Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand. — Thomas Carlyle
by Ken Sehested
It would be a stretch to say he was a friend. More like an acquaintance in his far-flung orbit of fellow pilgrims who looked to him for light.
We corresponded off and on for more than a decade. He was generous to people he barely knew, and was known throughout his life for kindness to those with whom he disagreed.
Read more ›by Ken Sehested
26 August 2018
I have disagreed with US Sen. John McCain on a whole range of issues over many years. We see the world in profoundly different ways. (And I say this without the slightest hint of having a fraction of his stature.)
However, he is numbered in a rare breed of politicians of his generation—or mine, or any in my memory—who has displayed more character and integrity, the willingness to be guided, more often than not, by moral principle rather than profit or political expediency.
by Ken Sehested
We must be prepared.
Things are likely to get worse
before they get better. We
must listen to the news,
from a variety of sources.
But we must not draw our
bearings from that news.
Ours is a larger horizon.
We must be prepared to
take emergency action, to
go completely out of our
comfort zones, in resisting
the Powers-and-Principalities’
sway over current events.
Years ago, in putting together a special issue of Baptist Peacemaker on the topic of anger, I asked two friends (thanks again, Steve & Marion) to do a bit of research. Read through the Psalms, I asked, and compile a list of verses that speak about anger and its various synonyms—expressions of hatred, longing for vengeance, threat of retaliation, etc.
Needless to say, there is a lot there; and it’s actually shocking that the believing community’s prayer book contains such a level of vile and violent accusations and bequests. (This material is formally referred to as the imprecatory psalms.)
In his Praying the Psalms, biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann says this material reveals ancient Israel doing three things. “First, you must voice the rage. Everybody knows that. Everybody in the therapeutic society knows that you must voice it, but therapeutic society stops there. Second, you must submit it to another, meaning God in this context. Third, you then must relinquish it and say, ‘I entrust my rage to you.’”
Read more ›by Ken Sehested
Introduction
Many years ago a friend wrote to ask about how to handle anger, naming a specific incident regarding
her congregation’s skewed budget habits. Of course, the incident is not unique, and the question
of what to do with anger stretches across a wide range of personal and public contexts.
Below is her question and commentary, then my response.
by Ken Sehested
It was the third of July on a cool cloudy sky
I set in for a storm in the makin'. . . .
I believe that a thought has just gotten caught
In a place where words can't surround it
It concerns the years past and the shadows they cast
And my path as I walk around it.
—John Prine, “The Third of July”
Some years ago, on a visit to the Maritime provinces of Canada, we took a history tour of St. John, New Brunswick, and learned details of a narrative I vaguely recalled. St. John’s story is uniquely tied to U.S. history.
Read more ›by Ken Sehested
U.S. President Donald Trump is a self-obsessed, infantile, demagogic and malicious huckster without a shred of moral capacity other than self-promotion.
There. Say it out loud.
Read more ›by Ken Sehested
One important thing that hasn’t been said this week [about the savagery of separating of children from parents at the US-Mexican border] is that this Department of Justice policy change is in fact a form of terrorism.
The point of terrorism isn’t killing people. Terrorists make strategic use of aggressive trauma to spread fear for the purpose of affecting social or political objectives. Look up the FBI’s definition.*
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§ “Christ, in disarming Peter, disarmed every soldier.”
§ “Shall we carry a flag? It is a rival to Christ.”
§ “It is absolutely forbidden to repay evil with evil.”
Read more ›by Ken Sehested
15 May is the anniversary of what Palestinians call al-Nakba, translated as “the Catastrophe” in reference to the day following Israel’s formation as a state in 1948. Some three-quarters of a million Palestinians were forced from their homes. Four hundred Palestinian villages cease to exist. The heirs of the expelled now number five million, most living in refugee camps on the West Bank, Gaza, and surrounding countries.
I was in my 30s when I first heard the word Nakba, and the historical moment it represents, well into a career requiring broad knowledge of global affairs. In my experience, few here in North America know the word.
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