The Quaker Agitator

See you later.

QuakerDave — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 23:03:40 +0000

I’m taking the rest of June – and all of July and probably August, too - off from blogging.

I need a break, to recoup and regroup and get some of the spark back.

And, I have a lot of reading and writing and now preparing (for my new teaching position) to do, and something had to give.

Posting will resume at the end of the summer. Promise.

Keep in touch. I’m not hard to find.

Way cool Saturday sounds.

QuakerDave — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 11:27:28 +0000

Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society: “Ferromagnetic” (live)

Is it jazz? Big band? Experimental? Or just great music?

Retreating again.

QuakerDave — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 17:00:36 +0000

Later today, I’m off again to the New Jersey Pine Barrens, for the second and final retreat part of the ongoing journey that has been my Spiritual Formation Group these past nine months. I am looking forward to it, of course, and the weather forecast is looking good for a fine couple of days, but part of me is a little sad that this journey is coming to an end.

But not really. The process of Spiritual Formation has moved me forward as a Quaker in a way that I never could have done on my own, at least not this quickly. It’s been like a spiritual B-12 shot. I’ve made new f/Friends that I think I will have forever, and the reading we’ve done together, not to mention the conversations, has been broad and deep.

I don’t know if other faith communities offer something like what we’ve done here, but if yours does, and you haven’t done this yet, I highly recommend it. It’s made me a better Friend in many ways.

I’ll tell you more next week. Have a good weekend.

Sick sad world, v. 1.

QuakerDave — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 11:00:25 +0000

I give up.

Gun-loving pastor to his flock: Piece be with you

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) June 4 – A Kentucky pastor is inviting his flock to bring guns to church to celebrate the Fourth of July and the Second Amendment.

New Bethel Church is welcoming “responsible handgun owners” to wear their firearms inside the church June 27, a Saturday. An ad says there will be a handgun raffle, patriotic music and information on gun safety.

“We’re just going to celebrate the upcoming theme of the birth of our nation,” said pastor Ken Pagano. “And we’re not ashamed to say that there was a strong belief in God and firearms — without that this country wouldn’t be here.”

The guns must be unloaded and private security will check visitors at the door, Pagano said.

He said recent church shootings, including the killing Sunday of a late-term abortion provider in Kansas, which he condemned, highlight the need to promote safe gun ownership. The New Bethel Church event was planned months before Dr. George Tiller was shot to death in a Wichita church.

Kentucky allows residents to openly carry guns in public with some restrictions. Gun owners carrying concealed weapons must have state-issued permits and can’t take them to schools, jails or bars, among other exceptions.

Pagano’s Protestant church, which attracts up to 150 people to Sunday services, is a member of the Assemblies of God. The former Marine and handgun instructor said he expected some backlash, but has heard only a “little bit” of criticism of the gun event.

John Phillips, an Arkansas pastor who was shot twice while leading a service at his former church in 1986, said a house of worship is no place for firearms.

“A church is designated as a safe haven, it’s a place of worship,” said Phillips, who was shot by a church member’s relative for an unknown reason and still has a bullet lodged in his spine. “It is unconscionable to me to think that a church would be a place that you would even want to bring a weapon.”

Phillips spoke out against a bill before the Arkansas General Assembly that would have permitted the carrying of guns in that state’s churches. The bill failed in February.

Pagano, 50, said some members of his church were concerned that President Obama’s administration could restrict gun ownership, and they supported the plan for the event when Pagano asked their opinion.

Marian McClure Taylor, executive director of the Kentucky Council of Churches, an umbrella organization for 11 Christian denominations in Kentucky, said Christian churches are promoters of peace, but “most allow for arms to be taken up under certain conditions.”

Taylor said Pagano assured her the event would focus on promoting responsible gun ownership and any proceeds would go to charity.

“Those two commitments are consistent with the high value the Assemblies of God churches place on human life,” she said in an e-mail message.

Pagano is encouraging church members to bring a canned good and a friend to the event. He said guns must be unloaded for insurance purposes and safety reasons.

He said the point was not to mix worship with guns, though he may reference some passages from the Bible.

“Firearms can be evil and they can be useful,” he said. “We’re just trying to promote responsible gun ownership and gun safety.”

And some of us think “those Muslims” have cornered the market on faith-based knuckle-headedness.

I’ll be real curious as to which passages from Scripture will be cherry-picked to justify this.

Remember.

QuakerDave — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:02:44 +0000

Twenty years ago today.

