How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

"Usefulness does not equal worth... despite what capitalism says, productivity does not equal value."

"I am opposed to the way that corporate platforms buy and sell our attention, as well as to designs and uses of technology that enshrine a narrow definition of productivity, and ignore the local, the carnal, and the poetic. I am concerned about the effects of current social media on expression, including the right not to express oneself, and its deliberately addictive features. But the villain here is not necessarily the internet or even the idea of social media. It is the invasive logic of commercial social media, and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction. It is furthermore the cult of individuality and personal branding that grow out of such platforms, and affect the ways we think about our offline selves and the places where we actually live."

"Our citizenship in a bio-region means not only familiarity with the local ecology, but a commitment to stewarding it together. It's important for me to link my critique of the attention economy to the promise of bio-regional awareness, because I believe that capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all co-produce one another."

"Simple awareness is the seed of responsibility."

"I'm sort of the quintessential California atheist."

"If we think about what it means to concentrate, or pay attention at an individual level, it implies alignment. Different parts of the mind and even the body acting in concert, and oriented toward the same thing. To pay attention to one thing is to resist paying attention to other things. It means constantly denying and thwarting provocations outside the sphere of one's attention. We contrast this with distraction, in which the mind is disassembled, pointing in many different directions at once, and preventing meaningful action."

"As I noted earlier, there is a significant portion of people for whom the project of day-to-day survival leaves no attention for anything else. That's part of the vicious cycle too. This is why it's even more important for anyone who does have a margin, even the tiniest one, to put it to use in opening up margins further down the line. Tiny spaces can open up small spaces. Small spaces can open up bigger spaces. If you can afford to pay a different kind of attention, you should."

"I don't know what a personal brand is, other than a reliable unchanging pattern of snap judgments. 'I like this, and I don't like this,' leave little room for ambiguity or contradiction."

"I worry that if we let our real-life interactions be corralled by our filter bubbles and branded identities, we are also running the risk of never being surprised, challenged, or changed, never seeing anything outside ourselves, including our own privilege."

"Eventually, to behold is to become beholden to." 

"It's pretty intuitive that truly understanding something truly understanding something requires attention to its context. What I want to emphasize here is that the way this process happened for me with birds, was spatial and temporal. The relationships and processes I observed were things adjacent in space and time. For me, a sensing being, things like habitat and season helped me make sense of the species I saw, why I was seeing them, what they were doing, and why. Surprisingly, it was this experience, and not a study on how Facebook makes us depressed, that helped me put my finger on what bothers me so much about my experience of social media. The information I encounter there lacks context, both spatially and temporally.

"For example, let's take a look at my Twitter feed right now as I'm sitting inside my studio in Oakland in the summer of 2018. Pressed up against each other in neat rectangles, I see the following: an article on Al-Jazeera by a woman whose cousin was killed as school by ISIL; an article about the Rohinga Muslims fleeing Myanmar last year, an announcement that At Dosharee Zone, a joke account, is selling new T-shirts, someone arguing for congestion pricing in Santa Monica, California; someone wishing happy birthday to former NASA worker Katherine Johnson, a video of NBC announcing the death of Senator McCain, and shortly afterward cutting to people dressed as dolphins appearing to masturbate on stage; photos of Yogi Bear mascot statues dropped in a forest; a job alert for director of the landscape architecture program at Morgan State University; an article on protests as the Pope visits Dublin; a photo of yet another fire erupting, this time in the Santa Ana Mountains; someone's date visualization of his daughter's sleeping habits during her first year; a plug for someone's upcoming book about the anarchist scene in Chicago; an Apple ad for Music Lab featuring Florence Welch. Spatial and temporal context both have to do with the neighboring entities around something that help define it. Context also helps establish the order of events. Obviously, the bits of information we're assailed with on Twitter and Facebook feeds are missing both of these kinds of context. Scrolling through the feed, I can't help but wonder, 'What am I supposed to think of all this? How am I supposed to think of all this?' I imagine parts of my brain lighting up in a pattern that doesn't make sense, that forecloses any possible understanding. Many things in there seem important, but the sum total is nonsense. And it produces not understanding, but a dull and stupefying dread."

"Presented with information in the form of itemized bits and sensationalized headlines, each erased by new items at the top of the feed, we lose that which was spatially and temporally adjacent to that information. But this loss happens at a more general level as well. As the attention economy profits from keeping us trapped in a fearful present, we risk blindness to historical context at the same time that our attention is ripped from the physical reality of our surroundings."

"...much necessary work is ignored or devalued as caregiving, a gendered after thought to the real dynamos of the economy, when in reality, no shared life could do without it."

"It's tempting to conclude this book with a single recommendation about how to live, but I refuse to do that. That's because the pitfalls of the attention economy can't just be avoided by logging off and refusing the influence of persuasive design techniques. They also emerge at the intersection of issues of public space, environmental politics, class, and race. Consider two things in tandem: first, people in wealthier neighborhoods almost always have more access to urban parks and to park land, on top of the fact that such neighborhoods are often in the hills or by the water... Second, consider that while seemingly every kid in a restaurant is now watching bizarre, algorithmically-determined children's content on YouTube, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both severely limited their children's use of technology at home. As Paul Lewis reported for The Guardian, Justin Rosenstein, the Facebook engineer who created the Like button, had a parental control feature set up on his phone by an assistant to keep him from downloading apps...without personal assistants to commandeer our phones, the rest of us keep on pulling to refresh [like on Twitter, a feature the creature is 'penitent' about bringing into the world], while overworked single parents juggling work and sanity find it necessary to stick iPads in front of their kids faces. In their own ways, both of these things suggest to me the frightening potential of something like gated communities of attention--privileged spaces where some, but not others, can enjoy the fruits of conemplation and the diversification of attention."

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Like the deeply introverted Gifty, I held my experiences with God and the Scriptures I had memorized sequestered inside my being as I went into a world both full of wonder and discovery and also set against the idea of there being a God if his existence implies any bit of relevance or answerability.

"This is something I would never say in a lecture or a presentation or, God forbid, a paper, but, at a certain point, science fails. Questions becomes guesses become philosophical ideas about how something should probably, maybe, be. I grew up around people who were distrustful of science, who thought of it as a cunning trick to rob them of their faith, and I have been educated around scientists and laypeople alike who talk about religion as though it were a comfort blanket for the dumb and the weak, a way to extol the virtues of a God more improbable than our own human existence. But this tension, this idea that one must necessarily choose between science and religion, is false. I used to see the world through a God lens, and when that lens clouded, I turned to science. Both became, for me, valuable ways of seeing, but ultimately both have failed to fully satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning."

