leading causes of life – Page 5

Shovel, Steel and Spirit

The Kelpies (and TC) at Grangermouth on the Forth and Clyde Canal

Are we doing anything today that will be useful and beautiful three hundred years from now? The question was irresistible at 4MPH on the Leeds and Liverpool canal. This 2,700 mile network of amazements were crafted by shovel, designed by impossibly bold engineers to move coal, limestone and Wedgewood china to the factories and markets before railroads and later roads and later computers. They were built shovel by shovel, snaking up, down and across high hills using the locks imagined by Leonardo DaVinci (who could not have imagined 2,000 miles of interlocking canals). Tunnels hewed by pick centuries ago still work. Aqueducts built by nameless artisans still gracefully carry canals high over rivers.

*dry-stone walls snake up from the canal, over and around the hills.*

Up from the canal I am caught and taught by the many more thousands of miles of dry-stone fences that measure every hill (and dale, of course—it’s Yorkshire) into pastures. Hands chose and placed each stone so carefully that they are useful today without cement, plastic or wire.

The canals, like everything in Scotland and England, thrive today in a constantly negotiated creative tension between every level of government and a dense mesh of volunteer societies, organizations, trusts and determinedly eccentric people.

Americans take credit for the volunteerism that powers our grass roots democracy, but it’s actually the Scots and Brits who invented it (along with canals, steam engines and computers). Their civic life is vital, muscular and kind where the American version has grown coarse, proud and polarized. Democratic systems live on the complex social life in which people work together to do many collective things, not just those explicitly political. This is especially true today as the mechanics of modern interconnected systems are so easily tamed and gamed, abstracted from lived life; froth blown by artificial non-intelligence.

The canals did not survive the centuries on their own. Everything made by and among humans has to be tended, repaired and protected by and among us. The best of any one generation only lasts when the next considers it worth tending and passing on. The canals were eclipsed by rail and eventually the climate-melting petroleum vehicles we consider normal. One by one the canals were abandoned, their locks and mechanisms rusted and blocked by careless new highway bridges. Surprisingly, after the decimations of world war two a most preposterous British style citizen movement brought the canals back to life. Technically the right to navigate was as British as voting, but somebody had to make it possible again. As always it began with two eccentric couples who created the Inland Waterways Association in a converted bedroom. Using all the movement arts—including no small civil disobedience—it made the canals visible to governments and eventually thousands of people who volunteered. They waded into and cleaned industrial canals. And they voted. Today the canals are managed by a “trust” which blends philanthropy, government funding and countless volunteer hours.

*Imagined by Leonardo DaVinci, the lock is changeless today.*

Why bother? In our nano-age, a 4mph thrill ride is not obviously useful. But there is brilliance in the odd. The canals are an ecological life web linking hundreds of protected wetlands and sensitive natural areas. Hundreds of small towns without their founding factories have lively new industries focused on the 35,000 canal boats that putter back and forth and the many more hikers, bikers and gongoozlers of the combined natural spectacle that is now fiercely beloved. The gongoozlers (canal talk for idle spectators) tend to vote. Like the stacked stone walls, a billion things have to be done well for something to exist at all; and if done really well, earn enough love to be protected by another generation.

I don’t know anything in the United States built by my generation likely to here in three hundred years. We might borrow from Jimmy Carter a tiny bit of credit for the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve—as it has taken constant battles to protect it (not all won and done, yet).

I once would have said that American democracy had been built for another ten generations, But under my generation’s watch it has wobbled and withered to where I’m not entirely sure it will make it another 56 days. That depends on millions of gongoozlers suspending their idle onlooking long enough to vote.

And then after democracy has once more been voted back to life and away from the abyss; what then? In Scotland, Yorkshire or North Carolina there are rivers and forests to tend, neighbors to visit, plenty of beating back the dead hand of greed while extending the gentle one attached to our own arms. And finding the Spirit that moves every human toward each other and the inexpressible wonders we call “natural.”

A final note about the comprehensive genius of the Scots. Their Forth and Clyde Canal started in 1668, the last shovel in 1690. It was the super highway on which the Scottish revolutions rode, industrial, intellectual and religious. And then, as in England, the canal eventually became superfluous and left behind until retrieved by civic movement in the 1990s. This was marked for the ages by two astonishing feats blending engineering and practical art: the Falkirk Wheel, which this engineer’s son breathless at how it used Archimedes principle of displacement, insane steel work and graceful art to link two canals separated by an 80 feet drop. (A later blog….).

Even more astonishing is the Kelpies–largest equine sculpture in the world honoring the massive horses that pulled the barges which sits just a few miles down the canal where it meets the river (the Forth; the Clyde being at the other end in Glasgow). Although the bankers and barons claimed credit, the canal was built on the thousands of nameless men with shovels and these massive beasts. Those barons have their little statues, now with signs explaining their ugly complicity in the tobacco and slave trade. None of those bald men had anything like the Kelpies.

The Scots saw in the canal horses the mythic Kelpie horse spirits of the sea that protect those who travel by water. When TC and I were there in the (rare) Scottish sun the stainless-steel Kelpies were alive and vital, heads a hundred feet above us little humans. The artist left us to the imagine the rest of the horses that would reach another two hundred feet below where the muscle would have flexed. I love the part we can’t see as much as the stainless steel dazzling above.

My engineering father taught me to appreciate the underneath part of a bridge, so I think about what makes canals and, yes, civic life durable, beautiful and life-giving. Art helps us see, engineering to see how, shovel and steel to make it real, Spirit to give our own lives in common purpose for another generation.

*TC and Lisa like twin headlights on the canal.*

Good start

Five hundred and six pages. Thirty-three authors. A big book. So, a warning, this is sort of a big blog.

It’s about the Handbook on Religion and Health: Pathways toward a Turbulent Future (Edward Elgar, UK), which focuses on the complex way that faith at social scale, for better or worse, shapes health and well-being … so that we can make the choices that lead toward life for the people and places that are ours to love. That itself is a big sentence which hints at the need of a big book. The Handbook dares to mark a pivot toward a whole new phase in the intellectual understanding of faith and health. All of its authors, many well known in their fields, were asked to step away from what they already knew and look forward. They did that.

There have really only been three eras before now defining that relationship. The first lasted three billion years when the dimensions of what humans eventually called faith, which eventually evolved into religion and even more eventually science, were simply and utterly part of the whole.

