Meditation can reduce stress – but the pressure to overwork remains

(The Conversation) — Mindfulness – meant to support health and detachment – is becoming a tool to support the corporate bottom line.

Jaime L Kucinskas
December 10, 2024

(The Conversation) — Overwork and burnout are affecting many Americans.

The American Psychological Association’s 2023 Work and Well-being Survey found that 77% of Americans suffered from workplace stress. Over half of the respondents reported symptoms of burnout, which ranged from emotional exhaustion to wanting to quit.

Many Americans feel under constant pressure to get ahead and are not able to take a break. Employees report that their workplaces do not encourage mental health or work-life balance.

As a result, an increasing number of Americans have turned to meditation. Some use it to take a break at work, others to refocus, or more generally to promote better mental health.

In my book “The Mindful Elite,” I tracked the growth of the mindfulness movement from 1979 until 2015. I spoke with over 100 meditators who run 61 mindful programs and organizations that bring mindfulness to secular workplaces and schools across the country.

Many of them told me how meditation helped them approach their work and lives with more patience, empathy and self-reflection. Meditation, they said, helped alleviate stress and increased their attention and self-awareness. Other studies also affirm mindfulness can help people cope with anxiety, depression and pain. However, it remains worth asking: Are there limits – or even downsides – to bringing meditation to work?
Mindfulness as a panacea

Early mindfulness leaders were remarkably successful in spreading meditation across America. Jon Kabat-Zinn, a molecular biologist, began his mindfulness-based stress reduction program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979 to provide a complementary and alternative model of care for the chronically ill.

He hoped to share the “essence of Buddhist mindfulness,” as he has written, within “mainstream medicine.” Over 25,000 people have completed his mindfulness-based stress reduction program, and it continues to be taught around the world.

By 2022, meditation had become the most prevalent relaxation practice in the United States, with 18% of Americans adopting it. Many people use meditation to address a health issue, or turn to it in the absence of access to conventional medical care.

Meditation has become popular in offices and schools across North America and Europe. To fit into workweeks of busy professionals, meditation teachers often offer shorter entry-level practice sessions tailored to host organizations’ goals and busy schedules. Some schools even offer short 15-minute lessons.

Meditation instructors secularize and justify mindfulness as aiding health and performance in a cost-effective manner that serves the bottom line.

They also adapt it to make it appeal to those they work with. A trainer for law enforcement and the military explained: “It’s very mission-oriented in terms of my experiences in combat. … We basically designed a curriculum that would speak to these kinds of folks.” In his program, he did not talk about meditation or do “anything that they would consider weird or unusual.” He said he did not even use the word mindfulness.

These approaches have led to some critiques that the primarily white and Western teachers are wrongfully appropriating the practices to support aims antithetical to Buddhist tenets of nonviolence or nonattachment to worldly outcomes.
Coping mechanism or transformational practice?

Leaders of the early mindfulness movement said they wanted to transform society for the greater good through the practice. Their goal was to spread meditation practices across science, health care, prisons, schools and other institutions.

Kabat-Zinn wanted to foster greater “awareness” through mindfulness so people would become more conscious of what motivated their actions. For example, it could help them understand if they were driven by their own sense of self-aggrandizement or greed and inspire them to change.

Saki Santorelli, the former leader of the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Program, similarly hoped that embedding mindfulness in secular institutions would force practitioners to understand the essential reality of interconnectedness. This reality draws on a Buddhist belief that all life is interdependent and connected with each other, rather than existing independently on its own. Through mind-heart training, he hoped they would realize their universal responsibility to others and help create more inclusive economic systems.

Meditation to support corporate ends

Yet in most of the organizations I studied, contemplative practice did not reach the organizational core and transform the larger workplaces they were a part of. Instead, employees reported that mindfulness was seen as marginal to core missions and workplace expectations.

People practicing mindfulness at a retreat.
Thomas Yau/South China Morning Post via Getty Images

Companies might offer recreational yoga in their fitness room for employees, but it was often not being used to address the underlying cause of stress, such as extremely high workloads and the emphasis on the economic bottom line at the core of corporate culture.

Even though some programs may benefit highly stressed-out workers, they struggle to bring lessons learned from meditation into competitive work cultures beyond their meditation groups.

Mindfulness teacher and scholar Cathy-Mae Karelse questions whether because mindfulness programs so closely mimic typical business and educational structures, they have lost the “emancipatory potential” some founders hoped for.

In her book “Work, Pray, Code,” Carolyn Chen shows how some Silicon Valley tech firms have adapted spiritual practices to such an extent that they have come to be used to support corporate ends, rather than individual liberation.

For example, one company even put their logo in the center of their labyrinth. Walking the circular maze of a labyrinth to end up in a place that emphasizes corporate loyalty seems to co-opt the liberational purpose of doing the practice. This is a far cry from many spiritual practitioners’ goals of using the practice as a transcendent metaphorical journey to a place of deeper personal insight.

I fear mindfulness is all too often becoming a Band-Aid that helps sustain overburdened employees on an endless quest for more productivity.

(Jaime L Kucinskas, Associate Professor of Sociology, Hamilton College. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

JESUS WAS PALESTINIAN

From DC to the Vatican, baby Jesus is wearing a keffiyeh

(RNS) — The pro-Palestinian creche is intended to point out the disconnect between the idealized Bethlehem of most representations and the reality in present-day Gaza and the West Bank.

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Washington’s Capitol Hill neighborhood is one of several churches across the country that have created crèches called “Christ in the Rubble.” The name comes from a book by Palestinian Christian pastor Munther Isaac. Featuring the baby Jesus wrapped in a black-and-white checkered keffiyeh, the creche is intended to remind Christians that if Jesus were born today, he would be born under the rubble. (Photo courtesy Lindsey Jones-Renaud)

Yonat Shimron
December 9, 2024

(RNS) — The scene representing the birth of Jesus is a common December sight, artfully arranged on church lawns or entryways across the country.

But in some churches this year, the nativity crèche is looking a bit different.

