Where Things Stand: A Link Between Backsliding Democracies And Abortion Bans

WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 03: Flyers that read "My Body, My Choice" are seen in front of the U.S. Supreme Court May 3, 2022 in Washington, DC. In a leaked initial draft majority opinion obtained by Politico 

By Nicole Lafond
TPM

There’s lots of brilliant think pieces from reporters, scholars and political observers to consume today to help wrap one’s head around the gravity of the last 24-hours. Here’s another take to add to the list this evening.

New York Times writer Max Fisher flagged a piece he published back in September 2021 here:

You should read the piece in full, but his global perspective helps string together a unique birds-eye-view correlation between developed nations, increasingly polarized politics, attacks on democracies and the roll-back of abortion rights. As Fisher notes in the piece, in the last two decades, we’ve seen more than 30 countries around the globe (some with a socially conservative and/or Christian-dominated populous) enact some form of legal expansion of abortion access for citizens. Only the United States, Poland and Nicaragua have done the opposite (as of his September 2021 writing).

Fisher spoke to several legal scholars to highlight the role a strong democracy plays in the longevity and strength of human rights laws in a given nation, specifically on the issue of abortion. But one particularly striking section of the article focuses on the growing phenomenon of minority rule in highly polarized societies.

While the makeup of high courts in democratic nations are, at least by design, meant to reflect public opinion, the current makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court obviously throws that ironclad rule out of whack. (And, as we know, public opinion on abortion is overwhelmingly in support of not overturning Roe, this Washington Post-ABC News poll on the issue just last week demonstrates that well.)

Citing Steven Levitsky, a Harvard University scholar on democracy, Fisher points out that the manipulation of certain systems that have perhaps long been controversial parts of a country’s grand experiment in democracy — like the U.S.’s Electoral College — have ultimately helped make the shift toward minority rule possible. And oftentimes the party with more populist or precedent-breaking voices in their ranks are more likely to manipulate the systems or the scraps of a manipulated system to their advantage (it’s obvious, but think: McConnell’s grand Merick-Garlanding).

This section gets into it far more eloquently than I can:

Electoral College and Senate maps have always tilted American elections to favor certain voters over others, for instance by granting rural states outsized representation. For the first time in American history, demographic groups that tend to support one party, the G.O.P., overwhelmingly cluster in the areas that receive disproportionate voice.

As a result, Supreme Court justices are increasingly likely to be appointed by a president who lost the popular vote and confirmed by a Senate elected by a minority. Republicans won the national popular vote in only one out of the last eight presidential elections, but have appointed six of the nine current Supreme Court justices.

In democracies, a drift toward minority rule can feed a sense that power does not flow from the will of the people as a whole. Such leaders and institutions often become likelier to overrule the majority on issues important to the minority that put them in power. …

In societies with high polarization, he (Levitsky) has found, parties often fight bitterly for control of the courts. These contests tend to send a message, intended or not, that courts exist to serve partisan interests, rather than guard against them.

Rulings at odds with public opinion, Dr. Levitsky said, can become “very likely in a period of polarization and hardball politics.”

AUSTRALIA
Trauma, disbelief and plenty of ideas shared at NSW flood inquiry hearing in Lismore

Residents of Lismore speak during the first public hearing of the 2022 NSW flood Inquiry in Lismore on Tuesday evening.

 Photograph: Jason O’Brien/AAP


Northern rivers residents make their voices heard at first community hearing into devastating events they say could have been avoided

Christine Tondorf

Tue 3 May 2022 23.25 BST

Megan James, who lives near Nimbin, was the first of many speakers to take the microphone at a university lecture theatre in Lismore for the first community hearing of the 2022 New South Wales flood inquiry on Tuesday evening.

“I’m the voice in the hills, but we’re no longer heard,” James said.

She told of how farmers once phoned Lismore to warn that their rain gauges were filling and a flood was on the way; now the town relied on official forecasts that weren’t always accurate.


