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cryingoflot49 · 2 years ago

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Book Review

Ratner’s Star by Don DeLillo

Somebody once told me that Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star is an inscrutable novel, impossible to interpret and impossible to understand. I took this as a challenge. After all, I’ve read supposedly impossible books like Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and Gravity’s Rainbow. I’ve plowed through The White Goddess by Robert Graves and managed to make some sense out of Heidegger’s Being and Time and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. The trick to understanding these books is knowing what to read for, where to look for it, and how to separate the main ideas from the noise and irrelevant details. And especially be careful when listening to others who have read these books and obviously didn’t understand them, but felt a need to explain them anyways. Whether I am guilty of this or not will be left to others to decide. My take on Ratner’s Star is that it is a picaresque-style novel and that Billy Twillig is one of the least important characters in the narrative.

Billy Twillig is a prodigal scholar. At the age of fourteen, he wins the Nobel Prize for mathematics due to his work with zorgs, a branch that only six people in the world are able to understand. Billy gets taken to a secretly-located institution to work on an assignment to decode a message received from aliens in outer space. Billy, unsurprisingly, acts like a teenager despite his advanced skills, an aspect of him that never gets fully explored by DeLillo in the narrative. He is equal parts cheeky and horny, taking every chance he can get to ask questions of the adults that deprecate them but never himself. The institute itself seems, at times, more like a lunatic asylum than it does a research facility. DeLillo says that this first half of the book was modeled on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I didn’t pick up on that by myself, but after having learned that, it fits more or less.

The other scientists are eccentric, to say the least. After arriving, Billy encounters some of them in an artificial, man-made Elysian field. One of the first he meets is Cyril, a scholar working with a team of linguists to define the word “science”. This task is harder than first imagined as they can not agree to where the parameters of the definition lie. Some of them argue that primitive magic, as described by Frazer in The Golden Bough, should be considered part of the definition because those folk magic and customs were devised for the same reasons that science was invented; the purpose was to understand nature and the universe and to exert some sort of control over it for the benefit of humanity. Modern science is nothing more than a precise and more finely tuned form of magic.

Throughout the course of the discussion, Billy is introduced to some female scientists who study the natural elements and he think of them as nothing less than Pagan deities. After assigning one of them the characteristics of a water goddess, he spies on her while she is bathing only to be chastised by her when she catches him. This scene alludes to Artemis, the Greek goddess of chastity, who caught Actaeon spying on her in the woods. This Paganism is all significant because it introduces a theme that pervades throughout the entire book, the primitivism of science as it encounters the frontiers of human knowledge and also the disconnection between language and reality. Since thought, science, and mathematics are all products of language, all of which are tools used to comprehend what we encounter as real, nothing can ever be known in full. The signifier can never be equal to the signified. In the context of comparing Pagan magic and its transition into science, the same questions are foundations for both endeavors with science introducing higher levels of accuracy but also increasing levels of complexity to the point where finding defnite answers may be impossible. Where magic and religion have finality, closure, and the illusion of certainty, science offers only open ended questions that never stop expanding.

Billy Twillig proceeds to meet other strange, eccentric scientists in a similar vein. One is an Indian woman from the untouchable class who studies animal communication and how they are able to think without language. Again, this is another commentary on language and the nature of thought. How can we even use language to comprehend thought that manifests without language? Considering the woman is untouchable, Billy wants to know what would happen if he touches her leg. “Nothing, obviously,” is the woman’s answer, rendering the concept of “untouchable” an empty set. There are also two sleazy gangster types who speak an odd mishmash of languages and left me wondering if they were actually space aliens. They represent the Honduran Syndicate and wish to recruit Billy to manipulate international financial markets. Yet another doctor, claiming to be a lapsed Gypsy, whatever that means, and wants to get rich by turning Billy into a super-computer by inserting brain-accelerating electrodes into his head. Also in a secret ceremony, Billy meets the old scientist Ratner who lent his name to Ratner’s Star, the part of the galaxy where the coded message came from. Ratner was an astronomer who abandoned science as a career and embraced the mysticism of Hasidic Judaism when he realized that science can not answer the question of what happens when we die. On his deathbed during the ceremony, Ratner tells Billy his life story and then whispers the ultimate secret of life into Billy’s ear, but the secret is the most mundane statement you could possibly imagine. But the symbolism of the old passing traditional knowledge down to the young is what is most important here. It also exemplifies how mysticism is a closed system of information whereas science is, by contrast, an open system.

Those are some of the minor characters from the first half. One of the more important characters is Billy’s father who doesn’t contribute too much to the overall narrative, but does introduce one important theme. He takes Billy down into the subways of New York City, where it is dark and there is a danger of getting hit by a train, to teach him that the basis of life is fear. In this instance Billy directly experiences the fear of death since getting hit by a train in the dark would inevitably result in death. Indirectly, DeLillo is pointing out how the fear of death leads to magic, mysticism, and religious thought. Through Billy’s father, DeLillo also points out that fear can lead people to live lives of absurdity since the father owns a guard dog that no one is scared of except for young Billy, develops a neurosis over a pile of dirty dishes in the sink, walks the streets prepared for brawls that never happen, and almost assaults an elderly and frail Chinese man who he mistakes for a mugger. The father also makes the mistake of admiring a tall and talented basketball player for being the kind of son he wishes he had even though the athlete makes a dumb decision that ruins his career while Billy goes on to be a success. The father even considers murdering Billy out of fear of how the boy, unusually small for his age and full of unusual ideas, will make the family look. The father’s fear of death does not lead him to make wise or sensible decisions about life which may be DeLillo’s critique of religion and the possibility of science as an alternative.

Then there is Endor, the mathematician who was assigned to crack the code from Ratner’s Star before Billy came along. Endor lost his patience, moved to a remote location, and spent the rest of his life living in a hole, eating grubs, and digging a tunnel. This latter project parallels the scientific task in that research involves digging oneself deeper and deeper into a hole that eventually will lead to some truth. Endor, as we learn later in the book, actually solved the code before seemingly going crazy. After doing so, he realized that the tunnel digging involved in solving the puzzle created a tunnel leading nowhere as the answer to the original problem ultimately led to more questions rather than one answer. So Endor quit and began digging a tunnel that literally had no purpose and led nowhere. But it did mean something symbolically. The entire book is full of tunnels and hallways all joining up with enclosed rooms, caverns, cells, and enclosures. These may or may not allude to the kabbalah diagram that Ratner describes to Billy as he dies.

In fact, there is one astrophysicist who explains to Billy that black holes are entrances to tunnels and anything that enters them re-emerges in another part of the galaxy. Every star corresponds to a black hole. I am not atronomically literate enough to know if this is true, but it serves a purpose in the book. The man who explains this to Billy is Orang Mohole, the man who discovered moholes, or pockets of hidden space that permeate the cosmos. This character is significant because his moholes play a major part in explaining where the message from Ratner’s Star came from and why they took so long to reach Earth. Mohole is also a pervert and a bipolar psychotic who enjoys inventing sex toys as if he is preoccupied with penetrating into the secret spaces of women’s bodies. He also sometimes goes crazy and shoots people at random. It is possible that he is the man having a firefight with the police when the riddle of the coded message is solved. As if he entered a narrative black hole and re-emerged in another part of the book, kind of like the Aboriginal shaman with white hair and one eye.

If the first half of the book is meant to portray the different aspects of science, two things are certain: one is that teamwork is necessary for scientific research; none of these people are working on their own, but rather they are each deeply involved in one complex part of a larger scientific problem. The other deduction, and the other side of that teamwork, is that individual scientists are lonely, eccentric, and socially isolated people who often risk their sanity for the cause of discovering higher truths. The fact that science, as an open system of information, can never be complete, drives some practitioners into mental territories that suggest locations on the autism spectrum. And all these characters in the first half do represent aspects of science. Ratner represents its mystical element. The Honduran Syndicate represent the exploitation of science for technocratic power, the lapsed Gypsy is the commercialization of science, and Cyril shows how science, in its inability to finally and completely explain the nature of existence, is always at the frontier of human knowledge, while Endor portrays the problematic side of science in that it can never fully explain nature the way religion can.

By the start of the second half of the book, one thing becomes clear; Billy Twillig’s purpose is to provide a structure to the novel and a thread that holds the whole mess together. He is like Virgil leading Dante through Hell in The Divine Comedy, only we, the readers, are Dante and Billy does not tell the stories of the lost souls we encounter, rather he lets them speak for themselves.

In this second half, Billy continues to serve his narrative function as the main character but not the most important character since that role gets filled by Softly, a drug and sex addicted dwarf with a deformed and asymmetrical body. He takes Billy into some underground tunnels to a cavern compound below the institute where they have been working. Softly has assembled a team of scientists to construct a language based purely on logic and mathematics that will be utilizable as a tool so that any intelligent living being on Earth or in outer space can communicate with perfect efficiency, without any ambiguities or misunderstandings. Wasn’t Esperanto meant to do something similar? Softly explains to Billy that he originally brought him to the institute for this secret project. When Billy asks why he had to spend so much time working on deciphering the message from Ratner’s Star even though no one actually cared about it, Softly explains that that project was nothing but preparation for this more important task. In terms of structure, this is the author’s way of telling us that the first half of the novel introduces all the themes of the book and the second half puts them into play. The metanarrative is actually encapsulated in the narrative. Is this Chomsky’s recursion at a semantic level? Remember how most of Moby Dick was descriptions of whales and the esoteric language associated with the practice of whaling? The layman needs to learn all of that so they don’t get lost in technical descriptiveness when the action of the novel begins. Well, that worked for Herman Melville, but not so much for Don DeLillo. Ratner’s Star reaches a narrative plateau rather than a narrative peak. While Billy isolates himself, refusing to do any work, the others set about the task of creating the language and, by God, they create it. Oh yeah, and Billy cracks the code of Ratner’s Star too. No big surprises or conventional conflict resolutions.

But like the first half of the book, the second half is really all about the characters. Where previously characters were meant to represent different aspects of the scientific endeavor, now the characters in the project are brought into three-dimensionality for an exploration of their individual motives. One man works on this project to advance his career and status in the scientific community, one woman uses it as a means of fueling her own philosophical theories about language. A third is engaged in the project to reconcile his identity as a Chinese-American man, being unable to fit completely into either category of “Chinese” or “American”; He latter concludes that language barriers prevent him from being wholly one or the other. The most poignant portrayals of the inner lives of the characters come from Softly and Jean Venable, an author he hires to write a book about the project. Jean is actually a talentless writer with a turbulent psyche and an unfulfilling social life, possibly even suffering from mental illness. Softly chose her because he wants the story to be told to the general public by someone who doesn’t understand science; in other words, he seeks fame through mass popularity while also seeking prominence in intellectual circles through his real work. Actually, though, he is more preoccupied with using Jean for sex to overcompensate for his physical malformations. As we get to know Softly more, we learn that he is motivated by insecurity and self-loathing. He refuses to look into mirrors out of disgust and tries to conquer the world to make up for his inadequacy.

Otherwise, the scientific themes in the second half are really just expansions on the themes introduced in the first half. One theme that deserves some attention here is that of mathematics. A lot of readers are put off to this book because of it, but you don’t actually need to do any math to follow what is going on since DeLillo limits his exploration to theoretical mathematics rather than applied mathematics. What I get from this book is the need for math to remain an open system of communication so that mathematics can expand eternally and adapt to scientific changes as more knowledge accumulates. The paradox is that while pure mathematics deal in absolute truths, applied math needs to be constantly readjusted to function since science is a process of never-ending self-correction. Pure mathematics can only be self-referential thereby posing the question of whether they are pure or not when we utilize them to explain scientific objectivity. Or do we, in reverse, adjust our perceptions of objectivity to correspond with the ultimate truths of pure mathematics? Of course, this is postmodernism so there can ultimately be no solution to these problems. Is postmodernism meant to be an admission that there are limitations to our intellectual abilities or is it merely just a cop out? When reading Wittgenstein I think it’s the former, when reading Derrida I think it’s the latter.

In the end, Ratner’s Star certainly has its flaws. The anecdotes about Billy’s childhood don’t lend a whole lot to the overall story and I think some of them should have been written to completion or else left out entirely. I guess in postmodern novels, not everything makes sense because the world is just that way. Pynchon can get away with this, but here DeLillo appears to have made some poor editorial choices. Billy could have been developed as a character more too. I know he is more of a narrative device than a real character, but this still leaves a huge void in the center of the novel that makes it underwritten which is strange considering how overwritten everything else in this book is. Speaking of Pynchon, DeLillo intended this to be an homage to him. But instead of reading like an homage, it comes off as derivative and unoriginal. There are secret plots, paranoia, underground tunnels, secret societies, communications theory, arcane technological jargon, loose plot threads, sexual perversion, non sequiturs, narrative derailments, and even a couple songs stuck in at random places. It’s as if DeLillo took every element from Pynchon’s first three novels and repurposed them for his own novel. It is often too close to Pynchon to be good, but isn’t that also postmodernism? There is never anything new, only copies of copies of copies? In DeLillo’s case it doesn’t quite work. But this novel is far from being a failure. The well-drawn characters are unforgettable and full of depth, so much so that within a sentence or two they feel complete and fully realized. This is a trick few authors can master.

Would Ratner’s Star stand on its own for a reader who had never heard of Pynchon? I think it would. There is enough brilliance here to be independently evaluated without the overbearing shadow of the great and mysterious Ruggles. DeLillo is full of his own ideas and this is a unique exploration of language, logic, science, and mathematics that could never be recreated by anyone else. DeLillo’s later novels were definitely better, and Ratner’s Star is not for the casual reader, but for those who make the effort, and especially those who have an eagle’s eye for fine details, reading this book is a rich and rewarding experience.

#book reviews #don delillo #postmodernism #books #sciencefiction #scifi #novels #fiction #ratners star

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apilgrimpassingby · 1 year ago

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You know where I got that quote from? A review of Dominion by Tom Holland. Where he, an atheist, argues that it is Christianity that gives us our concept of human rights. Where he also notes that the first person to call for the abolition of slavery was a Christian, Gregory of Nyssa.

While I admittedly haven't read it, I have read God's Philosophers (UK title)/The Genesis of Science (US title) arguing that Christianity not only did not hinder, but played a significant role in founding science as we know it. While the author is a liberal Catholic, he's been praised by people who aren't - it was shortlisted for Royal Society Science Book Prize in 2010 and the British Society for the History of Science Dingle Prize in 2011, and historian of science Edward Grant has this to say: “Hannam has written a splendid book and fully supported his claim that the Middle Ages laid the foundations of modern science. He has admirably met another of his goals, namely that of acquainting a large non-academic audience about the way science and various aspects of natural philosophy functioned in medieval society and laid the foundation for modern science. Readers ... will learn about these important matters in the history of science against the broad background of the life and times of medieval and early modern societies.”

May I recommend History for Atheists to you? You are exactly the kind of fevered, historically illiterate anti-theist militant it was written to combat.

