POPULARITY
4 episodes with guilty bystander
4 episodes with guilty bystander
2 episodes with guilty bystander
2 episodes with guilty bystander
2 episodes with guilty bystander
Welcome to the annual best-of-books episode of The Russell Moore Show! Former show producer and current editorial director of print Ashley Hales joins Moore to talk about his favorite reads of the year. Hales identifies three themes in Moore's book list—the importance of outsiders in communities, ways forward in our historical moment, and the pursuit of the beautiful as a humanizing mechanism. **Special Event: Join Russell Moore, Ashley Hales, Bonnie Kristian, and Matt Reynolds on YouTube for the CT Book Awards Live Event on December 12, 2024, at 8:00 p.m. EST. Book of the Year winner Gavin Ortlund and Award of Merit winner Brad East will share the inspiration behind their books and the big ideas that animate them as they answer questions from CT staff and subscribers.** Russell's top ten books (in alphabetical order by author): Another Day: Sabbath Poems, 2013–2023 by Wendell Berry I Cheerfully Refuse: A Novel by Leif Enger Willie, Waylon, and the Boys: How Nashville Outsiders Changed Country Music Forever by Brian Fairbanks Ghosted: An American Story by Nancy French The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt The Crisis of Narration by Byung-Chul Han, translated by Daniel Steuer The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C. S. Lewis & J. R. R. Tolkien by John Hendrix Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart: What Art Teaches Us About the Wonder and Struggle of Being Alive by Russ Ramsey Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment by Charles Taylor Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically by Kevin J. Vanhoozer Resources mentioned in this episode or recommended by the guest include: CT Book Awards Live Event “The Beautiful Orthodoxy Book of the Year” “Christianity Today's 2019 Book of the Year” The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt Moby-Dick by Herman Melville Owen Barfield A Secular Age by Charles Taylor Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ by Fleming Rutledge Poiéma by Michael Card Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose by Flannery O'Connor The Faithful Spy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Plot to Kill Hitler by John Hendrix Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton James by Percival Everett Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Nesta terceira e última parte do episódio final do Podcast da Irmã Morte, nós continuamos falando sobre a fase da 'transcendência' da experiência de aproximação da morte, conforme o livro 'The Grace in Dying', de Kathleen Dowling Singh.Partilhando algumas histórias de atendimento, eu abordo os fenômenos espirituais comumente associados à experiência de aproximação da morte, bem como algumas das tarefas nas quais as pessoas que estão morrendo podem se empenhar a fim de encontrar sentido e paz no final da vida. Livros: - The Grace in Dying: A Message of Hope, Comfort and Spiritual Transformation, Kathleen Dowling Singh.- The Four Things That Matter Most: A Book About Living, Ira Byock. - Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of Prayer, Richard Rohr- Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Thomas Merton. - The Sacred Heart of the World: Restoring Mystical Devotion to Our Spiritual Life, David Richo.Artigo: - Emanuel et al. 'The Dying Role'. Journal of Palliative Medicine, v.10, 1. 159-169 (2007). Música: 'Home' - Cody Martin
It is easy to lose sight of our humanity when so many in the world are suffering. Yet it is exactly our humanity that I don't want to lose sight of as the frightening conflict in Israel and Gaza intensifies. On this week's episode, I share some heartfelt quotes that have helped me align with love, as if we were seen in the eyes of the Divine, help me align with our innate goodness, with peace, with oneness and our humanity. Check out the links below for quotes referenced and the book “See No Stranger" by Sikh activist, Valarie Kaur. Particularly during trying times, may we chose love, may we hold onto our humanity. Enjoy the podcast! Links: Valarie Kaur Ted Talk Maha Rose Thomas Merton Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
NOTE FROM STEVE: I love this particular podcast because it is foundational to understanding the care of the soul. In this podcast, I explain what the soul is and how we can participate in the caring for our soul. As I've said , this message is needed because the message of soul care gets lost in our busyness and all the issues of life hitting us day by day! I hope you'll listen and pass this along to a few friends you think could really benefit by listening to it! Summer blessings! Steve SHOW NOTES Join co-hosts Steve Smith and Joe Chambers as they give more definition to what soul care is and how it relates to icebergs and the Brooklyn Bridge! Steve Smith shows us the stress of living divided lives and lays out the importance of caring for all aspects of the human experience: physical, emotional, relational, vocational, and spiritual. Plus enjoy an interview with Joe Walters, head of the Soul Care Institute and learn how you can take part in a 2 year journey to better soul health. LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE PODCAST Understanding the Soul with Icebergs: View and Download Article: Five Reasons Soul Care Matters by Stephen W. Smith: View and Download Poem: For One Who Is Exhausted by John O'Donohue. This poem is available in his book To Bless The Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings. Learn more about John O'Donohue at www.johnodonohue.com BOOKS RECOMMENDED The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk M.D. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton Building Below the Waterline: Shoring Up the Foundations of Leadership by Gordon MacDonald SUPPORT THE PODCAST Donate Here for an individual contribution. CONTACT US podcast@pottersinn.com INTERESTED IN MORE SOUL CARE RESOURCES? Check out our recommended reading, books on spiritual growth, and our soul care blog. Want to experience soul care in person? Learn more about our soul care intensives and retreats.
It's not everyday you get to talk to legends but I'll be damned if I'm not to talking to one on this episode! On the show we have musician and actor John Doe. We discuss John's new record Fables in a Foreign Land along with topics such as:- Writing murder ballads with Shirley Manson of Garbage- If John felt any pressure releasing Alphabetland after X hadn't released an album since 1993- Having to find a replacement bass player for a tour because Willie Nelson took yours- Being in the early stages of writing a new X record with Exene- Going on tour all summer with X and the John Doe Trio- If John's surroundings influence his songwriting- Trying new things as a musician 40+ years in your career- The irony of children listening to Folk music & more!Follow John Doe -https://johndoex.bandcamp.comhttp://www.theejohndoe.comhttps://www.xtheband.comhttps://www.instagram.com/theejohndoe/https://www.instagram.com/xthebandofficial/https://twitter.com/johndoefromXhttps://twitter.com/Xthebandhttps://www.facebook.com/theejohndoehttps://www.facebook.com/XLosAngelesCheck out the Power Chord Hour radio show every Friday night at 10 to midnight est on 107.9 WRFA in Jamestown, NY. Stream the station online at wrfalp.com/streaming/ or listen on the WRFA app.powerchordhour@gmail.comInstagram - www.instagram.com/powerchordhourTwitter - www.twitter.com/powerchordhourFacebook - www.facebook.com/powerchordhourYoutube - www.youtube.com/channel/UC6jTfzjB3-mzmWM-51c8LggSpotify Episode Playlists - https://open.spotify.com/user/kzavhk5ghelpnthfby9o41gnr?si=4WvOdgAmSsKoswf_HTh_MgThank you to Jay Vics for his behind the scenes help on this episode - https://www.jvimobile.comhttps://www.facebook.com/jvimobilehttps://www.twitter.com/jvimobile
In this episode, James' Senior Pastor and book author Kevin Cain helps us understand the spiritual discipline of silence. Drawing from his own experience, Kevin shares how practicing silence helps us learn how to break away with God from the noise and speed of the crowd so that we can learn to live in the stillness of body, mouth, and mind with God and within the crowd. Connect with Pastor Kevin Cain of Kingdom A Community Church of Westover, WV. Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/pastorkevincain/Early Will I Rise: Follow and be encouraged as Pastor Kevin brings daily meditations from God's Word. - https://www.pastorkevincain.com/earlywilliriseCheck out Pastor Kevin Cain's books: As She is Dying - https://amzn.to/3uueRa2. (My note on this book: This will be your go to book on ministering to families in the midst of their grief).Book Synopsis: Ask any Appalachian the question, "When is Appalachia most beautiful?" Every Appalachian will answer, "During autumn, when the leaves of Appalachia's trees are dying." Appalachians believe the beauty of their landscape is almost heaven. With the honor of officiating nearly 1000 funerals, Pastor Kevin Cain offers life in the midst of death.In As She Is Dying, Kevin Cain writes, "I have given my life to bring hope to a people who have little reason to hope. Maybe Appalachians have allowed our hills' majesty and grandeur to blind us from coal dust and addiction. Yet, I do see hope. I see hope in what is dying. I see hope in what is dead. I see hope in what remains. Yes, death has the keen ability to either clear up, cover up or stir up. Still, sometimes we must descend in order to turn into the clouds. As She Is Dying is a book about death that offers stories of life. In these pages, you will find a little bit of wisdom, some stories of hope, and the eulogizing words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart which I trust have been acceptable in the sight of my strength and my Redeemer. Somehow and somewhere in death, hope must be discovered. Maybe, through the literal metaphor of Appalachians' deaths, you can see life. Some were reconciled long before their deaths. Some were reconciled just prior to their deaths. And, others were reconciled in the midst of death. There is hope for all...hope's breath, even in death."The Humility of Being Found - https://amzn.to/36EvUOBBook Synopsis: The need to be rescued is somewhat about personal incompleteness and mostly about God, who desires to have loving communion with creation. Spiritual rescue follows a simple pattern: Messiah is lovingly sent to rescue; each has a tendency to fight against the Rescuer; personal humility is a statement of faithful surrender and the key to being found; the greatest journey of rescue is Jesus Messiah's upper room to empty tomb victory over sin and death; now rescued, the individual's only responsibility is to bear the Christ Who bears our wounds. Such is the journey to rescue.Books mentioned in this podcast:- Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander - https://amzn.to/3D6Fvde.- Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God - https://amzn.to/37MZguD.- Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution, Updated and Expanded: Living as an Ordinary - - Radical - https://amzn.to/3izdXUl.- Edward Dobson, The Year of Living like Jesus: My Journey of Discovering What Jesus Would - Really Do - https://amzn.to/3tErJeU.- Andy Freeman & Pete Greig, Punk Monk: New Monasticism and the Ancient Art of Breathing https://amzn.to/3wIi1d0.Connect with Us:Personal Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/jamessabin13/Podcast Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/ym_soul_keeper_podcast/Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/Youth-Ministry-Soul-Keeper-Podcast-112370807089603/?modal=admin_todo_tourTwitter - https://twitter.com/youth_keeperWould love to hear from you with questions and comments at the following email: ymsoulkeeper@gmail.comConnect with Guest Co-Host - Eben EddyInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/ebeneddy/Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/eben.eddyPodcast Friends:DYM Podcast – http://bit.ly/341g9e4Youth Ministry Hacks – http://bit.ly/2WazOoYMy Third Decade – http://bit.ly/2UzlpjLFifteen Minutes With Frank - https://bit.ly/2I7E0msYM Lab – http://bit.ly/2pO1GDmThe Morning After Ministry Show – http://bit.ly/2ofNLpbParent Tips – http://bit.ly/32MzM9nYW's Guide to Video Games – http://bit.ly/2Wds7yDYouth Ministry Sherpas – https://bit.ly/31VIIvsMiddle School Ministry – https://bit.ly/2BHezWj