Well done, New Hampshire.

QuakerDave — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 21:08:02 +0000

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) June 3 – New Hampshire legislators approved a measure Wednesday that would make the state the sixth to allow gay marriage, and Gov. John Lynch said he would sign it later in the afternoon.

He had promised a veto if the law didn’t clearly spell out that churches and religious groups would not be forced to officiate at gay marriages or provide other services.

UPDATE: The bill has been signed into law.

The Senate passed the measure Wednesday, and the House — where the outcome was more in doubt — followed later in the day. The House gallery erupted in cheers after the 198-176 vote.

“If you have no choice as to your sex, male or female; if you have no choice as to your color; if you have no choice as to your sexual orientation; then you have to be protected and given the same opportunity for life, liberty and happiness,” Rep. Anthony DiFruscia, R-Windham, said during the hourlong debate.

New Hampshire’s law takes effect Jan. 1. Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, Vermont and Iowa already allow gay marriage, though Maine opponents hope to overturn that state’s law with a public vote.

California briefly allowed gay marriage before a public vote banned it; a court ruling grandfathered in couples who were already married.

New Hampshire opponents, mainly Republicans, objected on grounds including the fragmented process that required three bills.

“It is no surprise that the Legislature finally passed the last piece to the gay marriage bill today. After all, when you take 12 votes on five iterations of the same issue, you’re bound to get it passed sooner or later,” said Kevin Smith, executive director of gay marriage opponent Cornerstone Policy Research.

Lynch, a Democrat, personally opposes gay marriage but decided to view the issue “through a broader lens.”

Lynch said he would veto gay marriage if the law didn’t address churches and religious groups.

The revised bill added a sentence specifying that all religious organizations, associations or societies have exclusive control over their religious doctrines, policies, teachings and beliefs on marriage.

It also clarified that church-related organizations that serve charitable or educational purposes are exempt from having to provide insurance and other benefits to same sex spouses of employees. The earlier version said “charitable and educational” instead of “charitable or educational.”

The House rejected the language Lynch suggested two weeks ago by two votes. Wednesday’s vote was on a revised bill negotiated with the Senate.

The vote was supporters’ last chance this year in New Hampshire.

Six down. A lot more work to go…

Summer reading!

QuakerDave — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 10:00:59 +0000

I have a ton of reading to do this summer. The curriculum guides I have to read for my new seventh grade social studies teaching assignment (YIPPEEE!!!… oh, sorry…) total something like 500 pages worth of stuff. And I’ll want to find some additional books to supplement that, I’m sure. Plus, there’s the reading I’ll continue to do for my book project.

BUT, beyond that, I’ve been collecting stuff on my little “save till summer” shelf, and here’s what’s there so far:

Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer by Chris Salewicz, which dubs itself as “the definitive biography.” We shall see about that.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. A novel certain friends of mine have been bugging me to read…

The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam. Korea was my father’s war, and I know next to nothing about it.

Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace, One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. A number of you all have read this one, so I’m anxious to get to it. I may read this one first.

Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery by Eric Metaxas. Loved the movie.

The Soloist by Steve Lopez. Mr. Lopez was a columnist for a Philadelphia paer for years, and I’m anxious to read this, before I rent the movie.

The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer by David Goldblatt. Did I mention we have a new soccer team in town? This is a LONG one, so we’ll see: I may have to take this in pieces.

Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrara, which I didn’t get to last summer.

Lost Prophet: The Life & Times of Bayard Rustin by John D’Emilio.

Still looking for a good historical novel or two to break up all the non-fiction here.

I could also use a recommendation from someone out there for good one-volume introductions to both Islam and Buddhism. Not guides to practice, but books that discuss both the history and the basic belief systems of each faith. Otherwise, I may have to resort to those ….For Dummies books.

So, readers out there, what’s on your list?

“War is sin.”

QuakerDave — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 09:00:11 +0000

by Chris Hedges

(TruthDig) June 1 - The crisis faced by combat veterans returning from war is not simply a profound struggle with trauma and alienation. It is often, for those who can slice through the suffering to self-awareness, an existential crisis. War exposes the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. It rips open the hypocrisy of our religions and secular institutions. Those who return from war have learned something which is often incomprehensible to those who have stayed home. We are not a virtuous nation. God and fate have not blessed us above others. Victory is not assured. War is neither glorious nor noble. And we carry within us the capacity for evil we ascribe to those we fight.

