There are times to stay silent. This is not one of them. Views from the Edge’s long silence does not imply consent. It was born of despair. Philosophy is born in a cry, wrote Willem Zuurdeeg in Man Before Chaos.1
Finding words to describe the origins of my protest failed me until the line “the walls of gold entomb us” came to mind and wouldn’t let go until I found it. Identifying its source felt like finding a breadcrumb pointing me home to my heritage and my deepest self. “O God of Earth and Altar” by G. K. Chesterton says what I believe, think, and feel in this “Golden Age.”
“Our earthly leaders falter, Our people drift and die”
O God of earth and altar, Bow down and hear our cry;
Our earthly rulers falter, Our people drift and die; The walls of gold entomb us, The swords of scorn divide; Take not Thy thunder from us, But take away our pride.
From sleep and from damnation, Deliver us good Lord! From all that terror teaches, From lies of tongue and pen; From all the easy speeches That comfort cruel men; From sale and profanation Of honor and the sword; From sleep and from damnation, Deliver us, good Lord!
Tie in a living tether The prince and priest and thrall; Bind all our lives together, Smite and save us all; In ire and exultation Aflame with faith, and free, Lift up a living nation, a single sword to Thee.1
Faith and Politics
Poetry is timeless. The lyrics Chesterton wrote in 1906 bubbled up from a hidden sea deep within me, the greater ‘Yes’ that includes the ‘No’ –– the protest of a primal cry against this new ‘Golden Age’ which moth and rust will inevitably consume.
“O God of Earth and Altar” strikes me now as a kind of catechism––a set of cliff notes on what it means –– and does not mean –– to follow Christ. Christian faith and ethics stand at the intersection of the divine and secular, prayer and politics, profession and profanation, truth and lies, salvation and damnation.
Three years after Chesterton said ‘No’ to life entombed within the ‘the walls of gold’, American poet priest Walter Russell Bowie spoke of walls when lust and greed no longer “Wring gold from human pain. “O Holy City, Seen of John” expresses the inseparability of faith and the ethic of compassion.
O Holy City, seen of John, Where Christ, the Lamb doth reign, Within whose four-square walls shall come No night, nor need, nor pain, And where the tears are wiped from our eyes That shall not weep again!
O shame on us who rest content While lust and greed for gain In street, and shop and tenement Wring gold from human pain, And bitter lips in blind despair Cry, “Christ hath died in vain”!2
Gordon C. Stewart, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock), January 6, 2026.
1 Willem Zuurdeeg, “Man Before Chaos,” Abington Press, 1968.
2 Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), “O God of Earth and Altar,” in The Commonwealth, 1906.
3 Walter Russell Bowie (1882-1969), “O Holy City Seen of John,” 1909.
Congressman Elijah Cummings (RIP) took congressional oversight seriously. Overseeing the Department of Homeland Security, he is like a mother bear protecting her cubs. His judgment rises from compassion. Addressing convicted felon Michael Cohen, he speaks like a grandfather to a grandson.
Rep. Elijah Cummings (RIP), former Chair of the U.S. House of Representatives Oversight Committee
We have met the enemy
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa broke through the wall of apartheid. Can a process of honest confession (truth-telling), and forgiveness reconcile us in America?
In the real world, I have often confused good and evil. I come up short until I remember that I live in Pogo’s world. “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Like the biblical prophets, Elijah Cummings confronted the worst in us and encouraged the best in us. “We can do better,” he says. I wonder if we can. “We’re better than this.” I wonder whether we are.
STOP! Listen up!
“If you bite and devour one another,” wrote the Apostle Paul to a church whose people were biting and devouring each other, “watch out that you are not consumed by each other.” (Epistle to the Galatians 5:15). The warning is more than a suggestion. In the Greek text, “WATCH OUT!” is to morality and ethics what “Halt!” is to soldiers:“STOP! LISTEN UP!”