In this episode, James' Senior Pastor and book author Kevin Cain helps us understand the spiritual discipline of silence. Drawing from his own experience, Kevin shares how practicing silence helps us learn how to break away with God from the noise and speed of the crowd so that we can learn to live in the stillness of body, mouth, and mind with God and within the crowd. Connect with Pastor Kevin Cain of Kingdom A Community Church of Westover, WV. Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/pastorkevincain/ Early Will I Rise: Follow and be encouraged as Pastor Kevin brings daily meditations from God's Word. - https://www.pastorkevincain.com/earlywillirise Check out Pastor Kevin Cain's books: As She is Dying - https://amzn.to/3uueRa2. (My note on this book: This will be your go to book on ministering to families in the midst of their grief). Book Synopsis: Ask any Appalachian the question, "When is Appalachia most beautiful?" Every Appalachian will answer, "During autumn, when the leaves of Appalachia's trees are dying." Appalachians believe the beauty of their landscape is almost heaven. With the honor of officiating nearly 1000 funerals, Pastor Kevin Cain offers life in the midst of death. In As She Is Dying, Kevin Cain writes, "I have given my life to bring hope to a people who have little reason to hope. Maybe Appalachians have allowed our hills' majesty and grandeur to blind us from coal dust and addiction. Yet, I do see hope. I see hope in what is dying. I see hope in what is dead. I see hope in what remains. Yes, death has the keen ability to either clear up, cover up or stir up. Still, sometimes we must descend in order to turn into the clouds. As She Is Dying is a book about death that offers stories of life. In these pages, you will find a little bit of wisdom, some stories of hope, and the eulogizing words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart which I trust have been acceptable in the sight of my strength and my Redeemer. Somehow and somewhere in death, hope must be discovered. Maybe, through the literal metaphor of Appalachians' deaths, you can see life. Some were reconciled long before their deaths. Some were reconciled just prior to their deaths. And, others were reconciled in the midst of death. There is hope for all...hope's breath, even in death." The Humility of Being Found - https://amzn.to/36EvUOB Book Synopsis: The need to be rescued is somewhat about personal incompleteness and mostly about God, who desires to have loving communion with creation. Spiritual rescue follows a simple pattern: Messiah is lovingly sent to rescue; each has a tendency to fight against the Rescuer; personal humility is a statement of faithful surrender and the key to being found; the greatest journey of rescue is Jesus Messiah's upper room to empty tomb victory over sin and death; now rescued, the individual's only responsibility is to bear the Christ Who bears our wounds. Such is the journey to rescue. Books mentioned in this podcast: - Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander - https://amzn.to/3D6Fvde. - Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God - https://amzn.to/37MZguD. - Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution, Updated and Expanded: Living as an Ordinary - - Radical - https://amzn.to/3izdXUl. - Edward Dobson, The Year of Living like Jesus: My Journey of Discovering What Jesus Would - Really Do - https://amzn.to/3tErJeU. - Andy Freeman & Pete Greig, Punk Monk: New Monasticism and the Ancient Art of Breathing https://amzn.to/3wIi1d0. Connect with Us: Personal Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/jamessabin13/ Podcast Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/ym_soul_keeper_podcast/ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/Youth-Ministry-Soul-Keeper-Podcast-112370807089603/?modal=admin_todo_tour Twitter - https://twitter.com/youth_keeper Would love to hear from you with questions and comments at the following email: ymsoulkeeper@gmail.com Connect with Guest Co-Host - Eben Eddy Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/ebeneddy/ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/eben.eddy Podcast Friends: DYM Podcast – http://bit.ly/341g9e4 Youth Ministry Hacks – http://bit.ly/2WazOoY My Third Decade – http://bit.ly/2UzlpjL Fifteen Minutes With Frank - https://bit.ly/2I7E0ms YM Lab – http://bit.ly/2pO1GDm The Morning After Ministry Show – http://bit.ly/2ofNLpb Parent Tips – http://bit.ly/32MzM9n YW's Guide to Video Games – http://bit.ly/2Wds7yD Youth Ministry Sherpas – https://bit.ly/31VIIvs Middle School Ministry – https://bit.ly/2BHezWj
In this episode, James' Senior Pastor and book author Kevin Cain helps us understand the spiritual discipline of silence. Drawing from his own experience, Kevin shares how practicing silence helps us learn how to break away with God from the noise and speed of the crowd so that we can learn to live in the stillness of body, mouth, and mind with God and within the crowd. Connect with Pastor Kevin Cain of Kingdom A Community Church of Westover, WV. Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/pastorkevincain/ Early Will I Rise: Follow and be encouraged as Pastor Kevin brings daily meditations from God's Word. - https://www.pastorkevincain.com/earlywillirise Check out Pastor Kevin Cain's books: As She is Dying - https://amzn.to/3uueRa2. (My note on this book: This will be your go to book on ministering to families in the midst of their grief). Book Synopsis: Ask any Appalachian the question, "When is Appalachia most beautiful?" Every Appalachian will answer, "During autumn, when the leaves of Appalachia's trees are dying." Appalachians believe the beauty of their landscape is almost heaven. With the honor of officiating nearly 1000 funerals, Pastor Kevin Cain offers life in the midst of death. In As She Is Dying, Kevin Cain writes, "I have given my life to bring hope to a people who have little reason to hope. Maybe Appalachians have allowed our hills' majesty and grandeur to blind us from coal dust and addiction. Yet, I do see hope. I see hope in what is dying. I see hope in what is dead. I see hope in what remains. Yes, death has the keen ability to either clear up, cover up or stir up. Still, sometimes we must descend in order to turn into the clouds. As She Is Dying is a book about death that offers stories of life. In these pages, you will find a little bit of wisdom, some stories of hope, and the eulogizing words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart which I trust have been acceptable in the sight of my strength and my Redeemer. Somehow and somewhere in death, hope must be discovered. Maybe, through the literal metaphor of Appalachians' deaths, you can see life. Some were reconciled long before their deaths. Some were reconciled just prior to their deaths. And, others were reconciled in the midst of death. There is hope for all...hope's breath, even in death." The Humility of Being Found - https://amzn.to/36EvUOB Book Synopsis: The need to be rescued is somewhat about personal incompleteness and mostly about God, who desires to have loving communion with creation. Spiritual rescue follows a simple pattern: Messiah is lovingly sent to rescue; each has a tendency to fight against the Rescuer; personal humility is a statement of faithful surrender and the key to being found; the greatest journey of rescue is Jesus Messiah's upper room to empty tomb victory over sin and death; now rescued, the individual's only responsibility is to bear the Christ Who bears our wounds. Such is the journey to rescue. Books mentioned in this podcast: - Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander - https://amzn.to/3D6Fvde. - Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God - https://amzn.to/37MZguD. - Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution, Updated and Expanded: Living as an Ordinary - - Radical - https://amzn.to/3izdXUl. - Edward Dobson, The Year of Living like Jesus: My Journey of Discovering What Jesus Would - Really Do - https://amzn.to/3tErJeU. - Andy Freeman & Pete Greig, Punk Monk: New Monasticism and the Ancient Art of Breathing https://amzn.to/3wIi1d0. Connect with Us: Personal Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/jamessabin13/ Podcast Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/ym_soul_keeper_podcast/ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/Youth-Ministry-Soul-Keeper-Podcast-112370807089603/?modal=admin_todo_tour Twitter - https://twitter.com/youth_keeper Would love to hear from you with questions and comments at the following email: ymsoulkeeper@gmail.com Connect with Guest Co-Host - Eben Eddy Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/ebeneddy/ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/eben.eddy Podcast Friends: DYM Podcast – http://bit.ly/341g9e4 Youth Ministry Hacks – http://bit.ly/2WazOoY My Third Decade – http://bit.ly/2UzlpjL Fifteen Minutes With Frank - https://bit.ly/2I7E0ms YM Lab – http://bit.ly/2pO1GDm The Morning After Ministry Show – http://bit.ly/2ofNLpb Parent Tips – http://bit.ly/32MzM9n YW's Guide to Video Games – http://bit.ly/2Wds7yD Youth Ministry Sherpas – https://bit.ly/31VIIvs Middle School Ministry – https://bit.ly/2BHezWj
Our world needs kindness right now. Social media is flooded with anger, frustration, fear, despair, and negativity. Technology allows us to interact instantly, but people feel ignored, unheard, misunderstood, discouraged, alone. What if we choose to change that? What if we use digital media to connect, build relationships, and better understand our fellow human beings? — Lauren Hug I think many of us can agree that digital media can be an overwhelming space. So many different opinions, yet very little respect, or kindness, is shown to one another. The question really is, how do we practice kindness on digital media? Pam is our host this week and will be talking with Lauren Hug, a lawyer & mediator who now works as a community engagement strategist. Her background as a lawyer gives her a unique perspective on how we can develop community in our online worlds by practicing kindness, grace, and advocacy. ABOUT LAUREN HUG An accomplished speaker, author, and strategist, Lauren Hug has helped people reach and motivate markets and audiences for 20 years. In 2012 she founded HugSpeak, a community engagement firm that develops participatory communication strategies, empowering vibrant communities in both digital and physical spaces. Her academic credentials include an LL.M. with merit from the University of London, a J.D. with honors from the University of Texas School of Law, and a Bachelor of Journalism and Bachelor of Arts in Spanish from the University of Texas. She is the author of Digital Kindness: Being Human in a Hyper-Connected World, The Professional Woman's Guide to Getting Promoted and The Manager's Guide to Presentations. Lauren's Website Book: Digital Kindness: Being Human in a Hyper-Connected World MENTIONED IN PODCAST Culinary Distancing COS (FB Group) Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton Factfulness by Hans Rosling Colossians 3:12-14 MSG MUSIC USED IN PODCAST First Music Break at 18:43 – Fulfill by Heath Cantu – from Epidemic Sound Second Music Break at 43:47: There is a Light by Stonekeepers – Epidemic Sound SUPPORT THE PODCAST We have two ways to make it easy for you: Use our Donation Page on our Website Donate using our new App CONTACT US podcast@pottersinn.com INTERESTED IN MORE SOUL CARE RESOURCES? Check out our recommended reading, books on spiritual growth, and our soul care blog. Want to experience soul care in person? Learn more about our soul care intensives and retreats.
