nor the British, but with the indigenous people that each side dispossessed.” Medved, in contrast, seems to argue that sympathizing with the oppressed peoples in our country’s past amounts to America-bashing. In chapters one and two of The 10 Big Lies, chapters on the Native Americans and slavery, respectively, Medved doesn’t try to defend the indefensible. Instead, he makes the case that because the United States wasn’t uniquely guilty of slavery and crimes against indigenous people – it was just the way of the world – modern Americans shouldn’t waste time apologizing for past sins or trying to make reparations.

Neither the expanded quote nor Ron Powers’s analysis of it disqualifies Medved from enlisting Twain in support of his point, but it’s indicative of my frustration with the book, and with all books, talk radio shows, and cable news channels like it: they are too willing to sacrifice context and complexity to further a political agenda. The United States is nothing if not a conversation, built around ongoing dialogues with each other, with our past, and with our ideals. Good conversation requires a respect for context.

I would have liked to see Michael Medved use Twain’s quote, at least in part, to advocate for a humbler, more honest, more complex patriotism. Something along these lines from my favorite Wendell Berry poem:

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.

Instead, the whole tenor of Medved’s book so far is that Americans must either feel pride for their country, or shame.

There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

The apostle Paul says followers of Jesus are ambassadors of reconciliation. That reconciliation work extends to – and is perhaps even rooted in – our particular places. Thus, part of what it means to be a follower of Jesus is to re-sacralize the desecrated places, as well as to resist the spread of “non-places” (to borrow a term from the Slow City movement) that are the byproducts of fast life.

Mike Huber’s blog post begins:

When I was in grade school, West 37th Avenue came to an abrupt end.  There was a steel guardrail to mark the limits of civilization.  Beyond the pavement, the ground was covered with weeds and tall grass.  A path, curving like a question mark, slipped past the authority of the guardrail.  That path rose with the slope of the Hill.

There wasn’t much to entice you upwards.  There was no beckoning destination.  The trees that grew above the scrubland were uninviting, nothing more than a jagged smudge of middle scenery.

Continue reading Huber’s post at Minding the Light…

This is from Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch in The Shaping of Things To Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church, in a section on Burning Man. What a rebuke. What a challenge.

One of the keys to understanding Slow Church is captured in the seventeenth-century French phrase le goût de terroir, which can be translated “the taste of the place.”

Carlo Petrini, co-founder of the Slow Food movement, writes often about terroir as “the combination of natural factors (soil, water, slope, height above sea level, vegetation, microclimate) and human ones (tradition and practice and cultivation) that gives a unique character to each small agricultural locality and the food grown, raised, made, and cooked there.” Thus, a Pinot noir from Oregon’s Willamette Valley takes on the taste and texture of the grape, the soil, the barrel, and the late frost. Milk, it turns out, is also highly sensitive to terroir, according to a fascinating and slightly terrifying article on raw milk in the latest issue of The New Yorker.

In the same way that food and wine take on the taste of the place, Slow Church is rooted in the natural, human, and spiritual cultures of particular places. Slow Church is a distinctively local expression of the global body of Christ. “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood” (John 1:14, The Message).

Continue reading at the Slow Church blog…

In a 2007 interview with Arthur Boers, the philosopher Albert Borgmann makes the case that television is of moral importance. Borgmann says: “When I teach my ethics course I tell these relatively young people that the most important decision that they’ll make about their household is first whether they’re going to get a television and then second where they’re going to put it.”

I think for my generation and for the generation coming after mine, the questions could probably be amended to (a) “Are you going to get a smartphone?” and (b) “If so, what limits are you going to place on its use?”

These are questions I’m asking myself right now too. I have an iPhone. Am I going to keep it? If so, how should I limit its use? To use a science fiction metaphor, the iPhone is a kind of portal, one that can cause me to be mentally, emotionally, and spiritually distant, even when I’m physically present. How often do I want to have that portal open?

The arts and craft college where I work sits on an 11-acre wooded campus in Portland’s west hills. It’s a beautiful campus, built on the site of an old filbert orchard, and it bewitches almost everyone who visits.  A few years ago, the college put in two new beautiful, architecturally-significant buildings. Both buildings have been submitted for Silver LEED Certification. Unfortunately, a significant percentage of the old filbert orchard was destroyed during construction. (This was not part of the master plan.) Many faculty, staff, students, and alumni were understandably devastated at the loss of so many beautiful old trees. There is still a palpable collective grief. I am a member of an Orchard Committee that has been formed to recommend what to do with the clover field that now covers that area.

Today, some students, faculty, and staff got together to do landscaping near the college library, which included planting two new Japanese maple trees transported from the nursery that surrounds our house in Silverton. It was a joint Earth Day/Arbor Day celebration. I was asked to say a few words at a tree dedication this afternoon. I thought I would post my brief remarks here, since they touch on the Slow Church theme of good work, as well as on the conversation taking place on this blog about the standards of health and flourishing. I have edited my remarks very slightly for clarity.

Continue reading at the Slow Church blog…