Oh, and by the way you still haven't responded to my point about the evidence for Jesus compared to similar figures. I'll be honest: you are the equivalent of someone who thinks the moon landing never happened. I will again call in Bart Ehrman (who, I will remind you, is an ex-Evangelical atheist who thinks Jesus was a failed doomsday prophet and the Bible is unreliable):

"Few of these mythicists are actually scholars trained in ancient history, religion, biblical studies or any cognate field, let alone in the ancient languages generally thought to matter for those who want to say something with any degree of authority about a Jewish teacher who (allegedly) lived in first-century Palestine. There are a couple of exceptions: of the hundreds -- thousands? -- of mythicists, two (to my knowledge) actually have Ph.D. credentials in relevant fields of study. But even taking these into account, there is not a single mythicist who teaches New Testament [Studies] or Early Christianity or even Classics at any accredited institution of higher learning in the Western world. And it is no wonder why. These views are so extreme and so unconvincing to 99.99 percent of the real experts that anyone holding them is as likely to get a teaching job in an established department of religion as a six-day creationist is likely to land on in a bona fide department of biology."

And while I'm being honest with you, I only responded to your initial post because I wanted to have a go at shredding your absurd and ignorant beliefs about the historical Jesus. So my interaction with you is not something you deserve.

Respond to my post comparing evidence for Jesus with evidence for Athronges, John the Baptist, the Samaritan Prophet, etc. in 24 hours from now (3:50 PM in the UK, 8:50 AM on the East Coast of the US) or I'm blocking you.

By the way @gaykarstaagforever, I had a little look at your blog and it reminded me of this quote by Tim O'Neill, amateur historian* and history blogger who got fed up of his fellow atheists pushing outdated pseudohistory.

"One of the things that often startles me about the way most anti-theist activists speak or write about Christianity is their almost visceral emotionalism. I happen to be a person raised a Christian who abandoned any faith pretty readily in my late teens and who lives in a highly secular country in a largely post-Christian society. On occasion certain Christians, particularly some prelates or politicians, will annoy me with a particularly stupid statement or action, but on the whole I can regard Christianity as I regard any faith – something that other people do that interests me largely as a historical phenomenon.

Many of those who are the focus of this blog, however, cannot seem to get Christianity out of their systems. A large number of them are, like me, ex-Christians, but ones who seem still mentally entangled in their former faith. Never able to emerge from a kind of juvenile angry apostasy, they seem impelled to strike out at it at every turn. They have to constantly remind others – and, it seems, themselves – of its manifest stupidity and wickedness.

This is why many of them cannot fathom how I can debunk myths about Christian history without also somehow being a kind of “Christian apologist” or “crypto-Christian”. It is why noting that the Church actually did not teach the earth was flat, that Christians did not burn down the Great Library of Alexandria or that the Galileo Affair was not some black-and-white moral parable of “science versus religion” elicits frantic efforts on the part of some to salvage something of these stories so that Christianity does not get off scot-free. It is also why the Jesus Myth thesis seems so convincing to many of these anti-Christian zealots while it appears clumsy and contrived to pretty much everyone else."

*He has an advanced degree in history, but it's not his job.

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elixirvitae · 2 years ago

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Haha okay. This is what I ended up keeping of my education, skills, and aptitudes for Alucard over his lifetime. The first paragraph is true and documented information as to the education of the irl Vlad Dracula.

No institutional education to speak of. He was tutored privately up until he was about 11. He was taught to be literate and multilingual. Historically, he spoke Bulgarian (most likely his mother tongue), Slavonic, what is now Romanian, Magyar, Turkish, German, Latin, and Greek. He would have learned basic math, how to ride a horse, and some basic information about foreign affairs, history, and religion. When he lived with the Turks he most likely taught geometry, chemistry, algebra, military history, how to fight in general (Hirano depicts him with a broadsword, but in reality he favored the kilij, a curved scimitar he learned to use with the Turks) and literature. Ottoman education was considered a higher standard of education compared to European schools.

After he turned, he wanted to learn about the nature of his new existence, and at the turn of the 16th century he picked up alchemical studies from his exposure to it via the Turks, which was basically the occult without being wholly rejected by the Abrahamic faiths. This opened the door to philosophy and further studies in chemistry. This was the gateway to him expand on his lesser intuitive capacity, as it allowed practical application theories (chemistry) to more conceptual theories (philosophy). He came to favor the works of Hermes Trismegistus, and found the concept of the Philosopher’s Stone an interesting concept. By the time his curiosity for alchemy had been sated, he’d decidedly settled on his own theory that the true nature of the Philosopher’s Stone was blood, and by “eating his own wings”--a metaphor for giving up his humanity and pursuit of divinity– he had incidentally transmuted his own blood into the Philospher’s Stone.

Conceptual studies weren’t all consuming; he still favored sensory (read as “practical”) skills. He expanded on his knowledge of arms and armory by learning to forge iron. Eventually he learned leatherwork and woodwork to supplement the creation of iron works. While these were means of survival or earning a living for humans, they were strictly hobbies for him, and he put them down to pick up new skills as his interests waxed and waned. He kept up with political affairs, domestic and foreign, and routinely brought in guests and tutors to keep his knowledge of the changing times up to date. When he wasn’t killing enemies of his homeland and feeding on them, he used the wealth he’d managed to abscond with and his up-to-date knowledge of the happenings of Europe to invest in commodities, political figures, and land.

Over time, he became less and less invested in the workings of the human world, and when he began keeping more to himself he picked up arts for the sake of learning something new. His favorite was architectural studies and design, and had a handful of properties built to his designs so he could move when there was cause for concern that he may be suspected for mass deaths in the local villages and encampments. Portraiture, landscapes, and architecture were subjects of drawing and painting, but when he reached a point of considerable technical skill he would drop the hobby for decades at a time. He learned to play a few instruments, including viola (and later on violin), harpsichord, and piano.

He consistently obtained books and hired the occasional tutor to teach him the remaining Romance languages and some others, as well as advancements in science, mathematics, philosophy, literature, warfare, and theology. This inevitably led to learning about the progression of Western Europe, and by the 19th century England was a significant place of secular development. Having learned Middle English long ago, he began learning modern English and English history with the goal of moving to England to expand his palette and his experiences of the human world.

He kept up with military developments throughout his entire life, and technology in general, and had long since begun learning how to use and maintain firearms. With the militarization of the Hellsing Organization in the 20th century, he got firsthand experience on modern weaponry, moreso under Arthur’s observance as opposed to Abraham who kept him on a very short leash. Despite sleeping through the 70’s and 80’s, he was quick on the uptake when Integra brought him back to the world. Integra allowed him to learn to operate vehicles, including cars, but particularly military aircraft as he made an excellent test pilot with effective indestructibility. He learned how to use phones and pagers, and developed a simplistic, if dismissive, understanding of how to operate a computer though he had little to no practical application of that understanding up until the end of the war in 1999.

Post series in the 2030’s he continued to bring himself up to speed on socio political affairs, technology, literature, sciences, and other practical matters.

#alucard hc #the first paragraph is true to the irl Vlad Dracula #thanks for the ask!

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ifthereisnowind · 4 years ago

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capitalism

context: why does it make me cringe? why does sales make me cringe?

why did I feel for a while that I don’t want to get caught up in the career ladder?

why do I judge people who chase money or fame?

what should truly motivate us at work

In a perfect world, when it came to choosing an occupation, we would have only two priorities in mind:

– to find a job that we enjoyed

– to find a job that paid us enough to cover reasonable material needs

But in order to think so freely, we would have to be emotionally balanced in a way that few of us are. In reality, when it comes to choosing an occupation, we tend to be haunted by three additional priorities. We need:

– to find a job that will pay not just enough to cover reasonable material expenses but a lot more besides, enough to impress other people – even other people we don’t like very much.

– we crave to find a job that will allow us not to be at the mercy of other people, whom we may deep down fear and distrust.

– and we hope for a job that will make us well known, esteemed, honoured and perhaps famous, so that we will never again have to feel small or neglected.

reforming capitalism

The system we know as Capitalism is both wondrously productive and hugely problematic. On the downside, capitalism promotes excessive inequality; it valorises immediate returns over long-term benefits; it addicts us to unnecessary products and it encourages excessive consumption of the world’s resources with potentially disastrous consequences – and that’s just a start. We are now deeply familiar with what can go wrong with Capitalism. But that is no reason to stop dreaming about some of the ways in which Capitalism could one day operate in a Utopian future.

What we want to see is the rise of other – equally important – figures that report on a regular basis on elements of psychological and sociological life and which could form part of the consciousness of thoughtful and serious people. When we measure things – and give the figures a regular public airing – we start the long process of collectively doing something about them.

The man is indeed employed, but in truth, he belongs to a large subsection of those in work we might term the ‘misemployed’. His labour is generating capital, but it is making no contribution to human welfare and flourishing. He is joined in the misemployment ranks by people who make cigarettes, addictive but sterile television shows, badly designed condos, ill-fitting and shoddy clothes, deceptive advertisements, artery-clogging biscuits and highly-sugared drinks (however delicious).

We intuitively recognise it when we think of work as ‘just a job’; when we sense that far too much of our time, effort and intelligence is spent on meetings that resolve little, on chivying people to sign up for products that – in our heart of hearts we don’t admire.

Fortunately, there are real solutions to bringing down the rate of misemployment. The trick isn’t just to stimulate demand per se, the trick is to stimulate the right demand: to excite people to buy the constituents of true satisfaction, and therefore to give individuals and businesses a chance to direct their labour, and make profits, in meaningful areas of the economy.

This is precisely what needs to be changed – and urgently. Society should do a systematic deal with capitalists: it should give them the honour and love they so badly crave in exchange for treating their workers as human beings, not abusing customers and properly looking after the planet. A standard test should be drawn up to measure the societal good generated by companies (many such schemes already exist in nascent form), on the basis of which capitalists should then be given extraordinarily prestigious titles by their nations in ceremonies with the grandeur and thrill of film premieres or sporting finales.

There’s no shortage: we need help in forming cohesive, interesting communities. We need help in bringing up children. We need help in calming down at key moments (the cost of our high anxiety and rage is appalling in aggregate). We require immense assistance in discovering our real talents in the workplace and understanding where we can best deploy them (a service in this area would matter a great deal more to us than pizza delivery). We have unfulfilled aesthetic desires. Elegant town centres, charming high streets and sweet villages are in desperately short supply and are therefore absurdly expensive – just as, prior to Henry Ford, cars existed but were very rare and only for the very rich.

But we know the direction we need to head to: we need the drive and inventiveness of Capitalism to tackle the higher, deeper problems of life. This will offer an exit from the failings and misery that attend Capitalism today. In a nutshell, the problem is that we waste resources on unimportant things. And we are wasteful, ultimately, because we lack self-knowledge, because we are using consumption merely to divert or quieten anxieties or in a vain search for status and belonging.

If we could just address our deeper needs more directly, our materialism would be refined and restrained, our work would be more meaningful and our profits would be more honourable. That’s the ideal future of Capitalism.

In the Utopia, businesses would of course have to be profitable. But the success of a business would primarily be assessed in terms of its contribution to the collective good.

On changing the world

the only way to bring about real change is to act through competing institutions. Revolutions in consciousness cannot be made lasting and effective until legions of people start to work together in concert for a common aim and, rather than relying on the intermittent pronouncements of mountain-top prophets, begin the unglamorous and deeply boring task of wrestling with issues of law, money, long-term mass communication, advocacy and administration.

Our collective ideal of the free thinker is that of someone living beyond the confines of any system, disdainful of ‘boring things’, cut off from practical affairs and privately perhaps rather proud of being unable even to read a balance sheet. It’s a fatally romantic recipe for keeping the status quo unchanged.

We have to make what we already know very well more effective out there. The urgent question is how to ally the very many good ideas which currently slumber in the recesses of intellectual life with proper organisational tools that actually stand a chance of giving them real impact in the world. From a completely secular starting point, it can be worth studying religions to learn how to alter behaviour.

This is what religions have, for their part, excelled at doing. They’ve realised that if you put down an important idea on paper in somewhat pedestrian prose, it won’t have any lasting or mass impact. They’ve therefore, over their history, engaged the most skilled artists to wrap their ideas in the coating of beauty. They have asked Bach and Mozart to put the ideas to music, they have asked Titian and Botticelli to give the ideas a visual form, they’ve asked the best fashion designers to make nice looking clothes and they’ve asked the best architects to design the most impressive and moving buildings to give the ideas heft and permanence.

We should use the history of religion to inform us about the role of repetition, ritual and beauty in the name of changing how things are.

There is a great deal of large-scale ambition in the world, but all the largest corporate entities are focused on servicing basic needs: the mechanics of communication, inexpensive things to eat, energy so we can move about. While our higher needs – for love, beauty, wisdom – have no comparable provision. The drive to grandeur is missing just where we need it most.

Good business

So, inevitably, businesses will evolve to profit from their wishes. Capitalism has not traditionally been interested in whether these are sensible, admirable or worthy desires. Its aim is neutral: to make money from supplying whatever people happen to be willing to pay for.

Philosophy, by contrast, has long recognised a crucial distinction between desires and needs:

A desire is whatever you feel you want at the moment.

A need is for something that serves your long-term well being.

And it’s our needs that are required for a satisfying, fulfilled life (which Plato, Aristotle and others call a life marked by eudaimonia).

Capitalism goes wrong when it exploits this cognitive flaw: large numbers of businesses sell us stuff that we desire but which (in all honesty) we don’t need. On longer, calmer reflection we’d realise those things don’t actually help us to live well.

Sadly, it’s easier to generate profits from desires than from needs. You can make much more money selling bad ice cream than by marketing Plato’s dialogues.

In a utopia, good businesses should be defined not simply by whether they are profitable or not; but by what they make their profit from. Only businesses that satisfy true needs are moral.

Good capitalism requires that we address two, core educational needs. Getting us to focus on what we really need, what the real challenges in our lives are. And getting us to focus on the value of particular goods in relation to our needs: that is, how do these particular purchases help with eudaimonia?

So, in search of a better economy, we should direct our attention not simply to shopping centres and financial institutions, but to schools and universities and the media. The shape that an economy has ultimately reflects the educated insights of its consumers. When people say they hate consumerism, what they often mean is that they are dismayed at peoples’ preferences. The fault, then, lies not so much with consumption as with the preferences. Education transforms preferences not by making us do what someone else tells us. But by giving us the capacities and skills to understand more clearly what we genuinely do want and what sort of goods and services will best help us.

tbc

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humansofhds · 4 years ago

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Amos Jackson III, MDiv ′23

“Healing matters to the oppressed, the disenfranchised, the poor, and the hungry. People can get justice, they can get policies and even resources, but it's the healing that actually helps them to move forward. If an individual gets justice but still carries trauma, are they really obtaining true justice?”

Amos is a first-year master of divinity degree candidate at Harvard Divinity School.