Groaning too deep for words
What makes us human is not power or the capacity to create chaos and division. Or to make noise. Or to take center stage. Noisy gongs and clanging cymbals distract us from hearing the groaning that rumbles deep within every human heart. These groans are the labor pains by which a better Michael Cohen, a better Donald Trump, a better America, a better world, and a better us are born.
Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf & Stock), Brooklyn Park, MN, July 16, 2025.
The video of a rhinoceros killing a lion and throwing it into the air like trash called to mind Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. As I remembered it, Rhinoceros, like other works of The Theater of the Absurd, tore back the curtain of presumption that keeps us from seeing who we really are. If Rhinoceros was about anything else, it was about order and chaos, dominance and subservience, power and the wannabe herd that surrenders its power to the Rhinoceros.
A day in Brooklyn Park
My sense of the absurd grows every day. I see myself as E.E. Cummings’ “Little i” –– Who am I, “little i” among the herd of “little i’s” clamoring for dominance? I know so much less than I once knew. The sense of absurdity has shredded my confidence in the unseen hand of divine providence.
Kay and I live in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, where a police bulletin advised all residents to stay in our homes until a future advisory. Keep the doors locked while the police searched for a shooter at loose in our neighborhood. The man is armed and dangerous. Do not answer the door under any circumstances. The suspect may be dressed like a police officer. Do not answer the door for anyone until you receive a further advisory.
The next day we learned that a suspect had been arrested. He had shot and killed former Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and had critically wounded MN state Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette.
The Army of God and the ‘unhumans’
The shooter had abandoned his van to flee on foot. The van contained a hit list of 40+ public servants. Everyone on the list was prominent member of the Democratic-Farm-Labor Party (DFL). To some, it came as a shock that the suspect identified himself as a Christian. On most Sundays, he attended worship at an evangelical megachurch. Others were not surprised. They recalled Stephanie McCummen’s article, “The Army of God Comes Out of the Shadows” (The Atlantic, January 9, 2025). The far-right New Apostolic Reformation has quietly sweeps through charismatic-evangelical Churches with its message of Christian nationalism.
“Our study of history,” says a book endorsed by JD Vance, “has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans. It is time to stop playing by rules they [i.e.‘unhumans’] won’t [keep].”
Earlier in American public life, residents of Brooklyn Park did not imagine that hate, heartlessness, and cruelty would define their community. Nor would they have thought of a Christian drawing up a hit list, disguising himself as a police officer driving a squad car facsimile loaded with guns, rifles, and military-style weapons used for assassinations and executions of public servants. There was, as there always is among humans anger, frustration, scapegoating, and loathing of others, but the community, for the most part, observed its own cultural commandments of do’s and don’ts.
Living with the Absurd
The ethical norms required for a healthy society have been eroded so slowly that we wonder how we got to the America of 2025 so quickly. Like buildings of brick and mortar, nations, religions, and communities need maintenance. Without it, they crumble.
While a student at a small Christian college, the Theater of the Absurd suddenly came to make more sense than the “Life-of-Brian” view of divine providence in which God’s in his heaven and nothing can go wrong. Things were not right with world. Unless God is a sadist, the world made no sense. I was 19 years-old when Eugene Ionesco, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre pulled me, dragging and screaming, into the Theater of the Absurd. I had experienced the angst to which Camus’ The Plague, Sartre’s No Exit, and Ionesco’s Rhinoceros gave expression, but I did not know enough history to understand the Sitz im Leben from which they wrote.
Don’t you see?
White Rhinoceros, courtesy of Working with Wildlife, South Africa
All these years later, I get it. Life in 2025 bears ghostly resemblance to these authors’ experience almost a century ago. In an interview published in 1983, Ionesco described the circumstances that led him to the image of a rhinoceros:
I first thought of the rhinoceros image during the war, as I watched Romanian statesmen and politicians and later French intellectuals accommodate themselves to Hitler’s way of thinking. They might say something like, “Well, of course the Nazis are terrible, terrible people, but you know, you must credit them with their good points.” And you wanted to say to them: “But don’t you see, if you start granting them a good point here, a good point there, eventually you will concede everything to them.” Which is exactly what happened. But they looked upon you as an alarmist, then a nuisance, finally an enemy to be run down. They looked like they wanted to lower their heads and charge.