Land swaps, relocations or rebuilds: Lismore community grapples with its future

The lack of warning from authorities of the impending floods, on 28 February and 30 March, was one of the most prevalent themes at the town hall-style meeting, at which the inquiry’s leaders, Professor Mary O’Kane, an engineer and scientist, and Mick Fuller, the former NSW police commissioner, explained they had come to listen, not provide answers.

In the words of another speaker: “There was no real clear warning that it was going to be as bad as it was.”

One northern rivers resident said he hadn’t come to blame State Emergency Service volunteers or the local council, but their modelling systems appeared to be failing.

An array of ideas was proffered from the floor. Blocks and tackles could be used to secure houses in flood plains and wetlands of native flora planted to divert water away from residential areas, because “lots of people still want to stay in this place”.

Professor Mary O’Kane (right) and Mick Fuller listen during the NSW flood inquiry in Lismore. Photograph: Jason O’Brien/AAP

Flood mitigation could include dredging Lismore Wilsons River and restoring it to the deep channel once used by ships – today it’s barely fit for a dingy. First Nations land management practices needed to be adopted.

The myriad of potholes in the region should be highlighted by white paint, because they were impossible to see at night on wet roads, and there were also calls to investigate whether the upgraded Pacific Highway had exacerbated flooding in some places.
I’d just like a cupboard for my undies, a pantry for my food.Displaced flood victim

Some suggested flood-zone houses should have mandatory roof hatches, like skylights, to prevent people in attics being drowned by rising waters. There were multiple calls for the insurance system to be overhauled, community communications systems to be strengthened with satellite, and a testimony about the impact on wildlife.

There were callouts for improved drainage and building flood-proof, because “clearly our infrastructure can’t handle this” and “disaster planning must be incorporated into regional planning”.

There were stories of trauma – the neighbours were screaming; children saw their pets drown. One woman referenced a friend who perished while trying to be saved on Facebook, and a miraculous rescue tale – someone was pulled from a strong torrent by a string of Christmas lights.

An image taken on 28 February shows two Lismore residents and their dog stranded on the roof of a home during major flooding.

 Photograph: NSW Rural Fire Service

There was even laughter when Byron Bay councillor Mark Swivel lamented the national media’s focus on Byron’s inundation– “the flood came to Byron because apparently water likes linen”.

The only agitation was when a woman spoke about being traumatised by the floods, which she attributed to climate change and a reliance on fossil fuels. She was met with applause and a couple of boos.

Stories were told from an array of perspectives. Helen Coyle, who lives with a disability, described being stuck in Ballina, unable to return to her Lismore home because the roads were cut. She went to the Ballina hospital for help but said staff chastised her for travelling with insufficient money.

She is calling for hospital staff to be kitted with the phone numbers for organisations that can support people with disabilities displaced by severe weather events.

A subsequent indignity, she said, was that the floods have robbed Lismore of public disabled toilets, only portaloos. Are the disabled expected to “shit themselves”?

Another Lismore resident called on flood clean-up volunteers to be trained in what is salvageable because well-intentioned volunteers had thrown away her son’s two prosthetic legs.

Flooding in Lismore on 28 February.

 Photograph: Jason O'Brien/AAP

Bruno Ros, a vet specialising in large animals, spent the first post-flood days on helicopters looking for stranded livestock and visiting isolated farming properties.

“Plenty of people were on the ground, barking, screaming and pleading for help,” he said after the inquiry, “and for me as a vet the Department of Primary Industries was just inaccessible. I begged for assistance. It arrived seven days after the floods, seven days too late.”

Dr Cam Hollows, a doctor on the ground in Coraki, recounted working for 40 hours and treating 60 patients in the aftermath.

“We’ve repeated every single mistake of the bushfires,” he said.

Lismore Labor MP Janelle Saffin agreed: “Government agencies weren’t prepared, and they need to ramp up really quickly because that’s what disasters need, but they haven’t done that.”

The NSW flood inquiry went for more than two hours in Lismore on Tuesday evening. Photograph: Jason O’Brien/AAP

Mark O’Toole, from Bungawalbin, said he asked members on a community Facebook page if anyone had been successful in securing a government business grant: “So far I’m up to 890 comments and nobody has got one”.