Politics and the Church

I was named after one of the minor prophets in the Bible as well as my father and my grandfather, who was named after his uncle. I'm the fourth generation of my name, but the third in my immediate family. I'm originally from West Palm Beach, Florida, but currently based in the Washington D.C. area. I’ve been here since I started college at Howard University, where I graduated from in 2019 as a double major in political science and African American studies.

I grew up in a non-denominational church and even went to pre-K there, but when I was about 13 we moved to a Baptist church not too far from our house, and that's where I really begun my personal faith journey. Growing up, no matter what happened on a Saturday night, we were going to church on Sunday at 7:45 am in the morning.

Interestingly, the church was my introduction to politics. I remember that the first time I met a politician was while he was at church campaigning, and I can recall asking myself why politicians frequented the Black church during election season. Because of the influence of my upbringing, and watching how religion played a big role in social movements, I've always had an interest in the intersection of religion and politics. I wanted to know why this intersection was so important to politicians. “Why now? Why here? What purpose does it serve?”

Seeking the answers to these questions is a big part of the reason I’m now at HDS. I still attend church every Sunday (now virtually) and lead a prayer call for my church every Sunday at 6 pm while also being devoted to the various social justice causes of my church, because I believe that faith requires me to go out of the four walls of the church building and be involved in the community.

Articulating the Value of HBCUs

I initially did not have the desire to attend an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) before I committed to Howard University. It wasn't until I got there that I understood the intellectual and cultural richness of the HBCU experience. The biggest benefit of all was getting my education from an African diasporic lens of learning. In comparison to other schools that might have been providing a Eurocentric or westernized form of education, I was learning about psychology, political science, and other spheres in a way that addressed them not just generally, but also their specific interactions with and effects on Black people.

Having the opportunity to be in a space where I felt comfortable and could unapologetically be myself was such a blessing. I also had the honor of being student body president and becoming an ambassador for my HBCU. HBCUs make up only 3 percent of higher education but produce 50 percent of Black lawyers and doctors. Some of the most exceptional Black leaders in this country—such as Martin Luther King, Thurgood Marshall, Ella Baker, John Lewis, Kamala Harris and so many others—were shaped and highly influenced by their HBCU education, and being able to stand on their shoulders as an HBCU alum is a high honor.

Working on a Historic National Campaign

2018 was a very important year for me. I met the then Senator Kamala Harris at an event in D.C., and I shared with her about the disappointment I had felt the night when the 2016 election results were released. I told her how I had believed my opportunities were crushed in D.C., but the silver lining in it all had been that fact that she was elected that very same night to the United States Senate. And there I was, a year-and-a-half later, asking if I could work for her. She offered me the opportunity, and that summer I started interning in her office. Just days after graduation, I was working as a national political coordinator for her presidential campaign in New Hampshire and Nevada. Fast forward to this past September, when I joined the Biden-Harris campaign as Senator Harris’s deputy political director. These opportunities have been endless, and I attribute this to my HBCU education providing me a pathway to work for an alumna of my institution. I do, in a way, see politics as a ministry, and I am grateful that I can now answer the questions I had as a child about why religion was significant for politics. I am seeing firsthand the extent to which society is driven by their social, religious, and moral views, and I'm just saying, that really matters.

The Road That Led to HDS

While in college I had also done an internship with the Center for Responsible Lending, which had a program called the Faith & Credit Roundtable. Part of the work we did there was train clergy to go to Capitol Hill and advocate for their parishioners and congregations regarding economic issues like payday lending, predatory lending, fair housing, and student loan debt, particularly in the Black community which, compared to other communities, has a very high debt-to-wealth ratio. Seeing the impact of that work awakened my aspirations, and I said to myself, “I can do this. I want to do this.” Incidentally, one of the directors of that program had received her master of divinity degree at Duke Divinity. She was the one that advised me to think about the possibility of attending divinity school. I, however, was under the impression that divinity school was only for those who wanted to preach or become a pastor, so I was really blind to all the opportunities that divinity school could bring. I did however end up applying to a few divinity schools, and ultimately Harvard. What solidified the decision for me was knowing that HDS provided the opportunity to take classes in all the different schools. So, if I wanted to see how religion affected public policy, I would have the Kennedy School. If I wanted to see how it affected business, I would have the Business School. If I wanted to see how it affected law and social justice, I would have the Law School. Therefore, making the choice to be in an institution that would enrich me in all of these capacities was a no-brainer.

Smelling the Roses

Something I’ve been reflecting on lately is that one of the biggest things we can do as students of ministry is to understand how healing works, and that it takes a communal effort to heal. Healing matters to the oppressed, the disenfranchised, the poor and the hungry. People can get justice, they can get policies and even resources, but it's the healing that actually helps them to move forward. If an individual gets justice, but still carries trauma, are they really obtaining true justice? People always ask me if I have plans to run for office, but I don't know about all that. I just love doing the work. If it provides an opportunity, sure; but that's not a goal of mine. I just want to pursue God's will for my life, and whatever that brings, I will take. I’m at the school I’ve always wanted to go to, doing the work that I always dreamed of doing, meeting the people I’ve always wanted to meet. So, I'm just trying to enjoy the moment right now, and be grateful and settled in the blessings that God has put in my life.

Interview by Suzannah Omonuk; photos courtesy of Amos Jackson III

#Harvard Divinity School #Harvard #politics #Religion #kamala harris #howard university #baptist church #social justice #large

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the-end-of-art · 4 years ago

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Sewn into his jacket an incoherent note

How to Make Love, Write Poetry, & Believe in God by Nin Andrews

A few weeks ago, I was part of a Hamilton-Kirkland College alumnae poetry reading, and after the reading a woman asked a simple question: “How do you write a poem?” I didn’t have an answer so I suggested a few books by poets like John Hollander, Mary Oliver, and Billy Collins. The woman said she had read books like that, but they didn’t help. She wanted something else, like a genuine operating manual—a step by step explanation.

I, too, love instruction manuals, especially those manuals on how to perform magic: write a poem or know God or make love, if only love were something that could be made. Manuals offer such promise. Yes, you, too, can enter the bee-loud glade and the Promised Land and have an orgasm.

I love the idea that my mind could be programmed like a computer to spit out poems on demand—poems with just the right number of lines, syllables, metaphors, meanings, similes, images . . . And with no clichés, no matter how much I love those Tom, Dick and Harry’s with their lovely wives, as fresh as daisies. I can set them in any novel or town in America, and they will have sex twice a week, always before ten at night, never at the eleventh hour, and it will not take long,time being of the essence.

I love sex manuals, too: those books that suggest our bodies are like cars. If only we could learn to drive them properly, bliss would be a simple matter of inserting a key, mastering the steering wheel, signaling our next moves, knowing the difference between the brakes and the gas pedal, and of course, following the speed limit.

A depressive person by nature, I am also a fan of how-to books on God, faith, happiness, the soul, books that suggest a divine presence is always here. I just need to find it, or wake up to it, or turn off my doubting brain. That even now, my soul is like a bird in a cage. If I could sit still long enough and listen closely, it might rest on my open palm and sing me a song.

God, poetry, sex, they offer brief moments of bliss, glimpses of the ineffable, and occasional insights into that which does not translate easily into daily experience, or loses its magic when explained.

In college, I took classes in religion, philosophy and poetry, and I studied sex in my spare time—my first roommate and I staying up late, pondering the pages of The Joy of Sex. As a freshman, I auditioned my way into an advanced poetry writing class by composing the single decent poem I wrote in my college years. The poem, an ode to cottage cheese, came to me in a flash as a vision nestled on a crisp bed of iceberg lettuce. Does cottage cheese nestle? I don’t know, but the professor kept admiring that poem. He said all my other poems paled by comparison.

This was in the era of the sexual revolution,long before political correctness and the Me-Too movement. My roommate, obsessed with getting laid, said we women should have been given a compass to navigate the sexual landscape. She liked to complain that she’d had only one orgasm in her entire life, and she wanted another. “What if I am a one-orgasm wonder?” she worried. The subject of orgasms kept us awake, night after night.

In religion class, my professor told the famous story about Blaise Pascal who had a vision of God that was so profound, his life seemed dull and meaningless forever afterwards. He never had another vision. But he had sewn into his jacket an incoherent note to remind him of the singular luminous experience.

The next day in religion class, a student stood up and announced that the professor was wrong—about Pascal, God, everything. The student knew this because he was God’s friend. He even knew His first name, and what God was thinking. The professor smiled sadly, put his arm around the student, and led him out of the classroom, down the steps and into the counselor’s office. When the professor returned, he warned us that if we ever thought we knew God, we should check ourselves into a mental institution. Lots of insane people know God intimately.

But, I wondered, what would God (or the transcendent—or whatever word you might choose for it: the muse, love, the orgasm, the soul, the higher self) think of us? For example, what would a muse think of a writer trying, begging, praying to enter the creative flow? All writers know it—that moment when inspiration happens. The incredible high. And the opposite, when words cling to the wall of the mind like sticky notes but never make it onto your tongue or the page.

What would an orgasm think of all the people seeking it so fervently yet considering it dirty, embarrassing, unmentionable? And then lying about it. “Did you have one?” a man might ask. “Yes,” his lover nods. But every orgasm knows it cannot be had. Or possessed. Or sewn into the lining of a coat. No one “has” an orgasm. At least not for long.

What did God think of Martin Luther, calling out to him in terror when a lightning bolt struck near his horse, “Help! I’ll become a monk!” And later, when he sought relief from his chronic constipation and gave birth to the Protestant Reformation on the lavatory—a lavatory you can visit today in Wittenberg, Germany.

I don’t want to evaluate Luther’s source of inspiration. But I do want to ponder the question: How do you write a poem? Is there a way to begin?

I think John Ashbery gave away one secret in his poem, “The Instruction Manual:” that it begins with daydreaming. Imagination. And the revelation that the mind contains its own magical city, its own Guadalajara, complete with a public square and bands and parading couples that you can visit this enchanted town for a limited time before you must turn your gaze back to the humdrum world.

But a student of Ashbery’s might cringe at the suggestion that poetry is merely an act of the imagination. In order to master the dance, one must know the steps. And Ashbery was a master. So many of his poems follow a kind of Hegelian progression, traveling from the concrete to the abstract to the absolute. Or what Fichte described as a dialectical movement from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. Fichte also wrote that consciousness itself has no basis in reality. I wonder if Ashbery would have agreed.

In college I wrote an inane paper, comparing Ashbery’s poetry to a form of philosophical gardening in which the poet arranges the concrete, meaning the plants or words, in such an appealing order that they create the abstract, or the beauty, desired. Thus, the reader experiences the absolute, or a sense of wonder at the creation as the whole thing sways in the wind of her mind.

Is there a basis in reality for wonder? Or poetry? I asked. Or are we only admiring illusions, the beautiful illusions the poet has created? How I loved questions like that. I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Fichte and Hegel and Ashbery and write mystical and incomprehensible books. I complained to my mother that no matter how hard I tried, I could not compose an actual poem or philosophical treatise—I was trying to write treatises, too. “That’s good,” she said. “Poets and philosophers are too much in their heads, and not enough in the world.”

I didn’t argue with her and tell her that not all poets are like Emily Dickinson. Or say that Socrates was put to death for being too much in the world, for angering the public with his Socratic method of challenging social mores, and earning himself the title, “the gadfly of Athens.”

Instead, I thought, That’s it! If I want to be a poet, I just need to separate my head from the world. Or at least turn off the noise of the world. And seek solitude, as Wordsworth suggested, in order to recollect in tranquility. I imagined myself going on a retreat or living in a cave, studying the shadows on the wall. Letting them speak to me or seduce me or dance with me.

The shadows, I discovered, are not nice guests. Sometimes they kept me awake all night, talking loudly, making rude comments, using all the words I never said aloud. “Hush,” I told them. “No one wants to hear that.” Sometimes they took on the voices of the dead and complained I hadn’t told their stories yet or right. Sometimes they sulked and bossed me about like a maid, asking for a cup of tea, a biscuit, a little brandy, a nap. One nap was never enough. When I obeyed and closed my eyes, they recited the poems I wanted to write down. “You can’t open your eyes until we’re done,” they said, as if poetry were a game of memory, or hide and seek in the mind. Other times they wandered away and down the dirt road of my past, or lay down in the orchard and counted the peaches overhead. Whatever they did or said, I watched and listened.

That’s how I began writing my first real poems. I knew not to disobey the shadows. I knew not toturn my back on them and look towards the light as Plato suggested—Plato who wanted to banish the poets and poetry from his Republic.I knew to not answer the door if the man from Porlock came knocking.

To this day I am grateful for the darkness. For the shadows it creates in my mind. It is thanks to them I have written another book, The Last Orgasm, a book whose title might make people cringe. But isn’t that what shadows do? And much of poetry, too? Dwell on topics we are afraid to look at in the light?

(https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2020/09/how-to-make-love-write-poetry-believe-in-god-by-nin-andrews.html)

Five prose poems by Nin Andrews (formatting better at http://newflashfiction.com/5-prose-poems-by-nin-andrews/)

Duplicity

after Henri Michaux “Simplicity”

When I was just a young thing, my life was as simple as a sunrise. And as predictable. Day after day I went about doing exactly as I pleased. If I saw a lovely man or women, or beauty in any of its shapes and forms and flavors, well, I simply had to have it. So I did. Just like that. Boom! I didn’t even need a room.

Slowly, I matured. I learned a bit of etiquette. Manners, I discovered can have promising side effects. I even began carrying a bottle of champagne wherever I went, and a bed. Not that the beds lasted long. I wasn’t the kind to go easy on the alcohol or the furnishings, nor was I interested in sleep. It never ceased to amaze me how quickly men drift off. Women, many of them, kept me going night after night. You know how inspiring women are.

But then, alas, I grew tired of them as well. I began to envy those folks who curl up into balls each night, their bodies as heavy as tombstones. I tried curling up with them, slowing my breath, entering into their dreams. What dreams! To think I had been missing out all along! That’s when I became a Zen master, at one with the night. Now I teach classes on peace, love, abstinence. At last I have found bliss, I tell my followers. The young, they don’t believe it. But really, I ask you. Would I lie?

The Broken Promise

after Heberto Padilla, “The Promise”

There was a time when I promised to write you a thousand love poems. When I said every day is a poem, and every poem is in love with you. But then the poems rebelled. They became a junta of angry women, impossible to calm or translate, each more vivid, sultry, seductive than the next. Some stayed inside and sulked for weeks, demanding chocolates, separate rooms, maid service. Others wanted to be carted around like queens. Still others took lovers and kept the neighbors up, moaning at all hours of the day and night. One skinny girl (remember her? the one with flame-colored hair?) moved away. She went back to that shack down the road where we first met. At night she lay down in the orchard behind the house and let the dark crawl over her arms and legs. In the end even her dreams turned to ash and blew away in a sudden gust of wind.

