Not a Slam Dunk

Posted on July 2, 2025 by hessd

I’d like to put two facts in opposition to each other. The first is that in Trump’s “budget” bill, which passed the Senate today, thanks to Vice President Vance’s vote, will have devastating effects on Trump’s core constituency.

Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at J. D. Vance’s alma mater [1] put it this way,“Districts represented by Republican members of Congress — as well as counties that supported Trump in the last election — are poorer, more rural, less dense, have fewer college graduates and are more likely to be in areas scarred by deindustrialization.”

It is hard to imagine that the Trump coalition will hold together through such a massive betrayal. Still, as Drew Altman, the president and chief executive of KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation) put it. “It looks like Republicans are handing Democrats their golden issue, but it’s not a slam dunk.
Why is it not a slam dunk? Against all the financial losses that will be suffered by the states most loyal to Trump, I put the sentiment in this picture.

You see that it is a Trump campaign poster. You can recognize him even in the blue tie. Think for a minute about who “They” is in this admonition. It isn’t just the Democrats. It is the nebulous evil organization he sometimes refers to as the “deep state.” It is the swamp he promised to drain. “They” are swamp demons.

And they are “after you.” There is an implacable resentment between “them” and you and this resentment is flavored with a casual dismissal of all the work you have done for them, In Kentucky’s District #5, Arlie Russell Hochschild ran into a sentiment that was expressed like this. [2]“They” are people who don’t honor the sacrifice that won World War II as the sign clearly says.


And I am “standing in the way”. I am going to take the vindictiveness of the people who disrespect you and turn it against them. I am the one you can turn to as a way to express your courage and your defiance.

That’s the way I read that sign. And that’s why it’s not a slam dunk. A lot depends, a Drew Altman puts it, on “whether Democrats succeed in holding the Republicans responsible.”


The case is there to be made. Altman, of KFF cited polling “showing that many voters are unaware of the effects of the Trump legislation. When they are told of the consequences, the already weak support drops precipitously.’ That is why the case is there to be made. Among these voters—the ones Altman is talking about—the support is weak and it goes into a nosedive when the practical consequences of the Trump budget are revealed.


Some say this nosedive occurs when people experience the concrete consequences. That will be some time. Altman’s experience with polling is that the nosedive occurs when the people are told about what they can clearly see is likely. That is the job of the Democrats.


And they have one more job. They need to find a way to be the ones that offer a way forward. Showing how bad Trump is will not do the job. The Democrats need to offer a candidate people can believe in. They don’t need to do that to win back the House and the Senate, but they do to win back the presidency.

[1]. If law schools have alma maters.
[2] Her recent book on this issue is called Stolen Virtue—surely one of the best titled books in recent years.

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Plenty left on the rack

Posted on June 30, 2025 by hessd

Some years ago I taught with a sociologist friend who taught me a song he called “the mini mart Song.” And that’s what we called it when we asked him to sing it for us. He was a conservative man, all things being considered, and part of the fun of listening to him sing the old Jimmy Buffet lyrics was the contrast between what he seemed to be advocating and who he was.

For example.

There is a rationale embedded in the chorus. Here are the words: “We never took more than we could eat/There was plenty left on the rack”. And here is the rationale. Our theft was limited to our immediate needs. The fact that food was the need makes it seem somehow justified. Further, the theft was insignificant because there was so much—“plenty,” the song says—left on the rack. [1]

And not only that, there is at the end of the chorus a very respectable oath. “We all swore if we ever got rich/We would pay the mini mart back.” Of course, this “oath” is not quite so respectable if you sing it with a grin and a wink, which is the only way I have ever seen it performed and it is the way my friend always sang it.

I don’t want to go back to those days which seem–from the perspective of my present in Portland, Oregon–to be innocent and to dump on the song, much less on my friend who sang it many times at our request. On the other hand, a lot of retail stores in Portland are closing because they can’t control shoplifting. People go into these stores and take what they need or what they want or what they think they can sell. The stores can’t make up the loss and, at those levels of loss, can’t afford either the insurance or the extra enforcement (private security guards) that would be required.

So what happened? The people who are represented in the song are stealing the food in order to survive. That is what the lyrics say. But the the performance of the song is not a celebration of survival. It is a celebration of what amounts to a prank, with all the limitations the song places on the theft. You don’t take more than your immediate need requires; you leave a lot on the rack for legitimate sale to later customers; you have every intention of repaying the value of what you took. Those limitations.

But those “limitations” justify everything that is going on in Portland today. They don’t seem carefree anymore, looking at the wave of closures. The language, taken at face value, doesn’t justify any more today than it did back in 1973, when the song was popular. Is it that only a few people did it back then—starving artist types—and now it is very nearly a mainstream activity? Is that the difference?