 

"My mother crawled out of her deep, dark tunnel, but perhaps this phrasing is too imprecise, the image of crawling too forceful to encapsulate the relentless but quiet work of fighting depression. Perhaps it is more correct to say that her darkness lifted, the tunnel shallowed, so that it felt as though her problems were on the surface of the Earth again, not down in its molten core."

 

"'I think it's beautiful and important that to believe in something, anything at all. I really do.'

"She said the last part defensively because I was rolling my eyes. I'd always been annoyed by any whiff of the woo-woo, faux spirituality of those who equated believing in God with believing in, say, a strange presence in a room. In college, I'd once left a spoken-word show Anne had dragged me to because the poet kept referring to God as a 'she,' and that need to be provocative and all-encompassing felt to trite, too easy. It also went counter to the very concerns of an orthodoxy and a faith that ask that you submit, not in the kumbaya spirit of the Earth, but in the specific. In God as he was written, and as he was. 'Anything at all' didn't mean anything at all. Since I could no longer believe int he specific God, the one whose presence I felt so keenly when I was child, then I could never simply 'believe in something.'"

 "We read the bible how we want to read it. It doesn't change, but we do."

 "Like everyone else, I get a part of the story, a single line to study and recite, to memorize."

"I'd once been like that, so lonely that I craved further loneliness." 

"I think we are made of stardust and God made the stars."

 

Falling Upward by Richard Rohr

The Invitation to a Further Journey

"Many, if not most, people and institutions remain stymied in the preoccupations of the first half of life." This looks like
~"establishing their personal (or superior) identity"
~"creating various boundary markers for themselves"
~"seeking security"
~"perhaps linking to what seems like significant people of projects" (vii)

"But, in my opinion, this first-half-of-life task is no more than finding the starting gate" (viii).

Desmond Tutu: "We are only the light bulbs, Richard, and our job is just to remain screwed in" (ix).

True Self: "the larger and foundational self that we are in God"... not "the small self or the psychological self" (169).

"God gives our soul, our deepest identity, our True Self" (ix).

"Our unique little bit of heaven is installed by the Manufacturer within the product, at the beginning! We are given a span of years to discover it, to choose it, and to live our destiny to the full. If we do not, our True self will never be offered again, in our own unique form--which is perhaps why almost all religious traditions present the matter with utterly charged words like 'heaven' and 'hell'" (ix).

So finding our true self=heaven?? If so, it seems we attain it at our own effort. God has given it, but it is up to us to uncover it.

"All we can give back and all God wants from any of us is to humbly and proudly return the product that we have been given--which is ourselves!" (x) (Similar wording to Micah 6:8, very different message!)

"True religion is always a deep intuition that we are already participating in something very good, in spite of our best efforts to deny it or avoid it" (x). (Again, shockingly similar language to biblical language of James 1:27, but the message is just so not that. I think the essence of Rohr's message can have some value, but I wish he would not equate it with faith. The two can inform one another, but I wish he would make it obvious that one can be a heaven-bound believer, due to their faith in Christ's work, without ever taking this journey, and that it is also possible to go on this journey without ever coming to faith. They are different. Obviously I think one is more important. But I still think the other is important, I just wish he wasn't being so heretical about it.)

"You are already in the eternal flow that Christians would call the divine life of the Trinity." "There is nothing to join, only something to recognize, suffer, and enjoy as a participant." So we're all already a part of it, and not we are called to participate? A lot of what Rohr is saying I just don't even understand, aside from trying to fit into a Christian framework, which I recognize I shouldn't do despite his insistence on labeling it as such. Maybe it's because I'm a novice mystic, but it just sounds so poetic it's nonsensical. Hopefully I'll understand better...

Introduction:
"There is much evidence on several levels that there are at least two major tasks to human life. The first task is to build a strong 'container' or identity; the second is to find the contents that the container was meant to hold" (xiii).

"We are a 'first-half-of-life culture,' largely concerned about surviving successfully" (xiii).  "But it takes longer to discover the 'task within the task,' as I like to call it: what we are really doing when we are doing what we are doing" (xiv).

eros- life energy
thanatos- negative energy

"We actually respond to one another's energy more than to people's exact words or actions...What we all desire and need from one another, of course, is that life energy called eros!" (xiv).

"This is surely what Jesus meant when he said that you could tell a good tree from a bad one 'by its fruits' (Matthew 7:20). Inside of life energy, a group or family will be productive and energetic; inside of death energy there will be gossip, cynicism, and mistrust hiding behind every interaction. Yet you usually cannot precisely put your finger on what is happening. That is second-half-of-life wisdom, or what Paul calls 'the discerning of the spirits' (1 Corinthians 12:10). Perhaps this book can be a school for such discernment and wisdom. That is surely my hope" (xv). LORD HAVE MERCY, is this really his theology? Does he  study these Scriptures he takes wildly out of context? In this discussion of the spirits, where is the Person of the Holy Spirit?

"It is when we begin to pay attention, and seek integrity precisely in the task within the task that we begin to move from the first to the second half of our own lives. Integrity largely has to do with purifying our intentions and a growing honesty about our actual motives. It is hard work. Most often don't pay attention to that inner task until we have some kind of fall or failure in our outer tasks" (xv). Okay, I'm squinting my eyes a little less now. This makes some sense. When we are young, we are focused on rule following and frameworks, indeed we need them to begin to grow. As we grow older we can get to nuance and the heart of the matter, and integration. I relate to this in regards to my journey of faith, going from what others told me the Bible said to figuring out a theology of the entire Bible, and seeing how it can still be true in light of different perspectives, etc. I think many go through this kind of journey.

"My observations tell me that if we can clarify the common sequencing, staging, and direction of life's arc a bit more, many practical questions and dilemmas will be resolved" (xv).

"None of us go into our spiritual maturity completely of our own accord, or by a totally free choice. We are led by Mystery...setting out is always a leap of faith, a risk..." We "set out from the known and the familiar to take on a further journey" (xvii).

"The soul has many secrets. they are only revealed to those who want them, and are never completely forced upon us" (xviii).