Little Big Man

after Russell Edson “Sleep”

There was once an orgasm that could not stop shrinking. Little big man, his friend called him, watching as he grew smaller and smaller with each passing night, first before making love, then before even the mention of making love, then before even the mention of the mention of making love. Oh, what a pathetic little thing he was.

One night he tried reading, Think and Grow Big, but it only caused him to shrink further inside himself. Oh, to grow large and tall as I once was, he sighed. What he needed, he knew, was a trainer with a whip and chains. Someone to teach him to jump through hoops and swing from a trapeze and swallow fire until he blazed ever higher into the night. Yes, he shuddered. Yes! as he imagined it. A tiny wisp of smoke escaped his lips.

Questions to Determine if You Are Washed Up

after Charles Baudelaire, “Get Drunk!”

Do you feel washed up lost, all alone? Do you fear that time is passing you by like a train for which you have no ticket, no seat? That you have lived too long in the solitude of your room and empty mind, that now you are but a slave of sorrow? Or is it regret? Do you no longer taste the wine of life on your lips, tongue, throat? Is there not even even a chance of intoxication? Bliss? No poetry or song above or below the hips? No love in the wind, the waves, in every or any fleeting and floating thing? No castles in your air? No pearls in your oysters? Are you wearing a pair of drawstring pants?

Remembering Her

after Herberto Padilla

This is the house where she first met you. This is the room where she first said your name as if it were a song. This is the table where she undressed you, stripping away your petals, leaves, your filmy white roots and sorrows. And there on the floor is the stone you picked up each morning, the stone you clung to night after night. Sometimes she kicked it aside. Sometimes she placed in on the sill and blew it out the window as her presence filled you like a glow, and you thought for an instant, I, too, can fly.

#Nin Andrews #poem #poet #poetry

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 4 years ago

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ICSA: Virtual Summer Conference, Saturday and Sunday, July 11-12

This two-day event will include a variety of presentations, panels, and workshops for former members of cultic groups, families and friends, professionals, and researchers.

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Day 1 – Saturday Conference Sessions, July 11, 2020 (11 am - 4 pm US Eastern Time)

Day 2 – Sunday Workshops, July 12, 2020 (11 am - 4 pm US Eastern Time)

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Saturday, July 11, 2020

11:05 -11:50 / "The Neurobiology of Sexual Abuse: Flashbacks, Triggers and Healing" (Doni Whitsett)

The first part of this presentation presents a neurobiological understanding of flashbacks and triggers resulting from sexual abuse. The second part of the presentation offers suggestions for dealing with triggers, learning to manage them, and perhaps using them to facilitate healing.

11:05 -11:50 / "MIND FIXERS: The History of Mass Therapy With its Roots in Mind Dynamics Institute, Misuse of Zen Insights, and Hyping the Positive Thinking of New Thought Religion." (Joseph Kelly, Joseph Szimhart, Patrick Ryan)

The title for this presentation, “MIND FIXERS: The History of Mass Therapy With its Roots in Mind Dynamics Institute, Misuse of Zen Insights, and Hyping the Positive Thinking of New Thought Religion,” covers a vast arena for specialized workshops that range from one day to several weeks. Borrowing techniques from encounter group formats, military boot camp training, and the mindfulness movements these specialized groups operate as unregulated mass therapy businesses and are not licensed as mental health professions. The stated purpose of these “large group awareness trainings” is to increase self-realization and success in life. The outcomes, however, are problematic with some critics claiming that a form of “brainwashing” is taking place that emphasizes promotion of the workshops while any real-life gains are highly questionable. Some participants report psychological and social harm. The speakers will guide a discussion to address the criticisms.

12:00 - 12:50 / "Coercive Control and Persuasion in Relationships and Groups– Intersections and Understandings" (Rod Dubrow-Marshall; Linda Dubrow-Marshall; Carrie McManus; Andrea Silverstone)

This panel will examine contemporary understandings of coercive control in relationships and groups with practitioners from both sides of the Atlantic. The way in which the term ‘coercive control’ is now being used and applied in different jurisdictions will be discussed and how changes to the law are reflecting advances in our understanding of how coercive control works psychologically across contexts. It will also be explored how a heightened dialogue between practitioners and researchers across the fields of intimate partner violence and cults/sects and extremist groups is leading to enhanced appreciation of commonalities in the process of psychological indoctrination. Positive implications for prevention, exit and recovery and rehabilitation across these areas will also be discussed along with recommendations for policy makers.

12:00 - 12:50 PM / "Unification Church (Moonie) SGAs: The Future is Unwritten" (Lisa Kohn; Teddy Hose; Jen Kiaba)

A panel of Unification Church (Moonie) SGAs (Jen Kiaba, Teddy Hose, and Lisa Kohn) will discuss their different experiences of living in, leaving, and learning to thrive after being part of the Unification Church (the “Moonies”). The questions and discussions will focus on how the panelists experienced being part of the Unification Church, how they were able to leave the Church, how they still feel affected by their childhood in the Church, and how they have healed since leaving the Church.

1:00 - 1:50 PM / "Lived Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Former Cult Members – Counseling Implications" (Cyndi Matthews; Stevie Powers)

Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual (LGB) individuals growing up in religious cults can face opposition to their sexual orientation. They may struggle with depression, anxiety, drug/alcohol abuse, self-mutilation, and suicidal ideation. Research by presenters will describe lived experiences of LGB individuals who grew up in religious cults. Best practices based on this research, APA & ACA Codes of Ethics, along with ASERVIC and ALGBTIC competencies will be presented.

1:00 - 1:50 PM / "How Female Former Cult Members Can Reclaim their Relationship with Knowledge and Self-Identity" (Jacqueline Johnson)

High-control and coercive groups work at stealing and silencing the thoughts and knowledge base, and subsequently, the voices, of its members. For females, this dynamic becomes more problematic when those female members are, or have been, part of a misogynous group that incorporates numerous ways of subjugating women. This presentation will outline the research of Belenky et al (1986), which examines the development of women’s self, voice, and mind. Belenky and her colleagues describe the cognitive and intellectual development in women in terms of five knowledge positions (ranging from silence to construction) through which women develop their identity. This presentation will examine ways that high-control, misogynous groups subjugate women, how this affects the epistemology of female cult members, her resulting relationship to knowledge, and the possible impairments to her ability to construct her own knowledge, develop her own identity, and find her own voice. Implications for therapists working with women are discussed in terms of helping former female cult members begin to develop their identity, find their voice, and construct their own knowledge.

2:00 - 2:50 PM / "Raised in a Cult: Psychological and Social Adjustment of Second- and Third-Generation Former Cult Members" (Sofia Klufas)

Former cult members often find themselves struggling to re-integrate into mainstream society and typically describe long periods of recovery post-exit. The current study aimed to qualitatively explore the experiences of individuals raised in cults (1) during, (2) in the process of leaving, and (3) post-cult involvement in order to understand how cultic influences might impact their ability to socially and psychologically adjust to life outside of the cult upon defection. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 8 participants from across North America and Europe who self-identify as second- and/or third-generation former cult members. Responses were qualitatively analyzed for totalistic patterns of influence which may dissuade members from leaving the group or simply deviating from its norms. Participants reported a wide range of emotional responses and psychological difficulties which they perceived to be the result of their cultic upbringing including but not limited to hyper-arousal, anxiety, doctrine-related fears, feelings of isolation, depression, anger/outbursts and suicidal tendencies. Identity reconstruction and social adjustment challenges such as relationship loss due to shunning, difficulty connecting with others, language differences were also reported by participants. Raised-in cult members are a distinct population from converted cult members as they have been exposed to cultic influence throughout the course of their developmental period. While the experiences of these two groups are comparable in many ways, previous research has demonstrated that raised-in cult members are at higher risk for social and psychological difficulties (Furnari, 2005).

2:00 - 2:50 PM / "What does awe have to do with it?" (Yuval Laor)

What is awe? What role does awe play in cult recruitment? And what brings about awe experiences? The talk will discuss these and other topics related to this strange emotion and the effects it can have on us.

3:00 - 3:50 PM / "Nxivm: the Reinventive Path to Success?"(Susan Raine, Stephen Kent)

In this session I discuss the multi-level cultic organization, NXIVM. I propose that NXIVM operated as, what Susie Scott (2011) calls, a reinventive institution—that is, an organization that people enter into voluntarily, because they promise to help people transform or reinvent themselves through personal and professional growth, self-actualization, self-improvement, and success. The group’s founder and leader, Keith Raniere offered members these outcomes via the Stripe Path—a hierarchal system of courses that were supposed to empower people as they worked towards personal growth and world peace. Scott stresses, however, that reinventive institutions incorporate structures of power and are far from benign. This dynamic is evident in NXIVM, which offered to empower its members but ultimately ended up disempowering many of them—especially its most committed female followers. I follow up this discussion by addressing how Raniere had groomed many of these most dedicated women for sexual abuse and exploitation. Grant Sinnamon’s (2017) research on adult grooming and Janja Lalich’s (1997) work on the psychosexual exploitation of women in cults provide extremely useful insights for understanding Raniere’s behaviour.

3:00 - 3:50 PM / "What Do I Tell People? Empowered Ways that Cult Survivors and their Families Can Tell their Stories. Cults, Recovery and Podcasts." (Rachel Bernstein)

Nearly all my clients and podcast guests have experienced fear when thinking about telling people about their cult-related experiences. Many live in isolation because of this, and at times it's for good reason. When they've tried to share their stories, they've been responded to with insulting judgment and condescension, with confusion and disbelief, or with inappropriately voyouristic interest and invasive follow-up questions. Learn how to take control of that conversation and present your story in an educational and empowered way so you don't have to live in fear of these moments and remain silent and alone.

This two-day event will include a variety of presentations, panels, and workshops for former members of cultic groups, families and friends, professionals, and researchers.

_______________________________________

Sunday, July 12, 2020

11:00 AM - 1:00 PM / Research Workshop

The Research Workshop will be facilitated by Rod Dubrow-Marshall, Chair of the ICSA Research Network and Co-Editor of the International Journal of Coercion, Abuse and Manipulation (IJCAM). He will speak initially with a short overview about research on cults and coercive control and he will be followed by introductory talks by Cyndi Matthews, Managing Editor of IJCAM, Marie-Andrée Pelland, Co-Editor of IJCAM and Omar Saldaña from the University of Barcelona, who will each speak about research and developments in their respective areas.

The Research Workshop will focus on key areas of research currently taking place on cults and extremist groups and related areas of coercive control including intimate partner violence, trafficking and gangs. Researchers will be able to discuss the challenges they may be facing or may have faced in proposing new research projects in these areas, including getting institutional approval (IRB or ethics committee), finding participants, clarifying aspects of research design and getting support from faculty/professors. Experienced researchers will be on hand to answer questions and all those present will be able to share their ideas on current and future research including possibilities for collaboration. Plans and opportunities for the ICSA Research Network will also be discussed.

11:00 AM - 2:00 PM / Mental Health Workshop

1:00 PM - 4:00 PM / Former Member Workshop

This workshop will include an Overview of Recovery, touching on such subjects as attachment, boundaries, and identity. There will also be an opportunity to offer reflections on sessions people have attended during the first day of the conference. The workshop is intended for both first and second/multi-generation former members.

(William Goldberg, Gillie Jenkinson)

2:00 PM - 4:00 PM / Family Workshop

"Building Bridges; Leaving and Recovering from Cultic Groups and Relationships: A Workshop for Families"

Topics discussed include assessing a family’s unique situation; understanding why people join and leave groups; considering the nature of psychological manipulation and abuse; being accurate, objective, and up-to-date; looking at ethical issues; learning how to assess your situation; developing problem-solving skills; formulating a helping strategy; learning how to communicate more effectively with your loved one; learning new ways of coping.

(Rachel Bernstein, MSed, LMFT, Joseph Kelly, Patrick Ryan)

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Virtual Summer Conference

Lisa Kohn

To the Moon and Back: A Childhood Under the Influence

VIDEO: ‘Meet the author’ interview

How do you learn to love yourself?

Lisa Kohn interview on Generation Cult

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Teddy Hose

Talk Beliefs VIDEO: Over the Moon – Escaping Sun Myung Moon, Hak Ja Han and their family

Talk Beliefs VIDEO: Secrets of the Moonies

Growing Up “Moonie” by Teddy Hose

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Jen Kiaba

The Purity Knife

Life Without Reverend Moon

Why Didn’t You Just Leave?

Jen Kiaba : Hello and welcome to my least favorite question in the entire world. It’s one I’ve heard more times than I care to count, and sadly I think that’s something many cult survivors can relate to. In the past that question used to make me clam up and spiral into shame, or mumble, “It’s not that simple.” But in those days I didn’t fully understand the coercive control mechanism that were used to keep me, and so many others, trapped. Read more:  https://jenkiaba.medium.com/lessons-on-leaving-why-didnt-you-just-leave-789953c4689a 

https://www.jenkiaba.com/portfolio

Jen Kiaba on the Ares Meyer podcast

Fuel For Nightmares: Jen Kiaba on the Elgen Strait podcast

#ICSA #Lisa Kohn #Teddy Hose #Jen Kiaba #FFWPU #Sun Myung Moon #Unification Church

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theliberaltony · 5 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

A central message of President Trump’s insurgent candidacy in 2016 boiled down to this: Millions of Americans are losers — economically, culturally and even demographically. Perhaps no group needed less convincing of this proposition than white evangelical Christians, who have long felt embattled. “Make America Great Again” was the perfect slogan for Americans who had already embraced the notion that the country’s culture and way of life had been deteriorating since the 1950s. Indeed, white evangelical Christians voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton in large numbers, and Trump has maintained their support to an impressive degree.

But there are increasing signs of a generational rift: Younger white evangelicals have not fully bought into Trump’s politics and are less receptive to Trump’s message of cultural decline. The age gap among white evangelicals in some ways just mirrors the age gap among the public overall with regards to Trump, but in conversations with a number of younger white evangelical Christians, many said they are reexamining the way their faith informs their politics and whether the two have become too tightly intertwined.

If you drill to the center of Trump’s political base, a big chunk of those voters are white evangelical Christians. Evangelical leaders are among the first to defend him from criticism and the most ready to forgive his personal behavior. Roughly seven in 10 white evangelical Christians approve of the job Trump is doing as president, and many have been delighted by Trump’s first term.

Younger white evangelical Christians, however, express far less enthusiasm for Trump, even if they haven’t completely abandoned him. According to the 2019 Voter Study Group survey, only six in 10 younger white evangelical Christians (between the ages of 18 and 44) view Trump favorably, whereas 80 percent of those age 45 or older have a favorable opinion of the president. The intensity gap is even more pronounced. Only one-quarter (25 percent) of younger white evangelical Christians report having a “very favorable” opinion of Trump, compared to a majority (55 percent) of older white evangelicals.