That first era was capped by a flurry of thinking once we humans accumulated enough frontal matter that we could name ourselves boldly homo sapiens sapiens (the human that knows it knows). For all this time religion, including faeries, YHWH, Jesus and all the saints and scientists were in one intellectual stewpot for better—and often for worse in the hands of the powerful.

The first phase lasted roughly up till the “Enlightenment” in the 1700s, during which pretty much everything thought to that point was unthought. It became obvious to every rational intellectual that we didn’t really need religion at all to map what was known and knowable. Religion was intellectual detritus that obstructed clear thinking or, at best, needed to be shown to be reasonable.

The Enlightenment glow went out in the middle of the last century, seared by murderous gas ovens, nuclear blasts and, now, 129-degree summers. We’ve been in an intellectual wilderness of post-modern, post-industrial, post-constitution, post-language, post, post, post, post everything. The boundaries have evaporated including, to the dismay of the left-over Enlightenment thinkers, the rise of religion entirely untethered to any social or political norms, logic or facts.

A friend sent me this picture from National Geographic that so vividly indicates there is way more going on then we ever thought.

The echo-chamber world of academic health research with its pristine peer-reviewing world of double-blind control trials ignored all the dismal wilderness outside (making it triple-blind). But late in the day, this era acknowledged minor claims that religion was a variable in human health. Each of these footnotes squeezed through a tortuous process that fundamentally considered any signs of religiosity to be a false signal, better explained by a bio-chemistry or abnormal psychiatric phenomena. In fact, the American Psychiatric Association had disease codes for religion until the 1970s.

It is important to remember that the simplifying secularists had a point; much of what is attributed to religion—by both believers and those who scoff—is a false signal, often harnessed for tribal, parochial interests that can be stupid and dangerous, especially at political scale. And it’s important to not trash the traditional research models that were superb at knowing what they considered knowable partly by rigorously excluding things not.

Still, the end of this era was marked by the article in Journal of the American Medical Association two years ago (Balboni, VanderWelle, Doan-Soares, et al., 2022). The Harvard team laboriously sorted through thousands of articles that claimed findings of spirituality in health for the few meeting the very highest standards of peer-reviewed studies. Only a thin gruel could pass through the thin intellectual mesh, but even those findings came as a shock to the field. It is also important to note that one of the problems in associating spirituality as a variable is that nobody agrees on what it is, which suggests that maybe it doesn’t exist at all.

That study would not have happened without the four pillars that begin with the earlier Handbook by Larson and Koenig, followed by the basic texts of Oman and Idler. This is why the JAMA article marks the end of the era, making possible a new beginning.

This brings us to the 506-page start of the fourth era, the Handbook on [Formerly Known as] Religion and [Formerly Known as] Health: Pathways for a Turbulent Future. I add ‘formerly known as’ deliberately. The new era lives in the science of complexity, and multi-variant phenomenological study of complex phenomena that begins with the assumption that humans are in our every facet biological, psychological, social and spirted. Most of the traditional gatekeepers do not think that way and remain especially uncomfortable with taking the phenomena “formerly known as religion” seriously. Dr. Paul Laurienti addresses this in his chapter in the Handbook, noting that those fields are busy “harmonizing” research methodology based on the old accepted processes that methodologically exclude any surprises. “Who needs a new era?” they would ask.

The Handbook is disruptive in another whole way because it grows from the Leading Causes of Life. Even the spiritual part of the last era was driven a great deal by the spirituality interested in death, dying and the closely linked clinical chaplaincy. The era has more to work with. The Handbook (Ch. 28, pp. 456-57) argues that

“Looking at humanity as a living system invites us toward an integrative generative practice that does not collapse in the simplicities of upstream-downstream instrumental intervention. To be deeply accountable for the whole of the social watershed invites the immediacy of picking up one’s own trash before it can contaminate the lives of those to whom it would otherwise flow. And it invites humility before all that we have received for good or ill. This posture of always being both recipients of blessings we did not create and stewards of the blessings that will flow through us is what the Leading Causes of Life call intergenerativity, or simply blessing. When we are conscious of being in this right relationship–recipient and steward—we feel something like awe, gratitude and being in the right place.”

This is not good news to all the traditional researchers who have based their careers and methodology on the previous models. Even those intellectuals talking about complexity do not quite honor the complex generativity of the psycho-social-spirited phenomena. We are not an interplay of calories or protein but consciousness of the whole becoming more vital and prosilient. This is part of how “what was known as religion” functions in synergy with the thing “formerly known as health”—the vital phenomena, not just biochemical or material, but consciously alive on all levels.

While the traditional researchers will perhaps not be happy to find that their academic cheese has moved, this Handbook is a three-pound thrill for the next generations of hard thinkers. And it is happy not to conclude anything:

“Perhaps we have only begun. Neither religion or the health sciences quite thinks this way about its work or way. This is not how we collect or analyse data and thus not the way we regard the possibilities of what we might learn from research (maybe we say, formerly known as research). But even asking whether we could learn more and thus be more accountable for possibilities and cannier about risks shifts us just a bit. As is evident in other chapters in this handbook, new methodologies, new norms of transdisciplinary dialogue and analysis will emerge, just as new shared language does in El Paso, Texas, and other borderlands—objective and subjective—around the world.” (Ch. 28, p. 457)

This may not be the last 506 pages needed. But it’s a good start ….

// The Handbook on Religion and Health: Pathways for a Turbulent Future is available in hardback immediately (priced for academic libraries!), with an eBook coming in a week or two (~$48) and, we hope (not yet confirmed), a paperback to follow later. Most of my friends will wait for the paperback or eBook! I’ll let you know when they are available.

Pathway

There are times when, amid what seems like chaos, clarity comes, is named and made visible. People respond, turn around, and make choices that lead to life. The closing months of 2024 are likely this kind of time.

When the times comes—some call it Kairos—one hopes the intellectual muscles are trained and ready. It takes time to think hard, and not possible to do alone staring at tiny screens. (To get anywhere intellectually is just like hiking: “to go fast, go alone; to go far, go together”).

Friday morning, we learned that Handbook on Religion and Health: Pathways for a Turbulent Future was published. Only 1,155 days ago Jim Cochrane was asked to consider editing a volume on religion and health. TC encouraged him: “Yes! Do this and blow the field wide open!” Eventually, 33 authors from around the world typed 502 pages of very hard and explosive thinking that none of us could have done alone.