"One of the best-kept secrets, and yet one hidden in plain sight, is that the way up is the way down. Or, if you prefer, the way down is the way up" (xviii). Examples: "Dr. Faust has to sell his soul to the devil to achieve power and knowledge; Sleeping Beauty must sleep for a hundred years before she can receive the prince's kiss. In Scripture, we see that the wrestling and wounding of Jacob are necessary for Jacob to become Israel (Genesis 32:26-32), and the death and resurrection of Jesus are necessary to create Christianity" (xix). "This, of course, was Scott Peck's major insight in his best-selling book, The Road Less Traveled. He told me personally once that he felt most Western people were just spiritually lazy. And when we are lazy, we stay on the path we are already on, even if it is going nowhere. It is the spiritual equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics: everything winds down unless some outside force winds it back up" (xix). These seem excellent observations. His examples of failures, suffering, and sin leading to spiritual breakthroughs, however, are downright heartbreaking. Adam and Eve "'sinned'" (in quotes), "Sin is behovely!" (xxi), and the if we try to avoid sin we are just Pharisees doing even more harm. Thus the sharp choice to call our spiritual breakthrough something we "fall" into. He concludes, "We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right" (xxii), and "the demand for the perfect is the greatest enemy of the good. Perfection is a mathematical or divine concept, goodness is a beautiful human concept that includes us all" (xxii). Oh, what a sad misrepresentation of the gospel. Oh, to see that we are indeed incapable of any breakthroughs or growth or anything good or meaningful on our own. To see that the answer is not to "fall" forward, giving up on perfection and seeing the goodness within, but to see rightly ourselves as already fallen and desperate for salvation. Oh, to recognize the need for a savior, that we may rightly celebrate the perfect gift of Jesus' righteousness that is given to us! Oh, to walk in his grace, to say "not I, but Christ in me" (is that not similar to Rohr's own language?). To be led by his Spirit! I remain convinced that this belief system does make sense, but only when we have all the pieces. If sin, atonement, imputed righteousness, or life by the Spirit are left out, it all falls apart, and we're left with meager innate human goodness and the spirit of eros.

Yet, I agree with him in part. Many have initially been taught to keep "up, clear, clean, and together" (xxiii), but when we, as Rohr says, "desire a downward path to growth through imperfection," or as I would say, realize that our best efforts at perfection or even goodness fall short, that is when the magic happens!! Rohr says, "those who have gone 'down' are the only ones who understand 'up,'" (xxv), and I would argue that only those who have become aware of their true desperation can know Christ's strength. We agree that "it is not by your own willpower or moral perfection" and that "we can't engineer it by ourselves. It is done unto us" (xxvi).

CHAPTER 1: The Two Halves of Life
"...the task of the first half of life is to create a proper container for one's life and answer the first essential questions: 'What makes me significant?' 'How can I support myself?' and 'Who will go with me?' The task of the second half of life is, quite simply, to find the actual contents that this container was meant to hold and deliver" (1).

"Only when you have begun to live in the second half can you see the difference between the two. Yet the two halves are cumulative and sequential, and both are very necessary....No Pope, Bible quote, psychological technique, religious formula, book, or guru can do your journey for you" (3).

Words for first-half-of-life-ers: juniors, beginners, novices, milk, letter, baptized, apprentice, morning, young
Words for second-half-of-life-ers: seniors, proficients, initiated, meat, spirit, confirmed, master, evening
The first look down on the views of the latter, because "they cannot understand what they have not yet experienced" (3).

The big three issues of the first half of life: identity, security, and sexuality and gender (4). Most of history, most generations, and most of religion is consumed with these, has only made it this far. This time is characterized by being "self-preoccupied," boundary formation, "ego structuring," boundaries (3). Another list: "success, security, and containment--'looking good' to ourselves and others...the early stages in Maslow's 'hierarchy of needs'" (6). There is a need for a "narcissistic fix," in that "we all need some successes, response, and positive feedback early in life, or we will spend the rest of our lives demanding it, or bemoaning its lack, from others" (4-5). Getting a narcissistic fix=being mirrored early in life. "You have already been 'attended to,' and now feel basically good--and always will" (5). "Once you have your narcissistic fix, you have no real need to protect your identity, defend it, prove it, or assert it. It just is, and that is more than enough" (5). "That is exactly what is meant by 'salvation,' especially when we get our narcissistic fix all the way from the Top" (5). "When you get the 'Who am I?' question right, all the 'What should I do?' questions tend to take care of themselves" (6). "We all want and need various certitudes, constants, and insurance policies at every stage of life. But we have to be careful, or they totally take over and become all-controlling needs, keeping us from further growth" (6).

Many teachers have used "process language" to describe the journey to maturity. "Unless you can chart and encourage both movement and direction, you have no way to name maturity and immaturity" (9). These many teachers agree:
1--"You can only see and understand the earlier stages from the wider perspective of the later stages" (9). These kind of people are the best leaders, and they're less concerned with defending their own stance, and more concerned with inclusivity and compassion.
2--"...from your own level of development, you can only stretch yourself to comprehend people just a bit beyond yourself" (10).

"If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and personal advantage--as if it were God!" (11). [Reminds me of my top take-away from None Like Him and Lore Wilbert's wise words on the Called Out Podcast.]

"Theologically and objectively speaking, we are already in union with God. But it is very hard for people to believe or experience this when they have no positive sense of identity, little courage yet, no strong boundaries to contain Mystery, and little inner religious experience at any depth. Thus the first journey is always about externals, formulas, quotes, and special clothing, all of which largely substitute for actual spirituality (see Matthew 23:13-32)" (13). Yet these things are "probably necessary" (13).

"In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in all things, charity"--Pope John XXIII (13).

"...authentic God experience...consoles our True Self only after it has devastated our false self" (13).  "...we have not found a way to do the age-appropriate tasks of the two halves of life, and both groups are losing out" (15).

CHAPTER 2: The Hero and Heroine's Journey

**Pause to take a deep breath and discern what is true in what Richard Rohr says, despite his audacious but amiss attempts to explain "the precise meaning of the wounds of Jesus!" (19).

All heroes go on a journey, which involves leaving security, safety, and comfort. "Unless you build your first house well, you will never leave it. To build your house well is, ironically, to be nudged beyond its doors" (23).

Chapter 3: The First Half of Life

"The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young." --James Hollis

"Healthily conservative people tend to grow up more naturally and more happily than those who receive only free-form, 'build it yourself' worldviews, in my studied opinion" (25).

"You need to struggle with the rules more than a bit before you throw them out. You only internalize values by butting up against external values for awhile. All of this builds the strong self that can positively obey Jesus--and 'die to itself.' In fact, far too many (especially women and disadvantaged people) have lived very warped and defeated lives because they tried to give up a self that was not there yet" (26).

"Law and tradition seem to be necessary in any spiritual system both to reveal and to limit our basic egocentricity, and to make at least some community, family, and marriage possible" (29).