Those who return to speak this truth, such as members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, are our contemporary prophets. But like all prophets they are condemned and ignored for their courage. They struggle, in a culture awash in lies, to tell what few have the fortitude to digest. They know that what we are taught in school, in worship, by the press, through the entertainment industry and at home, that the melding of the state’s rhetoric with the rhetoric of religion, is empty and false.

The words these prophets speak are painful. We, as a nation, prefer to listen to those who speak from the patriotic script. We prefer to hear ourselves exalted. If veterans speak of terrible wounds visible and invisible, of lies told to make them kill, of evil committed in our name, we fill our ears with wax. Not our boys, we say, not them, bred in our homes, endowed with goodness and decency. For if it is easy for them to murder, what about us? And so it is simpler and more comfortable not to hear. We do not listen to the angry words that cascade forth from their lips, wishing only that they would calm down, be reasonable, get some help, and go away. We, the deformed, brand our prophets as madmen. We cast them into the desert. And this is why so many veterans are estranged and enraged. This is why so many succumb to suicide or addictions.

War comes wrapped in patriotic slogans, calls for sacrifice, honor and heroism and promises of glory. It comes wrapped in the claims of divine providence. It is what a grateful nation asks of its children. It is what is right and just. It is waged to make the nation and the world a better place, to cleanse evil. War is touted as the ultimate test of manhood, where the young can find out what they are made of. War, from a distance, seems noble. It gives us comrades and power and a chance to play a small bit in the great drama of history. It promises to give us an identity as a warrior, a patriot, as long as we go along with the myth, the one the war-makers need to wage wars and the defense contractors need to increase their profits.

But up close war is a soulless void. War is about barbarity, perversion and pain, an unchecked orgy of death. Human decency and tenderness are crushed. Those who make war work overtime to reduce love to smut, and all human beings become objects, pawns to use or kill. The noise, the stench, the fear, the scenes of eviscerated bodies and bloated corpses, the cries of the wounded, all combine to spin those in combat into another universe. In this moral void, naively blessed by secular and religious institutions at home, the hypocrisy of our social conventions, our strict adherence to moral precepts, come unglued. War, for all its horror, has the power to strip away the trivial and the banal, the empty chatter and foolish obsessions that fill our days. It lets us see, although the cost is tremendous.

The Rev. William P. Mahedy, who was a Catholic chaplain in Vietnam, tells of a soldier, a former altar boy, in his book “Out of the Night: The Spiritual Journey of Vietnam Vets,” who says to him: “Hey, Chaplain … how come it’s a sin to hop into bed with a mama-san but it’s okay to blow away gooks out in the bush?”

“Consider the question that he and I were forced to confront on that day in a jungle clearing,” Mahedy writes. “How is it that a Christian can, with a clear conscience, spend a year in a war zone killing people and yet place his soul in jeopardy by spending a few minutes with a prostitute? If the New Testament prohibitions of sexual misconduct are to be stringently interpreted, why, then, are Jesus’ injunctions against violence not binding in the same way? In other words, what does the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ really mean?”

Military chaplains, a majority of whom are evangelical Christians, defend the life of the unborn, tout America as a Christian nation and eagerly bless the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as holy crusades. The hollowness of their morality, the staggering disconnect between the values they claim to promote, is ripped open in war.

There is a difference between killing someone who is trying to kill you and taking the life of someone who does not have the power to harm you. The first is killing. The second is murder. But in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the enemy is elusive and rarely seen, murder occurs far more often than killing. Families are massacred in airstrikes. Children are gunned down in blistering suppressing fire laid down in neighborhoods after an improvised explosive device goes off near a convoy. Artillery shells obliterate homes. And no one stops to look. The dead and maimed are left behind.

The utter failure of nearly all our religious institutions-whose texts are unequivocal about murder-to address the essence of war has rendered them useless. These institutions have little or nothing to say in wartime because the god they worship is a false god, one that promises victory to those who obey the law and believe in the manifest destiny of the nation.

We all have the capacity to commit evil. It takes little to unleash it. For those of us who have been to war this is the awful knowledge that is hardest to digest, the knowledge that the line between the victims and the victimizers is razor-thin, that human beings find a perverse delight in destruction and death, and that few can resist the pull. At best, most of us become silent accomplices.

