President

President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminiary on Simon Jenkins article

Martin Kelley — Tue, 15 May 2018 22:03:58 +0000

Chalk this one up as another whisper-down-the-lane. As readers will probably remember, a few weeks ago, non-Friend Simon Jenkins wrote an opinion piece in The Guardian about the possibility of British Friends dropping God from their Faith and Practice. There were a lot of exaggerations in it; the yearly meeting session was mostly deciding whether it it felt led to start the long process of revising the document of Friends’ belief and practice. Many yearly meetings do this every generation or so. AFAIK, there was no substantive discussion on what the revisions might bring. At the time, I speculated that “Jenkins is chasing the headline to advance his own argument without regard to how his statement might polarize Friends.”

Now we have another headline chaser. The president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary more or less reads Jenkins’s piece aloud on his radio show (hat-tip havedanson on the Quakers subreddit). He lightly skips over the fact that Jenkins isn’t Quaker and admits to limited experience of Quaker worship. The SBTS president, Albert Mohler, repeatedly calls the Guardian article a “news report” even though it is clearly labeled as an opinion piece. If any publicity is good publicity then it’s good that non-Friends like Jenkins and now Mohler are talking about the decision-making process of a Quaker yearly meeting, but this is stupid piled on stupid.

From a media perspective, I get it: Mohler has a daily 24-minute podcast to fill. He has interns who scan buzzy news items. They rearrange the text with interstitials like “he continues, and I quote” and “he goes on to say” so that Mohler can spend five minutes reading an article without sounding like he’s just reading an article. But seriously, how does the president of a major seminary have such disregard for anything approaching academic rigor? Also: how much regurgitated junk is on the internet simply because people need to fill time? The Quaker caution about giving ministry just because you’re paid to give ministry and it’s time to give ministry seems apt in this case.

Monday, May 14, 2018

Plain like Barack

Martin Kelley — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 22:31:42 +0000

As befits a Quaker witness, when I felt the nudge to plainness ten years ago, I didn’t quite know where it would take me. I trusted the spiritual nudges enough to assume there were lessons to learn. I had witnessed a God-centering in others who shared my spiritual conditions and I knew from reading that plainness was a typical first step of “infant ministers.” But all I had been given was the invitation to walk a particular path.

After the initial excitements, I settled into a routine and discovered I had lost the “what to wear?!” angst of getting dressed in the mornings. Gone too was the “who am I?” drama that accompanied catalog browsing. As clothes wore out and were retired, I reduced my closet down to a small set of choices, all variations on one another. Now when I get dressed I don’t worry about who I will see that day, who I should impress, whether one pair of shoes goes with a certain sweater, etc.

Apparently, I share this practice with the forty-fourth president. In “Obama’s Way,” a wide-ranging profile in Vanity Fair, Michael Lewis shares the President’s attitude about clothes:

[He] was willing to talk about the mundane details of presidential existence… You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”

A few distracting caveats: we can assume Obama’s grey and blue suits are bespoke and cost upwards of a thousand dollars apiece. He probably has a closet full of them. He has staff that cleans them, stores them, and lays them out for him in the morning. You won’t find Barack wandering the aisles of the Capitol Hill Macy’s or the Langley Hill Men’s Warehouse. Michelle’s never running things to the dry cleaners, and Sasha and Malia aren’t pairing socks from the laundry bin after coming home from school. A President Romney’s closet would also feature gray and blue (though his underwear drawer would be more unconventional). When protocol calls for the commander-in-chief to deviate from suits–to don a tux perhaps–one appears. Presidential plainness is far from simple.

The Quaker movement started as an invitation to common sense. Everyone could join. Early Friends were minimalists on fire, fearless in abandoning anything that got in the way of spiritual truth. In a few short years they methodically worked their way to the same conclusions as a twenty-first century U.S. president: human decision-making resources are finite; our attention is at a premium. If we have a job to do (run a country, witness God’s Kingdom), then we should clear ourselves of unnecessary distractions to focus on the essentials. Those core experiential truths have lasting value. As Jefferson might say, they are self-evident, even if they still seem radically peculiar to the wider world.

Unfortunately the kind of plainness that Barack and I are talking about is a kind of mind-hack, its power largely strategic. I’d love to see a president take up the challenge of some hardcore Quaker values. How about the testimony against war? Eliza Gurney got pretty far in correspondence with Obama’s hero, honest Abe, but even he punted responsibility to divine will. The witness continues.

From the Vault: More Victims Won’t Stop the Terror (10/2001)

Martin Kelley — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 16:22:55 +0000

Today is the ninth anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. In recognition, here’s my Nonviolence.org essay from 10/7/2001. It’s all sadly still topical. Nine years in and we’re still making terror and still creating enemies.