"...we ironically need limit situations and boundaries to grow up. A completely open field does not do the job nearly as well or as quickly.... If you want a job done well, on time, with accountability and no excuses, you had best hire someone who has faced a few limit situations. He or she alone has the discipline, the punctuality, the positive self-image, and the persistence to do a good job. If you want the opposite, hire someone who has been coddled, been given 'I Am Special" buttons for doing nothing special, and had all his or her bills paid by others, and whose basic egocentricity has never been challenged or undercut. To be honest, this seems to describe much of the workforce and the student body of America. Many of the papers I receive in summer graduate courses at major universities are embarrassing to read in terms off both style and content, yet these same 'adults' are shocked if they do not get an A. This does not bode well for the future of our country" (31).

"[Eric Fromm] says that the healthiest people he has known, and those who very often grow up in the most natural way, are those who, between their two parents and early authority figures, experienced a combination of unconditional love along with very conditional and demanding love!" (32).

"I know this is not the current version of what is psychologically 'correct,' because we all seem to think we need nothing but unconditional love. Any law, correction, rule, or limitation is another word for conditional love. It is interesting to me that very clear passages describing both God's conditional love and also God's unconditional love are found in the same Scriptures, like Deuteronomy and John's Gospel. The only real biblical promise is that unconditional love will have the last word!" (33).

"Butting up against limits actually teaches us an awful lot. 'I would not have known the meaning of covetousness, if the Law had not said, "You shall not covet,"' says St. Paul in his tour de force against the law in his letter to the Romans! (34).

"I am trying to place you and then hold you inside of a very creative tension, if you will allow yourself to be held there. I do promise you it is a creative tension, because both love and freedom are necessary for spiritual growth, as Paul says in Romans and Galatians...Despite having been directly taught to hold this creative tension, rare is the Christian believer who holds it well. We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them--both immature responses...very few Christians have been taught how to live both law and freedom at the same time. Our Western dualistic minds do not process paradoxes very well. " (35-36)

"I am also deeply aware of the damage that misuse of law, custom, authority, and tradition has done in human history and to personal development. I know the destructive and immature state that mere reliance on structure and authority has engendered. The anger and blindness it often brings is devastating, because it often takes away both a necessary self-confidence and a necessary self-questioning. We see this in our political debates today, in people's lack of basic self-knowledge (too-quick answers to keep you from necessary searching), and in scary fundamentalist thinking in all of the world religions" (38).

"But I am not here to say either-or. I am here to say both-and. It is not just 'the exception that proves the rule' but somehow that the loss or transgression of the rule also proves the importance and purpose of the rule" (39).

"None of us can dialogue with others until we can calmly and confidently hold our own identity" (42).

"Unfortunately, we have an entire generation of educators, bishops, and political leaders who are still building their personal towers of success, and therefore have little ability to elder the young or challenge the beginners. In some ways, they are beginners themselves. Self-knowledge is dismissed as psychology, love as 'feminine softness,' critical thinking as disloyalty, while law, ritual, and priestcraft have become a compulsive substitute for the actual divine encounter or honest relationship" (43).

"...spiritually speaking there are no dead ends. God will use this too--somehow--and draw all of us toward the Great Life" (43).

"Western people are a ritually starved people, and in this are different than most of human history" (44).

"The first battles solidify the ego and create a stalwart soldier; the second battles defeat the ego because God always wins" (47).

I'm not sure about the parallels he's making between Freudian terms and theological terms?? Maybe because I so poorly understand all the Freudian stuff, and I can't make sense of his theology either.

"The world mythologies all point to places like Hades, Sheol, hell, purgatory, the realm of the dead. Maybe these are not so much the alternative to heaven as the necessary path to heaven" (50).


Chapter 4: The Tragic Sense of Life

"Every time God forgives us, God is saying that God's own rules do not matter as much as the relationship he wants to create with us" (57).

"...the whole drama was set in motion by the 'transgression' of Adam and Eve, and then the whole world was redeemed, say many Christians, by an act of violent murder! If God has not learned to draw straight with crooked lines, God is not going to be drawing very many lines at all. Judeo-Christian salvation history is an intergrating, using, and forgiving of this tragic sense of life. Judeo-Christianity includes the problem inside of the solution and as part of the solution" (59).

"Sin and salvation are correlative terms. Salvation is not sin perfectly avoided, as the ego would prefer; but in fact, salvation is sin turned on its head and used in our favor" (60).

"The only people who do not believe that the Enneagram is true are those who do not understand it or have never used it well" (61).

"I do not think you should get rid of your sin until you have learned what it has to teach you" (61).

Chapter 5: Stumbling Over the Stumbling Stone

"Sooner or later, if you are on any classic 'spiritual schedule,' some event, person, death, idea, or relationship will enter your life that you simply cannot deal with, using your present skill set, your acquired knowledge, or your strong willpower. Spiritually speaking, you will be, you must be, led to the edge of your own private resources. At that point you will stumble over a necessary stumbling stone, as Isaiah calls it; or to state it in our language here, you will and you must 'lose' at something. This is the only way that Life-Fate-God-Grace-Mystery can get you to change, let go of your egocentric preoccupations, and go on the further and larger journey" (66).

None of us leaves our comfort zone until we have to (66). "So we must stumble and fall, I'm sorry to say" (66).

"It seems that in the spiritual world, we do not really find something until we first lose it, ignore it, miss it, long for it, choose it, and personally find it again--but now on a new level....In the end, we do not so much as reclaim what we have lost as discover a significantly new self in and through the process" (67).

"There must be, and, if we are honest, there always will be at least one situation in our lives that we cannot fix, control, explain, change, or even understand. For Jesus and for his followers, the crucifixion became the dramatic symbol of that necessary and absurd stumbling stone. Yet we have no positive theology of such suffering, for the most part. Many Christians even made the cross into a mechanical 'substitutionary atonement theory' to fit into their quit pro quo worldview, instead of suffering this inherent tragedy, as Jesus did himself. They still want some kind of order and reason, instead of cosmic significance and soulful seeing" (68). Footnote here says, "For Franciscans, Jesus did not need to change the mind of God about humanity, but he came to change the mind of humanity about God. Ours is a Cosmic Christ from all eternity who revealed the eternal love of God on the cross, but God did not need any 'payment' to love us." This blows my mind, because it seems Rohr himself is trying to fit the event into his logical framework, but of course it doesn't fit it you don't believe in sin and in forgiveness as grace motivated by love and other things of such "cosmic significance." I really am trying to see things from his point of view, but I still don't understand why he thinks Jesus had to die, then. To prove that facing and overcoming difficult things leads to new growth? I think he did mention elsewhere that if Jesus hadn't died, Christianity wouldn't have been born. It's all very brain-contorting to me. He does say, "Jesus must be crucified, or there can be no resurrection" (69). Hmm.