TC and I celebrated the publication at a Glasgow pub. “What’s it about?”, asked a bewildered friend, trying to be respectful. The question has come about everything I’ve ever written. The answer makes it worse, especially in a loud pub: “It’s about the intersection of faith (no, not that dumb kind!) and health (no, not the pills and machines!).” The real answer is almost too audacious to say out loud, even in a pub after more than one pint.

It’s about the leading causes of life, here, now.

“The first step in such fundamental research,” we wrote in our concluding chapter of the Handbook, “would be to understand the nature of the living system in question.In a nitty-gritty practical kind of way, confronting an ugly and terrifying contagion of polio, Jonas Salk of polio vaccine fame, knew he had to learn how to think like a virus or, as he put it, follow ‘the biological way of thought’ (Salk, 1972, pp. 7-15), before focusing on all the symptoms and damage the virus inflicts. A virus may not think in the way a human does, but in its own way it makes choices, indeed patterns of choices, as it adapts, moves as an organism inside and around the human creature that is also making choices and patterns of choices to create the ecology in which the virus finds its way. Something like this nesting of living systems is happening in every component of every living system. Part of what a virus must “consider” or “think” about is how it understands its relationship to the larger ecology of systems including the human one.

Maybe the virus has a more accurate view of what constitutes the human living system than do most humans; perhaps even those thinking about the health of the human public. A virus “sees” any one human as an inseparable part of a meshwork of other bodies offering a rich array of slightly different bio-psycho-chemistries linked in a connected social network that allows the virus to move around the entire living system as a single, if differentiated and variable, whole” (p. 453, Ch. 28: The Watershed of Life: A River Runs Through It).

The implications are profoundly hopeful for us humans. We have the intellectual leverage to break out of our doom loop of compounding stupidities. We are alive. And life has found its (our!) way for roughly three and a half billion years.

And even more hopefully, we have more to work with than any other part of the living system. We are capable of knowing ourselves (sapiens sapiens), but even more since spirit gives us the capacity to see dynamic emergent complexity that is us, in the spirited cosmos that is built for life.

“Public health science and public religion,” we also write (p. 456), “are best understood as co-creating components of a kind of consciousness of the planetary human phenomenon. The first immunizes humanity from the disease of premature certainty, the second from hubris and heart-heartedness. Science animates the religious ethical imagination by clarifying the boundaries and possibilities of mercy, while religion holds science accountable to serve all, not just whoever paid for the research or technical gizmo. Science protects religion from simply making things up, while religion protects science from overlooking the most obvious things—we are children of one family.”

The Handbook is published, but as an invitation to the hard thinking we need, it is just beginning. The official release is in Washington DC on September 27^th and 28^th, with other events planned in Minneapolis, La Crosse, Winston-Salem, Houston, Cape Town and elsewhere. The baobabs on the cover, on the website of the Leading Causes of Life Initiative , and for the preceding African Religious Health Assets Programme, are not just pretty. At every intellectual step we have figuratively gathered in the African way under the shelter of the ‘tree of life’ where we can talk deeply with each other about what matters most.

I’ve been thinking of the many people who have carried me on this spirited intellectual current, such as Reverend Larry Pray who came into my life as part of the CDC funded Institute of Public Health and Faith. The Handbook ends with the story of when he called me at the hospital in Memphis, urging me to grab the Bible he assumed (wrongly) I had on my desk. Liz Dover had one, so I was able to follow Larry to Ezekiel: “And on the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither, nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing” (English Standard Version Bible, 2006, Exekiel 47:12).

*Double rainbow over the University of Glasgow*

Easily overlooked is the humbling chiding for us humans as the vital flow rises over our heads: “Hey, do you see the flow?” (47:6). How could we miss it? It is life itself.”

/// The Handbook on Religion and Health: Pathways for a Turbulent Future is available in hardback immediately (priced for academic libraries!) with an eBook coming in a week or two ($48), and, we anticipate (not yet confirmed), with a paperback to follow later. Most of my friends will wait for the paperback or eBook! I’ll let you know when they are available.

Undeterred, undetoured

”It has to do with faith, love and hope – as much in secular as in religious terms. Without belief, without love and without hope my life would be meaningless. And in this respect, it is not about religion but about lived life.“

Jürgen Moltmann died Sunday after 98 years fully alive to the hope God places in us humans. His writings are foundational to the church of enough heart, hope, spirit and critical mind that Jesus might recognize. His “Theology of Hope” anchored my theological formation at Emory where he visited occasionally. The best sermon I ever preached, God is Not Done, in 1979 (!), has his fingerprints all over it. He is a powerful influence on the Leading Causes of Life intellectually and personally as he married Jim and Renate Cochrane who also met through him.

Like another icon in my life, Carl Sandburg, Jürgen almost died typing, releasing a profound book only last year. It is not yet in English, Weisheit in der Klimakrise: Perspektiven eine Theologie des Lebens (Gütersloher, 2023), which can be translated as “Wisdom in the Climate Crisis: Perspectives of a Theology of Life.”

While we less educated ones wait for the English edition, we can catch a sense of where he was going as he was dying in this article: The transformation of theology in the present climate crisis. Fiercely clear-eyed about the radical threat to the survival of our and many other species, he was undeterred in his theologically informed lens of hope. His wife, Elisabeth, who he dearly grieved since her passing in his arms in 2016, tuned him to the eschatological implications of the climate collapse.

In this sense he was not only undeterred, but undetoured.

He taught us a pastor, friend, intellect and spiritual guide to stand on hope and do not read the world through fear, even when those fears are quite justified.

Jim translated part of the introduction of his new book for me: “Instead of hope for life, anxiety about life spreads. ‘Fear the warming of the earth!’ one might say. ‘Fear the extinction of species!’ ‘Beware the poisoning of the air!’ These are the admonitions of the present, intended also to awaken those who do not take the coming dangers seriously enough. This fear is justified. But it must be limited to concrete fears if we do not want to lose our ability to act. Fear is the feeling of the coming dangers, so to speak, the radar of our mind, which warns us but should not paralyze us.”

We must not be detoured, either.

Against the tide of vacant secularism and stupid Christianity, The Reverand Dr Moltmann gives dignity, purpose and usefulness to theology. Theology of hope enabled action. “Then the question is: How can humans affirm their existence if they live in a meaningless world? Perhaps, there is no ‘strong anthropic principle’, but there is a solid ‘Christological principle’ which allows human beings to feel at home in the cosmos. There is a ‘cosmic Christ’.” (Moltmann, J., 2023, ‘The transformation of theology in the present climate crisis’, HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 79(2), a8460. https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v79i2.8460).