America's Obsession with Illusion Richard Gale and Gary Null PhD Progressive Radio Network, January 14, 2022 “He who despises his own life is soon master of others” – English proverb For the vast majority of Americans, the past year has been the most challenging in their lives – certainly for young adults. However, not everyone has been suffering equally. The nation's health or illness is not uniform. Much of our suffering is dependent upon the institutionalization and negligence of previous injustices, the loss of social equanimity, economic heedlessness, and our leaders' unmitigated greed and pursuit of power. Nor is everyone adversely affected by the shifts underway in the imaginations of the political and ideological universes. The transnational class of corporate and banking elites, for example, has little motivation to respect or contribute to national boundaries and interests. They perceive themselves as global actors. For the generals and captains of neoliberal globalization, the puppet masters of financial markets, the Covid-19 pandemic only caused annoying disruptions in the quality of their lives. For the remainder, it has been cataclysmic. As we begin 2022 should we not pause and reflect carefully about what we want and don't want as individuals and a nation to secure a sustainable future? A deep and collective introspection into the shared moral principles is called for. It is no longer what we say or profess that has any truth or significance. Rather what we actualize in our daily lives and as a society is going to determine whether the future will be better future or worse. Only our actions can realistically convey the deeper values in the American psyche. Therefore we need to ask ourselves more difficult questions to discover the real moral poverty that defines us as a civilization. Where were the large demonstrations against the trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street and foreign banks when barely a penny was spent for the average citizen? Where were the demonstrations against home foreclosures and the loss of small family farms? Debt drenched student aid? Exploitive payday loans and exorbitant credit card fees? There was no outrage against Obama's broken promises on universal healthcare, a platform that helped bring him to the White House. The single-minded attention on the pandemic has cancelled out 2.5 million homeless American children and 46 million adults and children who go hungry daily. Where was a collective voice condemning the hundreds of billion tax dollars to increase the power of the military and intelligence complexes as American cities further collapsed into ghettos? Where were the marches against corporations off-shoring jobs? Why no vocal outrage against the invasions of Libya and Syria, or the US' ongoing support of rogue dictatorships, such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE for crimes against humanity in Yemen? Where are the protests against corporations exploiting slave labor in poor countries such as Bangladesh and Indonesia? There were no noteworthy protests for any of these issues. And yet these are true existential threats to our very democracy. Bertrand Russell wrote, “one should care about the world they do not see.” Should we not be planning ahead for the future of our children, grandchildren and ourselves instead of being incapacitated by fear? The national popular disinterest in these and other crises foreshadows something on the horizon that does not bode well for most Americans. It is a simple principle to understand; yet so subtle it will likely go unnoticed until everyone is individually and collectively affected. It is the utter lack of balance within the nation's body politick, and across the media that spoon feeds us virtual images of a faux theatrical play, the illusory icons on our minds' monitor screens, that shape our perceptions of reality. This is how control is exerted over our thoughts, speech and actions. In fact, it is only after people exercise their thoughts independently, with the certain belief that they have actual self-control over their lives, that they can arrive at the realization that their perceptions may be largely distorted. Throughout America's history there has been a system of three federal branches to assure there is a platform for checks and balances as well as a structure to contain the tensions between them. That system now is being rapidly challenged and eroded. Now the middle of the road Democrats officially control the White House and both legislative bodies. We will see what awaits us. There is also what is commonly referred to as the “fourth estate,” the powers of the press and news media that control the framing of the political narrative and partisan issues. In the past, the media was expected to hold the government accountable by exposing its conflicts of interest that endanger the public, its misdemeanors, and systemic corruption. This too is in decay as the media has been fully captured by corporate interests and now aligns itself politically and ideologically with the new political elite determined to reshape democracy and launch a new reset that will dramatically infringe on individual rights and liberties. Finally, there is the growing influence of a fourth branch of government, the corpocracy and its private interests. We might also include the US intelligence community that increasingly operates independently from executive and legislative oversight. Together we can witness this loose cabal of seemingly independent entities, working simultaneously in consortium and in opposition to each other, propelling us towards a future tsunami of greater polarization and immense social disruption. Earlier generations were not threatened by the telecommunication and technological giants, such as Google, Facebook and Amazon. Clinton's Communications Decency Act of 1996, despite its well-meaning intentions to protect free speech, was otherwise destructively naïve. At that time it was sensible; however, that was before the advent of the social media that now dominates our lives and shapes political discourse. Silicon Valley has become a force far more powerful than the lobbyists on K Street to ensure that corporate Democrats are raised to a position of absolute power. Yet the problem would be equally threatening if it were the corporate and radicalized GOP in power. The centrist Democratic left, lulled in a passivity that “it can't happen here,” is every bit as dangerous and delusional as the Republican far-right's paranoia over conspiracies squatting behind every nook and cranny. A moderate centrist right no longer exists as it has now exited reality like a herd of lemmings to follow Trump phenomena over a phantasmagoric cliff. The more important question to contemplate is how this will impact yourself and average citizens. What happens elsewhere around the world can no longer be viewed in isolation. Globalization is perhaps the most holistic phenomena within the matrix of financial capital movements and post-modern social restructuring. China has the means to socially control most of its population, especially in urban areas. On the other hand, China would be unable to succeed in this endeavor without the direct assistance, trade and technological development of Silicon Valley and the private innovators of intelligence and surveillance applied science. China has already launched social scoring, a nefarious means to reward and penalize public activity. If a person protests the lack of personal freedom, democratic values and free speech, his or her social score decreases. And through digital networks, authorities can monitor and identify every Chinese citizen's movements. All of this technology is ready for launch in the US and other developed nations. However, rather than social scoring, it is block chain, the digital database that gathers any information it is programmed for. Block chain has already been employed for almost a decade. At this moment the federal government and individual states are blindly over-reacting to Covid's health threats, the climate and environment, and the collapse of social cohesion. These threats are eliciting government mandates, such as vaccination. A Biden federal vaccine mandate would overrule individual state laws. The fact that this is being publicly stated should quell many conspiratorial theories. It is part of a more comprehensive and long-term agenda for expanding government social control under the pretense and propaganda of keeping Americans safe under the banner of national security. New laws are under construction that would redefine hate speech. Censorship of free speech for criticizing official narratives and policies to tackle the pandemic are being enforced. Any criticism towards the failures of the Covid-19 vaccines is redefined as threats to public health. People raising such critiques may eventually find their names on domestic terrorist lists. This scenario is not beyond the imagination. Wikileaks revealed that environmental, animal protection, and human rights groups have been labeled as domestic terrorist organizations. Guilt by association laws, for example buried in Obama's National Defense Authorization Act, are in place. Expanding a law's scope is far easier than erasing it from the books. Consequently, it is not unlikely that these laws may eventually widen to include charges of subversion based solely on the emails you read, the videos you watch or the broadcasts you listen to. This would inevitably lead to the death toll for any residue of integrity in journalism. Silicon Valley's collusion with the government has canceled the voices of some of our best investigative journalists, such as Chris Hedges, Sharyl Attkinsson, Glenn Greenwald, Max Blumenthal and Craig Murray. These are only a few of many examples. The new unstated law is that original investigation must support the official narrative, otherwise it will be prohibited from accessible public view. We may recall that under the second Bush administration, the justice department created “free speech zones,” fenced off or confined areas where demonstrators were only permitted to exercise their Constitutional rights of free protest and expression. Today we are only several small amendments away before the right to assemble being banned altogether. Faced with growing condemnation by many nations, the US' hegemony on the world geopolitical arena has waned considerably. Biden's administration and its return to neocon foreign against Russia and China and neoliberal market policies will likely make every effort to regain the dominance it lost during the past four years. What has vanished in the US' former full spectrum dominance over the geopolitical landscape is now being inverted to strengthen federal hegemonic reign over the American population. Finally, we need to awaken to modern technologies' remarkable sophistication and its certain threats to the health of our societies, and even to our definition of being human. Sadly, this is an industry each of us has been complicit in advancing. Coining a term by one of the planet's most important and forgotten 20th century prophetic voices, the Trappist monk Father Thomas Merton, we are facing a great Unspeakable, a spiritual crisis contributing to the existential vacuity of modern American culture. Few are aware that in his 1964 collection of meditations, Seeds of Destruction, Merton predicted that the civil rights movement would confront a catastrophic impasse and may find itself without leadership. Four years later, Martin Luther King Jr, who Merton had a deep correspondence with, was assassinated. Merton would die suddenly later that same year under very mysterious circumstances in Thailand. Another way to describe the Unspeakable is criminal Sovereignty, with a capital S, to convey its almost numinous qualities. If alive today, Merton would look upon both the extreme right and left as mere expressions of the meaninglessness of American life manifesting as a turbulent ocean of afflictive emotions and thoughts. Instead of technology serving the needs of humanity, Americans are being increasingly conditioned to willingly bow as slaves to technology. The public, Somerset Maugham warned, “are easily disillusioned then they are angry or it was the illusion they loved.” The Unspeakable's unspoken mantra is: technology must progress regardless of how many people fall destitute, jobless, debt ridden and physically ill with only suicide as a recourse to escape. “American democracy today,” Merton observed over 55 years ago, “is just cheap pressed wood fiber, cardboard and spray paint.” Consequently, the elite sitting in the global control tower view the Great Reset's technological regime as preferable to democracy's kabuki theater. Advanced surveillance, artificial intelligence, intelligent robotics, transhumanism, a 5G internet of everything, genetic engineering, and weather modification should be our guiding avatars. The solutions, he would argue, can no longer be found in civil discourse or the rights of human beings gathering in assembly. For the ruling elite, the masses are blind sheep wandering in search of a shepherd. This is what author Ronald Wright called the “progress trap” – progress' unending efforts to feed technology's hunger to devour natural and human capital, interest free. And the mainstream press and news media, in its' malady of cognitive dissonance, serves as its unreflective cheerleader for our march towards civilizational collapse. Merton was keenly aware of technology's dangers to social stability. In a 1967 letter he took aim at the “universal myth that technology infallibly makes everything in every way better for everybody. It does not.” However, Merton was by no means a Luddite. “Technology could indeed make a better world for millions of human beings,” he wrote. Yet there remained the nightmare of technology transforming the world into a “more collectivist, cybernated mass culture.” Decades before the first desktop, Merton foresaw a complete fragmentation of the nation's moral and spiritual fabric when people will begin basing all of their political and ethical decisions on computers. Prophetically he wrote to a friend, “just wait until they start philosophizing with computers!” That was 1967. He even foresaw technology becoming a means to elevate the slaves of technology's false self, to satisfy narcissistic appetites for admiration and status. In other words, the woke social media. “The greatest need of our time,” Merton wrote in his Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, “is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning we cannot begin to see. Unless we see we cannot think. The purification must begin with the mass media.” For this reason we urgently need to penetrate the illusions of propaganda and popular falsehoods, across the entire political spectrum as well the self-appointed pontificating Pharisees who are ushering a new socio-economic era where endless technological innovation has precedence over human lives. Despite its newness, it has also been clearly predictable. No doubt, if Orwell were penning his great novel today, the emergence of this new American era we are witnessing would not be fiction.