The manger has been replaced with a pile of rocks, and the baby Jesus is swaddled not with a thin blanket but with a black-and-white keffiyeh, the Middle Eastern-style scarf that has become a symbol of Palestinians’ resistance to Israeli aggression.

This tableau, often called Christ in the Rubble, first appeared last year in the town of Bethlehem outside the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church, pastored by the prominent Palestinian minister and activist Munther Issac. All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California, quickly copied it and constructed one on its lawn.

This Advent season, leading to Christmas, they are becoming more common. Even Pope Francis was presented a crèche Saturday (Dec. 7) by two Bethlehem-based artists, featuring a baby Jesus nestled in a keffiyeh.

The pontiff declared “Enough wars, enough violence!” while receiving the delegation of Palestinian groups that organized the project.

Pope Francis prays in front of a nativity scene crafted in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, as he arrives for a meeting with the donors of the fir tree set up in St. Peter’s Square as a Christmas tree and those who have crafted the life-size nativity scene at the base of the tree, in the Paul VI Hall at the Vatican, Saturday, Dec. 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

In Washington, D.C., less than half a mile from the U.S. Capitol, another church assembled a Christ in the Rubble crèche last week.

The nativity scene outside St. Mark’s Episcopal Church features a Black baby Jesus swaddled in a keffiyeh lying in a bed of broken bricks and clumps of concrete and wire.

It is intended to bring awareness to Israel’s ongoing war that has leveled the Gaza Strip and killed more than 44,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, as well as to the plight of Palestinians in Bethlehem, located in the occupied West Bank. While most Palestinians are Muslim, there is a thriving Palestinian Christian community in Bethlehem, the site of Jesus’ birth, according to the gospels of Matthew and Luke.

“At Christmas, we sing about Bethlehem and we put up our manger scenes and talk about this story of Jesus being born in this town of Bethlehem with its themes of peace, love, joy and hope,” said Lindsey Jones-Renaud, a lay member of St. Mark’s who was part of the team that assembled the crèche last week. “But there’s such a disconnect between all that and what is actually happening in Bethlehem right now and in the surrounding lands.”

Since the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on West Bank Palestinians have skyrocketed. Israeli settlers have vandalized Palestinian property and burned homes and cars, often as Israeli security forces stand by. About 900 West Bank Palestinians have been killed in 1,400 attacks, according to the United Nations. More than 50 West Bank Palestinian communities have been forced to abandon their homes.

Steven Scammacca, left, and Lindsey Jones-Renaud, members of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, pose with the church’s “Christ in the Rubble” crèche in Washington’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. (Photo courtesy Lindsey Jones-Renaud)

On Sunday, Jones-Renaud flew to Israel on a 10-day delegation that will tour the West Bank in a show of solidarity with the Palestinian villagers — and, if necessary, to act as a buffer to protect them from the escalated attacks by Israeli settlers and the Israeli army. It is the fourth trip planned by the group Christians for Ceasefire.

Multiple U.S. Christian organizations have protested Israel’s harsh military rule on Palestinians. They have called for a cease-fire and an end to U.S. military aid to Israel. The U.S. has supplied more than $22 billion in military aid to Israel since the war in Gaza began, according to a Brown University study.

Now, during the season of Advent, these organizations are working on campaigns to bring greater awareness to the plight of Palestinians.

“We need to take more risks to stop the killing in the spirit of Christmas and the birth of the Prince of Peace,” said Eli McCarthy, a professor of theology at Georgetown University and a Just Peace Fellow with the Franciscan Action Network. (Jesus is often referred to as the Prince of Peace.)

Friends of Sabeel North America, an interdenominational Christian organization working on Palestinian justice, is encouraging a Preach Palestine Day of Action in conjunction with International Human Rights Day, which falls on Tuesday.

FOSNA’s Michigan chapter is planning to install two moveable “Christ in the Rubble” crèches this month, one at a park and another at a market — both in Detroit.

“Symbols matter and visuals matter, and our understanding in all of our traditions, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, is that God is always on the side of the oppressed,” said Kim Redigan, a member of the FOSNA Michigan group and a Catholic. “God is on the side of those who are suffering. God is on the side of those who are being crushed.”

Some churches will also be participating in a Mennonite Action event on Dec. 21 called the “Longest Night for Gaza Service” to grieve the loss of Palestinian lives. And on Dec. 28, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, some churches will take public actions on the day Christians commemorate the Gospel story of the massacre of male children in Bethlehem by King Herod.

“Scripture reminds us to seek justice, show mercy and protect innocent life,” said Steven Scammacca, a member of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church who worked on the Christ in the Rubble crèche alongside Jones-Renaud. “Those values are clearly violated by the violence in Gaza.”

Hindus debate the legacy of caste in America

(RNS) — As more institutions adopt policies against caste discrimination, disagreements about caste's prevalence among those in the Hindu diaspora are stronger than ever.

Supporters and opponents of a proposed ordinance to add caste to Seattle’s anti-discrimination laws attempt to out-voice each other during a rally at Seattle City Hall, Feb. 21, 2023, in Seattle. (AP Photo/John Froschauer)

Richa Karmarkar
December 10, 2024

(RNS) — Nearly a decade ago, a newly migrated Karthikeyan Shanmugam, an IT engineer from Tamil Nadu, in southern India, was puzzled, to say the least, at the caste conversations among the Hindus he met in the Bay Area.

As they discussed the California Department of Education’s 2016 battle with Hindu advocacy organizations over mentions of India’s hierarchy of hereditary social classes in the state’s social studies textbooks, Shanmugam realized, he said in a recent interview, that some of his fellow Hindus were unconvinced that the caste system needed to be addressed at all.

Shanmugam is among those American Hindus who believe that the Indian diaspora has grown to the point that caste needs to be addressed out of its context in India. “Caste is something very apparent as part of the Indian perspective,” Shanmugam told RNS. “It has to be taught, and it has to be taught properly, the right way. If you try to hide caste, then there is no solution to it.”