"Suffering does not solve any problem mechanically as much as it reveals the constant problem that we are to ourselves, and opens up new spaces within us for learning and loving. Here Buddhism was much more observant that Christianity, which made even the suffering of Jesus into God's attempt to solve some cosmic problem--which God had largely created to begin with! The cross solved our problem by first revealing our real problem-- our universal pattern of scapegoating and sacrificing others. The cross exposes forever the 'scene of our crime'" (69). So this makes it sound to me like the point of suffering is to reveal imperfections within us. I don't know of any worldview that gives a satisfactory, nice-bow-on-it, oh-now-I-understand-and-am-at-peace explanation of suffering, but I will say I far prefer Christianity's view of suffering that there is innocent suffering.

"If you do you do not do the task of the first half of life well, you have almost no ability to rise up from the stumbling stone" (71). Away from any thoughts about Christian teaching, orthodox or not, this makes sense form a developmental, habit, identity sense. "There is nothing to defeat 'infantile grandiosity.'...We try to believe that is is all upward and onward--any by ourselves" (71). Most don't succeed at this, (and "stay at the bottom of their own lives and try to overcompensate in all kinds of futile and self-defeating ways" (71)), but those who do "succeed" and are kept from "awareness, empathy, and basic human compassion" (72).

Chapter 6: Necessary Suffering

Carl Jung: much "unnecessary suffering" comes from people not accepting the "legitimate suffering" that is just part of being a person. "It is no surprise that the first and always unwelcome message in male initiation rites is 'life is hard.' We really are our own worst enemy when we deny this" (74).

"The Christian truth, and Jesus as its spokesman, is the worldview that got me started, that formed me and thrilled me, even though the very tangent that it sent me on made me often critical of much of organized Christianity. In some ways, that is totally as it should be, because I was able to criticize organized religion from within, by its own Scriptures, saints, and sources, and not by merely cultural, unbelieving, or rational criteria. That is probably the only way you can fruitfully criticize anything, it seems to me" (75). AND ME TOO. 

"Necessary suffering goes on every day, seemingly without question" (77). I sure question it. My worldview holds this to be the result of the fall, and not forever. Is there beauty in time? Yes. Does suffering somehow bring about maturity? Yes. But will there be suffering in heaven? I don't think so. Even realities like: "only one saguaro cactus seed out of a quarter of a million seeds ever makes it even to early maturity," I see to be a result of the fall. Hmm.

"I quote Jesus [so much] because I still consider him to be the spiritual authority of the Western world, whether we follow him or not" (81).  This statement baffles me because it seems quite objective and final for Rohr...but only claims to make Jesus the authority in the West.

Rohr says that when Jesus commands his followers to "hate" their family, "he is actually undoing the fourth commandment of Moses" (82).  🚨.

"Many people are kept from mature religion because of the pious, immature, or rigid expectations of their first-half-of-life family. Even Jesus, whose family thought he was 'crazy' (Mark 3:21), had to face this dilemma firsthand" (83).

"To move beyond family-of-origin stuff, cultural stuff, flag-and-country stuff is a path that few of us follow positively and with integrity" (84).

"The nuclear family has far too often been the enemy of the global family and mature spiritual seeking" (84). Interesting idea. Very interesting in light of trauma/attachment, etc...but is this what Jesus is talking about?

Chapter 7: Home and Homesickness

"Home is another word for the Spirit that we are, our True Self in God. The self-same moment that we find God in ourselves, we also find ourselves inside God, and this is the full homecoming, according to Teresa of Avila" (91). But why capitalize Spirit here?? I have a spirit, but the Spirit is the Holy Spirit aka God.

"The Holy Spirit guiding all of us from home and toward home is also described in John's Gospel as an 'advocate' ('a defense attorney,' as paraclete literally means, John 14:16), who will 'teach us' and 'remind us' as if some part of us already knew but still needed an inner buzz or alarm clock to wake up" (92).

Chapter 8: Amnesia and the Big Picture

"It is religion's job to teach us and guide us on this discovery of our True Self, but it usually makes the mistake of turning this into a worthiness contest of some sort, a private performance, or some kind of religious achievement on our part, through our belonging to the right group, practicing the right rituals, or believing the right things" (98). 😕

"Any discovery or recovery of our divine union has been called 'heaven' by most traditions. Its loss has been called 'hell'...Only the True Self knows that heaven is now and that its loss is hell--now" (101). 🤪

"Everyone is in heaven when he or she has plenty of room for communion and no need for exclusion. The more room you have to include, the bigger your heaven will be....If you go to heaven alone, wrapped in your private worthiness, it is by definition not heaven" (101). If the first part means having humility and recognizing that I am just as unworthy as anyone else to receive God's grace, then 💯

"If you accept a punitive notion of God, who punishes or even eternally tortures those who don't love him, then you have an absurd universe where most people on this earth end up being more loving than God! God excludes no one from union, but must allow us to exclude ourselves in order for us to maintain our freedom... No one is in hell unless that individual himself or herself choose a final aloneness and separation. It is all about desire, both allowing and drawing from the deepest level of our desiring.... Jesus touched and healed anybody who desired it and asked for it, and there were no other prerequisites for his healings. Check it out yourself. Why would Jesus' love be so unconditional while he was in this world, and suddenly become totally conditional after death?" (102). 🤦‍♀️

Chapter 9: A Second Simplicity

"I totally believe in Adam and Eve now, but on about ten more levels. (Literalism is usually the lowest and least level of meaning)" (106). 🤔

"...there was a much bigger world than the United States and the Roman Catholic Church, which I realized were also paradoxes. The e pluribus unum("out of many, one") on American coinage did not include very 'many' of its own people (blacks, gays, Native Americans, poor folks, and so on), and as a Christian I finally had to be either Roman or catholic, [meaning all-embracing] and I continue to choose the catholic end of that spectrum. Either Jesus is the 'savior of the world' (John 4:42), or he is not much of a savior at all. Either America treats the rest of the world democratically, or it does not really believe in democracy at all. That is the way I see it" (108). Oh that people wouldn't feel they have to choose between the church and a faith for all people. Lord, have mercy.

"Unfortunately, most Christians are not well trained in holding opposites for very long, or living with what could be creative tension" (111). Yep.

"Basic religious belief is a vote for some coherence, purpose, benevolence, and direction in the universe" (111).

"I worry about 'true believers' who cannot carry any doubt or anxiety at all...People who are so certain always seem like Hamlet's queen 'protesting too much' and trying to hard....It is probably necessary to eliminate most doubt when you are young; doing so is a good survival technique. But such worldviews are not true--and they are not wisdom" (111). 💯

"As the body cannot live without food, so the soul cannot live without meaning" (112).