Eugene Ionesco, Le Nouvel Observateur, February 1983
Conceding Everything
The statesmen, politicians, and intellectuals who today accommodate themselves to the thinking and morality of a rhinoceros are not Romanian, German, or French. They are Americans. The way of thinking is the same. The psychology is the same. Though the targets are different, the phenomena are the same. If Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals became the scapegoats that propped up the illusion of Aryan racial superiority in Germany, today in America, the enemy is leftists, socialists, communists, people of color, immigrants, and migrants poisoning the blood of our country. The scapegoat mechanism is the same. The excuses and accommodations are the same. The results are the same.
The strategy and tactics that now threaten democracy in the U.S.A. have a history. Too little has been made of the similarity of the Nazi’s failed coup d’etat –– the Beer Hall Putsch (November 8-9,1923) in Munich –– and the attempted coup d’etat in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021. Or of the fact that Adolf Hitler was tried and found guilty of treason and the charges in the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump in the wake of January 6. Or that the book Hitler wrote in prison, Mein Kampf, and the Speeches of Hitler, were, according to members of the Trump family and the co-author of The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz, were the only books in his bedroom. Most poignant is the Nazi decision to shift from the strategy of violent revolution to a slower evolutionary road to victory. It would happen more slowly and less spectacularly, but it would succeed. They would destroy democracy from within. And they did.
“Hitler’s lesson from the failed putsch,” wrote historian Christopher Browning in the February 2022 issue of The Atlantic, “was that he needed to pursue revolution through ‘the politics of legality’ rather than storm Munich City Hall. The Nazis would use the electoral process of democracy to destroy democracy.”
The late Bill Moyers (RIP) described Donald Trump as a man who has an open sore where a soul should be. Eugene Ionesco saw a Rhinoceros, and a herd of wannabe rhinoceroses, tromping behind the Rhinoceros whenever a snort tells them to lower their heads and charge.
Gordon C. Stewart, Presbyterian Church (USA) pastor, social critic, and public theologian, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock), 49 brief commentaries on faith and public life, Brooklyn Park, MN, July 9, 2025.
The date June 14 had multiple layers of meaning for my family this year. June 14 (Flag Day) was my mother’s birthday. Muriel Eva Titus Stewart would have been 110 this year. It was Donald J. Trump’s birthday; it was the day of the military parade celebrating the President’s birthday and the 250th Anniversary of the United States Army.
It was the day a gunman killed Minnesota Speaker of the House emerita Melissa Hortman (DFL-Brooklyn Park), her husband, Mark, in their own home, and critically wounded Sen. John Hoffman (DFL-Champlin) and his wife, Yvette, in their home.
A Brooklyn Park Police advisory to secure our property and stay put during the search for the suspect.
Later that day, downtown Minneapolis Interfaith Clergy representing Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Unitarian-Universalist congregations published the following statement on hate and violence.
Downtown Interfaith Clergy Statement, Jun 14, 2025
We are a multi-faith coalition of clergy representing more than 35,000 Minnesotans from congregations across the city of Minneapolis.
Many of us have had the honor of offering prayers in the chambers of the Minnesota House of Representatives and the Minnesota Senate. As clergy, we pray for unity, peace, and guidance for our elected officials—public servants working toward the well-being of all Minnesotans.
It is unimaginable that Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and Senator John Hoffman, his wife Yvette, and their daughter were targeted in an act of extreme political violence. We mourn alongside the family of Speaker Emerita Hortman and her husband in their time of inconceivable grief, and we send our prayers for a complete healing of body and spirit to Senator Hoffman, Yvette, and their daughter.