Disagreements about whether caste originated from the Hindu religion or South Asian history more generally came to a fever pitch in California last year, when a landmark bill designating caste as an official category of discrimination was vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom after intense lobbying.

More than a dozen universities, colleges and companies have adopted caste as a protected category in their discrimination policies, opposed by similar groups that argued the inclusion would only mischaracterize all in the micro-minority for following discriminatory practices that had long been disavowed in their homeland.


Thenmozhi Soundararajan, front center, leads demonstrators marching in favor of SB 403 near the California Capitol building in Sacramento, Sept. 11, 2023. (Photo courtesy of Equality Labs)

As these institutions implement anti-caste policies, Hindu Americans feel it imperative to discuss the unintended consequences, and hidden complexities, of “the caste problem.”

RELATED: Rutgers task force report urges university to add caste discrimination ban

The problem, said Shanmugam, is that those Hindus living in the United States who don’t see caste often miss it because they haven’t suffered caste discrimination, likely because they themselves are higher on the “caste ladder.” These upper-caste Hindus, or Brahmins, he said, make up the majority of Hindus who initially had the access and money to build a life in the U.S.

“They have to understand what social justice is, and how they benefit from their caste privilege,” said Shanmugam. “They first have to acknowledge it.”


Shanmugam, who is not a Brahmin, knew from his own experience that caste divisions persist in the U.S. He has known co-workers to try to “sniff out” his caste with pointed religious questions, and seen blatant shaming of meat eaters in his social circles, as it could indicate a lower caste.

So why, asked Shanmugam, did it feel as if many Hindu Americans were denying this reality?

In part to raise awareness about caste frictions, Shamugan co-founded the Ambedkar King Study Circle, a support group for other recent immigrants who followed the teachings of caste abolitionist Bhimrao Ambedkar, who is said to have influenced the thinking of Martin Luther King Jr., whose son Martin Luther King III once called them “brother revolutionaries.”


People demonstrate against Senate Bill 403 during a rally near the California state Capitol in Sacramento, Sept. 9, 2023. (Photo courtesy of Sangeetha Shankar/HAF)

But some Hindus maintain that even talking about the caste system outside its native contexts not only unnecessarily extends its power but paints Hinduism as essentially discriminatory. The argument against California’s caste discrimination bill and other institutional caste policies from these advocates held that they were being pushed by campus or corporate DEI officials.

Last week, a new report from the Network Contagion Research Institute, a nonprofit center at Rutgers University that studies misinformation and hate ideology, found that caste education can actually increase bias, saying, “anti-oppressive pedagogy increases hostility, distrust, and punitive attitudes — escalating tensions instead of fostering inclusion.”

In other words, those exposed to a DEI curriculum about caste equity written by Equality Labs, a Dalit, or lower-caste civil rights group, were more likely to perceive Brahmins as an inherently oppressive group, or perceive discrimination when there isn’t any evidence of it, said Indu Viswanathan, a researcher who helped produce the report.

Many Americans’ introduction to the caste system, she said, begins as early as middle school, when they find plastered in their social studies textbook a four-section pyramid, with Brahmins at the top and Shudras, or untouchables, at the bottom. The chart has become infamous among Indian American students, who are often faced with uncomfortable questions as a result.


The Caste System pyramid, as seen in many textbooks. (Image courtesy Wikimedia/Creative Commons)

“Categorical discrimination exists in every society,” said Viswanathan, “but when it’s represented as the bulk of what you need to know about a group of people, that’s when things begin to get skewed, and your concepts of that group of people and the purpose of their tradition start to become skewed.”

The versions of caste that come from the Hindu Scriptures, said Viswanathan, can’t be explained in a single diagram, nor can Western frameworks of the “food chain” articulate the nuances of caste, including the checks historically placed on those of a higher status, the role of regional and linguistic communities in caste designations, and the years of reparations put forth for those born in so-called backward castes.

DEI circles in schools and offices, then, she said, leave little room for progressive-minded individuals like herself to push back against the dominant narrative, which she sees as turning increasingly “anti-Brahmin.”

“We are a community like no other,” she said. “We’re a small group in the United States, but we maintain the incredible, sort of unimaginable diversity of India, even amongst the diaspora. But the story that is being peddled is that whatever is happening in India is also happening here.”

Pushpita Prasad, of the advocacy organization Coalition of Hindus of North America, said the fight against institutional caste policies has been pulled off-track by a “feel-good ignorance” that exists among well-meaning, but uninformed, lawmakers. She said that though she has lived in the U.S. for 25 years, she never heard caste being discussed until Equality Labs released its first survey in 2016 — which has since been criticized by other researchers for its methodology.

“It’s interesting that DEI, a concept that should have been about teaching pluralism, has become fundamentally so linear that it divides the world into black and white, good and evil, and it can’t see beyond that,” said Prasad.

Raju Rajagopal. (Courtesy photo)

But Raju Rajagopal, a self-described “caste-privileged” Hindu who sits on the board of Hindus for Human Rights, a social justice advocacy group, said those who say they see no evidence of caste discrimination are “missing the point.”

“You may think that you’re being falsely accused, but until you’re able to put yourself in the shoes of the discriminated, at least show some understanding of why they feel this perception. Unless you can give some safe space for Dalits to openly talk about what they’ve gone through, you’re not going to have the data to say that.”

In Rajagopal’s eyes, mentions of caste will only increase as more Indians immigrate to this country. The difficult conversations that will result are unavoidable and require the participation of all Hindus, regardless of their views on its origins. It is thus the responsibility of Hindus, he says, to “educate the mainstream American community, not to distance ourselves from something that our ancestors have contributed heavily to, similar to racism.”

Talking about caste gives teachers and parents the chance to highlight how Indians have tried to mitigate its effects, Rajugopal said, such as India’s affirmative action effort known as the reservation system. “There’s plenty that we can highlight to the children to say, ‘This is a problem, but look at all the things that we have done now.’ We have to do our bit in America.”

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Hinduism Is Fascism

Opinion

Both right and left claim Bonhoeffer as a champion. Here's why his ideas fit neither.