America's Obsession with Illusion Richard Gale and Gary Null PhD Progressive Radio Network, January 14, 2022 “He who despises his own life is soon master of others” – English proverb For the vast majority of Americans, the past year has been the most challenging in their lives – certainly for young adults. However, not everyone has been suffering equally. The nation's health or illness is not uniform. Much of our suffering is dependent upon the institutionalization and negligence of previous injustices, the loss of social equanimity, economic heedlessness, and our leaders' unmitigated greed and pursuit of power. Nor is everyone adversely affected by the shifts underway in the imaginations of the political and ideological universes. The transnational class of corporate and banking elites, for example, has little motivation to respect or contribute to national boundaries and interests. They perceive themselves as global actors. For the generals and captains of neoliberal globalization, the puppet masters of financial markets, the Covid-19 pandemic only caused annoying disruptions in the quality of their lives. For the remainder, it has been cataclysmic. As we begin 2022 should we not pause and reflect carefully about what we want as and don't want as individuals and a nation for securing a sustainable future? Fundamental is a deep introspection into the common and moral principles we are living today. It is not what we say or profess, but what we actualize in our daily lives and as a collective society that matters. Only our actions can realistically convey the deeper values in the American psyche. Therefore we need to ask ourselves more difficult questions to discover the real moral poverty that defines us as a civilization. Where were the large demonstrations against the trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street and foreign banks when barely a penny for the average citizen was spent? Where were the demonstrations against home foreclosures and the loss of small family farms? Debt drenched student aid? Exploitive payday loans and exorbitant credit card fees. There were no protests against Obama's broken promises on universal healthcare. The single-minded attention on the pandemic has cancelled out 2.5 million homeless American children and 46 million adults and children who go daily. Where was a collective voice condemning the hundreds of billion tax dollars to increase the power of the military and intelligence complexes as American cities further collapsed into ghettos? Where were the marches against corporations off-shoring jobs. Why no vocal outrage against Obama's invasions of Libya and Syria, or the US ongoing support of rogue dictatorships, such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, for crimes against humanity in Yemen. Where are the protests against corporations exploiting slave labor in poor countries such as Bangladesh and Indonesia. There were no noteworthy protests for any of these issues. And yet these are true existential threats to our very democracy. Bertrand Russell wrote, “one should care about the world they do not see.” Should we not therefore be planning ahead for the future of our children, grandchildren and ourselves instead of being incapacitated by fear. The national popular disinterest in these and other crises forebodes something on the horizon that does not bode well for most Americans. It is a simple principle to understand; yet so subtle it will likely go unnoticed until everyone is individually and collectively affected. It is the utter lack of balance within the nation's body politick, and across the media that spoon feeds us virtual images of a faux theatrical play, the illusory icons on our minds' monitor screens, that shape our perceptions of reality. This is how control is exerted over our thoughts, speech and actions. In fact, it is only after people exercise their thoughts independently, with the certain belief that they have actual self-control over their lives, that they arrive at the realization that their perceptions may be largely distorted. Throughout America's history there has been a system of three federal branches to assure there is a platform for checks and balances as well as a structure to contain the tensions between them. That system now is being rapidly challenged and eroded. Now the middle of the road Democrats officially control the White House and both legislative bodies. We will see what awaits us. There is also what is commonly referred to as the “fourth estate,” the powers of the press and news media that control the framing of the political narrative and partisan issues. In the past, the media was expected to hold the government accountable by exposing its conflicts of interest that endanger the public, its misdemeanors, and systemic corruption. This too is in decay as the media has been fully captured by corporate interests and now aligns itself politically and ideologically with the new political elite determined to reshape democracy and launch a new reset that will dramatically infringe on individual rights and liberties. Finally, there is the growing influence of a fourth branch of government, the corpocracy and its private interests. We might also include the US intelligence community that increasingly operates independently from executive and legislative oversight. Together we can witness this loose cabal of seemingly independent entities, working simultaneously in consortium and in opposition to each other, propelling us towards a future tsunami of greater polarization and immense social disruption. Earlier generations were not threatened by the telecommunication and technological giants, such as Google, Facebook and Amazon. Clinton's Communications Decency Act of 1996, despite its well-meaning intentions to protect free speech, was otherwise destructively naïve. At that time it was sensible; however, that was before the advent of the social media that now dominates our lives and shapes political discourse. Silicon Valley has become a force far more powerful than the lobbyists on K Street to ensure that corporate Democrats are raised to a position of absolute power. Yet the problem would be equally threatening if it were the corporate and radicalized GOP in power. The centrist Democratic left, lulled in a passivity that “it can't happen here,” is every bit as dangerous and delusional as the Republican far-right's paranoia over conspiracies squatting behind every nook and cranny. A moderate centrist right no longer exists as it has now exited reality like a herd of lemmings to follow Trump phenomena over a phantasmagoric cliff. The more important question to contemplate is how this will impact yourself and average citizens. What happens elsewhere around the world can no longer be viewed in isolation. Globalization is perhaps the most holistic phenomena within the matrix of financial capital movements and post-modern social restructuring. China has the means to socially control most of its population, especially in urban areas. On the other hand, China would be unable to succeed in this endeavor without the direct assistance, trade and technological development of Silicon Valley and the private innovators of intelligence and surveillance applied science. China has already launched social scoring, a nefarious means to reward and penalize public activity. If a person protests the lack of personal freedom, democratic values and free speech, his or her social score decreases. And through digital networks, authorities can monitor and identify every Chinese citizen's movements. All of this technology is ready for launch in the US and other developed nations. However, rather than social scoring, it is block chain, the digital database that gathers any information it is programmed for. Block chain has already been employed for almost a decade. At this moment the federal government and individual states are blindly over-reacting to Covid's health threats, the climate and environment, and the collapse of social cohesion. These threats are eliciting government mandates, such as vaccination. A Biden federal vaccine mandate would overrule individual state laws. The fact that this is being publicly stated should quell many conspiratorial theories. It is part of a more comprehensive and long-term agenda for expanding government social control under the pretense and propaganda of keeping Americans safe under the banner of national security. New laws are under construction that would redefine hate speech. Censorship of free speech for criticizing official narratives and policies to tackle the pandemic are being enforced. Any criticism towards the failures of the Covid-19 vaccines is redefined as threats to public health. People raising such critiques may eventually find their names on domestic terrorist lists. This scenario is not beyond the imagination. Wikileaks revealed that environmental, animal protection, and human rights groups have been labeled as domestic terrorist organizations. Guilt by association laws, for example buried in Obama's National Defense Authorization Act, are in place. Expanding a law's scope is far easier than erasing it from the books. Consequently, it is not unlikely that these laws may eventually widen to include charges of subversion based solely on the emails you read, the videos you watch or the broadcasts you listen to. This would inevitably lead to the death toll for any residue of integrity in journalism. Silicon Valley's collusion with the government has canceled the voices of some of our best investigative journalists, such as Chris Hedges, Sharyl Attkinsson, Glenn Greenwald, Max Blumenthal and Craig Murray. These are only a few of many examples. The new unstated law is that original investigation must support the official narrative, otherwise it will be prohibited from accessible public view. We may recall that under the second Bush administration, the justice department created “free speech zones,” fenced off or confined areas where demonstrators were only permitted to exercise their Constitutional rights of free protest and expression. Today we are only several small amendments away before the right to assemble being banned altogether. Faced with growing condemnation by many nations, the US' hegemony on the world geopolitical arena has waned considerably. Biden's administration and its return to neocon foreign against Russia and China and neoliberal market policies will likely make every effort to regain the dominance it lost during the past four years. What has vanished in the US' former full spectrum dominance over the geopolitical landscape is now being inverted to strengthen federal hegemonic reign over the American population. Finally, we need to awaken to modern technologies' remarkable sophistication and its certain threats to the health of our societies, and even to our definition of being human. Sadly, this is an industry each of us has been complicit in advancing. Coining a term by one of the planet's most important and forgotten 20th century prophetic voices, the Trappist monk Father Thomas Merton, we are facing a great Unspeakable, a spiritual crisis contributing to the existential vacuity of modern American culture. Few are aware that in his 1964 collection of meditations, Seeds of Destruction, Merton predicted that the civil rights movement would confront a catastrophic impasse and may find itself without leadership. Four years later, Martin Luther King Jr, who Merton had a deep correspondence with, was assassinated. Merton would die suddenly later that same year under very mysterious circumstances in Thailand. Another way to describe the Unspeakable is criminal Sovereignty, with a capital S, to convey its almost numinous qualities. If alive today, Merton would look upon both the extreme right and left as mere expressions of the meaninglessness of American life manifesting as a turbulent ocean of afflictive emotions and thoughts. Instead of technology serving the needs of humanity, Americans are being increasingly conditioned to willingly bow as slaves to technology. The public, Somerset Maugham warned, “are easily disillusioned then they are angry or it was the illusion they loved.” The Unspeakable's unspoken mantra is: technology must progress regardless of how many people fall destitute, jobless, debt ridden and physically ill with only suicide as a recourse to escape. “American democracy today,” Merton observed over 55 years ago, “is just cheap pressed wood fiber, cardboard and spray paint.” Consequently, the elite sitting in the global control tower view the Great Reset's technological regime as preferable to democracy's kabuki theater. Advanced surveillance, artificial intelligence, intelligent robotics, transhumanism, a 5G internet of everything, genetic engineering, and weather modification should be our guiding avatars. The solutions, he would argue, can no longer be found in civil discourse or the rights of human beings gathering in assembly. For the ruling elite, the masses are blind sheep wandering in search of a shepherd. This is what author Ronald Wright called the “progress trap” – progress' unending efforts to feed technology's hunger to devour natural and human capital, interest free. And the mainstream press and news media, in its' malady of cognitive dissonance, serves as its unreflective cheerleader for our march towards civilizational collapse. Merton was keenly aware of technology's dangers to social stability. In a 1967 letter he took aim at the “universal myth that technology infallibly makes everything in every way better for everybody. It does not.” However, Merton was by no means a Luddite. “Technology could indeed make a better world for millions of human beings,” he wrote. Yet there remained the nightmare of technology transforming the world into a “more collectivist, cybernated mass culture.” Decades before the first desktop, Merton foresaw a complete fragmentation of the nation's moral and spiritual fabric when people will begin basing all of their political and ethical decisions on computers. Prophetically he wrote to a friend, “just wait until they start philosophizing with computers!” That was 1967. He even foresaw technology becoming a means to elevate the slaves of technology's false self, to satisfy narcissistic appetites for admiration and status. In other words, the woke social media. “The greatest need of our time,” Merton wrote in his Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, “is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning we cannot begin to see. Unless we see we cannot think. The purification must begin with the mass media.” For this reason we urgently need to penetrate the illusions of propaganda and popular falsehoods, across the entire political spectrum as well the self-appointed pontificating Pharisees who are ushering a new socio-economic era where endless technological innovation has precedence over human lives. Despite its newness, it has also been clearly predictable. No doubt, if Orwell were penning his great novel today, the emergence of this new American era we are witnessing would not be fiction.