In these deeply troubling times, we stand united against the rising culture of hatred and fear that has been allowed to take root in our communities. Violent words lead to violent actions, and we must not let depravity become the new normal in our world. Together, we will work to counter it wherever we see it.This is a time of great divisiveness in our country. As people of faith, we are called, as the prophet Jeremiah teaches us, to seek “peace in the city, and in the places where we dwell.” (Jeremiah, 29:7) As interfaith religious leaders, we have worked to maintain connections across faiths through thoughtful and respectful dialogue, even when we disagree. Such conversations between people of faith offer a powerful alternative to division and hostility.
Interfaith relationships have brought us closer to our own faith and convictions. This work has opened the door to deeper engagement with our holy texts, our sacred communities, and our relationships with God. In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But it does not bend on its own. We must bend it—with courage, conviction, compassion, and action.
God help us to live our lives with moral courage, to strengthen our communities, and to stand together for justice.
Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman, on behalf of the Downtown Interfaith Clergy
Rev. Jeffrey Japinga, Westminster Presbyterian Church; Rev. Dan Adolphson, First Christian Church; Rev. Jullan Stoneberg, First Unitarian Society; Rev. Elizabeth Macaulay, Hennepin Ave United Methodist Church; Pastor Elijah McDavid III, Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church; Rev. Timothy M. Kingsley, Saint Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral; Rev. Jen Crow, First Universalist Church; Rev. Peter Nycklemoe, Central Lutheran Church; Makram El-Amin, executive director, Al-Maa’uun; Father Daniel Griffith, Basilica of St. Mary;Father Kevin Kenney, St. Olaf Catholic Church.
Downtown interfaith Clergy statement, Minneapolis, MN, June 14, 2025
Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, host of Views from the Edge, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017, Wipf and Stock), Brooklyn Park, MN, June 30, 2025.
Before Mitchell Dahood’s Anchor Bible Commentary on the Psalms (Psalms II) caught my attention, I had read Psalm 94 as addressing ‘the God of vengeance’. I don’t like vengeance, retaliation, or retribution. I see their results every day in others and in myself. “I am your retribution,” says Donald Trump on the campaign trail. The way of Jesus counters vengeance with mercy, retaliation with forgiveness, retribution with the sweet taste of kindness.
The God of vindication, Yahweh, The God of vindication, shine forth.
It was the God of vengeance whose wrath terrified Augustinian monk Martin Luther until Paul’s Epistle to the Romans relieved his distress. “God of vengeance” is mistaken; God was sovereign, yet His heart was for us; not against us. We were no less sinful than Luther had said, but Divine love surpasses our sin. One is ‘justified’ by divine grace through faith.
Father Dahood, Professor of Language and Literature at the Pontifical Institute in Rome, translates the Hebrew word which most translations render as ‘vengeance’ altogether differently. Psalm 94 addresses” the God of vindication.”
I confess that I sometimes hope for vengeance. “’Vengeance is mine; I will repay,’ says the Lord.” So where is it? Is it hiding? If so, why? Is it a projection? Painting God in our image? A Benedictine spiritual guide once replied to my statement, “I don’t believe in Hell” with “Well, we Benedictines say that Hell is real… but there’s probably nobody in it.” The monk was preserving God’s sovereignty as Judge, while maintaining God’s essence as Love.
Whether it’s God of vengeance or vindication, I feel the psalmist’s cry for God to show up, shine forth, come out of hiding. Show Yourself. Vindicate Yourself!
Dahood’s translation is also strange for spelling out the Hebrew Name for God. The Hebrew name was originally four consonants without verbs: YHWH, the inscrutable Name given to Moses out of the burning bush on Mount Horeb. “I Am,” “I Am Who I Am” or “I will be Who I will be.” The Name too holy to speak is above every name – the Breath that breathes in me, in us, in all life. Who , then, am I––little I— to come before You. Who am I to shrink You to a name, you who are the Mystery beyond and within the chaos, neither friend nor foe, “Immortal, Invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes.”