No issue exemplifies Trump’s influence among white evangelical Christians — and highlights the emerging generational divide — more than immigration. From the start, Trump has made opposition to immigration a central part of his political identity. And white evangelical Christians rallied around Trump in the 2016 election and were quick to embrace his hard-line immigration agenda. During the campaign, white evangelical Christians expressed support for preventing Syrian refugees from entering the U.S. and temporarily banning Muslims from coming to the country. After the election, they coaleseced in support of building a wall along the southern border and blocking immigration from majority Muslim countries.

Indeed, Trump has managed to push the issue of immigration to the center of the evangelical agenda. Seventy-two percent of white evangelical Christians believe immigration should be a top priority, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.1 Five years ago, in 2014, that number was 49 percent.

But, again, the broad policy support masks a growing generational divide in views on immigrants. Two-thirds (66 percent) of young white evangelical Christians (age 18 to 34) say that immigrants coming to the U.S. strengthen the country because of their hard work and talents, a view shared by only 32 percent of white evangelical seniors (age 65+). A majority (54 percent) of older white evangelical Christians believe that immigrants are a burden on American society.

So why has Trump found younger white evangelicals harder to win over? Age has a lot to do with it. The president is profoundly unpopular among all young adults. A 2019 Harvard Institute of Politics survey finds that 70 percent of young adults (age 18 to 24) disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president.

But immigration in particular points to another reason young white evangelicals have been less receptive to Trump: Their lives have been dramatically different than their parents’.

Most white evangelical Christians say that the U.S. becoming a majority nonwhite country is a negative development. However, the younger white evangelical Christians I spoke to said the immigration debate is complicated. “Immigration is not as black-and-white as abortion,” said Lauren Burns, an evangelical student enrolled at Biola University.

First, the young evangelicals told me that demographic change doesn’t register as a “threat” to them. Like young Americans more generally, racial, ethnic and religious diversity is a normal part of their everyday life. In the U.S., only half of all evangelical Christians under 30 are white according to a 2016 study. On Christian college campuses, which have seen enrollment gains in recent years, young white evangelical Christians are part of an increasingly diverse student body. White students account for 62 percent of the student body on the roughly 140 campuses affiliated with the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, down from 82 percent in 1999.

And there are other reasons to think younger evangelicals would be less receptive to a message of America in decline. Anecdotally, at least, it seems young white evangelical Christians are less apt to believe their faith is in imminent danger from the broader culture.

In a recent interview with Newsweek, Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, argued that the “Make America Great Again” slogan never really resonated with younger white evangelicals. “Young evangelicals do not feel as if they are losing anything in terms of American culture,” he wrote. “They came of age at a time when following Christ seemed countercultural to them anyway. They never expected a nominally Christian culture in which being a church member would be the equivalent of being a good American.”

Indeed, young adults are upending many of the religious conventions and cultural assumptions that defined American public life in the past. Young people don’t feel particularly negatively toward atheists, nor do they view Islam as incompatible with American values. They don’t feel especially confident in religious leaders and they don’t see religious commitment as synonymous with virtue. The 2018 General Social Survey found that the majority of young adults say that people with strong religious beliefs are often intolerant of others. Even back in 2015, the overwhelming majority of young adults said they do not believe America is a Christian nation — one in five said it never was — and being Christian is not an important part of being American. The Christian consensus of previous generations, such as there was, is gone.

But critically, for young white evangelical Christians, this is the way it has always been. Numerically, they are already in the minority. Only 8 percent of adults under 30 are white evangelical Protestants. The segment of that age group that’s unaffiliated with any religion is nearly five times as large. Among Americans age 65 and older, white evangelicals account for more than one quarter of the population. Not surprisingly, young adults today are actually more likely to say they know an atheist than an evangelical. Growing up in Portland, Oregon, Burns’s group of friends in high school included people of color, gay and lesbian people, and atheists. “If I limited myself to only conservative white Christians, it would be pretty lonely,” she said.

Rather than yearning for the past, many young white evangelical Christians I spoke with have learned to navigate between an increasingly secular culture and their own deeply held religious commitments. Perhaps nothing defines the experience of young white evangelical Christians more than the conflict between their peers and their faith. Aaryn Marsters, who at the time of the interview was a 33-year-old evangelical Christian living in Charlotte, North Carolina, described the experience to The New York Times: “As evangelical young people become more liberal, older evangelicals think we’ve been brainwashed by the world. And as we continue to hold onto our faith and some more conservative or traditional values, many non-Christians believe we are still brainwashed from our upbringing.”

For many older white evangelical Christians, Trump’s vigorous public defense of conservative Christians remains the most compelling reason to support his reelection. At the Road to Majority Conference, an evangelical grassroots summit, for example, Faith and Freedom Coalition chairman Ralph Reed affirmed evangelicals’ unwavering commitment to President Trump. “There has never been anyone who has defended us and fought for us, who we have loved more than Donald J. Trump.” Jerry Fallwell Jr., head of Liberty University and a staunch Trump supporter, recently suggested that Christians needed to stop electing “nice guys” in favor of “street fighters” like Trump. Facing what they see as an increasingly hostile cultural climate, many older white evangelical Christians view Trump as their last and only option.

But this sentiment makes many younger evangelical Christians profoundly uncomfortable and strikes them as practically unnecessary. Aryana Petrosky, an evangelical and recent graduate from a nondenominational Christian school in California, worries about Christians aligning themselves with those in power. She also challenges the notion that conservative Christians need politicians to defend their beliefs in the public square. “We shouldn’t be looking to political leaders to defend our faith,” she said. It’s a view that is entirely consistent with the way younger white evangelicals understand politics. A 2017 Voter Study Group survey found that while nearly three-quarters of older white evangelical Christians agree that “politics is ultimately a struggle between good and evil,” younger white evangelicals are far more evenly divided on this issue.

So what about 2020? Few young white evangelical Christians who I’ve spoken with express enthusiasm about the coming election. For most, Trump is not their preferred candidate, but an increasingly secular and liberal Democratic Party does not present an attractive alternative. Given evangelicals’ strong pro-life commitment, the Democrats’ vocal support for abortion access makes the possibility of defection even less likely.

At this stage, a couple of predictions are easy. White evangelical Christians will strongly back Trump’s reelection bid, following a decades-old pattern, while young adults will rally to the Democratic nominee, as they have done in every presidential election since 2004. In a two-way contest, Trump is still likely to make off with the majority of young white evangelical votes. A tepid vote counts just as much as an enthusiastic one. Yet Trump is redefining the relationship young evangelical Christians have with the Republican Party. The long-term implications for our politics and evangelical Christianity could be profound.

Kate Stewart was raised in a very civically minded family and had been excited about the prospect of voting in the 2016 election long before her 18th birthday. But she became dismayed and disillusioned by her options. “Having to choose between these lesser of two evils was really disheartening,” she said. Looking ahead to 2020, Stewart for the first time in her voting life has started to look at candidates outside the Republican Party. “I’m cautiously optimistic that the evangelical vote, or at least my evangelical vote, might find a home outside the party of Donald Trump.”

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Daniel Cox

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blackkudos · 5 years ago

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Benjamin Mays

Benjamin Elijah Mays (August 1, 1894 – March 28, 1984) was an American Baptist minister and civil rights leader who is credited with laying the intellectual foundations of the Civil Rights Movement. Mays taught and mentored many influential activists: Martin Luther King Jr, Julian Bond, Maynard Jackson, and Donn Clendenon, among others. His rhetoric and intellectual work focused on notions of nonviolence and civil resistance–beliefs inspired by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. The peak of his public influence occurred during his almost thirty years as the 6th President of Morehouse College, a historically black institution of higher learning.

Mays was born in the Jim Crow South on a repurposed cotton plantation to freed sharecroppers. He traveled North to attend Bates College and the University of Chicago from where he began his career in activism as a pastor in the Shiloh Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. After a brief career as a professor, he was appointed as the Dean of the School of Religion at Howard University in 1934 which elevated him to national prominence as a proponent of the New Negro movement. Six years later, Mays was elected as the president of Morehouse College, an at-the-time financially unstable enterprise. Over his tenure from 1940 to 1967, the college's financial endowment was doubled and enrollment quadrupled; it was established as a leading liberal arts college in the United States.

Due to the relative smallness of the college, Mays mentored and taught many students, most notably King. His connection with King spanned his early days at the college in 1944. King was known as Mays' "spiritual son" and Mays his "intellectual father." After King's famous "I Have A Dream" speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, Mays gave the benediction. Upon the 1968 death of King, he was asked to give the eulogy where he described him in his "No Man is Ahead of His Time" speech. Mays stepped down from the presidency in 1967 continuing to work as a leader in the African American community. He presided over the Atlanta Board of Education from 1969 to 1978, where he initiated the desegregation of Atlanta.

Mays' contributions to the civil rights movement have had him hailed as the "movement's intellectual conscience" or alternatively the "Dean [or Schoolmaster] of the Movement". Historian Lawrence Carter described Mays as "one of the most significant figures in American history". Hundreds of streets, buildings, statues, awards, scholarships, grants, and fellowships are named in his honor. Numerous efforts have been brought forward to posthumously award Mays the Presidential Medal of Freedom as well as feature him on a U.S. postage stamp.

Early life

Early life and ancestry

Benjamin Elijah Mays was born on August 1, 1894 in Epworth, South Carolina, in the small town of Ninety Six, South Carolina, the youngest of eight children. His mother, Louvenia Carter Mays, and father, Hezekiah Mays, were born into slavery on Virginia and South Carolina plantations, respectively. Both were freed in their later lives with the passage of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. Mays' father often hit him, his siblings and Louvenia growing up, expressing anger about how he was treated by his master. The "Mays" family name was derived from their slaver and owner's name, Henry Hazel Mays; he owned 14 slaves in the same area. Hezekiah worked as a cotton sharecropper to generate income for his family.

Mays was told to be cautious of white people and exhibit black pride whenever possible growing up. Mays' older sister, Susie, began to teach him how to read before his formal schooling commenced, which gave him a year's growth in reading compared to the other students in his primary schools. School officials cited him as "destined for greatness." Growing up, he went by the nickname "Bennie" and was inspired by Fredrick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Thomas E. Miller. The Bible was influential to young Mays because he could see his name (of Biblical origins) mentioned frequently, instilling a feeling of empowerment within. During this time, Benjamin Tillman rose to power in South Carolina which saw to the redoubling of lynching and segregation in Mays' neighborhood. Throughout his tenure as governor, 18 black men were lynched and dozens were hurt in the 1876 shoot-off. On November 8, 1898, members of the Phoenix Riot–a white suprematist mob–rode up on horses to the Mays household, a repurposed cotton plantation. They drew their guns at Mays' father and told him to remove his hat and bow down to them. The event would stay with Mays throughout his life. A year later, white mobs and Ku Klux Klan members searched his house in search of relatives after local newspapers announced that cotton prices had plummeted.

Early education

In 1911, he was enrolled at the Brick House School in Epworth, a Baptist-sponsored school. He then transferred to the High School Department of South Carolina State College in Orangeburg. He graduated in 1916, aged 22 as its valedictorian. In high school, teachers often let Mays instruct parts of the mathematics curriculum to students in exchange for extra credit. He won awards for debate and mathematics. A teacher at the school had told Mays to seek graduate school at the University of Chicago as he thought the school would best nurture Mays' intellect. However, before attending graduate school Mays needed to seek an undergraduate education. His relatives and teachers forced him to attend a Baptist university–the Virginia Union University. He grew weary of the violence against blacks in Virginia so he sought the guidance of his academic advisors at Virginia Union. They advised him to look into schools in the North as they were typically seen as more prestigious, challenging, and prominent than those of the South.

Four professors at the university had attended Bates College in Lewiston, Maine and urged Mays to apply. However, its exacting standards prohibited him from attending. After a year more in Richmond, Mays elevated his grades to the top of his class and wrote personally to Bates president George Colby Chase. Chase granted him a full financial aid package and boarding upon hearing his story and reviewing his academic background. Virginia Union's president warned him that studies at Bates would be "too hard for a colored boy" and that he should stay in Virginia. Mays ignored his warnings and enrolled in 1917, aged 23. While at Bates he felt pressure to compete with "Yankees at the Yankee level" which drove him to dedicate him to his studies. He would write in a diary: "Yankee superiority was the gauntlet thrown down. I had to pick it up." Working to midnight weekly and arising at 4 AM, Mays excelled at Greek, mathematics, and speech. Although he would experience little racism in college, upon seeing The Birth of a Nation in a local cinema, the crowd cheered for the white slaver which frightened Mays. In college, he was captain of the debate team, played on the football team and served as the Class Day Speaker. He graduated with departmental honors with a B.A. in 1920. Contrary to popular writing and official college records, Mays never received Phi Beta Kappa; his attendance of a "school from the South" disqualified him.

Marriages

Shortly after graduation, he married his first wife, Ellen Edith Harvin, in August 1920 in Newport News, Virginia. The two met when Mays was still in South Carolina and wrote to each other frequently. She was a home economics teacher at a local college before she died after a brief illness two years after they married at age 28. He met his second wife, Sadie Gray, while working at South Carolina State College. After months of courtship, they married on August 9, 1926. Mays was secretive about his relationship with his second wife; he burned the majority of letters and correspondence between them.

Early academic career

On January 3, 1921, he then entered the University of Chicago as a graduate student, earning an M.A. in 1925. Early on in his academic career he decided to join Omega Psi Phi, a national fraternity for colored men. This organization was known for pooling resources and information among its members so Mays viewed it with great interest. Mays viewed it as "a mountain top from which he could see above and beyond". In 1924, upon hearing news that there was to be a fraternity meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, Mays traveled by train. However, his decision to travel first class from Birmingham to St. Louis was indirectly against the Jim Crow laws. The ticket salesman only sold Mays a ticket when he lied about who it was for. While riding to St. Louis, the Pullman warned Mays that he was risking his life by sitting in first class and that he should get off at the next stop. Shortly after, three white men, guns drawn, escorted Mays into a car in the back known as the "Jim Crow car". He eventually made it to the Omega Psi Phi meeting, where he spoke of his experience.

To finance his time in university, Mays worked as a Pullman Porter, a railway assistant. Much of the money he had earned growing up was spent financing his time at Bates, on Christmas Day 1921, Mays held only $45 dollars ($587 in 2018 USD). Mays began labor organizing to increase his wage, which was seen negatively by the Porter managers. Although he legally established a labor group for Pullman Porters, he was fired from his job for "attracting too much attention to labor rights." His time at the University of Chicago was marked by segregation. He was asked to sit at the colored area in the dining halls and was only allowed to use certain rooms for reading. Mays tolerated the segregation with the mindset that he was "only there to get a degree, to convince another brilliant set of Yankees that he could do their work." Although he was licensed to preach in 1919, he was officially ordained a Baptist minister in 1921. During this time he encountered John Hope, the current president of Morehouse College. Hope spoke to Mays about the lack of "a fine education for the colored in Atlanta". Mays traveled to Atlanta in 1921 and served as a pastor at the Shiloh Baptist Church until 1923. In March 1925, Mays was award an M.A. in religious studies from the university. Upon receiving his master's degree, he wrote to the pastorate with his intention of resigning to pursue a doctorate in the coming years. However, due to his financial status, he took up a teaching position instructing English at South Carolina State College from 1925 to 1926. Mays left his teaching position after routinely clashing with other faculty over grade inflation and academic standards.

