Meanderings, 30 March 2024

Holy Saturday, mostly ignored in Protestant circles, will be the topic for a post on this Substack later this Saturday. Until then, here are some Meanderings to enjoy.

A Little Shop of Kindness

New York — Thousands of miles away from the violence that threatened her family, a 16-year-old girl sits in a wooden chair trying on a pair of colorful Converse sneakers, breaking into a smile when they turn out to be a perfect fit.

Like most teenagers, Kamilu Lozano loves shopping. But as a migrant who fled with her family from Peru to New York City with almost nothing, simple pleasures like picking out a new pair of shoes have become a luxury.

It’s only at the Little Shop of Kindness in the city’s Upper East Side neighborhood that migrants like Kamilu get a rare opportunity to choose their own clothes from racks instead of desperately digging through donation boxes.

“It feels like we’re finally being treated like human beings,” Kamilu tells CNN, lamenting how difficult it’s been adjusting to life in a new city where many people regard migrants as a burden. “We forgot what it was like to be treated normally again — like we’re just normal people.”

The boutique, tucked quietly inside a red brick church building on First Avenue, is run by Team TLC NYC, a nonprofit group that has met migrants at Port Authority Bus Terminal since 2019 to provide them with basic necessities and legal assistance.

The group opened the free shop last March to help address the city’s growing migrant crisis and counter the hostility many say they face from some city officials and residents. The items they offer are new or lightly used and donated by volunteers and city residents.

“It’s just so easy to call these folks the problem as opposed to being the victims of global changes and crises that exist around the world,” says director Ilze Thielmann. “These are families with children and young men in the worst moment of their lives. How can we turn our backs on other human beings?”

In what sense is “Good Friday” good? Kate Murphy.

Christians call the day Jesus was crucified Good Friday. It’s mystifying. Why would people who claim Jesus is their Lord and Savior call the day he was brutally murdered by the State a good day?

Many Christians have been told that Friday is good because on that day Jesus paid the price for our sins, that God needed someone innocent and righteous to suffer so that He could show mercy to guilty and unrighteous people like us. The takeaway has been, now that Jesus has been unjustly punished for our wrongdoing, Christians are righteous by default, no matter what. It’s a good day when Jesus pre-pays the tab on your sin.

This is the worst kind of plantation religion.

We have taken exactly the wrong lesson from Good Friday when we see Jesus hanging on the cross and think, well, sometimes innocent people have to suffer unjustly for the common good and it’s not my problem or responsibility. The death of Jesus does not justify evil, but exposes it. The cross forces us to see that the end never justifies the means.

We can not fight violence with violence. We cannot create peace through destruction. Before we call Friday good, we have to recognize crucifixion as horrible. Then, we have to see that crucifixion didn’t just happen only one time, only to Jesus. They still happen all the time.

A few piping plovers:

CHICAGO — It is almost time for Chicago’s piping plovers to return and volunteers flocked to Montrose Beach on Saturday to prepare for the visitor’s arrival.

“I come here regularly to take walks, to go bird watching and you know, because I use the grounds I also want to give back,” said Laura Miske, who is among the legion of piping plover fans.

Miske was just one of several people who joined in on the cleanup on Saturday.

“Is always really exciting as a bird watcher to see birds that aren’t everyday birds, that only come at certain times of the year or are more elusive,” Miske said.

The Great Lakes were once home to about 800 pairs of piping plovers, now they are nearly extinct in the region.

In June of 2019, a pair began nesting at Montrose Beach. The two love birds, named Monty & Rose, returned the next year, and the year after that.

“They can’t have too much vegetation or otherwise they won’t nest, so that’s part of what we do, is try to keep the vegetation as sparse as possible,” Mark Kolasa, who also joined in on the cleanup, said.

A wonderful student:

LAKE VILLA, Ill. – A Lake County teen is being praised for jumping into action when his bus driver suffered a medical emergency.

“I was terrified. Hopefully, nothing like this happens again in the future. I’m glad everyone was okay,” Jeffrey Starck Jr. said.

According to Lake Villa police, the incident happened around 8:15 a.m. on February 20 as Starck Jr. was on the bus with other students. The driver suffered a medical emergency and became unresponsive behind the wheel while on Oakland Drive, a residential street.