"Humans are creators of meaning, and finding deep meaning in our experiences is not just another name for spirituality but also the very shape of human happiness" (113). I see this and recognize its place, and it makes me long for what Eugene Peterson calls Spiritual Theology, because the spirituality of it all is essential, but so is good doctrine, IMHO. 

Chapter 10: A Bright Sadness

"There is a gravitas in the second half of life, but it is now held up by a much deeper lightness, or 'okayness.' Our mature years are characterized by a kind of bright sadness and a sober happiness, if that makes any sense" (117). Yes, it does.

"Holier-than-thou people usually end up holier than nobody" (118). 

"[In the second half of life] Daily life now requires prayer and discernment more than knee-jerk responses toward either the conservative or liberal end of the spectrum. You have a spectrum of responses now" (119).

On second-half-of-life people: " I no longer have to prove that I or my group is best, that my ethnicity is superior, that my religion is the only one that God loves, or that my role and place in society deserve superior treatment.... Erik Erikson calls someone at this stage a 'generative' person, one who is eager and able to generate life from his or her own abundance and for the benefit of following generations. Because such people have build a good container, they are able to 'contain' more and more truth, more and more neighbors, more and broader vision, more and more of a mysterious and outpouring God. Their God is no longer small, punitive, or tribal... They now enjoy the moon itself instead of fighting over whose finger points to it most accurately, quickly, or definitively" (121).

"I hope you are becoming that shining person yourself, and that this book is helping you... Otherwise, this book too will just be some more words--instead of words becoming flesh. Until it becomes flesh, it cannot shine and shine brightly" (125). In other words, apply what you read. Good advice in general.

Chapter 11: The Shadowlands

"Your shadow is what you refuse to see about yourself, and what you do not want others to see" (128).

"Spiritual maturity is largely a growth in seeing" (130).

"The general pattern in story and novel is that heroes learn and grow from encountering their shadow, whereas villains never do" (131).

"The gift of shadowboxing is in the seeing of the shadow and its games, which takes away much of the shadow's hidden power" (134).

"In our work with men, we have found that in many men this inability or refusal to feel their deep sadness takes the form of aimless anger. The only way to get to the bottom of their anger is to face the ocean of sadness underneath it" (135). 💯

Chapter 12: New Problems and New Directions

"If you are on course at all, your world should grow much larger in the second half of life" (137).

"'How can I honor the legitimate needs of the first half of life, while creating space, vision, time, and grace for the second?' The holding of this tension is the very shape of wisdom" (138).

"So again the meticulous navigating of our small river surpasses ever diving into the Big River" (139).

Then "Jesus' first definition of the church as 'two or three gathered in my name'" as being so wise: When did Jesus define the church this way?

"In your second half of life, you can actually bless others in what they feel they must do, allow them to do what they must do, challenge them if they are hurting themselves or others--but you can no longer join them in the first half of life. You can belong to such institutions for all the good that they do, but you no longer put all your eggs in that one basket. This will keep you and others from unnecessary frustration and anger, and from knocking on doors that cannot be opened from the other side. In short, this is what I mean by 'emerging Christianity'" (142). And my linear brain still just wants a definition, because I still don't understand what you mean. I have a lot to learn in understanding this line of thinking. 

"...the cure for loneliness is actually solitude!" (143).

"Basically, the first half of life is writing the text, and the second half is writing the commentary on that text" (143).

"At the risk of being too cleverly alliterative (though it may help you remember), here is the normal sequencing of the dualistic mind: it compares, it competes, it conflicts, it conspires, it condemns, it cancels out any contrary evidence, and then it crucifies with impunity" (147).

"Jesus, I am convinced, was the first nondualistic religious thinker in the West,... but his teachings were quickly filtered through Greek dualistic thought!" (149).

"Dualistic thinking gets you in the right ball park ('You cannot serve both God and mammon'), but non-dualistic wisdom, or what many of us call contemplation, is necessary once you actually get in the right field. 'Now that I have chosen to serve God, what does that really mean?' Nondualistic thinking presumes that you have first mastered dualistic clarify, but also found it insufficient for the really big issues like love, suffering, death, God, and any notion of infinity. In short, we need both" (150). 

Chapter 13: Falling Upward

"Until and unless you give your life away to others, you do not seem to have it yourself at any deep level" (154).

"The only final and meaningful question is 'Is it true?' Not 'Who said it?' 'When and where did they say it?' 'Does the Bible or the pope or my president say it?' or 'Do I like it?' The only meaningful, helpful, and humble question is 'Is it objectively true?'" (156).

"Intimate I-Thou relationships are the greatest mirrors of all" (159).

Not sure where this quote came from:
"“When you get your “Who am I?” question right, all the “What should I do?” questions tend to take care of themselves.”-- Rohr


Quotes I really like are this color. A few jump out as ringing true and being important. 

😕 This is the face I make when I think he is saying something that has a grain of truth in it, but on the whole is still way off base to the point of being misleading. Usually it's something that would be a lot closer to true if he understood the gospel message that he is misunderstanding and therefore misrepresenting.

🤪 This is the face I make when I think, 'either you're crazy or I'm crazy' because I don't see it the same way at all. 

🤦‍♀️ This is the face I make when I feel so sad and frustrated at how he's interpreting the gospel message. 

Red and the alarm emoji are for when I feel more negative emotions than just sad about the way he's interpreting the gospel message. 

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

 "It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing" (203).

Spurgeon's Sorrows by Zack Eswine

 "Remember, it has required more faith for some to do less than you" (48).

"Some things we never get over. We get through them of on with them, but not over them" (57).

"Realistic hope is a Jesus-saturated thing" (85).

"It would not be wise to live by a supposed faith, and cast off the physician and his medicines, any more than to discharge the butcher, and the tailor, and expect to be fed and clothed by faith. We make use of medicines, but these can do nothing apart from the Lord, 'who healeth all diseases'" (112).