(RNS) — Bonhoeffer matters precisely because he reminds us that Christian behavior and attitudes are more than calculations for a partisan edge.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer on a weekend getaway with confirmands of Zion's Church congregation in 1932. (Photo courtesy of German Federal Archives/Creative Commons)
Charles Marsh
December 9, 2024

(RNS) — In the decades since he was executed in Germany for crimes of high treason, Dietrich Bonhoeffer has become one of the most celebrated religious thinkers of our time, inspiring many of our era’s most influential leaders, intellectuals and artists, from Desmond Tutu and Vaclav Havel to Jimmy Carter, Angela Merkel and U2’s Bono. He is a model to millions more who confront the blood-stained face of history with courage and conviction.

British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge summed up how this brilliant pastor-turned-conspirator against Hitler became a hero in widely disparate religious traditions: “Some words Gorky used about Tolstoy come into my mind: ‘Look what a wonderful man is living on this earth!’”

But with the adoration of Bonhoeffer’s legacy comes sharp disagreement over its meaning and political uses.

A quick Google search of Bonhoeffer — or better, “Are we living in a Bonhoeffer moment?” — will put the reader directly into the crossfire between liberals and conservatives, each laying claim to the great Christian martyr’s moral inheritance. The relative dearth of explicit political discussion in his writings has made it easy for those with differing theological and ideological stances to cast Bonhoeffer in their own image.
RELATED: Stop taking Bonhoeffer’s name in vain, his relatives and scholars warn Eric Metaxas, Project 2025

Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived from 1906 to 1945. 

(Photo courtesy Joshua Zajdman/Random House)

In fact, Bonhoeffer’s political views, as gleaned from his biography, don’t map neatly onto today’s American left-right divides (nor onto the political map of the 1930s America that Bonhoeffer twice visited).

When today’s progressives laud him, they rarely cite his posthumously published book “Ethics” that called abortion “nothing but murder.” Nor do they recall his preference for monarchy over democracy, his dismissal of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis as the mere “gnawing away of otherwise healthy people’s confidence and security” or his sartorial extravagance. His privilege as a golden child of Berlin’s posh Grunewald district, which he wielded freely and without apology, tends to go unremarked among those who prize his “view from below” and solidarity with the poor.

On the religious right, a new generation of activist theocrats has convinced the rank and file that life under any Democratic administration will become a Fourth Reich and have turned Bonhoeffer into a political avatar. Who would not wish that a person we so greatly admire would have seen the world as we do?

Except that MAGA enthusiasts such as author and radio personality Eric Metaxas have transformed Bonhoeffer with little basis in fact. Ignoring biographical features he doesn’t like and inventing new parts he needs, Metaxas has recast Bonhoeffer’s story as a battle cry for conservative Christian activism in every American presidential election since the first Obama administration. He goes to such an extreme as to suggest moral equivalence between the political assassination of an American Democrat with Bonhoeffer’s involvement in a plot to kill Hitler.

Metaxas’ delusionally dangerous portrayal prompted 86 members of the Bonhoeffer family to release a public letter on Oct. 18 condemning the distortions and misuse of “right-wing extremists, xenophobes and religious agitators … whose intentions are diametrically opposed to Bonhoeffer’s thoughts and actions; ranging from Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s proposed program for Trump — to the German right-wing extremist Björn Höcke.”

How should we responsibly position Bonhoeffer within the current American political scene? A good place to start might be to ask how he actually voted.

In the only free election in which he participated, Bonhoeffer supported the Catholic Center Party, which drew its membership from aristocrats, priests, bourgeoisie, peasants, workers. It was the only party that had half a chance of defeating Hitler, Bonhoeffer believed, with its Vatican ties purportedly offering some buffer from full state control. Though Roman Catholic, the Center Party became a reliable inter-confessional partner in the various Weimar coalitions of the 1920s. It supported the separation of church and state and welfare capitalism, views that would not find a welcome reception with the Christian right in the United States.

Bonhoeffer was proven naïve, of course; when the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Center Party signed the Enabling Act, empowering Hitler “to assume dictatorial powers in Germany” and dissolve every party competing with his own.

Further insight into Bonhoeffer’s political leanings comes from his experience in the United States as a young theologian. While studying with Reinhold Niebuhr at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan in 1930 and 1931, Bonhoeffer encountered the American organizing tradition and its innovations in social ministry. Though initially vexed by American seminarians’ casual disregard for the doctrinal debates of the Protestant Reformation, he was won over by the robust social engagement of Union’s professors, students and clergy.

“Bonhoeffer” film poster. (Image courtesy Angel Studios)

In field trips with classmates, Bonhoeffer met with representatives of the National Women’s Trade Union League, the NAACP and the Workers’ Education Bureau of America. And, as he wrote to his pastoral supervisor in Berlin, “I visited housing settlements, Y.M. home missions, co-operative houses, playgrounds, children’s courts, night schools, socialist schools, asylums, (and) youth organizations.”

It is the signal virtue of the new biopic, “Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin,” released last month to strong box office numbers, to portray with remarkable ardor his encounters with American religion and society, especially his deep immersion in African American Christianity and culture. Bonhoeffer said he “heard the Gospel preached in the Negro churches,” and it sounded refreshingly different from the somber Lutheranism of the north German plains. He encountered the “Jesus of the disinherited,” to cite the Black Christian mystic and pastor, Howard Thurman.

Bonhoeffer would later say that these spaces of social hope existing in and beyond parish churches’ walls enabled a “turning from the phraseological to the real.” In one largely forgotten episode of his American year, Bonhoeffer took a road trip from New York to Mexico City through the Jim Crow South. He drove through Alabama the same month nine young black men, who had been falsely accused of raping white women, were convicted in a mob atmosphere in successive trials in Scottsboro, Alabama. “Blood laws, mob rule, sterilizations, and land seizures,” he wrote in his notes.

Returning to Berlin in the summer of 1931, Bonhoeffer told his atheist older brother, Karl-Friedrich, that Germany would need an ACLU of its own: The rights of conscientious objectors, protections for resident aliens from deportation and racial disenfranchisement mattered deeply. After denouncing the German church’s support of the Aryan Clause in 1933, Bonhoeffer’s life was set on a collision course with Hitler.