Rise, judge of the world, give the presumptuous their deserts
I want the world to be judged by an angry God, a vengeful God, but that God is AWOL –– either absent or indifferent to the carnage inflicted on the people of Gaza and Ukraine, indifferent to the wounded, dead and dying, the maimed and the starving, the blank eyes of babies and children dying of malnutrition.
Here in the USA, disinformation replaces reality. Presumption is everywhere without consequence. It sits behind desks in Moscow and in Washington, D.C. God’s name is spoken, but it is a god of vengeance that is invoked. Presumption waves a chain saw, smashes the good, destroys the boundaries that keep life human and humane.
How much longer shall the wicked, O Yahweh, How much longer will the wicked exult?
I watch the still-to-be sentenced convicted felon entertain his followers, alone on stage at a campaign rally, moving awkwardly, like a teenager who never learned to dance, swaying to the music of YMCA. I see an arena full of adoring fans who have no problem watching the 35-minute visible display of self-absorption.
How long will they pour forth defiant words, shall all the evildoers flaunt themselves?
I watch the richest man in the world jump up and down on stage like a clueless clown, brandishing a chain-saw to rescue prisoners held captive by the forest whose shade and shelter keep them free and sane. I ask what is wrong with us. What has become of us?
Your people, Yahweh, they crushed, and your patrimony they afflicted. Widow and stranger they killed, the orphan they murdered, Thinking “Yah does not see, Jacob’ God takes no notice.”
There is no Higher Power to judge our cruelty, no Holy One to hear their speeches or rebuke their misuse of authority. Though God is dead to them, ‘God-talk’ remains useful for their purposes. “God saved me,” says the POTUS after surviving two assassination attempts. “I felt then, and I believe even more so now, that my life was saved by God to make America great again.”
Learn some sagacity, you dolts, fools, when will you understand? Yahweh knows how vapid are men’s thoughts.
Our thinking is askew and dangerous. Our thoughts are vapid, a narcissistic revolt against our finitude, presuming dominance over the web of nature, indifferent or willfully blind to the harm our presumption has wrought: the increasing frequency of 100-year storms, winds, and fire that leave wide swaths of Hawaii, Los Angeles, and Ashville in embers and ashes; the rising sea levels, floods, and tsunamis which the Māori and other aboriginal peoples see as signs that the gods were angry — a clear message to run to higher ground; the warning of climatologists that we are at the point of climate departure when there is no way back.
William Blake painting of “Cain fleeing from the wrath of God “as Adam and Eve look on in horror following the fratricide.
I think of ‘Hevel’ — The Hebrew name translated into English as Abel, the slain brother in the Genesis story of Cain (Kay-in) and Abel (Hevel) — and wonder what the story-teller is telling us by naming the murdered brother Hevel (a mere short breath) and by leaving us with the image of Hevel’s blood crying from the ground. I hear Hevel’s voice screaming from the ground in Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan, Sandy Hill, Uvalde, Parkland, Ferguson, Minneapolis. How ‘vapid’ are my thoughts. I am a puff of air, nothing less and nothing more than a vapor that appears in the morning and by evening vanishes. “What is your life?” asks the Epistle of James. “For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.”
How have we mortals become such dolts that we would regard our species as inextinguishable? How does a Puff like me become wise? How does a descendant of Cain atone for spilling Hevel’s blood on the ground? How will I, a puff of air, live less pretentiously, more humbly before the Breath of Life itself, YHWH, God only wise, hid from my eyes?
I think of Elie Wiesel’s story of Rebbe Baruch and his grandson Yahiel. Wiesel tells the story in Four Hasidic Masters and Their Struggles with Melancholy. When Yahiel walks into his grandfather’s study in tears, Rebbe Baruch greets him with great tenderness. “Why are you crying, Yahiel?” His answer opens the door for Baruch to teach Yahiel about his relationship to God, and the character of God. Yahiel and his friend had been playing Hide-‘n-Seek, but the game ended before they had finished. Yahiel had hid so well that his friend gave up looking for him. He ran home in tears
“That’s not fair,” says Yahiel to his grandfather.