You're Not Enough (And That's Okay)

I share Stuckey's concern that our culture is searching for validation, meaning, fulfillment within the self in a way that is contrary to both the created order and the worship of Christ. What she defines as "self-love" if often manifested in mantras like, "You are enough," and "You are worthy," and emphasis on self-care and self-affirmation. I see the need for addressing this from a Christian perspective, because I believe that this approach on its own will never lead to fulfillment, but Christ can. Stuckey doesn't keep the focus on her book's titular topic; she covers everything from "the toxic culture of self-love," to race relations, to work, to marriage and dating advice, quickly turning this book into a chance to declare views on truth in many arenas. I found this disappointing for 2 reasons: one, in covering--mentioning, really--so many controversial topics in 224 pages, it was clear that she wasn't thoughtfully trying to model or teach discernment to her readers. There was only space to tell people what to think, to pat those on the back who agree with her. This wasn't even a space for either convincing others, or for helping those who already agree with  her understand why their views align with Biblical thinking. She only gave short arguments, and declared what was true, and moved onto the next thing. Two: There was utter dismissal of the fact that others within orthodoxy have different views. I agree with her on the (in these days, extremely counter-cultural) stance that God has authority to declare what is right and wrong when it comes to ethics, sexuality, and all the rest. What I don't appreciate is her treating her interpretation of Scripture as the Only One. There is a difference between standing for the primary doctrines of the faith, and stating, with just as much authority, that intersectionality has no place in the church. Her approach tries to exile even many who share the confession in the authority of God and Scripture from the Land of Truth. I found her tone lacking in humility and compassion. She's not trying to convince others as much as she's ridiculing those foolish enough to disagree. I do think our culture needs voices to speak against the blind acceptance of mainstream secularism and hyper-individualism, but I can't recommend this one.

One example is Stuckey's argument about self-love. She says that our culture already loves ourselves enough, as evidenced by our self-loathing, self-obsession, and "perpetual prioritization of our own wants, needs, problems, and dreams." She says that even someone committing suicide doesn't have a deficit of self-love because suicidal ideation is just one exercise of self-interest, as the concern is only ending one's own pain. To me, this whole argument points to a desperate need for definitions of terms. But sadly, this logic makes sense to me as Stuckey seems primarily set on arguing against the culture of progressives who prescribe self-love as salvation, who never point followers toward Christ. But sometimes, because we don't like the solutions the other side promotes, we deny even that their premise is correct. Stuckey herself ruins her own argument when she quotes CS Lewis: "Love is unselfishly choosing for another's good." If what Lewis says is true, then doesn't it follow that love of self is far different than self-obsession, and maybe the self-interest she's condemning is different from concern for the truly good? Choosing what is ultimately good for myself means pointing myself toward Christ and and his kindness and his truth. If the sufferer contemplating suicide were to love themself, that would look like walking away from a violent way of ending life; it would look like taking difficult steps toward healing and flourishing. And framed like that, it's hard for me to see how loving yourself (with a proper definition of love) is harmful.

Often, in my experience, Christians have created a false dichotomy that equates the self with the flesh, the deceptive heart, the depravity of fallen humanity, and says anything involving the self is bad because it is by definition mutually exclusive of Christ, goodness, and virtue.

Stuckey says that there's no indication that we don't love ourselves enough. Rather, she says, we love ourselves too much. "Yes, many of us struggle with insecurities and even self-loathing, but these are just other indicators of self-obsession. Even when we don't like ourselves, our perpetual prioritization of our own wants, needs, problems, and dreams above all else proves that we still love ourselves a whole lot." 

"The self can't be both the problem and the solution."

"The culture of self-love" falls short in light of Ephesians 2:2,4, which says that on our own we were dead, BUT GOD.

She speaks against "the cult of self-affirmation", in which the god is the self, and its tenets are authenticity and autonomy. The cult of self-affirmation shows up most apparently in the glorification of abortion." 

"This is why Christianity and the cult of self-affirmation can't coincide. The values of the Christ-follower aren't authenticity and autonomy, they're Christlikeess and obedience. We have an objective estandard of right and wrong, found in the Bible, which means we're not ruled by cultural standards or our feelings.

She quotes John Piper as saying, "We all have to ask ourselves, 'How do we find the pace we need to finish the race?'" We all need rest, breaks, etc, but is our mindset focused on what we are entitled to, or how we can best continue to serve for the long haul?

She quotes Brene Brown as saying, "The truth about who we are lives in our hearts." She then rips this apart because of course the truth of who we are is declared by God and revealed to us only through Scripture. OH FOR SOME NUANCE. I don't think this quote is in direct opposition to Christ. Of course, the foundation of our identity is based on who Christ says I am. As Christians, God's revelation should come first; anything else contradicting it cannot be true. But to act as if what our hearts tell us has no place and is always worthy of being wholly disregarded is just foolish. If I am healthy and growing in Christ, when I look in my heart, I will see the truths of what he has declared. And if when I look in my heart, I don't see the truths of Scripture, that is good for me to acknowledge, to be aware of, to investigate. I don't want what I Believe and Know about Truth to be so separate from my heart. This thinking that if any truth resonates with who we are, it is suspect or even automatically untrue, that to truly embrace absolute truth we have to disregard everything going on side of us, is harmful. Truly I think it's why so many are leaving the faith. We are not taught how discern, how to hold to the truth of Christ and integrate it into everything we are, even our hearts and experiences. We are not taught how Jeremiah 17:9 and Jeremiah 31:33 can BOTH be true, how there is our flesh and there is our identity in Christ, our now truest self. Then the world's offers of a life that validate this reality becomes irresistible, and sadly we think the two are mutually exclusive. 

"Our experiences and even ehtnicities matter, but they don't ultimately define us. We are defined by Jesus. There's not place for intersectionality in the body of Christ. This doesn't discount the disadvantages people indeed face, nor the uneven playing field that inevitably characterizes life on earth, and it certainly doesn't abdicate our responsibilities as Christians to help those in need."

"Colossians 3:23 says, 'Whatever you do, work heartily as for the Lord and not for man.' We don't have to have the perfect job to glorify God with our work. The work that honors him only has to meet three qualifications: it's done well, it meets a real need, and it contributes to the good of those around us. This means that whether you're a CPA, a botanist, a janitor, a secretary, or a graphic desire, your work can matter and bring glory to God. Glorifying work doesn't have to earn a paycheck either. Stay-at-home moms, caretakers, and volunteer workers can still fulfill the qualifications for God-honoring work by working diligently to help those around them." 

She quotes AOC: "We should be excited about automation, because what it could potentially mean is more time educating ourselves, more time creating art, more time investing in and investigating the sciences, more time focused on invention, more time going to space, more time enjoying the world that we live in. But the reason we're not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don't have a job, you're left to die, and that is, at its core, our problem." She says AOC and others view work as amoral and points to her Green New Deal, which provides for those who don't work. "This is an unbiblical view of work." 

Are warnings against idleness, warnings against the things AOC is talking about?

Just because we don't agree with the conclusions someone draws, doesn't mean we have to fight against their premises. Let's stop feeling attacked and suggest other creative solutions.

