NurTure

Links for Videos for Nurture:

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In addition to readings which I will share with you as we proceed, these are videos which I have found useful in preparing to lead.  Watch as you will, when you want. 1-9 provide background and offer perspectives.  10-15 are the videos we will work in order as grounds for our conversations.  Ten and 11 provide the background for our first meeting.

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Reinhold Niebuhr, Guide and Collaborator

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The current crisis of the church prods the conscience of Christians who see their civic responsibility in the context of ‘social gospel’; hence, our historical moment suggests that we might  turn to protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr for clarity, inspiration, and instruction.  It’s not necessary to watch the videos about him in order to follow along, but if you want to have a fuller sense of his life and message, I recommend three, one recent and two more than sixty years old.

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1. If you have Public Television access to archived shows, “An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story,” is very much worth watching.  Cornell West is particularly vigorous and insightful in linking Niebuhr’s thought to Martin Luther King Jr.  In fifty-two minutes you get a good sense of who he was, how his career developed, and what was the lasting effect of his thought.  I think the show is also available on DVD at the library.

https://www.pbs.org/video/mpt-presents-american-conscience-reinhold-niebuhr-story/

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2. Brief, definitely free, and fascinating for its nostalgic effect, is a late 1950’s series from National Educational Television, “Search for America.” The episode we want is “Morality with Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr.”   It’s about half an hour of Niebuhr speaking with Huston Smith.  Smith—quite wonderfully—bears a remarkable physical resemblance to Mister Rogers; the similarity of his voice to Rogers’ will astonish you.  The  half-hour helps reveal how liberal main line churches bear—and bore—a distinct responsibility to articulate a moral posture for American citizens in the 1960’s and 2024.  In the same series there’s a second episode with Niebuhr focusing on the topic of progress.  The one to start with:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOXhzVzrCp4

 

3. Extremely difficult to watch  is “The Meaning of the Birmingham Tragedy, 1963,” an interview with James Baldwin and Reinhold Niebuhr which took place within the first week after the bombing of the Baptist church.  Sponsored by the Protestant Council of the City of New York, Thomas Kilgore leads the discussion.  The video begins by the asking what to make of the fact that the blast that killed four children left intact a stained-glass window of Christ, though it did scorch His face and left it blank.  If you noted that Niebuhr’s voice was partially impaired in the 1959 interview with Huston, you will find that the strokes have further affected the clarity of his speech. The audio is also murky, so you’ll want to turn up the volume.   Yet the clarity of Niebuhr’s conviction is unimpaired.  And Baldwin is electrifying. This film is a treasure that was nearly lost.  (Note this detail: the film was preserved by the Presbyterian Historical Society of Philadelphia.)

https://digital.history.pcusa.org/islandora/object/islandora:71692

 

Two Contemporary Voices (To Encourage, to Restore)

 

4. James Talarico is a young Texas politician and seminary student who about six months ago delivered a sermon as guest preacher to his home church.  You’ll love this.  You might ponder what he means when he reminds us that “Constantine was the first Christian nationalist” and feel kinship with him when he says “The opposite of faith is not doubt.  Doubt is a healthy part of any faith.  The opposite of faith is control.”  That’s a nugget that calls for a long walk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Blph_2RSBno

 

5. Longer, four years older, and in some ways more challenging to all of us, is his “Trump or Jesus,” which, while in the same sanctuary, is less a sermon than a talk about his personal journey and his pride in his church’s progressive attitude that taught him “if we’re going to save the church it’s up to us to overturn the tables.”  I also find splendid his comment “I was taught from a very early age that Christianity is another word for breaking rules.”  He asks his audience at one point to “think of a person who led with their heart, not with their ego,” an exercise we might find useful at several points in our study.  He also quotes the black poet Audre Lorde, who succinctly articulates the paradox of responding to violence with violence: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”  Another point that deserves discussion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLoC90kbLlg&t=196s

 

6. Here’s a link to the Andy Grammer song with Staten Island’s PS 22 to which he alludes at the end of his talk.  Have tissues ready.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL9qp0FNEzU.

 

Two brief videos by Kristin Kobes du Mez efficiently lay out the parameters of the crisis.  She is the author of Jesus and John Wayne, to which will make frequent reference, and is particularly well informed as an historian and, like Talarico, was raised in a church that endowed her with an abiding sense of the gentleness of God’s love for creation.  This makes her an especially sympathetic voice to listen to. You’ll find many videos that include her and I recommend all, though these two get to the center of her contribution with admirable efficiency.