Is it that back when the values that would have been inculcated by a family precluded all but the most desperate thefts, and now that such behavior has escaped the family and become part of the general urban culture, there are no more limits on it? Is that the difference?

No one imagines that back in the old days, you knew the guy who owned the mini mart and so limited your theft, but now they are all anonymous chains and so there is no reason to limit it. This was never a local grocery run by that nice couple who lived just down the street from your parents. So that’s not it.

Jimmy Buffet locates this kind of activity back in his “hard luck days.” Stealing for resale isn’t any part of anybody’s hard luck days. It’s a business model and it is predatory. I’d like to go on singing the song because I think it’s funny, but it isn’t as funny as it used to be.

[1]. More likely it was a shelf the food was left on, but we really need a word that is going to rhyme with “back.”

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Writing in my civilian name

Posted on June 16, 2025 by hessd

A few years ago, I jotted a quick note to my son, Doug, and in my haste, signed it Dale instead of Dad. I considered that an egregious breach—more on that later—and wrote him another note the next day, as soon as I discovered it. He wrote back in a tone of consolation. “That’s alright, Dad. I’ve always known your civilian name.”

I had not been all that worried about it and when I got his note, I shut down even the little worry I had been carrying. But I have kept it in my “Don’t Throw This Away” file because I had a feeling that something in it mattered. The way my mind works, there is a phenomenon that is hard to describe. I sometimes say it is like a very small light going on somewhere in my peripheral awareness and when this light goes on, it means “This means something.” [1]

I have learned to trust the significance of that little light and eventually I come up with a guess—never more than haphazard, but nearly always valuable—of what it meant. That is what happened this time.

In raising my three children, seen here celebrating my 80th birthday, I have gone through all the stages a father can go through, including Authority, Supporter, Critic, Listener, and finally, Friend. Of those, I value what unites the first three in combination with what unites the last two. The first three can be collected under “Dad,” the name I was so eager to use with Doug. The last two can be collected under the name Dale, which is, as Doug put it, “my civilian name.”

I may have done more thinking about relationships, very likely, than the average octogenarian because I was forced to dip my toe into the dating pool some time after my wife, Marilyn died in 2003. I was 68 at the time and had not given serious thought to “dating” since I was 18. I was dating trying any dating at all because my son, Dan, whose advice I am inclined to take seriously, called one day and said, “Dad, I know you won’t want to hear this, but you really need to date a lot of women.” That was followed by a rationale that was tailored specifically to me and that was psychologically acute. It was offered by someone who knew my civilian name.

In my quest to find a woman to marry, I formulated an idea of the kind of relationship I was looking for. I understood that it was the kind that would have to be built over years of relationship by a husband and wife who were committed to the model. I was just looking for a woman who, when I said what kind of relationship I wanted, said, “That sounds really good. I would like to be in a relationship like that.”

The relationship has a collegial face and an intimate face. Those are the names I eventually settled on, although the distinction itself came from C. S. Lewis’s book, The Four Loves. I wanted, that is to say, a task partner, someone who would value me, and I her, for what each of us contributed to our common project. And, on beyond collegiality, I wanted an intimate friend, a face to face friend, to whom I could say, “I know who you are and I love you.” And who could say the same to me.

I raise this now obscure part of my biography today because I am pretty sure those two ways of being in relationship track the Dad/Dale distinction that Doug named as a throwaway line. I sit here, on the morning of Father’s Day in a hallway just outside our apartment. When we moved in here [2], I saw immediately that it could serve us as an extra room. Having no sense at all about names and functions, I called it a “parlor,” meaning that it would be a good place to talk. Parlor vous? I was describing this to my daughter, Dawne, who does not have her father’s problem with names and functions and who, in addition, lives in New Jersey. “Pop, that’s not a parlor,” she said with some vehemence. “That’s a front porch.” They know, in her part of New Jersey, what front porches are for and as I sit here, writing this and saying hello to the neighbors who pass by, I know she was right. It is my front porch.

I think the Dad/Dale division functions in the same way the Colleague/Intimate distinction does. It marks, for my kids, a part of who we have been but we are not that any longer. The authority element is long gone, which is good for a father whose kids are all in their 60s, but it has not been replaced by the friendship element. It has been complemented by the friendship element.

I am a friend in a way I could never be had I not been an authority once. That part of the relationship has long been transcended, of course, but it still sits in our common background and provides a color and a contrast to our present. Not a one of the three thinks, even now, that I was a perfect father, but they have been for quite a while now, inclined to celebrate the whole package of who we were for each other—redeeming in their minds the bad parts and celebrating the good parts.

I take great pleasure in that. I like it that they do it on purpose. I know that the reason they do it is that they love me in a really complicated way. It would have to be, surely, to take such discrepant elements into account and make an integrated whole. They have done that and we, the four of us, have done that, as well.