Wars may have to be fought to ensure survival, but they are always tragic. They always bring to the surface the worst elements of any society, those who have a penchant for violence and a lust for absolute power. They turn the moral order upside down. It was the criminal class that first organized the defense of Sarajevo. When these goons were not manning roadblocks to hold off the besieging Bosnian Serb army they were looting, raping and killing the Serb residents in the city. And those politicians who speak of war as an instrument of power, those who wage war but do not know its reality, those powerful statesmen-the Henry Kissingers, Robert McNamaras, Donald Rumsfelds, the Dick Cheneys-those who treat war as part of the great game of nations, are as amoral as the religious stooges who assist them. And when the wars are over what they have to say to us in their thick memoirs about war is also hollow, vacant and useless.

“In theological terms, war is sin,” writes Mahedy. “This has nothing to do with whether a particular war is justified or whether isolated incidents in a soldier’s war were right or wrong. The point is that war as a human enterprise is a matter of sin. It is a form of hatred for one’s fellow human beings. It produces alienation from others and nihilism, and it ultimately represents a turning away from God.”

The young soldiers and Marines do not plan or organize the war. They do not seek to justify it or explain its causes. They are taught to believe. The symbols of the nation and religion are interwoven. The will of God becomes the will of the nation. This trust is forever shattered for many in war. Soldiers in combat see the myth used to send them to war implode. They see that war is not clean or neat or noble, but venal and frightening. They see into war’s essence, which is death.

War is always about betrayal. It is about betrayal of the young by the old, of cynics by idealists, and of soldiers and Marines by politicians. Society’s institutions, including our religious institutions, which mold us into compliant citizens, are unmasked. This betrayal is so deep that many never find their way back to faith in the nation or in any god. They nurse a self-destructive anger and resentment, understandable and justified, but also crippling. Ask a combat veteran struggling to piece his or her life together about God and watch the raw vitriol and pain pour out. They have seen into the corrupt heart of America, into the emptiness of its most sacred institutions, into our staggering hypocrisy, and those of us who refuse to heed their words become complicit in the evil they denounce.

Feel free to discuss.

In case you missed it…

QuakerDave — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 11:35:10 +0000

Our new team has a new coach!

Philadelphia Union names Nowak first coach

CHESTER, Pa. (Philadelphia Inquirer) May 30 - Major League Soccer’s newest franchise has tapped national team assistant Peter Nowak as its first coach.

Nowak will head Philadelphia Union’s soccer operations as team manager when it begins play next year.

Philadelphia Union CEO Nick Sakiewicz says Nowak was the coach the expansion team targeted from the start.

Nowak, a former Polish national team captain, won MLS titles as a player and coach. He was a member of the Chicago Fire team that won the MLS Cup in 1998 and was the head coach of D.C. United’s 2004 championship team.

U.S. Soccer announced Nowak’s departure from the national team on Thursday. Nowak had served as the top assistant on the men’s team and led the under-23 national team at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

GREAT choice. Out-STANDING. Nowak always played all-out as a player, and his teams always play a full-out attacking style. This is just the kind of thing our club needs to get the supporters going and get us off to a good start next spring.

Happy here.

(Photo: MLSNet)

Poem.

QuakerDave — Sun, 31 May 2009 12:00:50 +0000

The Correspondence School Instructor Says Goodbye to His Poetry Students

Goodbye, lady in Bangor, who sent me
snapshots of yourself, after definitely hinting
you were beautiful; goodbye,
Miami Beach urologist, who enclosed plain
brown envelopes for the return of your very
Clinical Sonnet; goodbye, manufacturer
of brassieres on the Coast, whose eclogues
give the fullest treatment in literature yet
to the sagging-breast motif; goodbye, you in San Quentin,
who wrote, “Being German my hero is Hitler,”
instead of “Sincerely yours,” at the end of long,
neat-scripted letter demolishing
the pre-Raphaelites:

I swear to you, it was just my way
of cheering myself up, as I licked
the stamped, self-addressed envelopes,
the game I had
of trying to guess which one of you, this time,
had poisoned his glue. I did care.
I did read each poem entire.
I did say what I thought was the truth
in the mildest words I know. And now,
in this poem, or chopped prose, not any better,
I realize, than those troubled lines
I kept sending back to you,
I have to say I am relieved it is over:
at the end I could feel only pity
for that urge toward more life
your poems kept smothering in words, the smell
of which, days later, would tingle
in your nostrils as new, God-given impulses
to write.

Goodbye,
you who are, for me, the postmarks again
of shattered towns-Xenia, Burnt Cabins, Hornell-
their loneliness
given away in poems, only their solitude kept.

- Galway Kinnell