Perhaps what makes it so difficult to understand Bonhoeffer is that we do not often see Christians combine social idealism, pro-life ethics and fervent devotion to Jesus Christ. But these dissidents, dreamers and peacemakers who cut against the grain of the principalities and powers are out there. I am thinking of those Americans who people the faith-based reformist tradition hymned in two recent volumes from the Project on Lived Theology, the research community I am affiliated with at the University of Virginia: ordinary saints such as Ella Baker, Dorothy Day, Cesar Chavez, Mary Paik Lee, Florence Jordan, Sarah Patton Boyle and Ramon Dagoberto Quiñones.

The testimonies of these people are not readily reduced to sound bites, yet this is precisely the form that marks Bonhoeffer’s distinctive witness — a form without any natural partisan home.

Bonhoeffer’s response to our situation would begin with bold, straightforward questions such as those that animate his letters and papers written from a Gestapo prison in the months preceding his death: “Who is Christ for us today?” “Are we still of any use?” “How can Christ become Lord of the religious?” “Why are ‘good people’ often more inclined toward ‘ultimate honesty’ and ‘righteous action’ than church people?” What does God desire but for all humanity to show mercy and act justly?

Bonhoeffer prayed there would arise a generation of “responsible thinking people” with the strength to stand fast, exemplify civil courage and cleave to honesty. He asked whether the “time of words is over,” whether religious language has been so thoroughly profaned that the only way forward is through “prayer and righteous action.”

PODCAST: When religious power serves political force

Bonhoeffer matters because he reminds us that Christian behavior and attitudes are more than calculations for a partisan edge. He understood that a true disciple is “clothed not in the adornments of nationhood and race,” but in the excellences of Christ. Faith ought never divide the self into two halves, he said. “For it is only when one loves life and the earth so much that without them everything seems to be over that one may believe in the resurrection and a new world.”

(Charles Marsh teaches in the religious studies department at the University of Virginia and directs the Project on Lived Theology. He is the author of the award-winning biography “Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

Indigenous leaders bring first case under Texas' COVID-19-era religious liberty measure

(RNS) — In oral arguments before the state Supreme Court, Texas’ deputy solicitor general argued that the amendment was ‘not a Swiss Army knife of religious liberty’ and that ‘the amendment’s scope is designed to protect the right to gather,’ not to protect sacred spaces themselves.

The historic Brackenridge Park Pumphouse along the San Antonio River in San Antonio. (Photo by Charlotte Mitchell, courtesy of Brackenridge Park Conservancy)

BeLynn Buckley
December 10, 2024

(RNS) — For Gary Perez and Matilde Torres, like their ancestors before them, the river bend in Brackenridge Park in South Texas is more than the oak trees along the riverbank, the slow-moving water and the stars arrayed above at night. It is a sacred place, where the resident cormorants, they believe, take their prayers to the heavens.

That is why, when the city of San Antonio decided to remove 69 of 83 trees and prevent bird nesting in the river bend to allow the remodeling of a wall, Perez and Torres, ceremonial leaders of the Lipan-Apache Native American Church, sued to protect it on religious grounds.

Last week, the Texas Supreme Court heard their lawsuit challenging the city’s actions under a state constitutional amendment approved by Texas voters in 2021 to deal with restrictions on religious services imposed by local officials during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Religious Services Amendment to the Texas Constitution says that the state or a political subdivision of the state “may not enact, adopt or issue a statute, order, proclamation, decision, or rule that prohibits or limits religious services.”

John Greil, an attorney and professor at the University of Texas law school’s Law & Religion Clinic, represents Perez and Torres in Perez v. City of San Antonio. He noted that Perez and Torres are the first claimants to bring a suit under the Religious Services Amendment, giving the court’s decision in the case significant weight as a precedent.

“If 20 years down the road, there’s some emergency and cities start putting in new orders that would affect religious services, this case will determine how that amendment gets applied in the future,” Greil told RNS.


Visitors along the winding San Antonio River in Brackenridge Park in San Antonio. (Photo courtesy of Brackenridge Park Conservancy)

Perez and Torres perform their ceremonies at a part of the park known as Lambert Beach, they explained, because of their people’s ancestral connection to the land. They consider the waters, birds, trees and constellations above a “sacred ecology” and a tenet of the Native American Church. They believe that the San Antonio River bend is central to their creation story, which combines Indigenous and Christian traditions.

“Imagine removing the Old Testament and trying to surmise what happened within the New Testament,” Perez said. “By removing the trees and the birds, and destroying this spiritual ecology, there’s no reference back to the Old Testament. There is no hope.”

The two appellants’ brief provided evidence that for thousands of years Indigenous peoples have worshipped at this river bend, based on hieroglyphics found elsewhere in Texas.

The brief argues that worship cannot be done elsewhere because the specific attributes to the place are crucial to their ceremonies. If the trees are obstructed, if the birds are removed, Perez and Torres’ ability to worship would be gone forever.

“The city of San Antonio has chosen a construction design that will remove all but 14 of the 83 trees at the bend … without any consideration of the plaintiffs’ religious exercise,” Greil said before the Texas Supreme Court on Wednesday (Dec. 4).

A spokesperson for the city of San Antonio told RNS that the city’s current plan includes “a reduction in the number of trees planned for removal from 105 trees to 77 trees for Phase I and II of the project. Forty trees will be relocated rather than removed altogether and approximately 270 trees will be planted on site.”

At the hearing, Texas Deputy Solicitor General William Cole argued that the amendment was “not a Swiss Army knife of religious liberty” and that “the amendment’s scope is designed to protect the right to gather.”

RELATED: Judge blocks Arizona lithium drilling that tribe says is threat to sacred lands

Hiram Sasser, executive senior counsel for First Liberty Institute, a religious liberty advocacy group that submitted an amicus brief to the court, told RNS he was dissatisfied with the arguments from the state last week.