Then her explanation of her growing her role as commentator/speaker has to do with the satisfaction of doing something she knew she was good at and enjoyed. 

"There are not better earthly titles I could hold than mom and wife, as cliche as that may sound."

"You are entitled to your dreams" is a lie. She got exactly what she wanted, but we shouldn't expect that. 

She says that in order for feelings to be valid, they have to  be based in reality. "While all valid feelings are real, not all real feelings are valid." She goes on to talk about our fear not being rooted in the truth of God's promises, our anger being rooted in selfishness, etc. She tells us we should examine these and lay them before God. There is no room for getting curious about them. She then talks about sorting through our feelings. We examine them and lay them before God. 

In the section on marriage advice, she says, "feelings aren't everything but they are something, especially if they're giving you warning signs that something's not right." Then she goes on to say that investigating these feelings could lead to discovery of idols. This is a way more helpful way to look at it!

Compassion & Conviction by Justin Giboney, Michael Wear, and Chris Butler

 Law and Values

"The Separation of church and state was not intended to prevent Christians or any other religious group from promoting or applying their values in the policymaking process. All citizens have the right to advocate and vote based on their values, whether secular or religious. In fact, all policies and laws come from some set of values...

"A person's values are principles and standards of behavior, and laws are correspondingly based on principles and standards of behavior. The idea that it's possible to separate the values of the people from their laws is absurd" (31).

"There's nothing wrong with being conflicted about how both options are right in part and wrong in part. The bigger problem is when Christians are unaware or unbothered by the faults on the side they prefer. This isn't to suggest a false equivalency between the two parties. One party might be more wrong on more issues at a given time, but we must realize that both fall well short of the Biblical standard.

"Christians can choose a political party, but we can't choose between love and truth. We can't fully embrace movements that dismiss justice or undermine moral order" (40).

"The law is a teacher. When the law teaches the wrong lessons, it is our responsibility to listen and follow the teachings of Jesus and not allow politics to determine our values. However the societal effect of law is undeniable. If the law teaches that sexual freedom is an ultimate end, that will corrode the nation's moral infastructure. If the law teaches that economic profit is society's chief aim, that will corrode the nation's moral infastructure.

"How to apply moral standards can be complicated. Multiple moral truths might be in conflict when considering a single political decision. Policies that would seem to advance a moral truth might end up undermining it. Indeed, sometimes it is wise to accept that the best use of the law in a given situation is not to enforce morality but rather to allow for the freedom to be moral" (46-47).

"Partnering with nonbelievers can never mean agreeing with them on all matters" (59).

I learned about the Hidden Tribes study (Stephen Hawkins) that divides Americans into 7 tribes: Progressive Activists, Traditional Liberals, Passive Liberals, Politically Disengaged, Moderates, Traditional Conservatives, and Devoted Conservatives. "Interestingly, the two smallest and most extreme tribes (Progressive Activists and Devoted Conservatives, 8 percent and 6 percent of Americans respectively) have the loudest voice in American sociopolitical discourse because of their high levels of engagement and large amounts of money. They often frame the issues for the majority of us, who the study calls the 'Exhausted Majority' (67 percent). This has resulted in high levels of polarization" (62). 

Frederick Douglass: 'I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong' (68). May it be so.

"The civic space is full of hidden agendas and corrupt activity; it's no place to timidly accept the assertions of others. It's intellectually lazy to agree with the same political party on every single issue. That's a clear indication that we've become indoctrinated, which should never be an option for Christians" (73).

"Race is a part of the history of the United States and a part of the history of the church. Many of the personal and corporate experiences of Christians with race have been shameful and hurtful. Race is not an easy topic to engage, but an unwillingness to confront the issue of racism is one of the greatest roadblocks to reconciliation" (97). 

"We must confront racism with humility and grace, with a posture of self-examination, not self-defense, remembering that God demands something of all of us (Exodus 20), even if we've been the victim. As Christians we ought to have a much clearer view of our own depravity and need for mercy. That awareness of sin in our lives and in our own cultures must drive us to a posture of humility, first toward God and then by extension to our fellow humans (Ephesians 5:21). Furthermore, being aware of the profound mercy and forgiveness of God, we should find grace to confront our personal and cultural issues knowing that we serve a God of love who intends to cleanse us from sin rather than destroy us because of it (1 John 1:9)" (98).

"The basic, primal kinship that one can feel toward other people of the same race plays a part in identity politics: a black man wants to be able to show his son another successful black man as evidence that he can also be great. To conclude that your interests won't be fully represented when no one making the decisions looks like you or shares your experiences is a logical deduction with a sound historical basis" (100).

"And again, the church should be leading the way. We can understand and appreciate identity politics, intersectionality, and critical race theory. But our identity is in Christ, and our political values are deeply rooted in our faith. This should help us avoid identity-based manipulation at the hands of political parties and political leaders" (101).

I love the anecdote from Acts 19:32: "Some were shouting one thing, some another. Most of the people did not even know why they were there" as a picture of what's happening these days. "There was chaos and confusion, and the only thing that people were sure about and agrees on was that they were angry. Some of the people in Christian tribes want us to be divided and stirred into chaos because it makes it easier for them to control the opinions of large numbers of people" (102). The implication here is not that only those in Christian tribes do this, but let us certainly not think that only those outside the church do it!

"Like any other field of endeavor, effective political engagement requires a range of skills, and as Christians we must never make the mistake of thinking that the right motives are a substitute for strategic precision and skill" (113).

"...civility is a recognition of human dignity. All incivility is, at its root, preceded by dehumanization" (118).

"Unfortunately, incivility is often used as a misdirection. Incivility is not an excuse to deflect on issues of public import.... We should reflect on whether we employ calls for civility in circumstances that might hinder our political ambitions, or whether we only call for civility from those we disagree with" (122). 

"Injustice does not justify incivility, but it is reasonable for incivility to spring forth from injustice. People who are proponents of civility but quietists on everything else are, in fact, a great threat to civility" (123). 

"Incivility is a public problem, but incivility among Christians in the public square is a genuine threat to the witness of the church" (123)

"Dear Christian, if you are going to do civics and politics, we first urge you to do it. All throughout Scripture there are diverse action commands. Without a doubt, civic and political engagement begins with what we think about what we believe--and our prayer is that this book has helped you to shape and clarify your thinking and belief. But never be drawn off into the false assumption that right thinking and right belief are sufficient. As with so many other areas of Christian life, orthodoxy is hollow apart from orthopraxy. Christian faith starts with what we think and believe, but it manifests itself in what we do. Democracy is not ultimately an adjective or even a noun; democracy is a verb" (128).