From 1928 to 1930, he worked as the national student secretary of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). A couple of months later, he was asked to serve as the director of Study of Black Churches in the United States by the Institute of Social and Religious Research of New York. In 1932, Mays returned to the University of Chicago with the intent of completing a Ph.D. in line with what was asked by the Institute of Social and Religious Research of New York. After some deliberation between fields of studies he could pursue a doctorate in he eventually decided to study religion and not mathematics or philosophy. Mays also worked as a student assistant to Dr. Lacey Kirk Williams, pastor of Olivet Baptist Church in Chicago and President of the National Baptist Convention. In 1933, he wrote his first book with Joseph Nicholson, The Negro's Church. It was the first sociological study of the black church in the United States and was submitted to the university faculty as his dissertation in 1935. Historian John Herbert Roper estimates that Mays was one of 20 African Americans so earn a doctorate during that year.

Howard University

Shortly after receiving his doctorate, he was called by the presidents of multiple universities to lead their religion departments. Mays chose to accept a position at Howard University in Washington as its dean of religious studies. He was instructed to build up the department and establish a reputation for well-trained ministers. Mays first renovated its library and secured loans from the federal government to expand it. His second objective was to separate the federally-funded portions of Howard University from the new school of religion. At the time, the university was partially funded by the U.S. Department of the Interior which prohibited funding to religious enterprises. After he successfully removed the School of Religion from the auspices of the federal government he was tasked with securing funding from wealthy donors from the North.

Mays secured a multi-million dollar package from donors by 1930, and was averaging yearly contributions of $750,000 during the Great Depression. The expanding Department of the Interior under Franklin D. Roosevelt, coupled with Mays' fundraising led to unprecedented growth at the university. Salaries for professors increased, new dorms were built and refurbished, the library Mays had been developing was completed, and new lecture halls were established. In 1938, he published his second book, The Negro's God as Reflected in His Literature. In 1939, he secured a large collection of theology books for his new library which prompted the American Association of Theological Schools to accredit the new School of Religion. During this time Mays developed a reputation for exacting standards and elitism. He was a vocal opponent of the notion that black men are inherently more violent than their white counterparts in universities. He was a vocal proponent of the New Negro movement and frequently lectured about its foundlings and applications.

In January 1940, Mays was secretly approached by, John Hervey Wheeler, a trustee of Morehouse College, to see if he was interested in an upcoming search for the college's next president. Wheeler told Mays that the school had a tough time with getting tuition payments out of the students, growing their endowment, and establishing national prominence. Mays expressed interest in the position but Wheeler cautioned him about the odds of him actually being offered the job. On March 10, 1940, Mays was offered the presidency of Morehouse by its trustees; he moved to Atlanta shortly after. When Mays left Howard University, he was honored with the renaming of the newly constructed home of the divinity school to "Benjamin Mays Hall."

Meeting with Gandhi

In 1936-37, Mays traveled to Mysore, India, where, at the urging of Howard Thurman, a fellow professor at Howard, he spoke at some length with Mahatma Gandhi. The two spoke for an hour and a half about the realities and powers of militant pacifism which he used to shape his civil rights ideology and practice. Mays asked Gandhi about the influence nonviolence had in his life and what his personal thoughts were on the caste system in India. Gandhi told Mays that there was never an instance where violence was acceptable especially that which was undertaken in retaliation. He was told that "one must pay the price for protest, even with one's life". In response to the caste system. Gandhi believed that there those with darker skin were not inherently untouchable but labeled it a "necessary economic injustice".

Morehouse College, 1940–1967

Early years

Mays was offered the presidency on March 10 and inaugurated the sixth president on August 1, 1940. Upon his assumption of the presidency, the school was in severe financial distress. In his first speech to an incoming freshman class in 1940, he said, "If Morehouse is to continue to be great; it must continue to produce outstanding personalities." Mays set out to improve the training of Morehouse men, increase enrollment, grow its endowment, and collect tuition payments.

Many associated with the college referenced him as a "builder of men." To improve the training of Morehouse men, Mays set out to advance a new curriculum based on the New Negro movement. He specifically wished to increase the training of black physicians, ministers and lawyers. Although Morehouse College was not a medical, law, or ministry school, it was a feeder institution into them so Mays took the preparation of his students into these schools seriously.

Financial planning

During his first three months nothing was planned to be or currently being constructed on campus. Mays had inherited "mountains of uncollected student bills" which served as a threat to the liquidity of the college. In 1933, Morehouse was doing so poorly financially that it had allowed Atlanta University to take over its financial direction and budget. He earned a reputation for being a penny-pincher and demanded tuition fees on time, which earned him the nickname "Buck Bennie;" the student newspaper occasionally ran headlines such as "Buck Bennie Rides Again," during the first couple of years of his Morehouse presidency. However, he often helped students pay their bills by offering work or finding it around campus. He would write to the employers of the college's graduates to ask them how the recent grads were doing as a way to measure the Morehouse education. Within two years of his presidency, Mays was so successful that he was able to regain control of Morehouse's finances.

Effects of World War II

Soon after primary advancements were made with the college, World War II broke out and many students were drafted for military service. The Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Morehouse approached Mays and requested the school be shut down for the remainder of the war, which prompted Mays to lash out and reject his proposition publicly. Mays counter-proposal was to open the school to younger students who were ineligible to be drafted. He moved to improve the academic quality of the students by lowering admissions rates, and reforming the academic platform. College faculty often were encouraged to befriend students and provided them with guidance in a tumultuous social scene at the time.

Recognition

The introduction to his speech compilation at Morehouse notes him with the following:

In physical stature Mays stood six feet tall, but appeared taller because of his erect posture--a habit he developed during his youth to walk around with dignity and pride; he weighted approximately 180 pounds and had a full head of iron-grey air with a contrasting dark complexion. His distinctive physical appearance commented his towering intellectual stature. When Mays walked into a room, eyes were likely to focus in his direction. His mere physical presence attracted attention.

He received an honorary doctorate and the "Alumnus of the Year" Award from Bates College in 1947 and the University of Chicago in 1949, respectively. Although he was a college president, he was not allowed to vote in the 1950s until he was 52 years old. Pulpit, a magazine focusing on black religious preachers, ranked him among the top 20 preachers in America in 1954. The same year he was one of the "Top Ten Most Powerful Negros" in the nation according to black magazine, Our World.

Jackie Robinson

In 1966, as president, Mays was invited to sit at a Atlanta Braves baseball game as a guest-of-honor by Jackie Robinson when the sports franchise moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta. Robinson invited Mays because of his efforts to integrate the baseball team in Atlanta. Robinson said of Mays: "When we first moved here it was the first team of major league caliber to ever move this far south to play baseball. And of course [Mays] was one of the guys, one of the persons really that made things a lot easier for myself and some of the other black ball players."

Roles in the White House

As president he was in great demand as a public speaker. He met hundreds of national and international leaders and served as a trusted advisor to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter. He was appointed by President Truman to the Mid-Century White House Conference on Children and Youth. When Pope John XXIII died in 1963, President Kennedy sent Mays and his Vice President to represent the United States at the funeral in Rome, Italy. During the Kennedy administration, southern members of the Senate blocked Mays' appointment to the United States Civil Rights Commission by accusing him of being a Communist. Mays denied the charges. His relationship with President Jimmy Carter was marked with "warmth" and "hospitality." Carter visited Mays' home in Atlanta, and Mays in turn campaigned for Carter during his 1976 and 1980 presidential runs. Carter wrote to Mays on a monthly basis during his presidency asking him about "humans rights, international affairs, and discrimination."

Final years

Mays wanted to hire more teachers, and to pay those teachers a better salary. To do that, Mays sought to be more strict in the collection of student fees, and wanted to increase Morehouse's endowment from $1,114,000. He more than quadrupled the endowment that he inherited by the end of his 27-year tenure. Over Mays' twenty-seven years leading Morehouse, the enrollment increased 169%, from 238 to almost a thousand students and furthered the motivation for graduates to pursue graduate studies.

Connection to Martin Luther King Jr.

Mays first became associated with Martin Luther King Jr. during his time as a student at Morehouse College. While King was a student from 1944 to 1948 he often went to Morehouse's chapel to hear Mays preach. After the sermons, King would run up to Mays and engage with him about the ideas he presented often following him into his office, hours after the sermon ended. He was also a friend of Martin Luther King Jr.'s father, Martin Luther King Sr. and often participated with him religious organizations in Atlanta. Mays dined at the King's homes every so often and spoke with the young Martin Luther King Jr. about his career prospects and ambitions. His mother, Alberta Williams King said Mays was a "great influence on Martin Luther King Jr.," "[an] example of what kind of minister Martin could become," and "possessor of great moral principles."

While King was only his 20s, Mays helped him assume the responsibility of his actions in the civil rights rallies in which he participated. King needed Mays "for spiritual support as he faced the burden of being perceived as the personification of black America's hopes and dreams, it was Mays who held the job as King's consigliere over the next fourteen years as the death threats against him grew more ominous and the public battles more dangerous."

After King gained national attention as a consequence of his 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, he began to refer to Mays as his "spiritual and intellectual mentor", which enhanced the friendship they had and prompted Mays to be more involved with King's civil rights endeavors. Mays revered him as his "spiritual son". Mays gave the benediction at the close of the official program of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963.

"No man is ahead of his time" speech

The two developed a close relationship that continued until King's assassination by James Earl Ray on April 4, 1968. King and Mays promised each other that whoever outlived the other would deliver the eulogy at the other's funeral.

On April 9, 1968, Mays delivered a eulogy that would later be known as the "No Man is Ahead of His Time" speech. He noted King's time in history to an estimated 150,000 mourners by stating in his most famous passage:

If Jesus was called to preach the Gospel to the poor, Martin Luther was called to give dignity to the common man. If a prophet is one who interprets in clear and intelligible language the will of God, Martin Luther King Jr. fits that designation. If a prophet is one who does not seek popular causes to espouse, but rather the causes he thinks are right, Martin Luther qualified on that score.No! He was not ahead of his time. No man is ahead of his time. Every man is within his star, each in his time. Each man must respond to the call of God in his lifetime and not in somebody else's time. Jesus had to respond to the call of God in the first century A.D., and not in the 20th century. He had but one life to live. He couldn't wait.

The speech was well received by the attendants of the funeral and the American populate. It was later hailed as "a masterpiece of twentieth century oratory."

After the death of King, Mays drew controversy when his sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church urged an audience of mostly white people, "not to dishonor [King's] name by trying to solve our problems through rioting in the streets. If they could turn their sorrow into hope for the future and use their outrage to invigorate a peaceful climb to the mountaintop, Martin Luther King Jr. will have died a redemptive death from which all mankind will benefit."

After Morehouse, 1967–1981

Social tours and advocacy

Mays began teaching again, and served as a private advisor to the president of Michigan State University and went on to publish Disturbed About Man, a collection of his sermons at Morehouse College. His publications described his early life in South Carolina and the racial tensions he had to overcome. During this time he began to give speeches and commencement addresses at various intuitions to spread both religious and racial tolerance. He ended his social tours in the early 1980s, giving a total of 250 commencement addresses at colleges, universities, and schools. In 1978, the U.S. Department of Education granted him the Distinguished Educator Award and the South Carolina State House hung a commissioned portrait of him in its chamber. These awards from South Carolina were deeply appreciated by Mays as he left the state in fear of his life and this he loved. During the social transformation of the South in the 1970s, Mays' legacy in his birthplace was solidified and he took on the title of "native son".

Atlanta board presidency

At age seventy-five, Mays was elected president of the Atlanta Public Schools Board of Education, where he supervised the peaceful desegregation of Atlanta's public schools as a consequence of the 1970 federal court order. Members of the board argued that since the bussing was not a part of their system they did not have to create one for desegregation; however, the idea was shot down by Mays, who cited the Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education Supreme Court decision. It was during this time that Mays ordered the city to create bus routes to cater to African-American neighborhoods. The board did not support the decision and asked the Georgia's Attorney General, Arthur K. Bolton, for a review of the case. Bolton brought the city government together with the board and with Mays created what was known as the Atlanta Compromise Plan.

His "commanding and demanding personality" was largely credited for the exponential levels of desegregation in Atlanta. The Atlanta Compromise Plan prompted Mays to advocate for the administration of the plan to be "colorless", that is to say, black and white students were transported on the same routes, in the same buses. This was named the "Majority to Minority" volunteer plan, better known as the "M to M" plan. The plan also allowed each student whose race was in the minority to transfer to a school that had the majority race; this was advantageous to the black populace of Atlanta. The program was later known as the "Volunteer Transfer Program" or VTP, and was ministered by the federal courts and the board. On July 28, 1974, Mays signed the alignment order declaring that the Atlanta School System was unitary.

On July 1, 1973, Mays appointed Alonzo Crim as the first African-American superintendent of schools, which was met with backlash from the other board members and city officials. He used his power and influence in Atlanta to shield Crim from the criticism and allowed him the opportunity to run the school system. During the later part of his tenure he greatly expanded the jurisdiction of the board, and upon his retirement in 1981 Mays was honored by the naming of a street. Near the end of his tenure, the board voted to name a newly constructed school after Mays; Mays High School was constructed on February 10, 1985, and was open to students of all races. He retired from the board in 1981. The Atlanta Board of Education had a rule against naming buildings after people unless they had been deceased for two years; they waived it for Mays; he visited the school frequently when it was being built. He is widely credited as the most influential figure in the desegregation of Atlanta, Georgia.

Death and legacy

Benjamin Mays died on March 28, 1984 in Atlanta, Georgia. He was initially buried at South-View Cemetery, but in May 1995 his body was entombed on the campus of Morehouse College along with his wife Sadie. Morehouse College established the Benjamin E. Mays Scholarship shortly after his death.

Boston University professor Lawrence Carter described Mays as "one of the most significant figures in American history." Andrew Young said of Mays: "if there hadn't of been [sic] a Benjamin Mays there would not have been a Martin Luther King Jr. He was very much a product of Dr. Mays religious thinking." He was known to Dillard University president Samuel Dubose Cook as "[one of the] great architects of the civil rights movement. Not only in training individuals but in writing his books, leadership in churches, as a pastor, college president. He set the standard. And he was uncompromising." In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Benjamin Mays on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

Sites and honors

In his home state of South Carolina he was inducted into the South Carolina Hall of Fame in 1984. His childhood home was relocated from Epworth to Greenwood, SC and is listed as a State Historic Site by the government of South Carolina, and was referred to as an "education icon" by the South Carolina Radio Network in 2011. Upon his death Mays was designated Phi Beta Kappa, Delta Sigma Rho, Delta Theta Chi, Omega Psi Phi.