The United States has today begun its war against terrorism in a very familiar way: by use of terror. Ignorant of thousands of years of violence in the Middle East, President George W. Bush thinks that the horror of September 11th can be exorcised and prevented by bombs and missiles. Today we can add more names to the long list of victims of the terrorist airplane attacks. Because today Afghanis have died in terror.

The deaths in New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania have shocked Americans and rightly so. We are all scared of our sudden vulnerability. We are all shocked at the level of anger that led nineteen suicide bombers to give up precious life to start such a literal and symbolic conflagration. What they did was horrible and without justification. But that is not to say that they didn’t have reasons.

The terrorists committed their atrocities because of a long list of grievances. They were shedding blood for blood, and we must understand that. Because to understand that is to understand that President Bush is unleashing his own terror campaign: that he is shedding more blood for more blood.

The United States has been sponsoring violence in Afghanistan for over a generation. Even before the Soviet invasion of that country, the U.S. was supporting radical Mujahadeen forces. We thought then that sponsorship of violence would lead to some sort of peace. As we all know now, it did not. We’ve been experimenting with violence in the region for many years. Our foreign policy has been a mish-mash of supporting one despotic regime after another against a shifting array of perceived enemies.

The Afghani forces the United States now bomb were once our allies, as was Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. We have rarely if ever acted on behalf of liberty and democracy in the region. We have time and again sold out our values and thrown our support behind the most heinous of despots. We have time and again thought that military adventurism in the region could keep terrorism and anti-Americanism in check. And each time we’ve only bred a new generation of radicals, bent on revenge.

There are those who have angrily denounced pacifists in the weeks since September 11th, angrily asking how peace can deal with terrorists. What these critics don’t understand is that wars don’t start when the bombs begin to explode. They begin years before, when the seeds of hatred are sewn. The times to stop this new war was ten and twenty years ago, when the U.S. broke it’s promises for democracy, and acted in its own self-interest (and often on behalf of the interests of our oil companies) to keep the cycles of violence going. The United States made choices that helped keep the peoples of the Middle East enslaved in despotism and poverty.

And so we come to 2001. And it’s time to stop a war. But it’s not necessarily this war that we can stop. It’s the next one. And the ones after that. It’s time to stop combat terrorism with terror. In the last few weeks the United States has been making new alliances with countries whose leaders subvert democracy. We are giving them free rein to continue to subject their people. Every weapon we sell these tyrants only kills and destabilizes more, just as every bomb we drop on Kabul feeds terror more.

And most of all: we are making new victims. Another generation of children are seeing their parents die, are seeing the rain of bombs fall on their cities from an uncaring America. They cry out to us in the name of peace and democracy and hear nothing but hatred and blood. And some of them will respond by turning against us in hatred. And will fight us in anger. They will learn our lesson of terror and use it against us. They cycle will repeat. History will continue to turn, with blood as it’s Middle Eastern lubricant. Unless we act. Unless we can stop the next war.

That tired old quagmire playbook

Martin Kelley — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:13:26 +0000

“We’ll end the war just as soon as…” is the rhetorical parent of empire-crushing quagmires. The conditional changes as needed, because it needs to stay fresh to stay plausible. One president will claim that the right enemy leader needs to be killed, another that more troops need to be temporarily added.

Strategic changes can change the tide of a military conflict but Afghanistan is now an eight-year-old war. We’re not battling some other empire for control of territory. The fighters shooting at American soldiers are Afghani. They will still be there when we leave, whenever we leave. They are Afghanistan’s future whether we like it or not. The only real question is whether we’ll leave as friends or as enemies. Thirty thousand additional U.S. troops will be 30,000 additional U.S. rifles aimed at 30,000 more Afghanis who simply don’t want us there. Eighteen months will be eighteen more months of Afghan seething over the corrupt U.S.-backed Karzai government.

I’m no fan of the Taliban. But it’s hard to imagine being the country being ruled by anyone else when the U.S. troops eventually do pull out. Ten years of war will have insured another generation of radicalized Aghani youth. And what about America? A whole generation got interested in politics because of a bright young president promising change, yet here we have the same tired quagmire playbook. It’s a shame.