Richard Gale & Gary Null PhD Progressive Radio Network, January 7, 2022 During the past two years, the rise in wokeness and its cancel culture has shocked the sensibilities and moral fabric of the nation. It has fuelled divisions between races, class and economic status, levels of education and political allegiances. However, the anger that wokeness has carried into civil discourse is a symptom of a much deeper causal factor buried in the national psyche; that is, America's pervasive “reality deficit disorder (RDD).” This is a condition that has proliferated across the American landscape since the Age of Enlightenment and the 19th century's advent of scientific materialism as a secular religion. The proponents of modern behaviorism and the neurosciences are likewise saturated with RDD. The Woke self-congratulating experts and false prophets are its public face. These are plastic liberal intellectuals who have found reinforced their sense of self-righteousness by spreading the post-modern gospel of Robin DiAngelo's 2018 bestseller White Fragility. Despite the widespread adulation DiAngelo has received from liberal educators, the mega-corporate elite, and the left media, she has managed to jockey herself away from the deep scrutiny her writings and lectures deserve. An exception is Jonathan Church, author of Reinventing Racism, who brilliantly exposes DiAngelo's flaws and deconstructs her façade of her impartial objectivity. Church takes a more philosophical offensive to shed light on DiAngelo's implicit biases and contradictions that in turn distort the very ideas she attempts to proselytize. While we agree wholeheartedly with Church's polemic, we would take a more cognitive approach and state that DiAngelo's racial theories of irredeemable Whiteness as an inherent social construct have no basis in reality whatsoever. White Fragility reads like a tantrum by an author with a third-rate intellect who is deeply confused about her own gender and racial identity. “All white people,” DiAngelo wants us to believe, “are invested in and collude with racism.” If you were born White then racism is built into your socialized development and behavior regardless whether your family background is exemplary of racial justice or not. There can be no escape from this curse, DiAngelo suggests, no redemption or purification by fire regardless of how much penitence, public service or charity you perform for the greater good. We wonder whether she would include the indigenous blond hair, blue-eyed Finno-Ugric peoples inhabiting the northern forests and tundra of Scandinavia and Russia's Kola Peninsula as being socially structured and therefore colluding in the world's racism. The author reminds us of someone who has read every published book about chocolate and thus feels qualified to write one of her own despite never having tasted chocolate. Philosophy and postmodern sociology in general, notably the modern philosophies of science and mind, often suffer from this mental affliction. They write books about other philosophers' books who in turn wrote books about their predecessors' scribbling. Right-wing critics of wokeness and certain factions within postmodern Critical Race Theory likewise indulge in a similar cognitive hallucination built upon feeble-minded pre-Galilean superstitions. Their perceptions about themselves and the world, their righteous anger and biases, are similar to dreamscapes, phantoms they have conjured and which can have dire long-term consequences to the welfare of innocent victims prejudiced and canceled by their vitriol and condemnation. There have always been conflicting ideologies, cherished beliefs and inflamed emotions towards racial discrepancies, social order and justice or how the nation should be governed. But today these cognitive afflictions, masquerading as passions and righteous causes have disintegrated into tribalism. This is now fomenting new class and racial distinctions and struggles as well as media turf wars. No one can accurately predict where this collective reality deficit disorder will lead ultimately but it certainly won't contribute to a positive advancement of human well-being. It repeats the old adage of garbage in, garbage out. “The greatest need of our time,” the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote in his Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, “is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning we cannot begin to see. Unless we see we cannot think.” Merton believed that this “purification must begin with the mass media.” We would suggest it also begins with our educational institutions. Teachers who embrace White Fragility's social folly and logical fallacies need to introspectively gaze and observe the destructive ataxia nesting in their own minds. If anyone wonders why the nation is so angry, screaming and protesting, one reason is because the failed neoliberal experiment, the culture of political nepotism, a captured and biased media, and a thoroughly corrupt judiciary have created this horror show. And DiAngelo seemingly wants to gather tinder to keep racial conflagrations burning. "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous," Martin Luther King lamented, "than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." It is our deep ignorance about not first knowing ourselves and appreciating our intrinsic interconnections with each other and the environment that perpetuates the suffering around us. These deeper existential relationships can potentially outsmart and surpass the benefits Critical Race Theory has to offer. Underlying any social structure is to be found cognitive causal relationships. This includes our attachments to whatever accomplishments and failures we experience in our lives through racial identity, which may lead to a reality deficit with all of its superiority complexes, apathy and depression. First, there is sufficient empirical science to reach a consensus that we are a culture that has become habituated to mistaking its unfounded perceptions about itself and the world as reality-based. This applies to our cognitive conceptions of Whiteness, Blackness, Yellowness, etc. Church makes this clear; DiAngelo's use of the term Whiteness is “nebulous” and “vague.” He points out that her logic falls into a Kafka Trap, referring to Kafka's novel The Trial when an unassuming man is dragged into court and accused for an unspecified crime; subsequently his unwavering denial is itself interpreted as absolute proof that the accusation is true. “Yes, all white people are complicit with racism,” writes DiAngelo, “People will insist that they are not racist… This is the kind of evidence that many white people used to exempt themselves from that system. It is not possible to be exempt from it.” Consequently, for DiAngelo, Whites can only speak about their “whiteness” in terms of how it reinforces an implicit racism within the social system. But from a neuro-scientific perspective, all colored racisms are skewed perceptions of reality. For example, when we gaze into a deep azure sky we immediately assume there is physical blue over our heads. However, there are no blue-colored photons reaching our retinas. Rather, our brains receive the emitted photons and through a complex channeling of information from the eye to the visual cortex. The brain then Photoshops the color azure and projects it through our glance into the empty space of the sky. The same is true whether we gaze at a verdant forest canopy, a fiery sunset, the fluorescent, shimmering hues of a fanning peacock's feathers or observing an African, Asian or European person crossing the street. There is nothing mysterious behind this; it is visual brain science 101. No neuroscientist questions this visual phenomenon. We reify the sensory stimuli the brain receives from the objective world and then grasp and cling to these as being factually real. Theoretically race may be understood as only a conventional or relative appearance arising to our mental perceptions. No absolute objective claims can be made about it; therefore, there cannot be any absolute analyses or one-size-fits-all solutions for confronting racism either. In striking contrast to White Fragility's cognitive deficiencies, we may consider an argument posed by the great Jewish German existentialist Martin Buber. Buber speaks of an I-You relationship when we engage with another person as another subject instead of as an object. There's a subject there, and that subject is every bit as real as the subject over here. For example, as much as I might care about my own well-being, then so does another person. To transcend White Fragility's divisions and its many shortcomings, which relate to others as I-Its -- as mere objects -- we simply need to be aware of Buber's advice, and become fully engaged with that reality. Buber highlights this as a profoundly existential problem in modern society. It is debilitating. It is dehumanizing, although for DiAngelo and the cancel culture preserving racial I-It relationships is not only valid but essential. When we regard others simply in terms of whether the color of their skin is appealing or unappealing, pleasant or unpleasant, superior or inferior, and so forth we are bifurcating impressions that have no substance in reality. We are simply treating other sentient beings as if they have no more sentience, no more subjectivity, no more presence from their own side than a robot or computer. But that seems fine for DiAngelo and her tragic dehumanizing dogma. If DiAngelo were unintelligent or had severe brain damage, we might understand and would certainly sympathize. But she -- and we would argue many of those who would carry White Fragility's banner into school classrooms -- are likely very educated people. That is the calamity and the clear evidence for the deep-seated spiritual impoverishment when a person is viewed as nothing more than the race of their physical bodies. If anti-racial wokeness is true, then the more deeply we probe and investigate it, the truer it should appear. This was one of William James' fundamental principles when he made efforts to turn the psychology of his day into a valid science. If James' methodology had not been obliterated by the rise of behaviorism in 1910, psychology would be completely different today. We might actually be treating and curing people of mental disorders without prescribing life-long medications. On the other hand, if DiAngelo's hypothesis is false, the more deeply one investigates, which includes introspection, the more false it will appear. That is where robust inquiry comes in: to determine what is simply true regardless of whatever your personal unsubstantiated and biased beliefs about it might be. What you believe has absolutely no impact upon whether something is true or not. This is also basic Buddhist epistemology that has been repeatedly replicated by contemplatives for several millennia. Neuroscience, including its gross failures and tendencies towards metaphysical realism, has more to tell us about the inherent dangers in White Fragility's doctrine. First, modern brain science has not produced an iota of evidence to confirm that the mind and consciousness are solely a product or output originating in neuron and synaptic activity. None. Contrary to the evidence, most neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists nevertheless embrace this opinion as a settled matter. But it is ridiculous to believe that evolution somehow dragged along our ancient single-celled ancestors until some point was reached when a conscious mind -- a “nothing” that is not observable, not measurable, not quantifiable, without atoms or photons, mass, electric charge or spin – mysteriously arose out of something, such as genes and biomolecular phenomena. Therefore cognitive scientists pretend to know something about the mind and consciousness when in fact they haven't a clue. Although DiAngelo is not stating that socialized racism among Whites is genetically determined, the trajectory of her argument has the potential to lead towards that conclusion. She does consider systemic White racism as being unconscious. Therefore she has moved her social theory into psychology. Since modern psychology today is becoming increasingly informed by the neurosciences, which in turn is being informed by evolutionary biology, it is only a small leap away to find her theory complementing genetic determinism as a means to explain Whiteness' conditioned racism. If her socialized determinism, and that of the neuroscience and evolutionary biology fields, are correct, then it would break the fundamental physical laws of energy conservation and causal efficacy. In effect, DiAngelo is saying White people have no choice. It's socialized chemistry or its socialized chemistry; either way its socialized chemistry. In effect, DiAngelo is admitting that her own perceptions about reality are fundamentally flawed. Why is that? Dr. Donald Hoffman has been a professor of neuroscience at the University of California at Irvine for over three decades. He has an impeccable background having studied artificial intelligence at MIT. But unlike the vast majority of his colleagues, Hoffman broke ranks and passed beyond neuroscience's 19th century mechanistic base and dared to study modern quantum physics and relativity