And if that doesn’t make Father’s Day worth celebrating, I am going to sell off all my Hallmark stock shares.

[1]. Or as Roy Neary put it, referring immediately to the mound of mashed potatoes he had just scraped onto his place and ultimately to the site in Wyoming where we would first encounter sentient aliens, “This means something. This is important.”
[2]. Holladay Park Plaza, a senior center in Portland, Oregon. It’s what feels like home to Bette and me.

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Fun with Dick, Jane, and Ezra

Posted on June 10, 2025 by hessd

I had an experience this week that writers will recognize. I wrote a very small targeted fantasy as a way of unfolding some of the complexities of Israel’s post-Exilic history in the 6th Century BCE. It’s not as arcane as it sounds. Really. We had a really good discussion of this little fantasy in the group for whom I wrote it. One of the the members of the group expressed her appreciation for how really smart the authors were.

I agreed. Then, the rest of the day, I found myself confronted with really similar challenges which obligated me to be as smart as the authors I had invented and on several occasions, I actually did—I did the smart thing, just as my characters did.

That is the experience I am sure will be familiar to the writers among you.

The course I am working on studies the books of Jonah and Ruth and I have called them the “Yes, but…” stories. It is no secret to anyone that Ezra, the priest who played a leading part in putting Judah back together after the Exile in Babylon, ran a very tight ship. He took particular aim at the intermarriage of returning Judaeans and local Canaanites because he saw it as most likely to lead to idolatry. So Ezra, as I represent him in this story is a very narrow reformer.

The stories of Jonah and Ruth point in a different direction and were, according to quite a few scholars, composed during this very tense post-Exilic time. Because no one knows who wrote those stories and because I wanted to keep my fantasy on the light side, I named the authors Dick and Jane. It brings up a world of associations that is completely incompatible with Ezra, Jonah, and Ruth.

In this fantasy, Dick and Jane are alarmed by Ezra’s extreme social restrictions and meet with him to change his mind and moderate his behavior. (I told you at the beginning that this was a fantasy; you are going to have to give me a little room to imagine the scene I need.). They both know that telling Ezra that they think he is going too far is not going to help. So instead, they tell him a couple of stories. If there were a contemporary bumper sticker, “Tell Stories to Power,” Dick and Jane would be the reason for it. It is these stories that led one of the people in my group to celebrate how really smart Dick and Jane were. [1]

The stories present characters that cannot fit into the world Ezra is living in. They don’t appear to be making a point that matters to Ezra and in that sense they are simply a distraction. But they do make a point and the point they make cannot be made using the characters and the social dynamics that Ezra is most interested in. He will have to accept different characters, a different narrative arc, and a different outcome if he is to really tune in to the stories Dick and Jane are telling him.

Dick tells the story of Jonah. It is a story with one Israelite, unless you count the great fish and the vine-eating worm as Israelites on the ground that, unlike Jonah, they do what God tells them to do. Everyone else is pagan and all the pagans are admirable.

At the risk of asking you to remember more of Jonah than you want to, Jonah gets a call from God to go north to Nineveh and give a message to the Ninevites. This ought to be very much a Mission Possible for Jonah because the message is a message of imminent destruction and Jonah hates the Ninevites. But Jonah tries to sneak away (west) instead. God sends a violent storm to prevent that voyage and the sailors on the ship—worshippers of other gods who have no reason to care at all about the tiff Jonah is having with his God—act heroically on his behalf.

Jonah arrives in Nineveh and begins to preach imminent destruction and the people immediately take him at his word and begin to repent. The king of Nineveh follows suite and God changes his mind and forgives all the Ninevites and cancels the scheduled destruction.

What is Ezra to do with a story like that. Nothing in it says that the Israelites are not God’s special people. Nothing in it allows for the slow descent into polytheism and idolatry which is Ezra’s greatest concern. The whole point of the story so far as Nineveh is concerned is that God opposes bad behavior—the Ninevite king refers to it once as “violence”—but is quick to forgive when remorse is shown. Nothing in that story helps Ezra in his purity crusade.

Then Jane follows with the story of Ruth. I am representing these events as if they really happened and I feel obliged to say now and again that I am making up the whole Dick, Jane, and Ezra confrontation. The only piece of that for which there is biblical support is Ezra’s behavior in post-Exilic Judaea. Dick and Jane are fictions, as are Jonah and Ruth.

And Ruth turns out to be no better than Jonah; no easier for Ezra, that is. Ruth is a Moabite, a member of a truly hated neighboring nation. The whole identity and essence of Ruth is bad. It is only her behavior that is good. She marries an Israelite boy from Bethlehem. Her new husband dies, as does his brother and his father. That leaves the widow, Naomi, Ruth’s mother-in-law. The only sensible response is to do what Naomi tells her, which is to go back to her parents’ house and find a nice Moabite boy, but Ruth does not do what is sensible. She pledges her loyalty to this foreign woman in words so direct and powerful that they are still used in weddings in the U. S.