The real world’s competition this week is on the streets of Georgia

Martin Kelley — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 20:53:01 +0000

To American eyes the news of the escalating war in the Caucasus nation of Georgia almost reads as farce: a breakaway region of a breakaway region, tanks rolling to maintain control of… well, not that much really. We wonder how it could be in either Russia or Georgia’s interests to pick a fight over all this? Why does it seem like Russia’s de facto leader-for-life Vladimir Putin is still fighting the Cold War? And what must be going through the mind of Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili to be taunting the giant to its north?
But the farce turns to weariness as we realize just how familiar this all is. Tiny ethnic enclaves with centuries of animosities and well rehearsed stories of atrocities committed by the other set fighting by the breakdown of an empire that had uneasily united them in repression. Change a few details and we could be talking recent conflicts in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Rwanda, the Sudan, Palestine/Israel and Iraq. Blood money from the drug trade, from oil billions and human trafficking add fuel to the fire. We’ve been fighting these same wars since at least 1914. Why haven’t we learned how to stop them?
Seriously: otherwise strong economies collapse under the chaos that these territorial wars bring. Most of the wars seem to be fought in marginal areas and all sides would be better off if the politicians stopped worrying about these contested territories and just focused on building a economy attractive to international trade.
Why hasn’t the world learned the mechanisms to end these conflicts before they erupt into open warfare? Where is the political will to end this class of war once and for all? Disease and terrorism are the invariable fruits of these conflicts and strike us all across national boundaries. The “international community” needs to be mean more than impressive choreography and a few thousand athletes in Beijing. This week’s real gold metal will go to the leaders that can transcend macho posturing and weak-willed apologizing and get those Russian tanks out of Georgia.

The Andrew Walton Idiot Defense

Martin Kelley — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 18:22:24 +0000

Please read Galante and Follieri: the Bishop and the Con Man, which lays out the details mentioned in this post.

The Diocese of Camden is in frantic spin control mode after yesterday’s revelations that Bishop Galante personally received $400,000
from high flying Eurotrash con man Raffaelo Follieri for the sale of a
beach house the Bishop had been unable to unload. Follieri’s the guy
who’s been trying to buy up Catholic church properties across the
country while making out with his Hollywood girlfriend on San Tropez
beaches and partying it up with Bill Clinton’s sleezy billionaire
buddies.

It seems like a pretty clear cut case. Galante had his hand in Follieri’s cookie jar.
Sold his beach house to the guy who stood to profit most from the
Bishop’s plan to sell off half of South Jersey’s churches. Oldest story
in the book. Give him the cell next to Follieri’s and they can reminisce about
the good old days (NSFW).

I’ve been wondering just how the Diocese would try to spin this story
as it waits for federal investigators to come knocking at the door. And
today the official Spokesperson in Charge of Fairy Tales called up all the papers. Ladies and gentlemen, we present you with:

The Andrew Walton Idiot Defense

Turns out someone at the Vatican called someone at the
Diocesan offices back in 2004 telling them to sell to Follieri. That’s
it. No one can remember who made the call. No one can remember who took
the call. For all we know Follieri filled his mouth with cotton balls
and did his best Marlon Brando imitation from the pay phone across the street.

The Archdioceses in Boston, New York, Newark and elsewhere told Follieri they had enough bridges thank you very much, but poor Grandpa Joe was confused and started lending him priests and giving him the keys to the beach house.

How could anyone imagine that Follieri was a crook? He seemed like any
other Mother Teresa choir boy with his $10,000 suits, New York penthouse,
heroin habit, convicted mob associates, San Tropez weekends and expensively-maintained Hollywood girlfriend. “Nobody was aware of problems with Mr. Follieri or his company at that time.” Yeah right. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody. And I’m the widow of the late John Paul II, recently deceased President of the Vatican, with frozen assets in Nigeria I’d like your help in securing. Please email me back at your earliest convenience Andy Walton, I know you won’t be disappointed.

The bishop gets THAT LOOK

Martin Kelley — Sat, 31 May 2008 12:03:11 +0000

I’ve been busy with work lately and much of my free time has been spent helping Julie and the Savestmarys.net coalition. St. Mary’s is one of about sixty South Jersey Catholic churches the bishop is trying to close down and replace with smily happy Megachurches. I’m still not going Catholic on you all, I just don’t like short-sighted religious bureaucrats with secret agendas, and I like places and people and churches with roots and history.

On Tuesday night Bishop Galante and his posse came to visit St Mary’s and were greeted by an overflow crowd. He came with charts and a game show host of a priest for MC who tried to start the meeting with a pasted-on smile and crowd-control speaking rules. The St Mary’s parishioners were having none of it. There were over five hundred people in the pews asking why the Bishop wanted to shut down a church with sound finances, an impassioned priest, an involved laity and the wherewithal to continue another hundreds years.

“Vibrant” has become the Bishop’s stock answer, his new favorite code word. Like a President backpedaling on the rationales of an unpopular war, his spokespeople have admitted under pressure of evidence and easy solutions that the closures aren’t due to a priest shortage, financial problems at the targeted churches, or the lack of lay participation and involvement. The only explanation the bishop can offer for closure is “vibrancy.” But every time he tries to define “vibrant” he ends up describing St. Mary’s and dozens of other local churches he wants to close.

There’s obviously more to the definition than he’d like to share. One parishioner asked whether he thought a small church was even capable of displaying the “vibrancy” he demands. He refused to answer, which suggests we’ve finally dug down to a real answer. His fix for South Jersey is Megachurches that cop strategies from the Evangelical movement and consolidate power more closely in the diocesan offices.