theory. Theoretical physics is almost anathema in human biological research and medicine, which is why these soft sciences have made so little progress to improve human health and well-being. Hoffman has performed hundreds of thousands of simulations comparing different species and their chances for survival based upon their ability to perceive and comprehend reality more accurately or not. His discoveries are startling and utterly revolutionary. Hoffman discovered, across the board, species that best perceive reality go extinct more rapidly than competing species that only perceive what is necessary for them to remain fit and survive. During an interview following a TED Talk, Hoffman stated, “according to evolution by natural selection,” – and here he is limiting himself solely to evolutionary biological theory and not the various competing theories about the nature of consciousness – “an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.” In other words, evolution has nothing to do with perceiving reality more clearly, but only to be more fit in order to adapt, survive and procreate. And now physicists are even telling us that the primal cause behind all physical objects may be consciousness itself, which has no association whatsoever with natural selection. For example, Professor Edward Witten, regarded as “the world's smartest” physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, has been compared to Newton and Einstein. Witten doesn't believe science will ever understand consciousness. “I think consciousness will remain a mystery,” Witten stated during a lecture, ”I have a much easier time imagining how we understand the Big Bang than I have imagining how we can understand consciousness.” Or we can listen to Stanford University theoretical physicist Andre Linde: “The current scientific model of the material world obeying laws of physics has been so successful that we forget our starting point as conscious observers, and conclude that matter is the only reality and that perceptions are only helpful for describing it. But in fact, we are substituting the reality of our experience of the universe with a conceptually contrived belief…” One may feel our critique is too abstract with little or no practical application; however to at least conceptually understand race in terms of our sensory perceptions can have enormous benefits to cut through and lessen the false semblances that arise from reality deficit disorder that winds up producing books such as White Fragility. Moreover, contrary to DiAngelo's arguments, British journalist Melanie Phillips offers a clearer understanding for why we should not rely upon the pundits of anti-racial wokeness to save us from ourselves. Despite disagreeing with Phillips on many of her other socio-political positions, she correctly identifies the fundamental flaws being voiced by arrested development wokeness across our campuses and within the corporate wing of the Democrat party. First, it is unable to establish a hierarchy of values and morals. For example, if one refuses to say that any lifestyle or culture is better than another, then it cannot be said that liberalism is better than conservatism or any other ideology. Consequently, faux liberalism cannot legitimately defend the very principles upon which it defines itself: racial and gender equality, freedom of speech and religion, justice and tolerance, and class struggle. It contradicts its own principles and follows DiAngelo's footsteps to remove the dignity of the individual, which in the past was at the heart of authentic liberalism and once served as its moral backbone. What we are witnessing therefore in Woke liberalism – and in DiAngelo's reinvention of racism -- is “the strong dominating the weak,” and this is an ill-liberal ideology that is already showing signs of having catastrophic consequences in classrooms and the workplace. Finally, if DiAngelo's theory is correct, then all Whites, without exception, in American history, were unconsciously transmuted into racists starting at the time of their birth. What is her proof? Is there any scientific evidence to support this outrageous claim? Did she consider the lack of sensitivity towards other peoples and races who were victims of racial identity and violence, such as the Jews who experienced genocide at hands of their Nazi overlords? And what would she say against those Whites who have fought against racism throughout the American experience, such as the Abolitionists in the US and UK who put their bodies at great risk? In principle she is labeling them too as racist despite their fighting, protesting and even dying as committed anti-racists. Many Whites have embraced other races and cultures with open arms; however, DiAngelo wants us to believe this legacy was a sham, because in some strange voodoo way they were unconsciously racist. Is this not the height of hubris and arrogance?
This is WEEK 7 of our summer series The Roaring Summer of ‘21 Series: The Best of the Best! We have gone back thru all 5 of our seasons and come up with 10 episodes that have been our most listened to and will be airing those episodes over the next 10 weeks. Today is our 4th most popular podcast, and is one of our very first episodes (#2!) - What is Soul Care? SHOW NOTES Join co-hosts Steve Smith and Joe Chambers as they give more definition to what soul care is and how it relates to… icebergs and the Brooklyn Bridge? Yup, both of those! Steve shows us the stress caused by living divided lives and lays out the importance of caring for all aspects of the human experience: physical, emotional, relational, vocational, and spiritual. LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE PODCAST Understanding the Soul (with Icebergs illustration): View and Download Here Article: Five Reasons Soul Care Matters by Stephen W. Smith: View and Download Here Poem: For One Who Is Exhausted by John O'Donohue. This poem is available in his book To Bless The Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings. Learn more about John O'Donohue at www.johnodonohue.com BOOKS RECOMMENDED The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk M.D. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton Building Below the Waterline: Shoring Up the Foundations of Leadership by Gordon MacDonald Support the Podcast: Donate Here for an individual contribution or on Patreon. Sign up to receive email notifications as future episodes are available: Sign Up Here
Woke Critical Race Theory as Reality Deficit Disorder Richard Gale & Gary Null PhD Progressive Radio Network, July 1, 2021 Let us be clear. The recent rise in Wokeness is another symptom of America's “reality deficit disorder (RDD),” a condition that continues to proliferate across the American landscape since the Age of Enlightenment and the 19th century's advent of scientific materialism as a secular religion. The proponents of modern behaviorism and the neurosciences are likewise saturated with RDD. The gurus of modern Critical Race Theory, the Woke self-congratulating experts and false prophets, are its public face. These are plastic intellectuals who have found a righteous purpose spread the message in the Woke Critical Race movement's bible, Robin DiAngelo's bestseller White Fragility. Identity politics, efforts to consolidate groupthink in order to promulgate illusions about race, social status, and gender have found their voice in DiAngelo's and Ibram Kendi's writings. Despite the widespread adulation DiAngelo has received from liberal educators, the mega-corporate elite, and the liberal media, she has managed to jockey herself away from the deep scrutiny her writings and lectures deserve. An exception is Jonathan Church, author of Reinventing Racism, who brilliantly exposes DiAngelo's flaws and deconstructs her façade of being objective. Church takes a more philosophical offensive to shed light on DiAngelo's implicit biases and contradictions that in turn distort the very ideas she attempts to proselytize. While we agree wholeheartedly with Church's polemic, we would take a more scientific approach and state that DiAngelo's racial theories of irredeemable Whiteness have no basis in reality whatsoever. White Fragility reads like a tantrum by an author deeply confused about her own identity and with a third-rate intellect. “All white people,” DiAngelo wants us to believe, “are invested in and collude with racism.” If you were born White then racism is built into your genetic inheritance. There can be no escape from this curse, DiAngelo suggests, no redemption or purification by fire regardless of how much penitence, public service or charity you perform for the greater good. We wonder whether she would include the indigenous White Finno-Ugric peoples inhabiting the most northern forests and tundra of Scandinavia and Russia's Kola Peninsula are also genetically colluding in perpetuating the world's racism. The author reminds us of someone who has read every published book about chocolate and thus feels qualified to write one of their own; however, the person has never actually tasted chocolate. Philosophy and postmodern sociology in general, notably the modern philosophies of science and mind, suffer from this mental affliction. They write books about other philosophers' books who in turn wrote books about their predecessors' scribbling. Many authors writing about religion suffer from this same malady. Right-wing critics to RCT Wokeness likewise indulge in a similar cognitive hallucination built upon feeble-minded pre-Galilean superstitions. When the time comes to take their last breath, they will have failed to achieve any conscious lucidity to read the last page in the novel of their lives. Their perceptions of themselves and the world, their righteous anger and biases, will be revealed as dreamscapes –nevertheless the phantoms they have conjured will have had dire consequences to the welfare of innocent victims prejudiced and canceled by their vitriol and condemnation. There have always been conflicting ideologies, cherished beliefs and inflamed emotions towards racial discrepancies, social order or how the nation should be governed. But today these cognitive afflictions, masquerading as passions and righteous causes such as Woke Culture's anti-racism, have disintegrated into tribalism. This is now fomenting new class and racial distinctions and struggles as well as media turf wars. No one can accurately predict where this collective reality deficit disorder will lead ultimately but it certainly won't contribute to any positive advancement of human well-being. It repeats the old adage of garbage in, garbage out. “The greatest need of our time,” the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote in his Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, “is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning we cannot begin to see. Unless we see we cannot think.” Merton believed that this “purification must begin with the mass media.” We would suggest it also begins with our educational institutions. Teachers who embrace White Fragility's social folly, need to introspectively gaze and observe the destructive ataxia nesting in their own minds. If anyone wonders why the nation is so angry, screaming and protesting, it is because the failed neoliberal experiment, the culture of political nepotism, a captured and biased media, and a thoroughly corrupt judiciary have created this horror show. DiAngelo seemingly wants to gather tinder keep racial conflagrations burning. "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous," Martin Luther King lamented, "than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." It is our deep ignorance about not knowing ourselves and appreciating our intrinsic interconnections with each other and the environment that perpetuates the suffering around us. These deeper existential relationships outsmart and surpass any value Critical Race Theory might offer. This includes our attachments to whatever accomplishments and failures we experience in our lives through racial identity, which lead to a reality deficit with all of its superiority complexes, apathy and depression. First, there is sufficient empirical science to reach a consensus that we are a culture that has become habituated to mistaking its unfounded perceptions about itself and the world as reality-based. This applies to our cognitive conceptions of Whiteness, Blackness, Yellowness, etc. Church makes this clear; DiAngelo's use of the term Whiteness is “nebulous” and “vague.” He points out that her logic falls into a Kafka Trap, referring to Kafka's novel The Trial when an unassuming man is dragged into court and accused for an unspecified crime; subsequently his unwavering denial is itself interpreted as absolute proof that the accusation is true. “Yes, all white people are complicit with racism,” writes DiAngelo, “People will insist that they are not racist… This is the kind of evidence that many white people used to exempt themselves from that system. It is not possible to be exempt from it.” Consequently, for DiAngelo and Kendi, Whites can only speak about their “whiteness” in terms of how it reinforces systemic racism. But from a neuro-scientific perspective, all colored racisms are skewed perceptions of reality. For example, when we gaze into a deep azure sky we immediately assume there is