“God is hiding, too, Yahiel,” says the Rebbe. “God is crying because we have stopped searching.”
YHWH is hiding. God, too, is crying.
Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, host of Views from the Edge, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017, Wipf and Stock), Brooklyn Park, MN, April 29, 2025
President Abraham Lincoln (first DEI president) and Sojourner Truth
Lincoln’s Character
Abraham Lincoln is said to have spoken of his life as plucking thistles and planting flowers. Thanks to L.K. Hanson’s “You Don’t Say” (Minnesota Star Tribune, Feb, 17, 2025)
Die when I may, I want it said of me by those who know me best, that I have always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow. – Abraham Lincoln, 16th President
When there is no character
The structure of Lincoln’s statement remains the same this Presidents’ Day, but the thistles are taking root where flowers grew.
Die when I may, I want it said of me by those who know me best, that I have always plucked a flower and planted a thistle where I thought a thistle would grow.
Where have all the flowers gone? Gone to thistles every one. When will we ever learn?
Where have all the flowers gone?
Gone to thistles every one. When will we ever learn?
“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
Donald J. Trump
Gordon C. Stewart, Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, Presidents Day, Feb. 17, 2025
U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn) entreats his Senate colleagues to stand up and be counted for the American Constitutional Republic and the survival of the rule of law and law enforcement. The three examples of January 6 violence are chilling. We’re better than that!
As a child, I wondered why and how the home of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart could become the land and culture of death, led by an insane little man named Hitler. I no longer wonder. The German people and institutions fell under the spell of propaganda. I now know how. An old friend commented on a recent Views from the Edge post.
Reader’s Comment
I think that your explanation is correct but I also think it has very much to do with the same effect that elected Hitler as chancellor. It’s a matter of convincing a people that they are victims. It’s a word that we don’t hear much – propaganda. The German word for propaganda in Nazi Germany was Propagandaministerium, which translates to the Ministry of Propaganda. The Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda was the central institution of Nazi propaganda. It controlled all German mass media, including the press, literature, film, theater, music, and radio. Joseph Goebbels was in charge of the ministry.
Make no mistake – if Trump is elected, such practice will become the norm. As it is, his campaign is already using propaganda as the tool to convince the people that their lives are suffering because of the Democrats.
— Jim haugh
A documentary on how Hitler rose to power
How to win an Audience: Basic Principles of Propaganda from the Diary of Joseph Goebbels
Constantly repeat just a few ideas. Use stereotyped phrases.
Avoid abstract ideas — appeal to the emotions.
Give only one side of the argument.
Continuously criticize your opponents.
Pick out one special “enemy” for special vilification.
I no longer wonder. I think I know
During the Third Reich, the Dutch family of Willem Zuurdeeg defied the laws of Nazi occupation. They became a safe harbor to Jews. He questioned what it was about homo sapiens that led good people to follow a madman. This inquiry became his life quest. His search for answers became his life passion. As a philosopher of religion, his search exceeded the boundaries of any particular school of philosophy.
Willem Zuurdeeg was Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. His early death at the age of 57 left his work unfinished. He entrusted his work to his colleague, Esther Swenson. She carried it forward to publication under the title Man Before Chaos: Philosophy Is Born in a Cry (1963, Abington Press).
In Man Before Chaos and An Analytical Philosophy of Religion, Zuurdeeg discusses language as the way human beings “establish their existence” in time. We are born in a cry for what is beyond our ability to produce. We are, in Zuurdeeg’s view, less homo sapiens (“man-who-knows”) than we are homo loquens (“man-who-speaks”) and homo convictus (“man-of-conviction”) who look for a secure footing in an anxious world.
Homo Convictus makes easy prey for propaganda. It happened in Germany. It has happened here. God help us!