Then she accompanies Naomi on the trip back to Bethlehem, where she goes immediately to work, gleaning grains of barley in the fields so they will have something to eat. As the situation develops, she does what Naomi tells her to do. Naomi is the veteran Israelite, after all. Then, on Naomi’s advice, she does what her benefactor—and future husband—Boaz tells her to do. And after all that, she becomes the grandmother of David the King. How Jewish can you get, really?

But there is nothing in Ruth for Ezra to use any more than there is in Jonah. Ruth is the obvious target of Ezra’s ethnic concerns and everything about her is admirable. As Ezra hears the story, he is forced to hear about the ideal villain—a Moabite woman—behaving like an ideal Judaean. Ruth’s love for Naomi and her hard work on Naomi’s behalf are flawless. There is nothing there for Ezra to use and, in fact, the categories aren’t even helpful in Ezra’s crusade, which requires the holy families to stay clear of the non-Israelites. Boaz, to pick an obvious hero, does not stay clear of non-Israelites.

When he buys the property that belongs to Naomi’s family, he also buys Ruth—most versions say “acquire”—and then he marries her, knowing that if their union produces a son, the son will inherit everything that would have come to Ruth’s former husband. None of it will go to the current husband. That is not a problem for Boaz, who is as generous and openhearted as the foreign woman he is marrying.

Another great story; another completely useless tale for Ezra. It uses people from the wrong categories and those people don’t behave in ways that seem iconic to Ezra, so he has, apparently, wasted a whole afternoon listening to engrossing and useless stories.

So as I read what I had written, I felt it press on me. I have my own crusades to conduct, of course. I am entirely pleased with the good characters in Jonah (the sailors, the people and the king) and the good characters in Ruth (Ruth and Boaz). I am not so well pleased with the behavior of Dick and Jane, who, faced with a political regime that was, as I have constructed it, out of control and going too far, simply told engaging stories. What I want to do, in the face of such a political regime is to oppose it in the most forceful prose I have at my disposal. That will do no good at all, of course.

What would actually do some good is to do what Dick and Jane did, which is to conjure up really good narratives that, as Emily Dickinson famously put it, “tells the truth, but tells it slant.” It is hard to do. It is hard even to want to do. And to do it as well as Dick and Jane did it,is truly amazing.

[1]. By contrast with the Wise Men in Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus, who saw a star that represented a new king of Israel, so they rushed over to Jerusalem to share the good news with….um….the current king of Israel. Wise, but not Smart.

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No more money for you, Harvard!

Posted on June 6, 2025 by hessd

On April 11, three representatives of the Trump Administration wrote a letter to the president of Harvard, laying out the new requirements Harvard would be required to meet. If you treat the letter only on the level of the language it uses, it is hard to take seriously.

I am sure that if the Trump administration is allowed to mobilize the financial, legal, and regulatory pressures they threaten, it will be easier to take the treat seriously. The language, not so much.

This post is made up of quotations from the letter, which I will put in italics, and some comments of my own.

The letter is signed by Josh Gruenbaum, of the General Services Administration; Sean R Keveny, Acting General Counsel Department of Health and Human Services: and Thomas E. Wheeler, Acting General Counsel, Department of Education. No one you have ever heard of is listed as a signatory.

Here are some of the highlights of the letter.

The United States has invested in Harvard University’s operations because of the value to the country of scholarly discovery and academic excellence.

Then, three sentences later:

Harvard has in recent years failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment.

Fortunately, there is a ready solution.

By August 2025, Harvard must make meaningful governance reform and restructuring to make possible major change consistent with this letter, including: fostering clear lines of authority and accountability; empowering tenured professors and senior leadership, and, from among the tenured professoriate and senior leadership, exclusively those most devoted to the scholarly mission of the University and committed to the changes indicated in this letter;

Let’s just pause to see what we have so far. The U. S. Government has discovered that Harvard is an exemplar of scholarly discovery and academic excellence and that is why the government has invested so much money in the university. Harvard has recently stumbled, however, both intellectually and in what the letter calls “civil rights conditions.”

The university.must therefore reform, changing its governance practices and promoting to leadership those professors who will be most committed to “the changes indicated in this letter.”

Let’s do admissions next.

By August 2025, the University must adopt and implement merit-based admissions policies and cease all preferences based on race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof, throughout its undergraduate program, each graduate program individually, each of its professional schools, and other programs.