The bishop gave the church-saving movement its best metaphor when he disparaged the little churches he wants to shutter as “Wawa churches.” Readers from outside the Mid-Atlantic region might know that Wawa is a local convenience store chain but that’s like saying water is a common chemical compound. You can’t drive more than twenty minutes without passing three Wawas. South Jersians practically live there. The bishop might was well condemn motherhood, baseball and apple pie if he’s going to take on South Jersey’s Wawa.

One disgruntled “Catholic in name only” campaign supporter rose to reclaim the Wawa label, saying that all these little churches were indeed like Wawa: ubiquitous, open at all hours, with good food that brought people in. The bishop obviously prefers the Walmart model: big box, big parking lot, hidden Eucharists, gameshow-host priests and clowns for music directors (seriously: check out this post of Julie’s and scroll down to the Greatest American Hero dude). I’m not sure why someone who dislikes Catholic culture so much would want to become a priest and I’m really not sure why someone who dislikes South Jersey culture so much would agree to be its bishop. One blogger recently wrote “I have gone through enough mergers and consolidations to know one thing
is true: reductions in manpower and assets are made for tighter
control” which sounds like as good an explanation as any other I’ve heard. Power and money: same as it ever was.

I was following the kids around outside for much of what turned into a speak-out session but I got to see twenty seconds of my wife Julie’s testimony on the Fox affiliate’s 10 o’clock news. Julie had THAT LOOK when addressing the bishop. It’s a look I know too well, it’s a look that means “I’m right, I know it, and I’m not backing down.” If I’ve learned anything over the course of the last seven years of marriage it’s that I don’t stand a chance when Julie gives me THAT LOOK: it’s time to concede that yes she is right, because any other option will just prolong the pain and delay the inevitable. I saw hundreds of people giving the bishop that same look last night.

It’s nice to see South Jersey standing up to an outsider who hates its culture and wants to force change for the sake of his own power and profit. We get a lot of it down here. The power guys usually end up winning: the woods get chainsawed and the farmlands buried under vast expanses of generic box stores and cookie-cutter McMansions financed by Philly money and greased by the pro-development laws of North Jersey politicians. I could be wrong, but after this week I don’t think the bishop stands a chance. The question now is how long he’s going to prolong his . And how many churches will he succeed in taking down in the name of “vibrance?”

Cindy Sheehan “resigns”: It’s up to us now

Martin Kelley — Tue, 29 May 2007 16:56:47 +0000

Poor Cindy Sheehan, the famous anti-war mom who camped outside Bush’s Crawford Texas home following the death of her son in Iraq. News comes today that she’s all but “resigned from the protest movement”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070529/ap_on_re_us/cindy_sheehan. She posted the following “on her Daily Kos blog”:http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/5/28/12530/1525
bq. The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a “tool” of the Democratic Party… However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the “left” started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of “right or left”, but “right and wrong.”
The sad truth is that she was used. Much of the power and money in the anti-war movement comes from Democratic Party connections. Her tragic story, soccer mom looks and articulate idealism made her a natural poster girl for an anti-Bush movement that has never really been as anti-war as it’s claimed.
Congressional Democrats had all the information they needed in 2002 to expose President Bush’s outlandish claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But they “authorized his war of aggression anyway”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Resolution. More recently, Americans gave them a landslide vote of confidence in last November’s elections but still they step back from insisting on an Iraq pull-out. The Nonviolence.org archives are full of denunciations of President Clinton’s repeated missile attacks on places like the Sudan and Afghanistan; before reinventing himself as a earth-toned eco candidate, Al Gore positioned himself as the pro-war hawk of the Democratic Party.
Anti-war activists need to build alliances and real change will need to involve insiders of both major American political parties. But as long as the movement is fueled with political money it will be beholden to those interests and will ultimately defer to back-room Capital Hill deal-making.
I feel for Cindy. She’s been on a publicity roller coaster these past few years. I hope she finds the rest she needs to re-ground herself. Defeating war is the work of a lifetime and it’s the work of a movement. Sheehan’s witness has touched people she’ll never meet. It’s made a difference. She’s a woman of remarkable courage who’s pointing out the puppet strings she’s cutting as she steps off the stage. Hats off to you Cindy.

Nonviolence.org’s fundraising campaign ends in a few hours. In four months we’ve raised $150 which doesn’t even cover that period’s server costs. This project celebrates its twelfth year this fall and accurately “exposed the weapons of mass destruction hoaxes”:http://www.nonviolence.org/weapons_of_mass_destruction/ in real time as they were being thrust on a gullible Congress. Cindy signed off:
bq. Good-bye America …you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it. It’s up to you now.
Sometimes I really have to unite with that sentiment.