physical blue over our heads. However, there are no blue-colored photons reaching our retinas. Rather, our brains receive the emitted photons and through a complex channeling of information from the eye to the visual cortex the brain then Photoshops the color azure and projects it through our glance into the empty space of the sky. The same is true whether we gaze at a verdant forest canopy, a fiery sunset, the fluorescent, shimmering hues of a fanning peacock's feathers or observing an African, Asian or European person crossing the street. There is nothing mysterious behind this; it is visual brain science 101. No neuroscientist questions this visual phenomena. We reify the sensory stimuli the brain receives from the objective world and then grasp and cling to these as being factually real. Theoretically race may be understood as only a conventional or relative appearance arising to our mental perceptions. No absolutely objective claims can be made about it; therefore, there cannot be any absolute analyses or solutions for confronting racism either. In striking contrast to White Fragility's cognitive deficiencies, we may consider an argument posed by the great German and Jewish existentialist philosopher Martin Buber. Buber speaks of an I-You relationship when we engage with another person as another subject instead of as an object. There's a subject there, and that subject is every bit as real as the subject over here. As much as I care about my own well-being, then so do you. To transcend Critical Race Theory's divisions and its many shortcomings, which relate to others as I-Its -- as mere objects -- we simply need to be aware of Buber's advice, and become fully engaged with that reality. Buber highlights this as a profoundly existential problem in modern society. It is debilitating. It is dehumanizing and horrid, although for DiAngelo and Critical Wokeness preserving racial I-It relationships is not only valid but essential. When we regard others simply in terms of whether the color of their skin is appealing or unappealing, pleasant or unpleasant, superior or inferior, and so forth we are bifurcating impressions that have no substance in reality. We are simply treating other sentient beings as if they have no more sentience, no more subjectivity, no more presence from their own side than a robot or computer. But that seems fine for DiAngelo and her tragic dehumanizing dogma, the output of a massive reality deficit disorder. If DiAngelo were unintelligent or had severe brain damage, we might understand and would certainly sympathize. But she and Ibram Kendi -- and we would argue all of their followers who carry White Fragility's banner into school classrooms -- are likely very educated people. That is the calamity and the clear evidence for the deep-seated spiritual impoverishment when a person is viewed as nothing more than the race of their physical bodies. If antii-racial Wokeness is true, then the more deeply we probe and investigate it, the truer it should appear. This is one of William James' fundamental principles when he made efforts to turn the psychology of his day into a real science. If Jame's methodololgy had not been obliterated by the rise of behaviorism in 1910, psychology would be completely different today. We would actually be treating and curing people of mental disorders, and with life-long medications. On the other hand, if DiAngelo's hypothesis is false, the more deeply you investigate, which includes introspection, the more false it will appear. That is where robust inquiry comes in: to determine what is simply true regardless of whatever your personal unsubstantiated and biased beliefs about it might be. What you believe has absolutely no impact upon whether something is true or not. This is also basic Buddhist epistemology that has been repeatedly replicated by contemplatives for several millennia. However, for the Woked who cling to their beliefs most fiercely they are trapped in a cave of their own system's illusions. Neuroscience, including its gross failures and tendencies towards metaphysical realism, has more to tell us about the inherent dangers in White Fragility's doctrine. First, modern brain science has not produced an iota of evidence to confirm that the mind and consciousness are solely a product or output originating in neuron and synaptic activity. None. Contrary to the evidence, most neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists nevertheless embrace this opinion as being a settled matter. But it is ridiculous to believe that evolution somehow dragged along our ancient single-celled ancestors until some point was reached when a conscious mind -- a “nothing” that is not observable, not measurable, not quantifiable, without atoms or photons, mass, electric charge or spin – mysteriously arose out of something, such as genes and biomolecular phenomena. Therefore cognitive scientists pretend to know something about the mind and consciousness when in fact they haven't a clue. If the genetic determinism of DiAngelo and other materialists populating the evolutionary and biological sciences is correct, then it would break the fundamental physical laws of energy conservation and causal efficacy. Rather the absolutist determinism that underpins White Fragility's entire message is just the inverse side of the coin with Evangelical creationism. In effect, DiAngelo is saying White people have no choice. It's genetic chemistry or its genetic chemistry; either way its genetic chemistry. By disguising and recasting an evolutionary and genetic determinism about racist Whiteness into her critical race theory, DiAngelo is in fact admitting that her own perceptions about reality are fundamentally flawed. Why is that? Dr. Donald Hoffman has been a professor of neuroscience at the University of California at Irvine for over three decades. He has an impeccable background having studied artificial intelligence at MIT. But unlike the vast majority of his colleagues, Hoffman broke ranks and passed beyond neuroscience's 19th century mechanistic base and dared to study modern quantum physics and relativity theory. Theoretical physics is almost anathema in human biological reseach and medicine, which is why these soft sciences have made so little progress to improve human health and well-being. Hoffman has performed hundreds of thousands of simulations comparing different species and their chances for survival based upon their ability to perceive and comprehend reality more accurately or not. His discoveries are startling and utterly revolutionary. Hoffman discovered, across the board, species that best perceive reality go extinct more rapidly than competing species that only perceive what is necessary for them to remain fit and survive. During an interview following a TED Talk, Hoffman stated, “according to evolution by natural selection,” – and here he is limiting himself solely to evolutionary biological theory not quantum theories about the natural world or the deeper theories about the nature of consciousness – “an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.” In other words, evolution has nothing to do with perceiving reality more clearly, but only to be more fit in order to adapt, survive and procreate. And now physicists are even telling us that perceiving reality accurately is consciousness itself, which has no association whatsoever with natural selection. Yet this only occur after we have subdued our connate and conditioned mental and emotional afflictions that keep us chained to reality deficit disorder For example, Professor Edward Witten, regarded as “the world's smartest” physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, has been compared to Newton and Einstein. Witten doesn't believe science will ever understand consciousness. “I think consciousness will remain a mystery,” Witten stated during a lecture, ”I have a much easier time imagining how we understand the Big Bang than I have imagining how we can understand consciousness.” Or we can listen to Stanford University theoretical physicist Andre Linde: “The current scientific model of the material world obeying laws of physics has been so successful that we forget our starting point as conscious observers, and conclude that matter is the only reality and that perceptions are only helpful for describing it. But in fact, we are substituting the reality of our experience of the universe with a conceptually contrived belief…” One may feel our critique is too abstract with no practical application; however to at least conceptually understand race in terms of our sensory perceptions can have enormous benefits to cut through and lessen the false semblances that arise from reality deficit disorder and then produce books such as White Fragility and How To Be An Antiracist. Therefore, if neuroscientists and modern neo-Darwinists such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Robin DiAngelo, who believe they are telling the complete story about human existence, racial differences and a physical causality to the human mind, and that all of these emerged from natural selection, then Hoffman has shown they undermine their own credibility. The entire course of natural selection that gave rise to these scientists and the intellectuals behind Critical Race Theory has nothing to do with knowing reality as it is, including Blackness or Whiteness. Consequently, there is no reason to believe their sociological and scientific convictions are accurate. If we did not evolve to know reality as it is, then their science and philosophies are also irrelevant. They are birdbrained beliefs because none of us – if we take their Darwinian assumptions to their full conclusion -- did not evolve to perceive reality in the first place. Our sole purpose is to make babies and try to survive contently into old age. Finally, contrary to DiAngelo, British journalist Melanie Phillips offers a clearer understanding for why we should not rely upon the pundits of anti-racial wokeness to save us from ourselves. Despite disagreeing with Phillips on many of her other socio-political positions, she correctly identifies the fundamental flaws being voiced by arrested development Wokeness across our campuses and within the Democrat party. First, it is unable to establish a hierarchy of values and morals. For example, if one refuses to say that any lifestyle or culture is better than another, then it cannot be said that liberalism is better than conservatism or any other ideology. Consequently, faux Woke liberalism cannot legitimately defend the very principles upon which it defines itself: racial and gender equality, freedom of speech and religion, tolerance, and class struggle. It contradicts its own principles and follows DiAngelo's footsteps to remove the dignity of the individual, which in the past was at the heart of authentic liberalism and once served as its moral backbone. What we are witnessing therefore in Woke liberalism – and in DiAngelo's and Kendi's reinvention of racism -- is “the strong dominating the weak,” and this is an ill-liberal ideology that is already showing signs of having catastrophic consequences in classrooms and the workplace.
Credits: All songs and texts used with permission Opening Prayer written by Christine Valters Paintner Opening Song: Surrender by Deirdre Ni Chinneide Psalm Opening and Doxology by Richard Bruxvoort Colligan Interpretation of Psalm 81 by Rev. Christine Robinson Reading of the Night from Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. New York: Doubleday Religion (2009). Closing Poem by Christine Valters Paintner, Dreaming of Stones. Paraclete Press (2019). Closing Song: Lullaby by Margaret McLarty Please note: All of the Opening and Closing Songs are published on CDs in the Abbey of the Arts collection. In addition, these songs have accompanying gesture prayers and/or dances created by Betsey Beckman that can be found on the corresponding DVD (each album has a DVD companion). The Psalm Opening and Doxology also have accompanying congregational gestures. The audio and video recordings of these are available at AbbeyoftheArts.com.
“It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. (Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander)
This is the fifth episode of eight that focuses on the mystic, Thomas Merton. In the spirit of Lectio Divina, James Finley looks at a contemplative prayer from Thomas Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. In this session, Jim moves from a reflective prayer in the previous episode to contemplative prayer. Using wordless communion, Jim shares a series of paradoxes to help us not fall into reflection prayer. For the transcript to this podcast, you can find it here. To learn more about James Finley, visit jamesfinley.org Turning to the Mystics is a podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation. We'd love to hear your thoughts, comments or feedback. To do so, email us at podcasts@cac.org Have a question you’d like Jim or Kirsten to answer on a future episode? Email us: podcasts@cac.org or, send us a voicemail: cac.org/voicemail This podcast is made possible, thanks to the generosity of our donors. If you would love to support the ongoing work of the Center for Action and Contemplation and the continued work of our podcasts, you can donate at cac.org/podcastsupport Thank you!