And to ensure that Harvard is doing it right:

All admissions data shall be shared with the federal government and subjected to a comprehensive audit by the federal government… including information about rejected and admitted students broken down by race, color, national origin, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests—during the period in which reforms are being implemented, which shall be at least until the end of 2028.

Finally, there is the matter of reforming schools or departments that have succumbed to ideological capture or, in fact, to any biases at all.

By August 2025, the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit those programs and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture.including…the Divinity School.

The Trump administration knows it can count on opposition from the best established universities and it has chosen Harvard as it’s favorite bad example. Whenever the letter refers to “the federal government,” I think we should translate that into the values clearly espoused the Project 2025 or, more briefly, whatever institutions have recently riled Trump’s anger.

All it takes is a specification of just why “the United States” has been investing its money in Harvard. That is followed by an unsubstantiated charge that Harvard has lately been failing to meet those conditions. Then, finally, Harvard is to cease immediately using its judgment about what kind of education it wants to provide for the students it admits and turn that job over to the federal government for their quarterly review.

My favorite part of that is their singling out the Harvard Divinity School for special attention. Could it be that the Divinity School is not displaying the “viewpoint diversity” that could be required of them by an administration more committed to fairness? It’s hard to say.

Again, the threat may be real. The language makes it hard to take it seriously.

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An American Government of One Branch

Posted on June 1, 2025 by hessd

Let’s begin with just what to call this part of the Project 2025 Report (hereafter the Report) of the Heritage Foundation, a well-known conservative think tank.  The Report calls it “The Executive Office of the President of the United States.”  Simon Pierce has written a critique of the Report, called Project 2025: A Mandate for Authoritarian Leadership.  In his critique, he calls this section,  “Expansion of Presidential Powers.”  As you see, I have called it “American Government.”  My reasoning is very straightforward.  The Report sees the President as the American Government.

You might miss some reference to other familiar institutions such as the Congress and the Supreme Court.  The Report criticizes these institutions, but only as asides.  In this section, as I will show, the government is the President and the job of the President is to serve the People.  (Caps in both cases are deliberate.)

I will be taking quotations from Pierce.  He says that the Report says such and such on page 43 and I take him at his word.  The few times I went to the Report to check for myself, he was correct, so I stopped checking.

Here is what the Report says on page 43 in the section Pierce titles Expansion of Presidential Powers.”

“The President must set and enforce a plan for the executive branch.  Sadly, however, the President today assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences—or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly “woke” faction of the country.  The modern conservative President’s task is to limit, control, and direct the executive branch on behalf of the American people.”  (I have put the last sentence in bold font because Pierce put it in bold font.)

The error in this section is so large and so grievous that it is hard not to be drawn away into what means might be employed to put it into practice.  The error is that there are two actors in American government.  There are the People (capital P) and the President.  The People may or may not have preferences.  The Report doesn’t say.  They are, rather, the recipients of the actions taken by the President “on their behalf.”

The preferences of the American people are famously diverse. Like every citizenry everywhere, they want lots of government services and low taxes.  Ordinarily, debates take place within the presumed framework of the Constitution and one set of policy preferences is traded off against another.  

That is not the problem as the Report sees it so we would expect that the solutions they propose will be in line with the way they see the problem.  The problems they identify are “a sprawling federal bureaucracy” which is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences or, possibly the policy plans and preferences of a radical, “woke” faction of the country.

There are two kinds of difficulties here.  The first is that the bureaucracy has its own plans, presumably plans that will benefit the patrons of whichever bureau proposed them.  The second is that even if the bureaucracy is being guided by the people, the people they are being guided by are the wrong people.  Those people are “a faction,” they are radical, and they are “woke.”  The bureaucracy should, therefore, not be guided by them.

At this point, the casual reader desperately misses any reference to the Congress, the body to which the Constitution gives the task of enacting those policy plans and preferences and, by the way, of funding them as well.  The President has the job of enforcing the laws the Congress passes and even if, as is often alleged, the Congress simply passes the legislation the “sprawling federal bureaucracy” asks them to pass, still, the point where changes need to be made is with the Congress, not with the bureaus.

But if American government is, as in the quote above, made up of the President, then Congress need not be consulted.  The President understands what will benefit the American people and is free to act on their behalf.  “On their behalf,” it goes without saying, as the President sees things.

What could possibly go wrong?

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Lives v Souls

Posted on May 30, 2025 by hessd

Simon Pierce has done us the favor of collecting substantial parts of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and commenting on them. [1] My own interest here is to look at the relationship between the recommendations made by the Project (hereafter, the Report) and the perspective in which those recommendations appears to be most at home.

I am beginning with a section Pierce calls “Christian Nationalism.”  Here is a quotation that appears on page 453 of the Report.