He ended that article exactly as he ended his life, an undetoured trustworthy witness.

“In the Letter to the Ephesians, the second act, which follows after the reconciliation of the cosmos ‘through his blood’ (Eph 1:7), is called anakephaleiosis ton panton, ‘a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth’ [εἰς οἰκονομίαν τοῦ πληρώματος τῶν καιρῶν, ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι τὰ πάντα ἐν τῷ Χριστῷ, τὰ ἐπὶ τοῖς οὐρανοῖς καὶ τὰ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς ἐν αὐτῷ] (Eph 1:10). Here the theological foundation for a ‘cosmic spirituality’ is to be found. Christ also died for the redemption of the cosmos. We are ushered into God’s ‘wide space’ if we meditate on this.”

Thank you, Jürgen.

//// The image of Dr. Moltmann is from https://scottpaeth.typepad.com/main/2014/08/where-to-start-with-j%C3%BCrgen-moltmann.html

Normal

As actual patriotism seems to harder to find, Memorial Day amps up the maudlin version of military valor which is almost never loud and bright.

As actual patriotism seems to harder to find, Memorial Day amps up the maudlin version of military valor. The 35^th version of the Memorial Day concert on the Mall gave us almost cartoon versions of the now-aged heroes and heroines.

Military valor should be normal, not exotic. I have family in Arlington; my sister’s husband Spence, a no kidding combat hero in Korea. He was always dismayed that his behavior was not more normal. My dad did not go abroad because the army needed a normal railroad as well as the occasional superhero.

Recently, TC and I saw military valor that was shocking in the same way a good railroad is.

We were disgorging from the airport bus to pick up a rental car when TC noticed that a woman was stranded behind. Not elderly, but a bad knee made the step just a tad too much to navigate. Her husband, just short of a MAGA hat, wasn’t much better off. A hefty African-American man had already turned and offered to help her; “just put both hands on my shoulders and I’ll get you down. For him this was military muscle memory ethic: “never leave your wounded behind.” A committee formed, of course, with helpful variations. Nobody asked about voter preferences. The bus driver poked a button to lower the vehicle 6 inches. Soon on the sidewalk, the woman turned to thank TC and complement on her on her shoes as everyone headed to the counter to get the rental cars.

Normal, not exemplary. That’s what makes actual valor so essential to the human prospect. As normal and essential as a bee giving its life to defend the hive.

Way more interesting that a wagon of fireworks. Real life every day valor.

Later in the evening, we were present as 31 Randal Lewis Fellows demonstrated intellectual valor as they graduated from their internship that they had stack on top of already rigorous graduate training in health-related fields. Partners for Better Health imagines academic health Green Berets. Their internships demanded highly technical analysis of some problem that turned out to be solvable they brought ethics and intellect to see the hopeful path. This is what normal humans do in the presence of possibility.

The next morning Stakeholder Health recognized three similar exemplars, Kevin Barnett, Lauran Hardin, and Maria Hernandez. Their awards were named after other exemplars, Ruth Temple, Jerry Winslow and Soma Saha. Brilliant leaders all, but as role models, not cartoons. Like Mandela, Tutu or Carter, or those on the Mall, really. Circumstances—sometimes extraordinary–offer different opportunities to do the right thing. As King noted, all work is honorable, if it serves the whole.

When we describe these choices as “moral courage” we risk elevating them to something only expected of rare heroes—and not ourselves. This only helps the venal ones who want their smallness to be the norm. Normal people don’t kidnap innocents, bomb and starve babies, gas civilians, twists the courts or stand by in the presence of horrible behavior.

I doubt that Mr. Netanyahu would do to children in person what he is ordering others to do by email. I doubt you or I would offer to chip in for a 2,000 pound bomb to drop on them, either. Or pour bleach on the last of the coral reefs, strangle the last caribou, spray neurotoxins on the garden honeybees.

Democracy swings in the wind. It always does. It helps the venal for the rest of us to wait for a superhero. They want us to stay behind our flat screens so that we are less likely to act normal. Normal people do love mercy. They do act justly. They tend to walk humbly. Those qualities are in the Bible precisely because they are expected of all of us.

Every day, whether we are on a New York jury the whole world was waiting for, or another down the hall on a case we’ll never hear about.

So it is not delusional to expect Joe to stop giving Bibi two-ton bombs in our name. Any normal guy from Scranton knows that. Somebody in Moscow knows to not gas their neighbors. Somebody in Winston-Salem knows how to build a house for poor people. And anyone on the bus could have helped the woman with a bad knee.

Bee sex in Texas

Humans get so many things wrong about honeybees. I’m sure they are a bit confused about us, too. But they must be especially mystified by the way we call the one who sows all the eggs in the hive a queen, which implies the off-putting and inefficient pomp of human royalty. Mother is closer, given her role in laying many thousands of eggs; but also wrong given her lack of maternal qualities. She lays eggs but has no role in raising them. And the first thing she does when she emerges with her impressive stinger is to kill her competitors. Not like my mother.

The one we call queen is more like a sower of seeds. She is not even a gardener that carefully plants a seedling, making sure the roots are nestled just right in the soil. Let’s call her Sower.

Honeybees have successfully flourished for 30 million years precisely because they have no royal qualities at all. We have no idea how 60,000 bees in the hive think collectively, but we know it’s not the queen. Every single worker bee—all girls—have the identical genetics of the Sower. The hive every egg “royal jelly” for three days before switching to the more mundane “bee bread.” But the hive feeds the Sower special food her whole life turning on the genes that make her much bigger and living 10 times as long and, of course, able to lay a thousand eggs a day. But she isn’t any smarter than the other bees. Her most consequential decision is which egg to lay in which cell and doesn’t really decide even that. She sticks her tentacles into the cell to see which one the architect bees intended (the 10% drone cells are slightly bigger).

Why is this important for humans? We have long fallen for the idea of the Elevated Decider who receives ridiculously disproportionate privileges in exchange for making big decisions. The honeybees make those decisions collectively without the process skewed by privilege. Flat democracy so perfect humans can’t even recognize it.

Now and then humans approach smart by accident, such as recently seen in Texas of all places.

