The Hmong language is, uh, more blunt, and arguably more accurate:
The Hmong have a phase, yuav paim quav, which means that the truth will come to light. Literally, it means “feces will be excreted.”
The casual way that American Christians have of talking about God is not simply dispiriting, but is, for some sensibilities, actively destructive. There are times when silence is not only the highest, but the only possible, piety.
See also Naomi Shihab Nye.
Coworker 1: “I haven’t been watching the olympics much, but I just think Snoop Dogg such an American treasure.”
Coworker 2: “Totally! 100 percent.”
Coworker 1: [Sharing phone screen] “Look at him! He’s so cute. And so genuine, I feel.”
Me:
Stanley Hauerwas, still fighting the good fight:
The disavowal of violence is to create a world in which alternatives exist that I couldn’t have imagined if I thought that reaching for the gun takes precedence over the possibility of sharing a meal with an enemy.
Mary Catherine Bateson:
Learning is perhaps the only pleasure that might replace increasing consumption as our chosen mode of enriching experience. Someday, the joy of recognizing a pattern in a leaf or the geological strata in a cliff face might replace the satisfactions of new carpeting or more horsepower in an engine, and the chance to learn in the workplace might seem more valuable than increased purchasing power or a move up the organizational chart. Increasing knowledge of the ethology of wolves might someday replace the power savored in destroying them.
We reach for knowledge as an instrument of power, not as an instrument of delight, yet the preoccupation with power ultimately serves ignorance.… Ironically, in our society both the strongest, those who have already succeeded, and the weakest, those who feel destined for failure, defend themselves against new learning.
While they may never properly iron linen table napkins, children and adults alike gain much from cultivating the skills required to bring livable order to ordinary chaos. It is a balm to have that skill in one’s pocket, not because it exercises proto-dominance on an indifferent universe, but because it can also bring clarity and calm to one’s cluttered interior. It mirrors exactly what thinking effects. Yet why is it bestselling brilliance for psychologist Jordan Peterson to say “make your bed,' but not when your mother teaches you to do it?
This essay, and its references, reminded me a lot of Mary Catherine Bateson’s Peripheral Visions, which I’m also freshly reminded was one of the best books I’ve ever read.
To be resigned or hopeful, calculated or surprised — Jürgen Moltmann
Pure Joy
When I see people who have never set foot in Russia or Ukraine or Gaza or Israel, with no family ties to those countries, spouting the propaganda of foreign lands, I wonder whether I am witnessing the genuine adoption of an identity or a consumer for whom sampling the spice of nationalist fervour is just one of the commercial choices you’re offered when you purchase a cell phone that connects to the internet.