“I was shocked that Deputy Solicitor General Cole said that Article I, Section 6-a does not prohibit the government from banning singing in churches, especially after the Texas Legislature fought so hard to give that freedom to churches after COVID shutdowns by tyrant local officials. I hope Attorney General (Ken) Paxton corrects the record and deals with this problem,” said Hiram.

How We Build Socialist Power (Literally)

By Our Changing Climate

December 9, 2024

Source: Our Changing Climate

In this Our Changing Climate climate change video essay, I dive into how we might be able to build out a socialist power grid. Specifically, the video examines the pitfalls of a capitalist market-based approach to the power.

Further Reading and Resources: https://ourchangingclimate.notion.sit…

Timestamps:
0:00 – Intro
1:57 – What Are Power Grids and Utilities?
6:19 – A Grid for the People
15:07 – Toward’s People Power

Slavery Forever? Alabama Prisoners Fight to Abolish Forced Labor

By Emily Early, Mansa Musa 

December 10, 2024

Source: The Real News Network

Five incarcerated people in Alabama are fighting to push forward a lawsuit, Stanley v. Ivey, challenging the state’s power to punish prisoners who resist forced labor. Despite a state constitutional provision abolishing slavery that was passed in 2022 by referendum, Montgomery County Circuit Court dismissed the plaintiffs’ lawsuit, arguing Governor Kay Ivey and Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm were protected by state sovereign immunity. Emily Early, Associate Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Southern Regional Office, joins Rattling the Bars to discuss the lawsuit and the plaintiffs’ ongoing fight to have their case appealed.

Trump Reneges on Promise That His Tariffs Won’t Raise Costs for Consumers

In his first term in office, Trump’s tariffs cost consumers around $1.4 billion per month, one study found.

By Chris Walker

December 10, 2024

Source: Truthout


Screenshot from X



President-elect Donald Trump took a massive step back from previous claims he’s made on his planned tariffs, stating in an interview over the weekend that he could no longer “guarantee” that costs from tariffs wouldn’t be passed onto consumers.

During the presidential campaign, Trump often touted tariffs as a means of generating revenue for the U.S. without raising taxes directly on American taxpayers. Trump vowed that tariffs wouldn’t create higher costs for consumers, flouting wisdom from economic experts who have repeatedly concluded that tariffs do, in fact, raise prices on goods.

Tariffs are taxes placed on companies that import goods to be sold in the U.S. from another country — economists often regard these as taxes on consumers, however, as companies will pass the costs onto those who buy the products. But Trump wrongly pushed the idea that the countries themselves, not the consumers, would pay the costs of the tariffs.

On Sunday, NBC aired Trump’s appearance on “Meet the Press” with host Kristen Welker. In their discussion on tariffs, the president-elect refused to offer the same assurances he gave on the campaign trail.

“Economists of all stripes say that ultimately consumers pay the price of tariffs,” Welker said, prefacing her question on the subject.

“I don’t believe that,” Trump interjected.

“Can you guarantee American families won’t pay more?” Welker continued.

Trump responded with a shrug, saying he “can’t guarantee anything.”

He then falsely suggested that his track record on tariffs, during his first term in office, showed that they didn’t raise costs.

“We had the greatest economy in the history of our country, and I had a lot of tariffs on a lot of different countries,” Trump said.

Those tariffs, however, did raise costs for consumers. For washing machines, a product that had been decreasing in price for some time prior, costs went up by $86 per unit after Trump’s tariffs were imposed. One study also found that the Trump tariffs overall cost U.S. consumers an extra $1.4 billion in extra spending per month.

In late November, weeks after his presidential election victory, Trump promised to impose steep tariffs on the U.S.’s largest trading partners, including a 25 percent tariff on products imported from Mexico and Canada, and a 10 percent increase of existing tariffs on China. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum responded to Trump’s plan by suggesting that it could result in a trade war between the countries.

“One tariff will be followed by another in response,” Sheinbaum said.

Tariffs on Mexico could raise grocery store costs by huge margins, as 69 percent of vegetable imports to the U.S. and 51 percent of fresh fruit imports come from that country alone. Tariffs on Canada could also raise costs on both gas and lumber.

“Tariffs artificially raise the cost of doing business, which depresses overall economic production in the form of lower gross domestic product, artificially higher prices, and fewer goods sold. For the consumer, this means a reduction in purchasing power,” Boise State University political scientist Ross Burkhart told PolitiFact about the matter.



Chris Walker is a news writer at Truthout, and is based out of Madison, Wisconsin. Focusing on both national and local topics since the early 2000s, he has produced thousands of articles analyzing the issues of the day and their impact on the American people.

Bipartisan Plan to “Reform” Energy Permits Is a Brazen Giveaway to Fossil Fuels 

Leading supporters of permitting reform either have a business interest in it — or have effectively been bribed.

By Basav Sen

December 9, 2024

Source: Truthout


Illustration: Kevin Hong

This summer, a bipartisan bill sponsored by Senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and John Barrasso (R-Wyoming) to expedite the permitting of energy infrastructure cleared the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. A similar bill is being considered by the House Committee on Natural Resources.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) reportedly wants to bring the Manchin-Barrasso bill to the floor for a vote during the “lame duck” session before January. A version of “permitting reform” could become law soon.

Senators Manchin and Barrasso, the American Petroleum Institute, and other supporters of these bills claim that there’s a crisis of energy availability, affordability and reliability in this country. And they blame that crisis on restrictive permitting processes for energy infrastructure.

But none of this is true.

The U.S. is a net exporter of both crude oil and its derivatives, as well as natural gas. We produce more than enough fossil fuels to meet domestic demand. Likewise, we generate enough electricity on a monthly basis to meet domestic demand. Our power grid is highly reliable, with infrequent, short service interruptions mostly attributable to distribution line problems (such as downed power lines during a storm).

Even when energy availability crises do occur, insufficient generation capacity isn’t the cause.