Honeybees typically produce way more honey than they can possibly consume, leaving plenty for us. They can also produce more hives, which is why they are so adaptive, able to explode into almost any niche given the chance. The Texas department of agriculture triggered an explosion of bee hives by granting agricultural tax abatements to any “farm” over 5 acres with 5 or more hives. Texans are not known for environmentalism, but they known a lucrative write-off when they see it.

Honeybees are insects, as TC reminds me, with little emotional bandwidth. They don’t care about dubious Texan morality. Suddenly, there were bees everywhere! And the people dumping poisons suddenly were surrounded by tax-incented Texans. (Here’s the story.)

We are so used to complaining about environmental decline that we overlook the natural superpowers like the honeybees’. They can make a new Sower and thus entire new hive when they need or want to do so. Normally, this is when the old Sower starts to show signs of wearing out and getting erratic. The hive puts some promising eggs in larger cells and feeds those eggs nothing but special food. In about 16 days a Sower will emerge. (She isn’t nice: as I mentioned, her first act is to kill the other potential queens.) She’ll fly off to mate with six or ten drones and returns to lay eggs in the dark for a couple years.

Often in the Springtime the the hive will find itself thinking of reproduces itself. Honeybee sex involves the whole hive. The existing Sower is chased around the hive to lose weight so she can fly one last time. About half the bees in the hive pour into the air in a swirling ecstatic cloud bringing the old Sower with them. They pause in a tree branch to give the scouts a chance to find a new permanent location in the neighborhood. While they are pausing an opportunistic human can persuade them into a box they may find it acceptable.

Kelly Carpenter’s bait hive for Methodist bees. So far it has captured four swarms that have come from his church rafters.

Kelly Carpenter and I have captured three Methodist hives this way in the past couple weeks. Combined with some Texas-style splits, 5 hives are now 16. The process is risky and wild. They bet everything on expansive possibility which has worked for thousands of millennia.

Last year about half of all hives in the United States did not make it through the gauntlet of toxins, sprays, overcrowding and stupid human behavior that magnify the threats of mites and such. But it is important to note that most of the hives that failed were the ones kept by humans.

Many natural species are also capable of exuberant expansion once humans quit pumping poison into their neighborhood. Nature out-generates death every chance it finds. Humans can help the most by removing the financial incentives to poison. Just imagine if we gave tax rebates for planting butterfly and pollinator flowers. Do we really need Texans to show us?

Why five acres? Our townhouse community has one acre of sanitized fescue vacuumed in the fall. The city council could change the game for bees and bugs and songbirds with a 5% property tax rebate. Of course, we could just do it. We not legally bound to spray neurotoxins on ourselves.

Too small to matter? One of my favorite organizations is Homegrown National Parks. “Homegrown National Park® addresses the urgent biodiversity crisis with a simple, science-based solution to a global challenge. We are a grassroots call-to-action to regenerate biodiversity by planting and preserving native plants that support critical ecosystem services and removing invasive plants that do not. We are catalyzing action that will have meaningful, tangible, measurable, and immediate results. We can do this NOW, without waiting for legislation.”

We are not inherently smart as honeybees. We have to think hard and do things on purpose. Somebody had to notice that there is more private land currently planted in lawns than in all the national parks put together. And think about what that means.

We can just stop behind stupid. Start choosing abundance.

Nature just won’t quit trying. Here’s an eager dandelion emerging from our parking lot. Never quit trying….

Community Perspective on CalAIM

Life is generous, although most humans don’t notice.

*Sunrise in God’s Acre in Old Salem, March 31, 2024*

I offer evidence, if you failed to notice the azaleas, not to mention the rising sun. I’ll point to a full bloom of creative generosity where you might not expect it—in a complicated partnership between government, healthcare and hundreds of small community-based organizations in California.

This week Stakeholder Health released some careful research into a radical innovation in how the state of California is providing health care for the poor.

Here is the link to the webinar.

Here is a link to a two-page summary of the research.

Here is a link to the full report.

In most places government and healthcare are built proudly with nonchalant acceptance of the fact that the poor live demeaning lives and then die in humiliating pain. Sorry, there’s just not enough to go around, says the hard-hearted god of the castles. Even when the poor can slither through the doors into the emergency rooms, they have little access to 21st century preventive medicine. For decades it has been clear that most of the drivers of disease and suffering are not medical and need relatively inexpensive preventative care. Most conditions that look medical are best managed by something social, mental or spiritual before leaping to the expensive pill or carving up a body part.

This is technically called the social determinants of health (SDOH) which is unhelpful language because they go way beyond social work. Everything that happens in human life has biological-psychological-social-and Spirit drivers and implications. Duh. Humans are complex and wonderfully made (Psalm 89). Even straightforward medical problems—say a broken leg, which my kid is still recovering from— has a four-fold a healing path. It works the other way, too: childhood trauma shows up as wickedly complex biological issues decades later.

The healthcare industry is not organized this way. Governmental programs usually take the head off the body and put it over in the mental health agency, then detach body parts in thousands of reimbursable codes. Everything outside one’s skin goes under a totally different set of social services agencies leaving a scrap for public health to inspect the food, chase rats and get ready for the next pandemic.

BUT now California launched the first really large-scale trial (CalAIM) using Medicaid to treat humans as they actually are—complex and wonderfully made and living in communities that are complex human systems that can care for each other. The technicians in government (usually called bureaucrats) leaned into all that complexity and got the federal government to grant a “waiver” to spend Medicaid money on a wide range of SDOH drivers. North Carolina had been lauded for talking about this. California has done it in a state five times larger following science to embrace 10 times the range of SDOH factors. Bold.

AND they are spending that money through the extraordinary array of community-based organizations. In reality, these groups have only had scraps of money from bake sales or philanthropic largess (social justice one chardonnay at a time, says Dr. Suzanne Henderson). CalAIM has put $4 billion in motion, which, even in California, is a lot of chardonnay.

AND the innovations continued by investing millions in helping community organizations strengthen their capacities to interface with governmental funding procedures. This would be impossible except for the last innovation—the government folks listen, adapt in real time and change their way of doing things, too. Note the research was paid for by CommonSpirit Health, one of the largest healthcare systems in the nation. It is rare for such systems to even be curious about the reality of community organizations, much less partner in learning. It is head-breakingly difficult to blend institutional cultures and ancient practices. Easier to shame, blame and whine. Not here.