“We went off-roading; hit a mailbox and two trash cans,” Starck Jr. said.

The 19-year-old, who is autistic, told WGN-TV he didn’t think twice about jumping into action when he noticed his bus driver wasn’t responding to him. He was able to get a hold of the steering wheel, maneuver the bus onto a lawn, and press the brake.

Video obtained by WGN News shows the moments bus narrowly missed a retention pond and clipped a tree before it came to a rest just feet before it could hit another tree head-on.

Humanities crisis: a classroom problem? No, a social problem.

A summary statement of the author: I won’t deny that the downward trend in majors is troubling to people (like me) who love the humanities. But I disagree with the notion that success is based on convincing 18 year olds to declare an English major. That makes a mockery of the whole subject. Youngsters may eventually decide that the humanities are worth studying, but that will only happen after humanistic thinking starts to pervade our society.

I think about my night school students a lot whenever I hear people lamenting the crisis in the humanities.

That’s a popular topic.

These articles always assume that the crisis is happening at college—and can only be solved on campus. Even the people who disagree with these doomsayers share the same assumption. When they defend the humanities, they always point to what’s happening in a classroom.

Maybe I once believed the same thing. Not anymore.

The situation today is eerily similar to the crisis of 1800, when people rebelled against the overreach of rationalistic and algorithmic thinking—the zeal for financial optimization forcing people into sweatshops and the ‘dark Satanic mills’ of the Industrial Revolution.

This revolt was intense. But it didn’t happen at college. It took place in society at large.

This marked the end of the Age of Reason, and the rise of Romanticism, with its celebration of creativity, artistry, music, poetry, and growing respect for human dignity.

For the next hundred years, creativity got more esteem than rationalism. Artists were more admired than bankers. Culture was viewed as more foundational than commerce.

And it wasn’t just about poets and musicians. Laws got passed restricting child labor and other exploitative practices. (I note that children are the worst victims of today’s exploitative tech—but we don’t have laws against it yet.) The labor movement and other humanistic initiatives gained in strength.

People mattered—for a change.

And the experts and industrialists who ran the Age of Reason were in shock. They never saw it coming.

But they were the actual cause of the humanistic revival. They had assumed that humans would do their bidding—that people could be endlessly manipulated and controlled. Just so long as profit was maximized, who cared how much suffering was inflicted.

But the humans resisted. They created a flourishing counterculture that eventually went mainstream.

Very little of this happened at colleges. Both the crisis and solution took place in society at large.

Academics were probably the last to notice. They usually are.

We need something similar today.

Well, I’ve never heard any of this from a pastor. You?

Every time I hear a pastor critique the world of sports and hear advice to “be careful what place sports occupy in your heart,” some small part of me wants to grab the evangelical church complex by the shoulders and whisper: You’re missing the point.

No matter what you think about sports, or whether you even play sports or not — when a large swath of the American population (70 percent to be specific) are either watching sports, talking about sports, or playing sports on a daily basis, it’s worth considering why. Even if you have incredibly strong opinions about the place of sports in church, there’s something happening here that shouldn’t be so swiftly dismissed.

Yet, too often within Christian circles, sports are relegated to distractions to the gospel at best, and more sinisterly as forms of idolatry. So a fumbling cycle manifests itself: Pastors demur Christians succumbing to sports culture and, inevitably, then struggle to treat sports with any real importance within the Christian life. Rarely are thoughtful connections attempted between that thing that so many of us love and the spiritual life to which we’ve been called. Instead, the call rings forth, “Exorcize!”

Sports itself is not the problem. Rather, it’s our lack of ability to leverage sports for theological gain. The silence of theologians on sports, historically and presently (even though, apparently, John Calvin played a bit of bocce ball and supposedly Dietrich Bonhoeffer played tennis), reveals the way that this topic has been relegated to a non-issue in some circles. And this silence alone has impacted seminary preaching labs more than we realize. 

As it pertains to sports today, to quote Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, “you don’t have to like it, but you have to accept it.” As a pastor, you’re not going to be able to convince a congregant to stop watching their favorite sports team, though your criticism will definitely make them leave your church. People love sports, and sports are here to stay.

Pastors must stop trying to strip the average American from the object of their love and instead spend more time understanding its origins and how to generate spiritual conversations around it.