For example, how much risk mitigation is worth the price of shutting down churches on the holiest day of the Christian calendar and far beyond, as happened in 2020? What is the proper balance between lives saved and souls saved?” The CDC has no business making such inherently political (and often unconstitutional) assessments and should be required by law to stay in its lane.

We have here, two questions and a declaration.  The first question has to do with the proper balance between lives saved and souls saved.  The second question provides the context for that clearly unanswerable question.  It says that mitigating risk [the reference is to the risk of exposure to COVID 19] may be a good thing, but it must be balanced off against the closure of churches.  We’ll get to the declaration later.

The Report, in posing the question in the form that they do, appear to believe that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) can know whether there are souls; what will happen to them if they are not saved, and the role that the churches play in saving them.  How the CDC could be thought to know those things escapes me and the idea that they should lay down the requirements for the proper treatment of souls is even more bizarre.

There appears to be a call for balancing.  On the one side, we have souls saved; on the other, we should, in all fairness, have “lives saved.”  We do not, of course.  On the other hand side we have only an amount of “risk mitigation.”  If you think that is a less political formulation, I suggest that you try to call up a protest banner reading “Increase Risk Mitigation Among Our Black Citizens.”  So we do not have, in this paragraph the call we ought to have that the government decide wisely between saving lives and saving souls.

That option is rejected in several ways by what I referred to above as the declaration.  It is: “The CDC has no business making such inherently political assessments and should be required by law to stay in its lane.”

I agree with the Report that requiring public institutions to close during the worst of the pandemic is political.  The CDC is a political body and doing what it can to save lives is part of their mandate.  It did not have, the last time I looked, [2] a similar mandate for souls and if it did have, it would need some public process for deciding between the merits of the two.

The call, then, that the CDC be required by law to “stay in its lane” would be a call for it to save the lives it can without coming into conflict with Christian organizations who have access to national power.  The “lane” of the CDC could be defined as being medical rather than political, which I am sure is what the Report had in mind.  But when the question is whether Christians ought to be allowed to infect their neighbors as they please provided they can continue to gather in churches, the idea that the CDC ought to stay in its lane, does not seem to be an idea Americans generally would warm to.

[1]. Pierce’s book is called Project 2025: A Mandate for Authoritarian Leadership.  It was published by the author in 2025.

[2] These things have been changing rapidly and I have not looked today.

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The art of walking downstairs

Posted on May 24, 2025 by hessd

I recently watched a young waitress bring a dish of food down the stairs to a friend of mine who was waiting at the bottom.  Walking down the stairs carrying the food would have been a high risk endeavor for my friend, and, frankly, for me, too.  The waitress skipped nimbly down the stairs, handed the plate to my friend, and walked lightly back up to the top.

It was impressive and I thought as I watched her that I “appreciated” her grace, much the way I would have appreciated the balance and control of a ballerina.  I didn’t really enjoy it though.  I’ll tell you what I enjoy. I enjoy the way I go down the stairs.

Very likely, I never had the waitress’s agility, but if a old person had been waiting at the bottom of the stairs for her food and if anyone had asked me to take it down to her, I would have done it casually and comfortably, without a second thought.

It has been a long time since I have taken a physical action without a second thought.

On the other hand, I really enjoy the way I go down the stairs.  The way I go down is the result of one adjustment after another and as I perform this feat, I assess and celebrate every layer of the process.  I have had to learn them, you see, and one has been built on top of another so that I am independently conscious of every layer as if I were an anthropologist of my own performance. 

I stand as erect as I can, for instance, so that leaning forward doesn’t put undue stress on my knees.  That’s the most recent innovation; the top layer.  Just below that is “reaching with my hips.”  Many years ago, when I first tried race walking, I got shin splints every time I trained.  That was when I learned that you reach forward independently with each hip as you walk.  It isn’t that hard, once you get the hang of it, but then you have to pay attention all the time or you will go back to regular walking.

When I am walking down stairs, I reach forward and down with my left hip, then with my right hip.  I can very nearly put my foot on the step below without bending my knees at all.  Then I reach with each foot, left right left, to touch the step below before I put any weight on it.

I have no idea at all what it looks like, of course.  I suppose it looks like an old man perilously navigating a stairway. [1]. But, I feel the artistry of it.  I feel a really good foot placement and a smooth extension of one hip, then the other.  I reach with the foot to touch the step.  Then I recover and do it all again.  And again.  A performance only I can truly appreciate and I do.

[1]. All this is on the way down.  Up is not a problem as long as my quads and my gluts hold up and they are good and strong.

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Reading the Bible as a Christian Scholar

Posted on April 4, 2025 by hessd

My apologies to my non- and anti-religious friends.  I have some of each and value them greatly.  The apologies are only for choosing a title that is misleading.  I want to argue that “Christian” in the title is not a very useful word.