How can a hobby become a way to connect with God? Pastor BJ Woodworth shares his journey with home-brewing, revealing how fermentation is a metaphor for the spiritual life, and inspiring us to listen for ways to enjoy time with God in new ways.Show NotesInto the Silent Land: The Practice of Contemplation by Martin LairdLost in Wonder: Rediscovering the Spiritual Art of Attentiveness by Esther De WaalOn Celtic prayers over daily lifeThe Great Good Place by Ray OldenburgLetters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria RilkeConjectures of a Guilty Bystander by Thomas MertonIsaiah 30:15A Vow of Conversation by Thomas MertonCooked by Michael Pollan
This episode concludes our conversation with Sister Kathleen P. Deignan, C.N.D. Sister Kathleen is an Irish-American theologian, author and sacred song writer who has been engaged in the ministry of liturgical musicianship for over forty years. She is currently composer-in-residence of Schola Ministries and is the founder and director of Iona Spirituality Institute at Iona College, New York, and previously directed the Iona Institute for Peace and Justice Studies in Ireland. Sr. Kathleen is a GreenFaith Fellow who recently completed an intensive training in religious environmental leadership. Her work in this area focuses on the prophet legacy of Father Thomas Berry and The Great Work of our time. She has previously served as president of the International Thomas Merton Society, and currently sits on the board of the American Teilhard de Chardin Society. We can't lose our real connection to the vitality that's brought everything into being; the genius that brought everything into being; the hard work that every single creature which is part of my body — I am cell of their bodies, they are cells of my body — that all these cellular dimensions of this one planetary body we are, are working hard to get well. So I lean into that radically incarnate, visceral, physical, cellular kind of hope. — Sr. Kathleen P. Deignan, C.N.D. Note: The featured image on today's post is from Gethsemani Abbey, Kentucky. Photo by Patricia Turner is used by permission. Learn more about her and her photography by clicking here: www.aphotographicsage.blogspost.com Some of the resources and authors we mention in this episode: Sr. Kathleen Deignan, ed., Thomas Merton: When the Trees Say Nothing — Writings on Nature Sr. Kathleen Deignan, ed., Thomas Merton: A Book of Hours Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times Thomas Berry, The Great Work Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing Charles Péguy, The Portal of the Mystery of Hope Pope Francis, Laudato Si' Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas Paul Hawken, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming John Moriarty, A Moriarty Reader: Preparing for Early Spring John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us Sister Kathleen notes that her music is freely available online. But if you are interested in purchasing her music on CD, here are a few titles that feature the music of Sr. Kathleen: Ave: Songs of the Congregation of Notre Dame A Garden Once Again: Songs in Celebration of Creation The Gift: Songs of the Grateful Heart For me, I feel my spiritual work is to live within radical unknowing, so my prayer is in "the cloud of unknowing." Speaking of silence, you know that in the school of the cloud of unknowing, it's all about silence. The only thing that you let spring up is a passionate word of love. That's it. For me, it's also mercy. — Sr. Kathleen P. Deignan, C.N.D. Episode 67: Silence and Nature: A Conversation with Sr. Kathleen Deignan (Part Two) Hosted by: Kevin Johnson With: Carl McColman, Cassidy Hall Guest: Sr. Kathleen Deignan, C.N.D. Date Recorded: April 22, 2019 I've been reading Thomas Merton since I was a young teenager. I was introduced to him during detention. At school I was always acting out in religion class, and the nun was always throwing me out of the classroom, down to the library. And the nun who was the librarian, we had this thing going, and she'd say, "In detention again, Kathleen Deignan?" and I'd say, "Yes, mother," and she'd say, "Well, read that." Boom! "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander." The next couple of days, she'd slam something down, it would be my favorite — "The Sign of Jonas" — or something... and then I joined the Congregation, and I was blessed to have an old training, and we had a lot of silence, and I had a lot of Merton.
This episode concludes our conversation with Sister Kathleen P. Deignan, C.N.D. Sister Kathleen is an Irish-American theologian, author and sacred song writer who has been engaged in the ministry of liturgical musicianship for over forty years. She is currently composer-in-residence of Schola Ministries and is the founder and director of Iona Spirituality Institute at Iona College, New York, and previously directed the Iona Institute for Peace and Justice Studies in Ireland. Sr. Kathleen is a GreenFaith Fellow who recently completed an intensive training in religious environmental leadership. Her work in this area focuses on the prophet legacy of Father Thomas Berry and The Great Work of our time. She has previously served as president of the International Thomas Merton Society, and currently sits on the board of the American Teilhard de Chardin Society. We can't lose our real connection to the vitality that's brought everything into being; the genius that brought everything into being; the hard work that every single creature which is part of my body — I am cell of their bodies, they are cells of my body — that all these cellular dimensions of this one planetary body we are, are working hard to get well. So I lean into that radically incarnate, visceral, physical, cellular kind of hope. — Sr. Kathleen P. Deignan, C.N.D. Note: The featured image on today's post is from Gethsemani Abbey, Kentucky. Photo by Patricia Turner is used by permission. Learn more about her and her photography by clicking here: www.aphotographicsage.blogspost.com Some of the resources and authors we mention in this episode: Sr. Kathleen Deignan, ed., Thomas Merton: When the Trees Say Nothing — Writings on Nature Sr. Kathleen Deignan, ed., Thomas Merton: A Book of Hours Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times Thomas Berry, The Great Work Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing Charles Péguy, The Portal of the Mystery of Hope Pope Francis, Laudato Si' Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas Paul Hawken, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming John Moriarty, A Moriarty Reader: Preparing for Early Spring John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us Sister Kathleen notes that her music is freely available online. But if you are interested in purchasing her music on CD, here are a few titles that feature the music of Sr. Kathleen: Ave: Songs of the Congregation of Notre Dame A Garden Once Again: Songs in Celebration of Creation The Gift: Songs of the Grateful Heart For me, I feel my spiritual work is to live within radical unknowing, so my prayer is in "the cloud of unknowing." Speaking of silence, you know that in the school of the cloud of unknowing, it's all about silence. The only thing that you let spring up is a passionate word of love. That's it. For me, it's also mercy. — Sr. Kathleen P. Deignan, C.N.D. Episode 67: Silence and Nature: A Conversation with Sr. Kathleen Deignan (Part Two) Hosted by: Kevin Johnson With: Carl McColman, Cassidy Hall Guest: Sr. Kathleen Deignan, C.N.D. Date Recorded: April 22, 2019 I've been reading Thomas Merton since I was a young teenager. I was introduced to him during detention. At school I was always acting out in religion class, and the nun was always throwing me out of the classroom, down to the library. And the nun who was the librarian, we had this thing going, and she'd say, "In detention again, Kathleen Deignan?" and I'd say, "Yes, mother," and she'd say, "Well, read that." Boom! "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander." The next couple of days,
Join co-hosts Steve Smith and Joe Chambers as they give more definition to what soul care is and how it relates to icebergs and the Brooklyn Bridge! Steve Smith shows us the stress of living divided lives and lays out the importance of caring for all aspects of the human experience: physical, emotional, relational, vocational, and spiritual. Plus enjoy an interview with Joe Walters, head of the Soul Care Institute and learn how you can take part in a 2-year journey to better soul health. LINKS & RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE PODCAST Be sure to click 'Subscribe' to see the embedded links: Understanding the Soul with Icebergs: View and Download Here Free Giveaway: Five Reasons Soul Care Matters by Stephen W. Smith: View and Download Here Poem: For One Who Is Exhausted by John O’Donohue This poem is available in his book To Bless The Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings. Learn more about John O’Donohue at www.johnodonohue.com BOOKS MENTIONED: The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk M.D. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton Building Below the Waterline: Shoring Up the Foundations of Leadership by Gordon MacDonald Support the Podcast: Donate Here Sign up to receive email notifications as future episodes are available: Sign Up Here
You would think that honoring the Sabbath would be engrained into the human DNA. It's been a part of our existence since God took the 7th day off after creating the universe. Even though God made "Keep Holy The Sabbath" the 4th of his Ten Commandments it still seems humankind has a hard time honoring this gift of a day of rest, peace and reflection. The cultural phenomenon of constant hustle and radical distraction seems to creep into almost all of our quiet and introspective time, and that includes all of our Sabbaths. This perpetual busyness and ignoring of the Lord's day of rest is a pattern that can be decaying our relationship with God, each other and ourselves. Maybe it's time we all took a step back and relooked at what the Sabbath is meant to be. This "day of rest" was given to humankind not as a rule but as a gift from God for us to have a protective time and space for us to open to new things and hear the small voices and inner wisdom. The Sabbath is more than a day on the calendar; it can be a powerful tool for deep listening, inner peace, rest, rejuvenation, and active worship that cultivates what is precious in our life and guides our fruitful work with wisdom. Resetting our Sabbath rhythms and allowing it to come to us come can be a transformative beginning to a stronger connection to the Divine and a whole new way of being. Readings: 1 Samuel 3:1-10(11-20)2 Corinthians 4:5-12Mark 2:23-3:6 Resources: Jane Kenyan - Let Evening Come Wayne Muller - Sabbath Thomas Merton - Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander About Pulpit To Pew Pulpit to Pew is a conversation between priest and parishioner, to understand how the message translates and to explore further the weekly Sunday sermon and lessons within the Episcopal tradition and daily life. Click here learn more about Christ Church Cathedral. Please come and worship with us every Sunday at 10 am (central) Pulpit To Pew is a Christ Church Cathedral and Deep Fried Studios collaboration.
Genesis 32:31 NLT 'The sun was rising as Jacob left Peniel, and he was limping because of the injury to his hip.' In his book, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Bantam Doubleday Dell), Thomas Merton wrote these words, “Sunrise is an event that calls forth solemn music in the very depths of man’s nature, as if one’s whole being had to attune itself to the cosmos and praise God for the new day…” I, like Merton, and in some ways inspired by him, seek to rise early enough to observe the dawn. I love sitting surrounded by the last darkness of the night and slowly experience the sky filling with light as the sun rises above the horizon. It is for me a sacramental moment, a Eucharist of sight and sound, as I celebrate with all of nature the return of light and the dissipation of darkness that cannot withstand its arrival, much as an incoming tide slowly consumes the beach before it. Daybreak is a symbol of Christ’s faithfulness. It breaks the hold of night and brings with it a fresh wave of hope. No longer constrained by night’s shadows, light brings both perspective and clarity. So here with Jacob, wrestling through the night, daybreak brings clarity and a remembrance from his fight with God in the shape of a limp. Jacob dealt with his deepest fears through his fight with God. Finding revelation is often the toughest part of walking the way of faith. How am I to find my way forward when so much appears stacked against me? In whom or in what can I place my hope? It can only be God and the way forward may mean a season in the dark night terrors and little clarity. Yet the dawn will break, although I may emerge a very different person into the daylight. I walk forward aware that I now have a limp, I have wrestled with God, I have gazed upon and embraced my destiny, and discover again the warmth of God’s love and a fresh clarity of faith.
“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.” ― Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
Almost a continuation of the last episode, Frank is both pumped and pissed all at the same time. Learn the 3 groups involved in the fate of your practice, who's with you and who's against you and who is on who's side. You can't grow your practice with any chiropractic marketing until you understand a thing or two about these three groups. Tune in, buckle up and get the hot dope on what Frank has in store for you next.
Almost a continuation of the last episode, Frank is both pumped and pissed all at the same time. Learn the 3 groups involved in the fate of your practice, who's with you and who's against you and who is on who's side. You can't grow your practice with any chiropractic marketing until you understand a thing or two about these three groups. Tune in, buckle up and get the hot dope on what Frank has in store for you next.
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