There are around 100 farmers just in his town, he said, and “the money needs to start flowing now, not in six months or 12 months.”

A woman fought back tears as she described families with children still camping in backyards. Another outlined simple wishes: “I’d just like a cupboard for my undies, a pantry for my food.”

For more than two hours the Lismore crowd listened in near silence – a demonstration of forbearance and patience from a community that had already endured so much.

The NSW flood inquiry will hold its next public hearing at the Tumbulgum Hall in the Tweed Shire on Wednesday. It is required to report to the premier by 30 September and is open to submissions from any member of the public, which can be made online, via email, post or phone.

 The endangered California condor has returned to the skies over the state's far northern coast redwood forests for the first time in more than a century.

Navy launching investigations into USS George Washington and shipyard life

By Geoff Ziezulewicz
Tuesday, May 3

Sailors assigned to the aircraft carrier George Washington await orders in August during a simulation of an underway replenishment. (Navy)


The Navy parent command of the aircraft carrier George Washington is commencing investigations into both the three crew suicides last month and the unique stressors that come with operating in a shipyard maintenance environment, where the carrier and its crew currently find themselves.

GW has been undergoing a refueling and complex overhaul, or RCOH, maintenance period since August 2017, but it was supposed to wrap up last year.

Speaking with reporters Tuesday, the head of Naval Air Force Atlantic, Rear Adm. John Meier, said the ship will now not leave Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia until March of next year.

Meier said one investigation, expected to wrap this week, will look at whether there were any immediate triggers or linkages in the April suicides of Master-at-Arms Seaman Recruit Xavier H. Mitchell-Sandor, Interior Communications Electrician 3rd Class Natasha Huffman and Retail Services Specialist 3rd Class Mika’il Rayshawn Sharp.

“To lose three sailors in such a short time is devastating,” Meier said. “We don’t take that lightly.”

Turkey imposes systematic religious discrimination on minorities: Report

Ankara [Turkey], May 4 (ANI): After more than a hundred years of its supposed secular foundations, the institutionalised religious intolerance and racism in Turkey has continued to persist and has even accelerated in recent times, a report said.

Ankara has been brainwashing its population with the ‘Turkish Migration Routes’ map, which since Turkish independence, has been used to decorate all primary school walls during the single-party Republican People’s Party (CHP) period, International Forum for Rights and Security (IFFRAS) said in a report.
This map was made in order to prove that the Turkish race migrated from Central Asia to the four corners of the world and carried civilization and that the tribes that founded the old civilizations in Anatolia were essentially Turks, the report said.
Turkey has also been promoting and exporting this idea through professionally made Turkish serials of international standards which focus on that racist and Islamic conquest, the report further said, adding that, in an environment where the masses are conditioned in this way, religious intolerance is but natural the logical end product.
Turkey is known to have a history of religious repression and mass massacres in the name of Islamization with the Armenian genocide that took place more than 100 years ago in 1915 being one of the most brutal examples.
The genocide was the systematic destruction of the Armenian people during World War and was implemented primarily through mass murder of around one million Armenians during death marches to the Syrian Desert and forced Islamization of Armenian women and children, the report said.
Though the genocide took place hundred years ago, the Armenians and Assyrians, who are very few in Turkey, continue their search for rights and justice till today.
According to the report, even today, a child’s freedom of religion, the right to participate, and the right of parents to raise their children according to their own philosophical or religious views are subject to systematic interference within the education system in Turkey.
The Turkish government has also been trying to lay the groundwork to make religious education (Islamic Sunni) compulsory for children in the age group 4-6 years, the report said.
In addition, the parents and students belonging to the atheists, deists and agnostics groups do not have the right to be exempted from compulsory Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge courses, the report further said.
Those who criticize religion or belief in general, especially Islam, or certain interpretations of that religion or belief, are at risk of being prosecuted under the Turkish Penal Code (TCK), the report added.
Furthermore, the non-Muslim foundations in Turkey cannot elect their board of directors even today. Elections for the board of directors of these foundations have been prevented since 2013. As a result, the functioning of community foundations and the communities that benefit from them are paralyzed and weakened, the report said.
Highlighting that there also exists a striking disparity in terms of resource allocation to different religions by the Turkish government, the report said that, most of the resources from the public budget are meant only for the Sunni Muslim community for religious services.
Religious communities such as the Alevi community, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, the Armenian Patriarchate and the Protestant community are unable to provide even training to their religious officials because of a paucity of resources, the report added.
The report went on to call on Ankara to take measures without delay in order to prevent religious violations by fulfilling the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) judgments and the Opinions of the Human Rights Committee in cases concerning freedom of religion or belief. (ANI)