The two kinds of reading I have seen actually practiced are commonly, if not accurately, called “devotional” and “scholarly.”  There is a third kind, but I will argue against this third kind even before I try to explain the other two.  The third kind is thought to be “reading for application,” as if the reading you do will convey to you what actions you should be taking as a result of the reading.

I have two arguments against that idea.  The first is that there are no clear lines of action indicated by whatever scripture you might select for your study.  The specific actions that are urged in scripture are imbedded in the context of the time and do not apply clearly to our time.  What does “Do not swear at all” mean in a culture like ours in which “swearing” means something neither Moses nor Matthew ever considered?  And the general directions, like “love your neighbor as yourself” don’t say how to go about that.  In many cases, you must love the persons themselves or the group that they are currently damaging.  Not both.  What to do?

What the followers of such an emphasis do actually do, in fact, is to superimpose their sense of what needs to be done and claim the general mandate—often “love your neighbor,” seldom “never charge interest to a member of your tribe.”  The things you come up with to do may very well be good things to do, but they are not to be decided upon by deriving them from the Bible.  I will make one exception to that before I finish.

Devotional Reading

Devotional reading—mistakenly called “devotional study” sometimes—is a way of reading the Bible for the purpose of generating certain feelings that are expected and valued.  I don’t have a criticism of that practice on the grounds that it is harmful.  And if it sustains the Christian life of the people who are participating in it, then it provides a positive service for them.  The argument on their behalf would have to be that feeling the ways the devotional reading cause you to feel are valuable in themselves and productive of Christian thoughts, feelings, and actions.

My argument against it is that it presupposes the meaning of the texts being studied.  You can argue that “it really means what it means to me” but there is no way to verify, even within the person, that it will “mean” the same thing from one time to another.  And of course, if the text has different and irreconcilable meanings to different members of the group, then one of two paths will be taken.  All can agree that there is no agreed upon meaning or that the meaning I locate is right and the one you locate is wrong.

Or, if you are reading the devotional thoughts of an author, you can all agree that what he thinks the passage means is what it really means.  You can, of course, argue that he is right about some things and wrong about others, at which point all the old arguments break out.

The presuppositions of such a study direct our attention to how the passages chosen make us feel and away from the text itself.  What we might mean by “the text itself” will be explored when we look at the scholarly approach, but certainly it will need to take into account when it was written, by whom, to whom, and why.  When the argument leads to a satisfactory account of why the author wrote it the way he did, we have arrived.

Scholarly Reading

The presuppositions of scholarly study direct our attention to what the author meant to say.  We look at the text, to the extent we are able, as the author does.  A point needs to be made; certain tools and sources are available; when the right choices are made, the best case possible is presented.  Raymond Brown, in his writings and lectures, makes the point that the Synoptic writers place Jesus’ “cleansing” of the Temple in Jerusalem at the end of the ministry and make it part of the increasing conflict with the authorities.  John places the same event at the beginning of the ministry and treats it as one of the signs that the spiritually perceptive will understand, viz. that Jesus himself is the Temple, the Sacred Space.

The Synoptics put it where they put it to tell the story they are trying to tell; John puts it where he puts it to tell the story he is trying to tell.  The scholarly study does not ask when Jesus actually did it [1] but what the various authors are trying to achieve.  “Does this do the trick?” we might ask.  “What would work better?”

In a recent study of Galatians, I ran across the work of J. Louis Martyn, who gives Paul’s opponents a good solid case.  Paul was outraged by the effects of their work—Martyn calls them “the Teachers” rather than the more common “Judaizers.”  It is easy to see why he would be upset.   On the other hand, he may also have been angry because they were pointing to weak spots in his ministry.  If both cases are made—one directly taught by scripture, the other broadly implied by scripture—wouldn’t a better understanding of the situation in Galatia come from understanding both of them?

The scholarly study is oriented toward how we can best understand the material.  It passes by the question of how reading this passage makes me feel.  On the other hand, the devotional study presupposes that there is something significant in the story; something I should pay close attention to.  The scholarly study might arrive at that by the time it is done.  You do spend a lot of your time reading about the teachings of Jesus and the dilemmas of Paul.  Those stories provide a context for your thought and it is hard to imagine that they do not have an effect.  It is hard also to imagine just what the effect is.

The picture that caught my eye at the beginning of this journey is that the presuppositions of these two ways of approaching the Bible might be complementary.  I’ve never seen it done that way.  I’m not sure I would recognize it if I saw it.  But I am intrigued by thinking that presupposing personal meaning on the one side and seeking the best understanding of the passage on the other, might complement each other.

[1] They might ask what evidence there is that he ever did it at all.

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Screwtape 3:16. Really.

Posted on March 17, 2025 by hessd

If you are willing to put up with a paragraph of so of apologetic throat-clearing, I will tell you why I chose this odd title for today’s post.