The initiative has released creative energy and imagination through changing the work of many hundreds of organizations. Many of the groups were built from faith, which is supposed to believe in generosity and even resurrection, but settle for much less. The Stakeholder Health panel included Lutheran Services, which has been doing this kind of work for many decades, now accelerated with the partnerships. And it includes “Pneumacare” (spirit—get it?)—a collaborative that grew out of a ministerial association, now managing millions of dollars to provide care that that cares in partnership with CalAIM. And yes, the healing is for everybody of every kind of faith and no-faith, skin and language. It’s California.

You have to watch the video to hear the story of real resurrection going on and be amazed at the technical skill making it work. (Here’s the link.)

This is smart generosity, not dumb give away. It is obviously smarter to invest in what people actually need when they need it will prove less expensive than the obviously dumb current idea of waiting for their life to blow up so completely, that they then end up in an emergency room. This kind of work is hard with many technical challenges. You have to do the right things right. It breaks every day and is fixed in real time. The research reveals a bold effort still underway.

California chicken from a generous california hen.

The only unforgivable sin is to accuse God of creating a world broken from the beginning without enough for everyone. All the disciples of every religion can’t work around that because it assumes that inequity is inevitable; God’s fault, really. That sin is the root of every angry political movement. If they would open it, even You-Know-Who’s $60 Bible tells of a God who did a good job for everyone and expects us to do so, too. Turn on the lights to the most the most obvious thing in the world– there is enough for everyone. Everything works—politics, faith, family, health, food systems, housing, education—if you begin with that most obvious fact. Witness California.

Labyrinth

Lit by the light of the Milky Way, the four of us held hands to find our way through and around the labyrinth. The Ramadan moon has not yet risen, and the African air was dry enough for the light to mark the sandstones against the dark gravel. We moved in toward the center, then to the left, followed the long loop and around before heading back in and around again. The pilgrims included myself, Marcellino, a South African community activist and researcher, and TC, my Bride of many years, as well as Bastienne. She is a Greek scholar who said that we should have been dancing as the Greeks did. We did well enough. Once at the center, we paused to look up with wonder at the thousands of stars, knowing there are billions beyond our sight and depth far beyond our capacity to imagine, much less grasp. We moved back out, turning, turning, seeking, seeking. Finding our way.

Most find the labyrinth a place of personal spiritual way-finding. Who and where am I in life? Holding hands, if not quite dancing, this was not personal; it was a hint of a greater whole moving in a social labyrinth. For today it is the whole that is seems needing to find a way. More likely to see that way by starlight instead of the stultifying glow of our screens and their chattering distraction.

I have been coming to Africa for nearly forty years, always amazed by the gritty tenacious people who simply won’t give up despite ever new complexities layered on historical traumas. I’ve sat with Thomas Sankara, the iconic young leader of Burkina Faso still seen as a wayfinder by youth today because of his fierce integrity. He renamed his country “land of upright people” and then made it real. Through the blowing red dust, he told of their victorious “commando vaccination” in which they mobilized the whole society to vaccinate every child in the country (and the thousands that were brought across the border by their mothers). Killed cynically, probably by the French, his life still resonates decades later with youth desperate for heroes who might show a way in and out, back and round, maybe even forward.

This particular labyrinth was on the grounds of Goedgedacht, a bold experiment in rural development an hour and a half north of Cape Town. The name means “good thinking,” and it is a good place to see clearly how much good thinking we will all need to find our way. Here we see radically different lives in a spectrum of whites, blacks and browns speaking far more than the eleven official languages. The local poor were already poor enough without the arrival of immigrant workers from all over Africa now competing for the scarce and difficult jobs. And the local rich were rich enough without finding new ways too exaggerate their privileges. Goedgedacht grows olives from the tough dry soil to finance the rural development efforts in the villages. But it can’t qualify for the valuable “organic” label because of the pesticides that drift from the farm next door, which is literally covered in plastic to shelter their luxury crops from the blazing sun. Their neighbor’s private dam shining like a jewel out of place in that bright sun is filled from a pipe drawing water from a river 15 kilometers away. All this bizarreness is possible because of the specialty grapes and clementines grown to be shipped abroad. Nothing local about it. Maybe I’ve had one of those clementines in the US.

Only a four-dimensional labyrinth could map the difficulties of navigating such complexity. But that is what the South Africans are doing by light of the Southern Cross. Shock after shock (AIDS after Apartheid, ‘state capture’ after freedom, then COVID, then ….). Layers of ironic betrayals that would shatter the heart of any lesser people left Mandela, Tutu and millions that hoped with them in tears. But the people do not quit. They do not stop putting one foot in front of the next finding the way by not stopping.

We were at Goedgedacht to convene some of the Fellows of the Leading Causes of Life Initiative. I once thought those words were too happy and American to even speak here in such a mystifyingly difficult place. The Africans taught me that life is the only thing tough enough to work here. No simplistic professionalism, no shallow plans, brittle schemes or mere interventions. Only life can live here. Only it can find the way.

Marcellino, Sandy and Beulah helping each other find the way.

And how does it do so? By what light? We gathered around the hunch that it might be fueled by something more like joy, let us dare to say dance. The English word “joy” falls so short, but still comes closer to the way we move with just enough light to see to the next turn on the path. Never one by one; always in small groups who would be lost entirely if not held by slender and improbably threads of trust.

One of these improbabilities that lights up the sky is the Christian Institute of Southern Africa, which Goedgedacht has honored with a peace grove of 28 olive trees for the founding giants who suffered with some dying in the bitter decades of struggle against Apartheid. Built with what we now see as the sinews of life, it defied the massive structures of Apartheid. Nobody involved had any clear thought as to how it could be ended. They gathered and spoke such vivid truth that the government banned them all, preventing them from being together or even be quoted in public. Tiny, nimble and fragile looking, they nonetheless persisted, gathering support all across the globe, creating channels for funds to flow into the struggles for justice, dignity and integrity. They won their day in ways that inspire us to struggle with very different demons in ours.

We walk in their light today because they kept weaving thin webs across borders, time zones, political snares, theological lines and impossibilities of every kind. Like the Milky Way constellations, the dozens whose names we know reflect millions who we do not know who also risked everything for a future that drew them beyond the possible. Most in the movement did not get an olive tree memorial garden or even a footnote.

What do we do with this light? Their specific answer and ways of struggling are not ours. It is unlikely they were any smarter than us. Or that they would be any better than we at figuring out how to move through the current labyrinth of collapsing climate with political systems so easily gamed and tamed by the cynical powers.