 

The scientific meltdown over a controversial discovery of ‘biblical Sodom’

The remains of a city’s fiery demise near the Dead Sea have archaeologists at odds.

People participate in the Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project at Tall el-Hammam, an ancient settlement near the Dead Sea, in western Jordan. The Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project is a joint venture by Trinity Southwest University and Veritas International University. Photo via tallelhammam.com

April 20, 2022

By 

Jerry Pattengale

(RNS) — What everyone agrees on is that something unusual happened at Tall el-Hammam, an ancient settlement near the Dead Sea.

In a layer of ancient earth, archaeologists claim to have found evidence of an apocalyptic event: Melted rooftops. Disintegrated pottery. Unusual patterns in the rock formations that can be associated with intense heat. For another three to six centuries after 1650 B.C., the settlement’s 100 acres lay fallow.

But when Steven Collins, the principal archaeologist at Tall el-Hammam, considered the scientists’ evidence in an article that ran last year in the respected scientific journal Nature, he claimed that the incineration matched with the place and timing of the biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah. This brought down on himself what in academic circles might be called hellfire.

That story of Sodom and its sister city Gomorrah is one of the Bible’s best-known stories. Abraham bargains with God to spare Sodom — even then synonymous with sin — to save its few righteous residents. The Lord was having none of it. “Then the LORD rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah,” the Book of Genesis says. Abraham looks back and sees “dense smoke rising from the land, like smoke from a furnace.”

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RELATED: Earliest mention of ‘Yahweh’ found in archaeological dump

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On the face of it, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see possible connections between Tell el-Hammam. But in a real sense you do.

Steven Collins. Photo via tallelhammam.com

Led by Collins, dean of the College of Archaeology at Trinity Southwest University, 21 experts from 19 research institutions weighed in on Tall el-Hammam’s remains, concluding that the nature of the destruction suggested a massive airburst or comet. 

“The proposed airburst was larger than the 1908 explosion over Tunguska, Russia, where a 50-m-wide bolide” — a meteor that explodes in midair — “detonated with 1000× more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb.”

These scholars, more than half with scientific posts, also claimed that the “destruction matrix,” which they put at around 1650 B.C., “is highly unusual and atypical of archaeological strata throughout the ancient Near East.”

What was unlike destruction caused by earthquakes or warfare were pottery shards with their outer surfaces melted into glass, some bubbled as if boiled, “bubbled” and melted building brick and plaster, suggesting some unknown high-temperature event. Objects of daily life, carbonized pieces of wooden beams, charred grain, bones and limestone cobbles were burned to a chalklike consistency.

But last month Steven Jaret, a postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History, and R. Scott Harris, a space scientist at Atlanta’s Fernbank Science Center, challenged these conclusions of the 21 scholars, also in Nature, basically hinting that Collins’ group confused run-of-the-mill smelting and pottery processes with heat from an airburst.

A burgeoning group of scientists agree with these two, making much of the fact that Collins’ school is “an unaccredited Bible college.” Paul Braterman, blogging at Primate’s Progress, headlined his take, “an airburst of gullibility.”

“It certainly raises suspicions when an archaeologist makes dramatic claims like ‘this site is Biblical Sodom’ and that person is not credentialed as we expect,” said James Hoffmeier, emeritus professor of Near Eastern archaeology and Old Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, in an interview with Religion News Service.