During the 2021 Texas freeze, all generation facilities, of every kind, struggled to generate enough power, and adding more capacity wouldn’t have helped. The Texas grid’s overreliance on natural gas in particular made it more vulnerable to gas supply disruptions because of frigid weather — and its isolation from the rest of the U.S. grid made it harder for Texas to import power from neighboring states. Worse still, corporate profiteering through generating artificial scarcity to drive up natural gas prices may have played a role.

The summer 2024 blackout during Hurricane Beryl was caused by downed power lines, exacerbated by the failure of Texas utilities to make their distribution infrastructure more resilient in the face of climate change. New generation or transmission infrastructure wouldn’t have prevented this blackout.


The U.S. is a net exporter of both crude oil and its derivatives, as well as natural gas. We produce more than enough fossil fuels to meet domestic demand.

Americans do experience energy affordability issues, but none of them have to do with permitting of energy infrastructure. Crude oil prices soared in the summer of 2022, when a combination of factors including collusion and price fixing by some in the industry and supply disruptions caused by the Russia-Ukraine war led to a price spike. Lack of production and refining infrastructure wasn’t to blame.

Natural gas prices showed similar trends, driven by some of the same factors. In fact, by expanding liquefied natural gas exports, the Senate bill may even increase domestic prices for natural gas, making utility bills higher.
Greenwashing Fossil Fuel Development

In addition to greenlighting more fossil fuel development, some backers of “permitting reform” also claim that weakening environmental standards will facilitate the rapid buildout of renewable energy and transmission lines for it.

Several studies have identified the key obstacles to the buildout of renewable energy. One is the wait time for generation projects to get connected to the power grid, which is known as the interconnection queue. As of 2022, there were about 2,000 gigawatts of capacity in the interconnection queue, of which 95 percent were from wind, solar and storage projects.

Bureaucratic delays at grid operators and utilities, not environmental regulation, were the culprit here. Another key obstacle is understaffing and lack of capacity in permitting agencies.

But more than 95 percent of renewable energy projects already face a streamlined federal environmental review process, or do not undergo review at all, because they usually aren’t polluting and controversial. There’s simply no credible evidence that restrictive environmental laws are causing delays in bringing renewable energy online.

Likewise, the need for a massive transmission buildout to facilitate renewable energy expansion is exaggerated. There’s huge potential for expanding distributed renewable energy in or near major centers of electricity demand.

Proponents of the Senate bill point to modeling claiming that the benefits of renewable energy and transmission line expansion will outweigh increased emissions from expedited permitting for fossil fuel projects, and more fossil fuel leasing on public lands and waters.

However, the modeling is flawed. By relying on official government data, it undercounts emissions of methane in oil and gas drilling and transportation, as shown by numerous peer-reviewed studies. This is a serious shortcoming, because methane is a short-lived but powerful climate pollutant — 81 times more powerful than carbon dioxide over a 20-year window and 28 times more powerful over a 100-year window.

Further, the modeling makes unfounded assumptions about climate benefits from U.S. liquefied natural gas exports replacing coal in importing countries. There’s evidence that lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of liquefied natural gas, including methane leakage and emissions from the liquefaction process, are actually worse than emissions from coal — and that the climate damage from liquefied natural gas exports outweighs any economic benefits.
Fossil Fueled Lobbying

The push for more fossil fuel infrastructure is contrary to science. Every credible international body with expertise on this issue, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the International Energy Agency and the UN Environment Programme, agrees on the need to stop building new fossil fuel infrastructure.

It’s also contrary to justice. Indigenous, Black, Brown and poor white communities have long borne the brunt of air and water pollution from the U.S. fossil fuel industry and the resulting health consequences. Adding to this burden would be outrageous.

There’s no excuse to ease permitting for fossil fuels along with renewable energy.

The chorus of establishment voices pushing for “permitting reform” without considering the evidence can be partly attributed to groupthink. But some of them may be acting in bad faith.

The American Petroleum Institute supports the Manchin-Barrasso bill, which should tell you everything you need to know about who’s behind this push.

Sen. Joe Manchin received more oil and gas campaign money than any other member of the Senate or House for years — and owns a coal company. Sen. John Barrasso is the third highest recipient of oil and gas industry money in all of Congress in the current election cycle. Rep. Bruce Westerman, lead sponsor of the House bill, received more than $300,000 in oil and gas campaign money, making the industry his top contributor.

In other words, leading supporters of permitting reform either have a business interest in it — or have effectively been bribed.

If Congress wants to make policy in the public interest, using the best available evidence, they need to reverse course. They need to pass legislation banning new fossil fuel infrastructure and instead requiring the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to reform interconnection procedures to clear the backlog in connecting renewables to the grid.

Instead of gutting the National Environmental Policy Act and other environmental laws to benefit polluting energy projects, they should pass legislation that provides funding to permitting agencies to hire more staff with relevant expertise, and requires more transparency and community engagement. There’s already a bill that does exactly that.

The job of those who care about the climate is to compel Congress to do it.

Nature Based Solution Carbon Myopia

From a satellite you will not see the butterflies

By Gunnar Rundgren

December 9, 2024

Source: Garden Earth


Multinational forestry company Arauco arrests and burns the homes of indigenous and campesino people living in their ancestral forest territories. Photo: Registro de las familias afectadas por Arauco (Families Affected by Arauco)



Recently, The Guardian featured an interesting article by Tess McClure about the fate of abandoned landscapes, with a special focus on Bulgaria: The great abandonment: what happens to the natural world when people disappear? As of the 2021 Bulgarian census, almost 300 villages were completely abandoned, and more than 1,000 had populations below 30. For someone that has lived in rural Sweden for most of his life, this is of course a rather familiar view. I have visited a number of abandoned hamlet or lone crofts and have even taken down a few such buildings for reuse of the material. Since the 1950s, some scholars estimate up to 400m hectares – an area close to the size of the European Union – of abandoned land have accumulated across the world.