I appreciate now in a way it had not occurred to me to appreciate before that the verse numbers in any Bible that has them are much more aligned to the text than the Screwtape number I am going to use as if they were an alternative source of opinion.  For instance, John 3:16 in the Bible I use most looks like this. “For this is how God loved the world: he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”  It is not a complete thought, really, because it requires the context of the verses before and after, but just by itself, it says something and I take it that that was one of the goals of the people who invented “verses.” [1]

Screwtape 3:16 is not nearly as complete.  It reads on the page I am using “…practice self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those…”. Even more than John 3:16, this fragment would benefit from context.  The immediate context is provided by lines 15–18, which read

15.You must bring him to a condition in which he can practice self 

16. examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about 

17. himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the 

18  same house with him or worked in the same office.

You can see, in the context of Screwtape 3:16, that an idea is being expressed, as odd as it must surely seem to people who don’t remember that Screwtape is a devil, in fact a very senior devil. [2]

How do we get a Screwtape 3:16?  The idea is very simple.  C. S. Lewis’s book, The Screwtape Letters, contains 31 separate letters. [3] and if you put a line number to every line, you will see that line 16 of Letter 3 could plausibly be referred to as Screwtape 3:16, borrowing the colon which I suppose Stevens invented for his arrangement of verses.

It is actually a little more complicated than that because just what line is numbered 16 will depend on the size of the margins, the size of the font, and the style of the font.  I am using Times font, size 15, with one inch page margins on each side.  I am aware that changing any of those would change what words appear on what line and if I attract colleagues to this project, we will need to agree on those three constraints.

Since The Screwtape Letters takes on the perspective of a devil, we would expect that if a topic is addressed by a biblical passage and also by a diabolical passage, that the categories, the vocabulary, and the causal relations, would all be different.  They really aren’t.

Anyone who has tried to live a principled and honorable life—in the context of this debate, we may abbreviate this as “a Christian life”—knows that you go through periods where this kind of life seems natural and almost easy.  Then there are periods where it seems nonsensical and therefore very difficult.  I am going to offer some comments from Paul, the Apostle and from Screwtape the Devil on that topic.  With any luck at all, I will then point out how similar they are (not denying the differences) and I will be done for the day.

Screwtape calls it “the Law of Undulation” and in Letter 8, he explains it this way.  Here are lines 8—13.  That gives me the chance to point directly to this passage as Screwtape 8:8—13

“Has no one ever told you about the law of Undulation?  Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy’s determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.”.

Romans 8:5—8, by a lovely coincidence, says nearly the same thing.

5 “Those who are living by their natural inclinations have their minds on the things human nature desires; those who live in the Spirit have their minds on spiritual things. 6 And human nature has nothing to look forward to but death, while the Spirit looks forward to life and peace, 7 because the outlook of disordered human nature is opposed to God, since it does not submit to God’s Law, and indeed it cannot, 8 and those who live by their natural inclinations can never be pleasing to God.”

Now.  Does this work in any practical way?  No, of course not.  To use this kind of comparison, you would need a Bible divided into chapters and verses and a set of the Letters, divided into letters and numbered lines.  Everybody has access to the former; only the group studying Screwtape has the latter.  So it is a very narrow effort, as it should be.  And I am doing the work of standardizing the line organization and numbering, which gets onerous at times.  On the other hand, I get to cite Screwtape 8:8—13, from which I take more pleasure than a well-balanced person would allow himself.

Even so, it is hard not to notice the similarity.  Paul is deeply committed to what he, in this passage, calls “having the mind on spiritual things.”  Screwtape sees that same reality as his deepest danger, which is why he counsels his pupil, Wormwood, to press the Patient to feel the frustration and give up on the whole “religious thing.”  The two authors see, in other words, the same reality.  Paul counsels supporting it (Romans 8:6b), where Screwtape counsels using it to destroy the Patient (Screwtape 8:35—36) and in 8:47, identifies the limits God must face. [4] 

For fans of C. S. Lewis and his treasure of diabolical advice, this whole exercise is a romp.

[1]. Robert Stevens, who goes by several other names, in 1551.  Surely there are books about just how he went about his work.  How, for instance did “Jesus wept” come to be a “verse?”

[2]. And, as C. S. Lewis, the creator of Screwtape, could not resist adding, “very low in the Lowerarchy.”

[3]. Actually only thirty and a half.  He inadvertently changed into the shape of a giant toad in the middle of one of them and needed to have another devil finish it for him.

[4]. I know I’m cheating here because I have not appended the line-numbered letters as I would have to in a study essay.  I just wanted to use the parallel citations.  Screwtape 8:35—36 reads, “We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons.” And 8:47 reads, “He cannot ravish. He can only woo.”

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