Gordon C. Stewart, Public theologian, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017, Wipf & Stock), 49 brief, stand-alone meditations on faith and public life. Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, January 14, 2024.
January 6 is the Day of the Epiphany on the Christian calendar. It strikes me again this year, as it did January 6, 2021, as a two-fold manifestation. It celebrates the manifestation of Light and opens our eyes to the darkness. We cannot celebrate light without facing the darkness in Herod, who invites the foreign sages (Magi) to report back to him when they have found the new-born king, “so that I too might worship him.” Herod’s stated intent is a fraud. He worships nothing higher than himself. He says nothing to the Magi about the slaughter of innocents.
Epiphany opens our eyes to the Light of truth and goodness, on the one hand, and the darkness of deceit and malice, on the other: the contrasts of light and darkness, hope and despair, fear and love, goodness and evil.
Jimmy Carter as a manifestation of goodness
President Jimmy Carter (1924-2024), RIP
As President Jimmy Carter lies in state in the nation’s capitol, and President-elect Donald Trump chooses a group of billionaires to join his cabinet, is it too much to ask for a pause to ponder what has happened to us, who we are, and what we aspire to become?
Whatever our differences, I have heard no one question Jimmy Carter’s character or motives. I have yet to hear criticism of Jimmy Carter as ruthless or vindictive, or the charges that his efforts for peace arose from self-serving motives, or that his policies on climate change responsibility were rooted in vested interest or ill intent.
The solar panels on the White House are long gone, but the prophetic light of the good man who put them there will not be forgotten. What happened in the nation’s Capitol on Epiphany 2021 and in the years that followed expose a darkness no eye can see, no court indict, no jury acquit or convict.
Of Treason and Traitors:the Supreme Judge of the People
Nothing in history is sealed in a vacuum. What seems unrepeatable gets repeated. The names are different, the places are different, but they are essentially the same. The past is never dead. Those who ignore it are doomed to repeat it.
“The Night of the Long Knives” is one such moment. In June, 1934, six months after Hitler took the oath of office required to become Chancellor, an irreconcilable conflict arose between the two paramilitary forces that had brought Hitler to power. On “the Night of the Long Knives” Hitler settled the dispute. The SS carried out Hitler’s covert plan to seek and execute members of the of the SA (the “Brownshirts”). As news of the covert operation began to leak, Reich “Minister Without Portfolio” Joseph Göring ordered police stations to burn “all documents concerning the action of the past two days.”
Newspapers were told not to publish the names of the dead. In a radio address to the German people, Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Hermann Goebbels went to the airwaves to inform the nation that Hitler had prevented traitors from creating social chaos and overthrowing the government. Eleven days later (July 13, 1934) Hitler’s address to the Reichstag (the German equivalent of Congress) filled the airwaves of an anxious nation by conflating the nation with himself. The Strong Man who made Germany great again proclaimed himself “the Supreme Judge of the German people” and called those who opposed him “traitors”.
Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, social commentator, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017, Wipf and Stock), Brooklyn Park, MN. January 6, 2024.
I have often wondered how the home of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart became the country of Adolf Hitler, the SS, SA, Brown Shirts and the Holocaust. I no longer wonder.
Third Reich Minister of Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels’ diary details the elements of propaganda that led German people to succumb to the spell of Hitler.
Propaganda: Basic Principles
Constantly repeat just a few ideas. Use stereotyped phrases.
Continuously criticize your opponents.
Avoid abstract ideas – appeal to the emotions.
Give only one side of the argument.
Pick out one special “enemy” for special vilification.
The Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda was the central institution of Nazi propaganda. It controlled all German mass media, including the press, literature, film, theater, music, and radio. Those who don’t know history are bound to repeat it; those who know it have a duty to learn and act accordingly.
Gordon C. Stewart, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017, Wipf & Stock), 49 brief, stand-alone meditations on faith and public life. Writing from Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, Nov. 5, 2024.
Views from the Edge 