We are here now, not them. And we are in our struggle, which is not exactly theirs. Their problem was nationalwith some hope to be found abroad. Ours is planetary with no help on the way at all except for the next generation. They are rising quickly, but time is short.

What can we learn except like them to act as best we can; to risk as wisely and boldly as they did with those they trusted with their lives and with the life of their hopes.

Neither they nor we could know if our very best would be enough or in time. Who can ever know that?

Hold hands with a few you trust and put one step in front. Turn, move, turn again and yet again, grateful for the light of billions of stars.

Bolt

Compared to Ukraine, Gaza or the wobbly democracy in the US, reading about my Chevy Bolt may not seem urgent. But stick with me; it might relieve some of your despair.

TC and I bought a basic 2020 Chevy Bolt the dealer was so eager to get it off the lot, they let us strip it of everything including the silly floor-mats. I mean basic; the cheapest EV one can buy. And still a terrific car comparable driving and space to my beloved Mini Cooper. It’s a small hatchback with the same 250-mile range as the base Tesla. I usually charge it at home with the stock cord and a $20 adapter from Amazon to plug it into the same 220v plug which powers my big wood turning lathe. It’s not elegant, but it works overnight. I plug it in a couple times a week as most of my life takes place within a couple dozen miles of home.

An electric car is only as clean as the electricity, which in Winston means coal from Duke Power. We once looked into installing solar panels but avoided the mud wrestle with the home-owners’ association by buying our power through Sol Systems (formerly Arcadia). They negotiate with Duke Power to buy wholesale electrons from solar and wind producers. It costs us a few dollars for the moral fig leaf, of claiming to be 100% solar. It’s a nice tingle.

We also have TC’s Prius for when we don’t have the patience on long trips or if we would have to cross West Virginia or Mississippi. The guzzle bunny, as I call it, gets 52 miles to the gallon which is a good tingle, too. I prefer the Bolt on the road as it is more quiet and comfortable.

Long distance driving in an EV in the Deep South requires patience and planning, neither of which I am known for. And a lot of apps, which I am known for. I am 70-ish, so I need to pee and stretch more often than I need to charge. The 240 miles range means a couple of added hours on a 400 mile day but the breaks mean we arrive a lot less frazzled. It’s a feature, not a flaw. That’s really true of nearly everything the climate crisis is forcing us to do from eating closer to the land, to E-bikes, to recycling to slowing everything down. Every single thing is quieter, calmer and better for us. Don’t the screamers make you miss the real plot–it’s better, if sometimes, like my Bolt, a bit awkward.

The complication is that a handful of Bolt batteries caught fire a few years ago, which forced GM to recall everyone’s car. GM came up with what they called a “final solution” (they need a new PR firm). They offered $1,400 to allow an electronic monitor on the car for 6,200 miles to detect the rare fatal signs. I took the money. The catch is that the process reduces range by 20% while monitoring which means in the Winter I have more like 180 than 240 miles. That’s a big difference.

That set up my 1,400 mile Deep South drive to Atlanta and Orlando and back as an adventure. I’ve driven to Atlanta innumerable times over the decades including 4 trips in the EV recently so I know where the good chargers are in Charlotte, Greenville and over the Georgia line. These are by Electrify America, which VW had to set up as penance for their environmental fraud. Good comes from bad sometimes, as there are now fast inexpensive chargers in Walmart parking lots along many highways. They barely need even 45 minutes to get from 20% to full and there’s always something to buy in a Walmart. The one in Greenville even has a Chick Filet across the parking lot. The destination Marriott in Decatur had a free charger in the basement, so I sleep well.

South of Atlanta was new EV territory. First stop was Buc-ee’s just south of Macon. The nice Mercedes charger outside almost made up for the bizarreness inside. As usual chargers are off on the edges of the lot as if we should be ashamed of ourselves, like smokers. This is especially ironic at Buc-ee’s with everyone smothered and covered by plastic crap and deadly food. So we left without a full charge, stopping in Tipton where a pokey charger at a hotel bumped us back up enough to get to the Walmart in Valdosta. TC needed some contact solution.

I don’t really know what to say about Buc-ee’s. Nice Charger. Great driving companion.

We were aiming for Palatka for the night which is about 200 miles from Valdosta—just out of range. The first time I’ve ever had to wait for a charger in three years was at a Shell station in Lake City: all three stations were occupied and the 4^th one broken, kinda off in the dark side of the lot. I had promised dinner, but there were only sad hot dogs on greasy steel metal rollers, so TC settled for a bag of pistachios. She graciously pointed out the gorgeous full moon rising over the vacant scrub behind the gas station. It is important to marry someone with a sense of humor, if one drives an EV.

An EV journey makes one think about places along the way such as Palatka. We had watched a great PBS story about William Bartrum, who visited here in 1774 writing his amazing “Travels.” A Quaker botanist, ethnographer and poet, his book about the St. John’s river, plants, animals and people mesmerized all of Europe—and justified our slight detour. We stayed in the Great Gables Inn, which, once the finest house in all of Florida, run by Tate and Jennifer, who were even better than their house.

Great Gables Inn, Palatka, Florida. The town was nearly chosen as the Capital and the house looks like it.

Alas, Palatka has only one ancient charger on the side of the Nissan dealer a bit out of town. Every Nissan dealer in America has a free charger dating from when they introduced the first Leaf. They also have a nice bathroom and impressive array of drink and candy machines including more pistachios. But we found seafood later at Corky Bell’s across the river, damn near worth the whole drive down.

We could easily have made it to Orlando with 250 mile range, but with 180 we swung by the Walmart on I-95 at Daytona where we found a surprising selection of wines and tennis balls. Then a short bounce down I-4 for a delightful couple of hours with Bill Davenhall (formerly of ESRI) and finally to the hotel in plenty of time. As in Decatur, they have a free charger with plugs for both Tesla and normal people.

EV driving clarifies that moving a noisy machine really fast down the road is no big accomplishment. Nothing like seeing a Manatee which drew us to Blue Springs State Park a few miles out of our way heading back north. Hundreds of Manatee spend their winters in the warm pristine gushing spring. The Springs once became so dirty that the winter count got down to 20 of the magical creatures. Government and citizens made a million right decisions over a couple of decades so; there were 124 the day we visited. We talked for hundreds of miles of their wonder.