Nationally, he was awarded the Spingarn Medal from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1982. He was elected to the Schomburg Honor Roll of Race Relations along with "only a dozen major leaders to be so honored." In 2011, Wiliams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, introduced the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship at Williams College. The National School Boards Association created the Benjamin Elijah Mays Lifetime Achievement Award for "an individual who—during his or her lifetime—has demonstrated a longstanding commitment to the educational needs of urban school children through his or her service as a local school board member." Due to his stature in academia he was frequently awarded honorary degreess from universities. He was awarded 40 of them during his lifetime and as of February 2018, he has received 56 honorary degrees.

Bates College's highest alumni distinction is known as the Benjamin E. Mays Medal and is reserved for "the alumna or alumnus who has performed distinguished service to the larger (worldwide) community and been deemed a graduate of outstanding accomplishment." The inaugural winner was Mays himself. The college established the Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Professorship in 1985.

Mays has been the subject or inspiration of memorials, and the eponym of hundreds of buildings, schools, streets, halls, awards, grants, scholarships, fellowships, and statues. Although he through his life had been appreciative of all of them, he "[was] reported to have said he was moved most deeply when a small black church in Ninety Six, South Carolina, renamed itself Mays United Methodist Church. There are numerous memorials to Mays in the United States, including:

Benjamin E. Mays High School, in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.

Benjamin E. Mays Drive in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.

Benjamin E. Mays Archives in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.

Benjamin E. Mays National Memorial in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.

The Statue of Benjamin E. Mays at Morehouse College, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.

Benjamin Mays Hall of Howard University, in Washington, D.C., U.S.

Benjamin Mays Center of Bates College, in Lewiston, Maine, U.S.

Benjamin E. Mays International Magnet School, in St. Paul, Minnesota, U.S.

Mays House Museum, in Greenwood, South Carolina, U.S.

Benjamin Mays Historic Site, in Greenwood, South Carolina, U.S.

Dr Benjamin E. Mays Elementary School in Greenwood, South Carolina, U.S.

Mays United Methodist Church, in Ninety Six, South Carolina, U.S.

Mays Crossroads on Highway 171 in Ninety Six, South Carolina, U.S.

Benjamin E. Mays Elementary Academy, in Chicago, Illinois, U.S.

Benjamin E. Mays High School in Pacolet, South Carolina, U.S.

Medal of Freedom effort

After Mays stepped down from the Atlanta Board of Education presidency in 1981, a petition was sent to the desk of U.S. President Ronald Reagan requesting that Mays be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but it was turned down. Georgian representative John Lewis proposed a bill in January 1993 that would commemorate Mays on a federal stamp and requested that Mays be given the Medal of Freedom posthumously. The request was sent to U.S. President Bill Clinton but his time as president ended before he could address the request. A request was sent once again to U.S. President George Bush by Georgian representatives Max Cleland and Zell Miller which passed both houses of Congress but has yet to be signed by a U.S. president. The petition was sent once more in 2012 to U.S. President Barack Obama, yet failed to be awarded.

#08/01 #03/28

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newstfionline · 6 years ago

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China Is Detaining Muslims in Vast Numbers. The Goal: ‘Transformation.’

By Chris Buckley, NY Times, Sept. 8, 2018

HOTAN, China--On the edge of a desert in far western China, an imposing building sits behind a fence topped with barbed wire. Large red characters on the facade urge people to learn Chinese, study law and acquire job skills. Guards make clear that visitors are not welcome.

Inside, hundreds of ethnic Uighur Muslims spend their days in a high-pressure indoctrination program, where they are forced to listen to lectures, sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party and write “self-criticism” essays, according to detainees who have been released.

The goal is to rid them of devotion to Islam.

Abdusalam Muhemet, 41, said the police detained him for reciting a verse of the Quran at a funeral. After two months in a nearby camp, he and more than 30 others were ordered to renounce their past lives. Mr. Muhemet said he went along but quietly seethed.

“That was not a place for getting rid of extremism,” he recalled. “That was a place that will breed vengeful feelings and erase Uighur identity.”

This camp outside Hotan, an ancient oasis town in the Taklamakan Desert, is one of hundreds that China has built in the past few years. It is part of a campaign of breathtaking scale and ferocity that has swept up hundreds of thousands of Chinese Muslims for weeks or months of what critics describe as brainwashing, usually without criminal charges.

Though limited to China’s western region of Xinjiang, it is the country’s most sweeping internment program since the Mao era--and the focus of a growing chorus of international criticism.

China has sought for decades to restrict the practice of Islam and maintain an iron grip in Xinjiang, a region almost as big as Alaska where more than half the population of 24 million belongs to Muslim ethnic minority groups. Most are Uighurs, whose religion, language and culture, along with a history of independence movements and resistance to Chinese rule, have long unnerved Beijing.

After a succession of violent antigovernment attacks reached a peak in 2014, the Communist Party chief, Xi Jinping, sharply escalated the crackdown, orchestrating an unforgiving drive to turn ethnic Uighurs and other Muslim minorities into loyal citizens and supporters of the party.

In addition to the mass detentions, the authorities have intensified the use of informers and expanded police surveillance, even installing cameras in some people’s homes. Human rights activists and experts say the campaign has traumatized Uighur society, leaving behind fractured communities and families.

China has categorically denied reports of abuses in Xinjiang. At a meeting of a United Nations panel in Geneva last month, it said it does not operate re-education camps and described the facilities in question as mild corrective institutions that provide job training.

“There is no arbitrary detention,” Hu Lianhe, an official with a role in Xinjiang policy, told the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. “There is no such thing as re-education centers.”

The committee pressed Beijing to disclose how many people have been detained and free them, but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs dismissed the demand as having “no factual basis” and said China’s security measures were comparable to those of other countries.

The government’s business-as-usual defense, however, is contradicted by overwhelming evidence, including official directives, studies, news reports and construction plans that have surfaced online, as well as the eyewitness accounts of a growing number of former detainees who have fled to countries such as Turkey and Kazakhstan.

The government’s own documents describe a vast network of camps--usually called “transformation through education” centers--that has expanded without public debate, specific legislative authority or any system of appeal for those detained.

The New York Times interviewed four recent camp inmates from Xinjiang who described physical and verbal abuse by guards; grinding routines of singing, lectures and self-criticism meetings; and the gnawing anxiety of not knowing when they would be released. Their accounts were echoed in interviews with more than a dozen Uighurs with relatives who were in the camps or had disappeared, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid government retaliation.

The Times also discovered reports online written by teams of Chinese officials who were assigned to monitor families with detained relatives, and a study published last year that said officials in some places were indiscriminately sending ethnic Uighurs to the camps to meet numerical quotas.

The long days in the re-education camp usually began with a jog.

Nearly every morning, Mr. Muhemet recalled, he and dozens of others--college graduates, businessmen, farmers--were told to run around an assembly ground. Impatient guards sometimes slapped and shoved the older, slower inmates, he said.

Then they were made to sing rousing patriotic hymns in Chinese, such as “Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China.” Those who could not remember the words were denied breakfast, and they all learned the words quickly.

Mr. Muhemet, a stocky man who ran a restaurant in Hotan before fleeing China this year, said he spent seven months in a police cell and more than two months in the camp in 2015 without ever being charged with a crime. Most days, he said, the camp inmates assembled to hear long lectures by officials who warned them not to embrace Islamic radicalism, support Uighur independence or defy the Communist Party.

The officials did not ban Islam but dictated very narrow limits for how it should be practiced, including a prohibition against praying at home if there were friends or guests present, he said. In other sessions, the inmates were forced to memorize laws and write essays criticizing themselves.

“In the end, all the officials had one key point,” he said. “The greatness of the Chinese Communist Party, the backwardness of Uighur culture and the advanced nature of Chinese culture.”

After two months, Mr. Muhemet’s family was finally allowed to visit the camp, located near “New Harmony Village,” a settlement built as a symbol of friendship between ethnic Uighurs and the majority Han Chinese. “I couldn’t say anything,” he recalled. “I just held my two sons and wife, and cried and cried.”

The Xinjiang government issued “deradicalization” rules last year that gave vague authorization for the camps, and many counties now run several of them, according to government documents, including requests for bids from construction companies to build them.

Some facilities are designed for inmates who are allowed to go home at night. Others can house thousands around the clock. One camp outside Hotan has grown in the past two years from a few small buildings to facilities on at least 36 acres, larger than Alcatraz Island, and work appears to be underway to expand it further, according to satellite photos.

In government documents, local officials sometimes liken inmates to patients requiring isolation and emergency intervention.

“Anyone infected with an ideological ‘virus’ must be swiftly sent for the ‘residential care’ of transformation-through-education classes before illness arises,” a document issued by party authorities in Hotan said.

The number of Uighurs, as well as Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities, who have been detained in the camps is unclear. Estimates range from several hundred thousand to perhaps a million, with exile Uighur groups saying the number is even higher.

About 1.5 percent of China’s total population lives in Xinjiang. But the region accounted for more than 20 percent of arrests nationwide last year, according to official data compiled by Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group. Those figures do not include people in the re-education camps.

Residents said people have been sent to the camps for visiting relatives abroad; for possessing books about religion and Uighur culture; and even for wearing a T-shirt with a Muslim crescent. Women are sometimes detained because of transgressions by their husbands or sons.

One official directive warns people to look for 75 signs of “religious extremism,” including behavior that would be considered unremarkable in other countries: growing a beard as a young man, praying in public places outside mosques or even abruptly trying to give up smoking or drinking.

Hotan feels as if under siege by an invisible enemy. Fortified police outposts and checkpoints dot the streets every few hundred yards. Schools, kindergartens, gas stations and hospitals are garlanded in barbed wire. Surveillance cameras sprout from shops, apartment entrances and metal poles.

“It’s very tense here,” a police officer said. “We haven’t rested for three years.”

This city of 390,000 underwent a Muslim revival about a decade ago. Most Uighurs have adhered to relatively relaxed forms of Sunni Islam, and a significant number are secular. But budding prosperity and growing interaction with the Middle East fueled interest in stricter Islamic traditions. Men grew long beards, while women wore hijabs that were not a part of traditional Uighur dress.

Now the beards and hijabs are gone, and posters warn against them. Mosques appear poorly attended; people must register to enter and worship under the watch of surveillance cameras.

The government shifted to harsher policies in 2009 after protests in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, spiraled into rioting and left nearly 200 people dead. Mr. Xi and his regional functionaries went further, adopting methods reminiscent of Mao’s draconian rule--mass rallies, public confessions and “work teams” assigned to ferret out dissent.

They have also wired dusty towns across Xinjiang with an array of technology that has put the region on the cutting edge of programs for surveillance cameras as well as facial and voice recognition. Spending on security in Xinjiang has soared, with nearly $8.5 billion allocated for the police, courts and other law enforcement agencies last year, nearly double the previous year’s amount.

The campaign has polarized Uighur society. Many of the ground-level enforcers are Uighurs themselves, including police officers and officials who staff the camps and security checkpoints.

Ordinary Uighurs moving about Hotan sometimes shuffle on and off buses several times to pass through metal detectors, swipe their identity cards or hand over and unlock their mobile phones for inspection.

A resident or local cadre is assigned to monitor every 10 families in Xinjiang, reporting on comings and goings and activities deemed suspicious, including praying and visits to mosques, according to residents and government reports. Residents said the police sometimes search homes for forbidden books and suspect items such as prayer mats, using special equipment to check walls and floors for hidden caches.

The authorities are also gathering biometric data and DNA. Two Uighurs, a former official and a student, said they were ordered to show up at police buildings where officers recorded their voices, took pictures of their heads at different angles and collected hair and blood samples.

The pressure on Uighur villages intensifies when party “work teams” arrive and take up residence, sometimes living in local homes. The teams ask villagers to inform on relatives, friends and neighbors, and they investigate residents’ attitudes and activities, according to government reports published online.

One account published last year described how the authorities in one village arranged for detainees accused of “religious extremism” to be denounced by their relatives at a public rally, and encouraged other families to report similar activities.

“More and more people are coming forward with information,” Cao Lihai, an editor for a party journal, wrote in the report. “Some parents have personally brought in their children to give themselves up.”

A Uighur woman in her 20s who asked to be identified only by her surname, Gul, said she came under scrutiny after wearing an Islamic head wrap and reading books about religion and Uighur history. Local officials installed cameras at her family’s door--and inside their living room.

“We would always have to be careful what we said and what we did and what we read,” she said.

Every week, Ms. Gul added, a neighborhood official visited and spent at least two hours interrogating her. Eventually, the authorities sent her to a full-time re-education camp.

Ms. Gul, who fled China after being released, later tried to contact her brother to find out if he was in trouble. He sent a wordless reply, an emoticon face in tears.

Afterward, Ms. Gul’s mother sent her another message: “Please don’t call us again. We are in trouble.”

The Chinese government says it is winning a war against Islamic extremism and separatism.

Still, many who have emerged from the indoctrination program say it has hardened public attitudes against Beijing.

“It was of absolutely no use,” said Omurbek Eli, a Kazakh businessman, of his time held in a camp in 2017. “The outcome will be the opposite. They will become even more resistant to Chinese influence.”

For many families, the disappearance of a loved one into the camps can be devastating, both emotionally and economically--a point reflected in reports posted online by the party’s “work teams.”

Some of these reports describe Uighur families unable to harvest crops on their own because so many members have been taken away, and one mentioned a mother left to care for five children. In another report, an official near Hotan described holding a village meeting to calm distraught relatives of those sent to the camps.

The mass internments also break Uighur families by forcing members to disown their kin or by separating small children from their parents. So many parents have been detained in Kashgar, a city in western Xinjiang, that it has expanded boarding schools to take custody of older, “troubled” children.

Ms. Gul said the camp she was in was ramshackle enough that children who lived nearby sometimes crept up to a window late at night and called out to their mothers inside. “Their children would come and say, ‘Mother, I miss you,’” she said.

“We didn’t say anything,” she added, “because there was a camera inside the cell.”

#China #Xinjiang #Uighur Muslims

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earthconstructs · 4 years ago

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context: why does it make me cringe? why does sales make me cringe?

why did I feel for a while that I don’t want to get caught up in the career ladder?

why do I judge people who chase money or fame?

what should truly motivate us at work

In a perfect world, when it came to choosing an occupation, we would have only two priorities in mind:

– to find a job that we enjoyed

– to find a job that paid us enough to cover reasonable material needs

– to find a job that will pay not just enough to cover reasonable material expenses but a lot more besides, enough to impress other people – even other people we don’t like very much.

– we crave to find a job that will allow us not to be at the mercy of other people, whom we may deep down fear and distrust.

– and we hope for a job that will make us well known, esteemed, honoured and perhaps famous, so that we will never again have to feel small or neglected.

reforming capitalism

In the Utopia, businesses would of course have to be profitable. But the success of a business would primarily be assessed in terms of its contribution to the collective good.