We are not only bad

Many seem to embrace the opinion that abandonment by humans essentially is a good thing as it will “leave more to nature”. This view is obviously based on the notion that humans are inherently bad for nature as well as not being part of it. For sure, it is not hard to find examples of how humans screwed up both nature and their own ecological foundations. But as the article demonstrate, the human influence can also be beneficial for many species, “rather than always being antithetical to nature, human presence can help make life possible for a vast array of species”. A human made pond is not necessarily worse – or better – than a beaver made pond (we have beavers on our farm, I like them very much, even if their logging is a bit irregular).

Most people, in Europe at least, will see forest as the natural pristine stage that we should strive for. But forests are just one of many biomes possible in temperate climates and a “forest” is not necessarily a dense forest plantation but a patch work of woods, swamps, ponds, open spaces etc. Earlier, large herbivores, beavers and other ecosystem engineers kept the land dynamic. Homo agricola took, to a large extent, over that role, in the more traditional forms of landscape management. The semi-natural grasslands of Europe is in that perspectives descendants of those mega-herbivore landscapes. This is not only the case of Europe, research from South America also points to that the mega herbivores created a savanna like landscape in huge parts of the continent.

Carbon myopia

In a recent paper in PNAS, Matthew Hayek and colleagues set out to demonstrate how much carbon that can be stored through afforestation of land currently used for grazing cattle. I will not go into detail, but in their main scenario 184 million hectares of grasslands in temperate climates would be converted to forests and that would sequester 125 Gt carbon dioxide over a period of 75 years. For me, this paper have all the signs of “nature-based-solutions” carbon myopia, i.e. the perspective that how we manage landscapes is all about maximizing carbon storage in ecosystems.

In their view, the choice stand between a very low beef production and a high rate of carbon sequestration though afforestation. They don’t even mention that some of the land they propose to plant full of trees is the land that has the highest biodiversity in Europe. Instead they talk about afforestation as “ecosystem restoration” stating that (dense) forests would be the natural ecosystem in those areas, which has been discussed above.

Their calculations are based on an average of 15 kg of beef produced per hectare and year from the grasslands they propose to plant with trees. In my own very small farm (with five mother cows), the natural grasslands, which has a modest productivity, yields in the range of 80 kg of meat (carcass weight) per year. Research from France and the UK shows a higher production and the Knepp estate, famous for its rewilding, yields 54 kg of live weight (which would equal around 27 kg of carcass weight) from a mix of game and cattle. The figure used indicates that they either made mistakes or included a lot of land that is abandoned or has a very low productivity, which in turn would mean that trees hardly would grow there. The assumed net primary production of pastures is very low, just 1 ton of carbon per hectare and year. In Sweden, which has a harsh climate and most pastures are on marginal lands, it is estimated to 2.8 tons.

The researchers’ calculations are also based on the rather heroic assumption that these forests/plantations will thrive and grow well and not be harmed by insects, fires, storms or any of the other things causing massive damage to trees. In addition, they don’t assume any use of the wood at al, which in my view implies that the land will be bought by government and put in a reserve. Meanwhile their research is also based on the assumption that soil carbon storage in the forests created would be five times as high as soil carbon storage in the grasslands to be planted. I can find no support for that assumption, on the contrary, I find many sources claiming the opposite (that above ground carbon storage is considerably higher in forests than in grasslands is not disputed, the whole definition of a tree is that it has a wooden structure that is built by carbon). In Sweden, research points to that the soil carbon content of grasslands and forests is quite similar but a bit lower in forest soils.

Don’t afforest the Arctic

It is particularly absurd that, according to the research, the Murmansk region has a very high potential for replacing beef from pasture with forests. Murmansk is considerably colder than Anchorage in Alaska and just a bit warmer than Kiruna in Sweden. I find it hard to believe that there is any beef cattle grazing there – most of the region is Sami country with reindeer. Talking about that, recent research also points to that it is a very bad idea to try to afforest arctic and subarctic lands. Interviewed by 8point9 lead author Assistant Professor Jeppe Kristensen says that the unique characteristics of Arctic and sub-Arctic ecosystems make them poorly suited for tree planting for climate mitigation. How much sunlight is reflected back into space, without being converted into heat (the albedo effect), is more important than carbon storage for the total energy balance.

Come down from the satellite please!

This research is just one of many similar articles the last decade, where researchers use global datasets, meta-analyses, artificial intelligence and satellites to determine the best land use – or the best diet, or the best what not. Another such example was the The global tree restoration potential published in Science 2019 which promoted the planting of 0.9 billion hectares forests, popularly interpreted as 1 trillion trees, for carbon sequestration. That article was, rightly, heavily criticized.

In my view, these kinds of research are essentially irrelevant. But they are also harmful if they are construed as policy advise, which the example clearly is: “this work can aid the design and improvement of policies related to natural climate solutions”. They are arrogant, in that that they pretend that we humans know what is the best, that we should – or even can – control nature. They are deceptive, because there are so many error factors and biases built in such assessments and the results are predicated on those initial assumptions anyway. They are prime examples of that as soon as technology allows some kind of new research, it will be made, regardless of its utility. They are harmful, because they neglect – and reject – the local communities that in most cases already know quite well how to manage the land.

Just the other day, UNESCO declared the fäbod system (seasonal grazing in mountain areas) of Norway and Sweden a world heritage.* The seasonal grazing creates a varied landscape with an open forest canopy and very high biodiversity, combining the biodiversity of the forests, bogs, mountains and grasslands. The fäbod system, the Sami reindeer management, my cows or my apple orchard will never fit into any of these global analyses.

Global projections and scenarios, like the one above, disregard people, culture and nature and try to isolate one aspects for optimization, in this case carbon, in other cases something else. But the Earth system and the important human sub-system of the planet cannot and should not be based on optimization or maximization of one aspect, be it carbon, things or money. How humans are in nature is something that is constantly negotiated, adapted and adjusted with and in the landscape. As a minimum, researchers should cross check their data with the realities on the ground. Preferably, researchers should come down to earth and get their hands and feet dirty, instead of sitting in their skylabs. I have some spare shovels.

* The paper identifies even higher potential for afforestation of grasslands in the Eastern USA (and in some other places). I am not in a position to have any opinion about that.