Manatee were created by a kind-hearted God on a good day. And the water would occupy Monet for years.

Up through Jacksonville and across the Georgia line. Zapped up again near Charleston and over to Columbia with 80 miles still in the battery. We slept in a hotel near….an Electrify America (TC sleeping while I charged up). A final bounce up to Charlotte for our last 20 minute charge got us home for lunch.

I mentioned the apps, which is how one navigates the chargers. Electrify America guides you to theirs, my first choice. Chargeaway and PlugShare show details about nearly every socket in the nation. Tesla has a great onboard app, which everyone is copying. Google shows charger details on their web-based maps, but weirdly, not on the phone. In short, finding the chargers is the emerging art. There aren’t enough and they aren’t all compatible, yet. But it’s all coming along.

What could be more complex than changing the whole energy system in the largest economy on the planet? It demands a million right things big and small done right over a couple of decades. Some of the choices are not great and will need to be improved. But it is is happening, even in the Deep South which weirdly treats sunlight as if it a liberal conspiracy.

Elon made his expensive cars fart (as he did the internet). Nameless GM engineers simply made them go. He did make 10,000 good chargers, which will soon be open to everyone, making it even easier to drive in the quiet elegance of an EV, albeit a Chevy which normal people can afford.

I’m almost done with the 6,200 battery monitoring. I can hardly wait to drive to St. Louis in April with all our mileage back. We’ll drive past Buc-ee’s this time. Maybe we’ll see another full moon, if nothing as astonishing as a Manatee.

Have you ever really looked up to the sky through Spanish Moss moving in the wind? *Palatkak Florida.*

Just Peace, please

Weapons on their way to another failed peace. Wow, indeed. says the Memphis billboard.

These are tender days for those who wish to be peacemakers amid the savagery in Ukraine, Palestine, Israel and dozens of African countries too accustomed to being forgotten. Who can speak of peace with any credibility without empathizing with the rage and bitterness? But how to empathize without enabling? Is there nothing in play but raw violence ending only with extermination?

I was raised in a military family and predictably entered ROTC at Wake Forest. But then I woke up (I’ll claim it!) and began the process of applying to be a conscientious objector, thinking of Canada if my application was denied by the draft board, as it likely would have been given my family. I pulled #348 in the draft lottery which made the question entirely theoretical, never applied and don’t know to this day what I would have actually done. One never does until one is in the actual moment of decision.

Years later I found myself at the Thomas Merton’s Abbey of Gethsemane in bourbon country south of Louisville for a meeting to develop a protocol of just peacemaking to balance the many centuries old protocol about just war. The more appropriate ambassador types at The Carter Center sent me because it sounded more like religion than serious statecraft. I found a spot in the back row until I was informed, I was supposed to be one of the experts to provide some basic principles to guide the discussion. Yikes. (The story of that otherwise dignified event is here.)

The group had giants in the field, so despite me, they identified 10 basic practices to judge whether a government, religious group or non-governmental organization can claim they have exhausted the peacemaking. Only then—after all the peacemaking–is just war theory relevant at all. War can only be considered ethical after the peacemaking.

Despite about sixteen centuries of weirdly meticulous ethics debate about its principles, Just War theory is almost always an ineffectual footnote applied after all the blood and tears has soaked into the soil. How do we know when peacemaking is enough?

This week the International Court said that the state of Israel had plausibly failed to conduct a just war so egregiously that genocide may be underway. Generations of Israelis will have to explain that to their children, a desecration of the memory of the lives so horribly lost on October 7^th. Their failure is not my point here. I have a lot to live with, too.

I am am pretty sure the court would find those of us claiming to be peacemakers negligent, too. We are guilty of malpractice, lazy practice and no practice at all as the engines of war were tuned and the lies so necessary for hatred were refined and repeated. We have known better for at least 30 years, from the beginning of Just Peacemaking theory at Merton’s abbey. More than that as he wrote 14 years earlier:

“Finally, we must be reminded of the way we are ourselves tend to operate, the significance of the secret forces that rise up within us and dictate fatal decisions. We must learn to distinguish the free voice of conscience from the irrational compulsions of prejudice and hate. We must be reminded of objective moral standards, and of the wisdom, which goes into every judgment, every choice, every political act that deserves to be called civilized. We cannot think this way, unless we shake off our passive ear responsibility, renounce our fatalistic submission to economic and social forces, and give up the unquestioning belief in machines and processes which characterizes the mass mind. History is ours to make. Above all we must try to recover our freedom, or moral autonomy, or capacity, to control the forces to make for life and death in our society.” (Thomas merton, The Non-violent Altnerative (New York: Farrar, Strais and Giroux, 1980) 78-79.)

The group at his Abbey came up with these guidelines which have become official policy of numerous religious bodies. An academic industry has risen up around them. You can get a PhD in them. But as a generation we have failed to do them with anything like the scale or energy of those seeking death. As Dr. Fred Smith says, we have allowed evil to out-organize us. Guilty.

Sprouts find their way through the bullet holes in an old refrigerator in North Georgia.

You can’t say you have sought peace until we:

1. Support nonviolent direct action.
2. Take independent initiatives to reduce threat.
3. Use cooperative conflict resolution.
4. Acknowledge responsibility for conflict and injustice and seek repentance and forgiveness.
5. Advance democracy, human rights, and religious liberty.
6. Foster just and sustainable economic development.
7. Work with emerging cooperative forces in the international system.
8. Strengthen the United Nations and international efforts for cooperation and human rights.
9. Reduce offensive weapons and weapons trade.
10. Encourage grassroots peacemaking groups and voluntary associations.

From Just Peacemaking, edited by Glen Stassen (Pilgrim Press, 1998)

No American voter can be proud, measured by these standards.

But it is not only up to the leaders of statecraft to do peace. The politicians and their technicians are trapped unless we the people lead in making peace possible. A brilliant interview of Mahmood Mandani in The Nation provocatively argues that the state itself is built to exclude and that genocide is just an extension of its logic.

Dr. Mandani is not a cynical man, but inconveniently clear-eyed for those of us who think the instruments of state will just do the right thing. We citizens must not give up on the means of peacemaking, including the structures of government. He and Merton warn us that the seeds of the next war are already germinating in us, the people.

We must hurry to do justice and mercy now. Who will build back the ruined hospitals, public health and social services of Gaza? Why would we imagine that it is anyone else’s job than those of us who dare to think we are peacemakers?