 

7. From a year ago, there’s this response as part of a panel on ‘Christian Nationalism’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k82uUhj_PKc

 

8. And more recently, this response to the threat of Project 2025:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkxH1qWZz2I

 

Not for the Faint-Hearted

 

9. What is the menace and obscenity of Christian Nationalism, aka Christo-Fascism? The longest and the roughest of videos that I would suggest to you, Bad Faith, Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy is a documentary directed by Stephen Ujlaki and Christopher Jacob Jones, 2024.  It includes important and bracing participation from the likes of William Barber, Linda Gordon, Russell Moore, Anne Nelson, Katherine Steward, Jim Wallis, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove.  It’s available on several platforms including YouTube. It will cost a couple bucks.  As much as this documentary is an indictment of the Christian Nationalist ideas, it’s also asking what’s up other churches that complacently neither hear, nor see, nor speak of evil.  But should speak.  How?  Is the question that confronts us.  This film comprehensively lays out the problem and inspires a sense of urgency.  What to do, however, remains unexplored.  It seems to be available through Hulu, Apple, Kanopy, and a few other streaming services.

 

This is the link through Amazon Prime: https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Faith-Peter-Coyote/dp/B0CWP2KRTW

 

 

Core Videos for Discussion

 

The online colloquium I followed was presented by Homebrewed Christianity (Tripp Fuller, prop.), broadcast primarily in June 2024 and called Faith and Politics for the Rest of Us.  There was a weekly live-stream of discussion among Fuller, Diana Butler Bass, and Tim Whitaker. The background lectures on which the panel based its weekly discussion were exceptionally good and will provide ample information and outtakes for discussion.  Each is worth the half hour each takes:

 

10. The lead off lecture from the Maine woods:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ya4dBr2nmhs

 

11. This is a highly revealing and encouraging breakdown of statistics on "how to measure Christian nationalism:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUgdqNJHiDI

 

12. Realism v. Nationalism re. Reinhold Niebuhr.  Admirably concise academic approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzzhHeOLg84

 

13. The view from the post-Evangelical corner of Yale Theological:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwkctCsFh3s

 

14. The most powerfully personal of the lectures:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB3TJZrDdeY

 

15.  This video ponders the conundrum of how to defy our own othering without responding in kind.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj4I_bmV8bo

 

Williams asks us to “move beyond the ideal of individualism and exceptionalism set in place by the antagonistic structure” of Christian Nationalist pretentions.  We might sum up by wondering what he means by that.  And add to it the challenge of how a Matthew 25 church can best respond.  Simply put, do we walk away, or wade in?

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Nurture, Sunday 20 October 2024

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A Cat’s View of Nurture . . .​​​​​​​​​​​

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Aren’t you done talking yet? Nibble some kibble?

 

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Ready for the Final Meeting?

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15.  Reggie Williams’ video ponders the conundrum of how to defy our own othering without responding in kind.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj4I_bmV8bo

 

Williams asks us to “move beyond the ideal of individualism and exceptionalism set in place by the antagonistic structure” of Christian Nationalist pretentions.  We might begin to sum up by wondering what he means by that.  And add to it the challenge of how a Matthew 25 church can best respond.  Simply put, do we walk away, or wade in?  Alone, or together?

 

Here’s something else from Reggie Williams, made about ten years ago, a brief record of his visit to Flossenbürg Prison where Dietrich Bonhoeffer was murdered.  Towards the end, the video shifts from close-up interview to Williams at a pulpit, speaking to a church in Düsselldorf and commenting “It would be a mistake to think that the experience Bonhoeffer had in New York was something that was only for that time and does not affect our lives here and now.  White supremacy is often misunderstood to be describing people in America who wear hoods or only the Nazis.  Instead, white supremacy properly understood is a reference to white as normal humanity.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFk8fvD1bTM

 

Between Williams and Harvey, steeped in the ethics of race and inclusion, repair and acceptance, let us try to achieve some provisional clarity about the threat of ‘Christian Nationalism’ and its sidekick Project 2025. In that regard, here is a link to Jen Harvey’s Pride Day sermon at Riverside Church, 30 June 2024.  It makes a powerful pairing with the video by her we have already seen.  I’m planning on playing the second half of it when we are together, yet, if you have the time to watch it, knowing the context Harvey develops in the first half could be helpful.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXBJXZSlHJw

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Here’s Some Follow-Up

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I apologize.  The line in “Lord of the Dance” is not about dancing with a monkey on one’s back—that’s my Dad’s bad influence still buzzing away.  Rather, it’s the Devil on one’s back that makes dancing more difficult than it ought to be.  I knew the tune was from a Shaker hymn, but I was not aware of how recent the lyrics actually are.  They were written by an English song-writer, Sidney Carter, in 1963. Carter was aware that the American Shakers danced as a matter of spiritual exercise; he also felt that the Christ of the dance and journey was not just Jesus, for other Lords of the Dance, other Christs, might appear in other times and places, on this planet and on others. 

 

The tune, its theme and variation, most notably also appeared in Aaron Copland’s 1944 Appalachian Spring, composed for Martha Graham and her dance troupe. The story is placed in western Pennsylvania at the time of the Civil War.  The Shaker tune turns up midway through the ballet as an interlude representing dance and sowing, preceding the intrusion of fear, wrath, war and the sorrow it brings. The theme returns at the end, the Lord’s Day movement in which the Sabbath provides an evolution of motion and sound towards vacancy, stillness and silence. Graham’s original production is available in four parts on YouTube.

 

The lyrics of the original 1848 Shaker Hymn, “Simple Gifts,” have an uncanny relevance to our subject and our times:

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‘Tis the gift to be simple, ‘tis the gift to be free

‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,

And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gained,

To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed,

To turn, turn will be our delight,

Till by turning, turning we come ‘round right.

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Every Riven Thing

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About this time last year The New Yorker profiled Christian Wiman, a poet in his late fifties who has at least four times held back death from lymphoma through aggressive and extremely difficult interventions of ‘miracle’ cures. Among the quotations on Rohr’s weekly email was the line by Christopher Wiman: “There is some inexplicable connection between suffering and joy.  One of the greatest graces of this existence is that we are able to experience joy in the midst of suffering.” Ten years the editor of Poetry, he had taught in several prestigious universities and currently is on faculty at Yale Divinity School. The title of the book that failed to materialize when I wanted it to is Every Riven Thing (2011). Here is the title poem:

 

God goes, belonging to every riven thing he’s made
sing his being simply by being
the thing it is:
stone and tree and sky,
man who sees and sings and wonders why

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God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he’s made,
means a storm of peace.
Think of the atoms inside the stone.
Think of the man who sits alone
trying to will himself into a stillness where

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God goes belonging. To every riven thing he’s made
there is given one shade
shaped exactly to the thing itself:
under the tree a darker tree;
under the man the only man to see

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God goes belonging to every riven thing. He’s made
the things that bring him near,
made the mind that makes him go.
A part of what man knows,
apart from what man knows,

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God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made.

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(I find it helpful to contemplate synonyms of riven: split, cleft, sundered, torn, cracked, breached, scratched, rift, ruptured, and rifted.  You can hear the poem read here: https://onbeing.org/poetry/every-riven-thing/.)

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Dancing with Yeats

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We brushed by Yeats.  Let’s digress.  Digression is good for the roots.  William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939, was the Irish poet who set the theme of our age in 1919 with “The Second Coming, which ends with the lines:

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… twenty centuries of stony sleep

We vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 

Four years later he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and then in “Sailing to Byzantium” (1927) wrote an exhortation which I repeat almost daily:

 

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress . . .

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Lizzie’s insights about dance, and how it seems at its best to ‘unself’ us and join us to others, finds echo in Yeat’s poem “Among School Children” (1922).  Yeats in his early sixties was appointed to the Senate of the new Irish Free State and amid revolutionary chaos he sought to use his celebrity to instill a sense of reconciliation, of shared Irish destiny.  He was, not incidentally, an Anglo-Protestant in a newly and bitterly Celtic-Catholic country.  Seeking connection, one of his gestures was to visit an elementary school where nuns taught children from humble homes.  The result is a poem of eight eight-line stanzas, unmistakably symmetrical and ordered, that travels from the innocence and simplicity of a school child’s wonderment through erotic myth, Plato and Aristotle, the Italian Renaissance, and at its end couples our meager being with all nature and civilization in a pair of questions:

 

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

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Oliver says: “I’m nervous.  But I’m ready.”

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