On changing the world

We should use the history of religion to inform us about the role of repetition, ritual and beauty in the name of changing how things are.

Good business

Philosophy, by contrast, has long recognised a crucial distinction between desires and needs:

A desire is whatever you feel you want at the moment.

A need is for something that serves your long-term well being.

And it’s our needs that are required for a satisfying, fulfilled life (which Plato, Aristotle and others call a life marked by eudaimonia).

Sadly, it’s easier to generate profits from desires than from needs. You can make much more money selling bad ice cream than by marketing Plato’s dialogues.

In a utopia, good businesses should be defined not simply by whether they are profitable or not; but by what they make their profit from. Only businesses that satisfy true needs are moral.

tbc

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timespakistan · 4 years ago

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Uniform syllabus for primary classes in August Islamabad : The Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training on Wednesday announced the introduction of a single curriculum for primary classes throughout the country next August. According to the ministry, it in consultation with provincial and area governments and all other stakeholders have developed the Single National Curriculum (SNC) for pre-first to fifth grades that will be followed by all public and private sector schools across the country from the next academic year. “On the directives of Federal Minister for Education and Professional Training Shafqat Mehmood, the new year will now start in August 2021 due to extension in examination dates to be held in May/June and prolonged school closures in the academic year of 2020,” it said. The ministry also said the National Curriculum Council in consultation with all stakeholders on the ministry’s orders had developed model textbooks aligned with student learning objectives prescribed by the Single National Curriculum for pre-first to fifth graders. The ministry said it had issued a letter to all provincial and area governments regarding the single national curriculum textbook policy on the directions of the federal education minister. According to the policy, private publishers are allowed to develop textbooks to be used by students under the new curriculum on the condition that the books are aligned with the [student learning outcomes] prescribed by SNC. Also, the publishers will require a no-objection certificate (NOC) by the provincial textbook boards so that they may ‘check any inclusion of anti-Pakistan, anti-religion, and any other hate material’. The ministry also advised the countrywide textbook boards to facilitate the NOC (no objection certificate) procedure without red-tapism and avoiding cumbersome administrative complications. If things go as planned, the single curriculum for middle classes will be introduced in 2022 and for high and higher education classes in 2023. According to the education ministry officials, the country has three parallel systems of education, including public schools, private schools and seminaries, so the SNC has been developed to bring the entire country’s schooling education system under one umbrella. They insist that the initiative is meant for one system of education for all in terms of curriculum, the medium of instruction and a common platform of assessment so that children across the country have a fair and equal opportunity to receive a high-quality education. The officials say before the SNC development, multiple comparative studies were carried out to align the SNC with international standards and they include analysis of Pakistani curriculum with Singapore and Cambridge’s, comparison of Pakistan Learners’ Standards with Singapore, Malaysia/Indonesia & UK’s. All the findings were incorporated in the SNC. The ministry also consulted all federating units, public sector, private sector, federal government educational institutions Cantonments & Garrisons, seminaries, Cambridge University UK for English, Maths and Science, and LUMS and AKU-IED. https://timespakistan.com/uniform-syllabus-for-primary-classes-in-august/9410/

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kadimadayschool · 4 years ago

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The Right Place: How to Choose the Best School for Your Child – Hebrew Day School

Dr. Steven Lorch explains what distinguishes Jewish day schools from other private schools with an international reputation, and suggests to parents: "The place in which you feel at home is the school you should choose for your children's education."

In 2007, a study was published that found that graduates of Jewish day schools in America have a significant academic advantage in ability and achievement. This was well known years earlier; however, the study was an official confirmation that children who study in Jewish schools reach higher levels of achievement, and when they are in college, they have wider options than their peers who studied in non-Jewish schools.

When American Jewish or Israeli American parents are asked what is important to them in a school, how they choose a school for their children to go to, and whether Jewish Studies are a significant factor in their decision, many of them answer that they are interested in keeping the tradition, that their children should feel connected to their roots and their identity, but not necessarily that they should invest much time or effort in Jewish Studies classes.

Dr. Steven Lorch, who researched the topic in depth and also published a well-known article in 2008 that discusses these matters, says that this reflects thinking that is partial and not necessarily correct. Because this is a subject that concerns many parents, we decided to ask Lorch about the factors to consider when one is at a crossroads on the way to choosing a school for one's child.

Why Choose a Jewish Education?

"Many parents think about the Jewish and identity-related advantages for their child. They want their child to continue to be a Jew, to be loyal to family traditions, and even to be able to communicate with family members who live in Israel. In effect, they measure all these desires against the benefits of non-Jewish schools.

"Parents don't factor in the academic advantages of Jewish education over non-Jewish education, and this is the root of the problem. If one thinks about all the benefits of a Jewish school, it will be clear that it is superior to public or private schools on every academic and community dimension."

The Relational Benefit

"One of the factors that is considered a predictor of success in education and in life is a school's community character. To be part of a supportive, embracing community is an important feature that influences the ability of a child. In the psychological literature, this is called a sense of belonging, and it is strongly present in Jewish schools, but not necessarily true of non-Jewish schools. In reality, this is the first advantage that Jewish schools have that parents tend to ignore."

Dr. Lorch, who received his master's degree in education from Harvard and his doctorate in religion and education from Columbia, and is an ordained rabbi, is a recognized authority on education and Jewish education. Lorch is currently the head of Kadima Day School in Los Angeles. He came to Kadima after 40 years of heading schools in Israel and America, having arrived in the summer of 2018 from New York on account of the rich community that the school offers and the values that he is developing.

When he recalls the many parents he has spoken with over the years who struggled with the question of Jewish education, he says that many think that they are paying a price in other realms for the sake of the Jewish aspect. "From their perspective, they want Judaism enough that they are prepared to compromise. This is an error. No compromise is needed; rather, there is an advantage in every respect."

"If we take into account not only the Jewish aspect, but also the values-based, community-oriented, relational, and academic dimensions - the Jewish school is superior in all of them. This is the right way of thinking, which will lead the ambivalent Jewish parent to the right school for his or her child."

Dr. Lorch speaks from his rich experience, and in the aftermath of one school visit that took place 12 years ago, in the 2000s, when he served as the chairperson of a school accreditation team, that helped him understand with utmost clarity the importance and advantage of Jewish education.

The members of accreditation teams would visit many different schools and be hosted by them for several days, and at the end of their visits would write reports on the schools' progress based on their achievements. In this connection, Lorch and 12 fellow teachers and administrators, the members of the team, were hosted by a Jewish school in New Jersey.

"I had a powerful experience," he recalled. "I sat with my fellow team members, nearly all of them from famous, well-reputed non-Jewish independent schools in the area. Something happened that I hadn't expected. They commended the Jewish school in New Jersey for its successes, not just in the Jewish realm, but also in its values education, community spirit, academic preparation, and its students' future life chances."

The strong and surprising statements that he heard made him proud but also aroused his curiosity. "I felt proud to be a Jewish educator, but in my capacity as chairperson of the team I had to suppress this feeling and focus my professional curiosity." He started to research the matter in depth. "I tried to inquire into each of these interesting statements. I examined the findings, the studies that had been published about each domain or topic. I reached several conclusions that can be divided into three key features that can perhaps shed light and explain the claims of the team members."

Academic Advantages

"In Jewish schools, students learn approximately twice as many academic subjects as students from other schools. Alongside the range of subjects studied in every school in America: language arts, history, science, math, and a foreign language, students learn a complete second range of subjects: Bible, Rabbinic literature, Jewish history, Jewish thought, and even law - a subject that is taught in America as a post-bachelor's program is studied in Jewish schools beginning in second or third grade."

While he was writing his article, an important study from Brandeis University was published that focused on the success of graduates of Jewish day schools in undergraduate university programs, compared to the graduates of other schools. The study revealed that graduates of Jewish day schools felt fully prepared for the workload in university. The study load was familiar to them because they were accustomed to a long school day. The homework load demanded of them in university was similar to, and even less than, the workload in high school, and they were better prepared than their peers who had not attended Jewish schools.

"Work ethic, skills, and perseverance - these are the three characteristics that distinguish Jewish schools from others," says Lorch.

Much research has been devoted to the effects of bilingualism, and they show the importance and great benefit of knowing languages at a high level already from a young age. Speakers of at least two languages possess advanced academic abilities, as expected, in learning languages, but also in other, unexpected areas, such as map reading. Apparently, bilingualism shapes the brain in such a way that it becomes able to learn in ways that monolinguals are unable to achieve.

Lorch explains: "In schools that teach Hebrew as a spoken language, and it becomes in effect a language on a par with the native language for the school community, it becomes something more significant. In schools that teach Hebrew as an academic language, meaning literacy skills and the language of the Bible and prayers rather than as a living language - the impact is smaller. I would not predict the advantages of bilingualism from such schools, because it [bilingualism] doesn't exist there."

Don't Non-Jewish Schools Teach Second Languages, Such as French or Spanish?

"We need to understand that the timing is important. The fact that students start to learn a second language at a relatively young age has a great influence on the brain plasticity of the child."

The third element of the academic advantage is the method of study in Jewish subjects. "Jewish schools are engines of academic excellence," Lorch explains. "When students learn, in addition to spoken Hebrew as a second language, ancient Biblical Hebrew, with its unique syntax and vocabulary, this is comparable to an Israeli child who starts to learn Shakespeare in English at a very high level, beginning in second grade. At a certain stage, in fourth or fifth grade, another layer of studying Rashi and other commentaries is added. These commentaries are not in modern Hebrew, and also not in Biblical Hebrew. Again, there's a new layer of language that they experience. It's like teaching Shakespeare with commentaries, also in English, but from a few centuries later, which isn't the same as modern English."

What Else Do Students Gain from Studying Bible?

"They learn how to look at a brief passage from several angles at once, to try to understand this passage from every angle at the same time, whereby the first commentary is possible, and the second and third enrich the understanding. Here too, if we draw a parallel to studying poetry in university, it's like taking a word or two and analyzing them from several angles. Students in Jewish schools learned skills beginning at a very young age that will be required of them in their academic studies in the future."

Is the Study of Bible Commentary Different in Judaism from Other Religions?

"There are thousands of Jewish cases [of texts which Jewish commentators analyze and debate], unlike other religions, where such instances are rare. Matters of this kind are usually studied only in institutes of higher learning, but here, already from a young age, students are taught how to inquire and interpret in depth. Even if students in second grade, for example, aren't ready to engage independently in an in-depth investigation, their teachers are steeped in these investigations and are able to structure the value concepts in a way that draws from the tradition."

Advantages in Values Education

According to Dr. Lorch, another important benefit, in addition to the others, is values education.

"I discovered that, in the independent school world, one of the internal critiques that the schools themselves identify as a weakness is that, as a general rule, the shared values that they impart are very general, and it is hard to derive practical implications from them."

What Do You Mean?

"Let's take a striking example. We identified that they all advocate equality, fairness, and so on, but what is behind these commitments? What can the students say about this value? What happens when a school is struggling with a particular issue or dilemma? To what extent are they helped by a particular value? This was their self-critique: what does fairness mean? Does it mean that everyone is treated the same, or should each person receive what he or she needs, even if it's different from what others receive? What is fairness, after all?" Lorch asked these questions and came to the realization that, in non-Jewish education, even in a religious setting, schools lacked the tools to inquire deeply.

Do Jewish Schools Have the Tools to Grapple with These Questions?

"Yes," concludes Dr. Lorch unequivocally. "Jewish schools have a large number of sources, each of which delves into and analyzes the particular value, so that the value does not only remain at the level of slogans or general statements, but, in addition, provides specific, detailed guidance to the school."

Lorch refers to an important value that is frequently mentioned in Judaism - humility. "What is humility? In order to know, let's go to the Bible. In the Bible, we read about Moses, who was said to be the humblest person. Already there we find a reflection of this value. When we analyze his life and deeds, we learn more about this value. Already in the first layer of Jewish tradition we find details about this matter that don't exist elsewhere. There is an entire tradition of commentaries on these verses about Moses and other Biblical characters. To this can be added the many legal rulings on this matter that are, in effect, legal debates that developed around real cases that occurred. In the study of other religions, there is no parallel because there is no tradition of commentary and legal argumentation comparable to what we find in Judaism."

These three distinctive qualities, the communal-relational, the academic, and the values-based, are good enough reasons, according to Dr. Lorch, for parents to be aware of and take into consideration when they are making a decision about their child's schooling.

Once a Parent Has Chosen to Send a Child to a Jewish School and Discovers That There Are Many Such Schools, What Additional Tips Can You Give to Those Who Are Wavering?

"Being a customer in education demands a lot of self-confidence. When we buy something like a car or clothing, for the most part we know something about the merchandise, and if not, we know where to turn to find reviews and even to read in-depth analyses of the product in order to make the best purchase. In education, it's hard to see the product and very hard to differentiate among the manufacturers. Therefore, many parents try to find a substitute for a direct judgment of the quality of teaching and learning. The substitute is usually something visible: what does the school building look like, and not necessarily the curriculum? Parents find it hard to judge for themselves, and therefore they tend to check who else sends their children to the school: friends, famous people, wealthy people, etc. This comes from a lack of confidence."

After he identified the problem, Lorch comes to his suggestion. "Feel confident to make your own assessment of the atmosphere and culture of the school. You are more knowledgeable and able to do this than anyone else. You are experts in your child. Feel the atmosphere that is best for your child. Ask yourselves, is the atmosphere comfortable for you? Does it speak to you? Can you see yourselves fitting into the school community? Don't ask yourselves whether you want to aspire to this community, but rather is it the right fit for you now? If the community and the atmosphere are a good fit for a parent touring the school, that's the right school for that parent's child. Different schools are right for different parents, and therefore there's a variety of Jewish schools. You know what your child needs better than anyone else. Trust yourselves and your gut feeling. Just like the El-Al commercial: Feel at home."

Dr. Lorch speaks from experience. The reason he moved to Los Angeles to head Kadima Day School, after he had led well reputed schools in New York, is similar to parents' decision making. "I chose to move here and work at Kadima because I felt most at home here. It is a welcoming and warm school. I was impressed with all the people I met here: parents, faculty, and students. I encountered serious people, interesting and interested not just in their own needs but in the common good. This is not to be taken for granted; I haven't seen this in many other places."

Kadima Day School, which has been in existence for 49 years in the West Valley of Los Angeles, and which Dr. Lorch has been leading for the past year, won him over. In Kadima, Lorch and the faculty are working to create a community characterized by a mixture of tradition and innovation. This independent-community school that is growing from day to day is an institution of learning, inspiration, and growth which continues to produce many students whose academic ability demonstrably surpasses that of many of their peers whom they encounter in later life - academic excellence that propels them toward a future filled with opportunity, in accordance with the guiding principles of Dr. Lorch.

To know more information visit:

https://www.kadimadayschool.org/

#jewish school #jewish private school

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