But Hoffmeier added, “As we well know, however, there are highly qualified archaeologists whose minimalist presuppositions draw outrageous negative conclusions about the Bible and their work is rarely subjected to critical evaluation.”

In comments to RNS, Collins noted that most of the 21 authors of the paper are scientist peers who worked “six years” to produce their findings. But he conceded that “even if the two critics’ claims are valid about the failure to meet the crystalized criteria for extraterrestrial matter, it doesn’t even touch the melted room, plaster, humans, etc.”

The archaeological site of Tall el-Hammam in western Jordan. Photo by Deg777/Wikipedia/Creative Commons

He reiterated his agreement with the findings of the authors of the original paper, going a step further to claim it’s sure evidence of the biblical account of Sodom’s fall. In one of his many video clips he claims he’s walking through the mudbrick gate of the city, “We are now entering Sodom!”

But besides the causes of the destruction, Tall el-Hammam’s link to the biblical events has another test that is perhaps more difficult to prove — its date. The Bible chronology watchdog Answers in Genesis, along with many others such as Bryant Wood, editor of Bible and Spade, are rather candid in putting the fall of Sodom some two centuries off.

Furthermore, other details of the biblical narrative create issues. Simon Turpin, executive director and speaker for Answers in Genesis–U.K., argues, “The only way for proponents of Tall el-Hammam to synchronize it with biblical Sodom is to revise the biblical date of the Exodus, embrace a short Israelite sojourn in Egypt, and significantly reduce the lifespans of the patriarchs.”

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RELATED: In time for Hanukkah, archaeologists reveal battle-scarred stronghold against Maccabees

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Collins has gained traction, at least in the media, and a few scientists and some Bible scholars are telling him to keep looking. Tall el-Hammam, the largest known city of its era in the region, is the best candidate that has surfaced.

But the intense criticism from the larger fraternity of scientists includes assertions that some of the original papers’ authors have been too quick in the past to identify bolides. Science Integrity Digest pointed out that eight of the 21 authors are founders of the Comet Research Group, which has attempted “to show that ancient cities were frequently destroyed by comets, and to do something about comets before ‘your city is next.’”

But Hoffmeier reminds us that scientific debate can proceed without ridicule. “Walter Rast and Tom Schaub in the 1970s-’80s had advanced the idea that Bab ed-Dra and Numeira were associated with Sodom and Gomorrah,” he said. “Their idea was evaluated by the discipline and rejected. I think Collins and his team should be afforded [such] a courtesy.”

 

The world can learn about conservation—and trust—from Indigenous societies

Traditional ecological knowledge encompasses medicine, religion and culture.

A family in northern Siberia watches -- but decides not to hunt -- a musk ox that wandered into the area where they live. ()

May 13, 2022

By 

John Ziker

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(The Conversation) — Twenty-five years ago, when I was a young anthropologist working in northern Siberia, the Indigenous hunters, fishers and trappers I lived with would often stop and solemnly offer something to the tundra. It was usually small, such as coins, buttons or unlit matches. But it was considered essential. Before departing on a hunting or fishing trip, I’d be asked if I had some change in my outer coat. If I didn’t, someone would get me some so it was handy. We left other gifts, too, such as fat from wild reindeer to be fed to the fire.

I was intrigued. Why do these things? Their answers were usually along the lines of, “We are the children of the tundra,” or “we make these sacrifices so that tundra will give us more animals to hunt next year.”

These practices are part of what I and other anthropologists call “traditional ecological knowledge.” Beliefs and traditions about the natural world are central in many Indigenous cultures around the world, bringing together what industrialized cultures think of as science, medicine, philosophy and religion.

Many academic studies have debated whether Indigenous economies and societies are more oriented than others toward conservation or ecology. Certainly the idealized stereotypes many people hold about Indigenous groups’ being “one with nature” are simplistic and potentially damaging to the groups themselves.

However, recent studies have underscored that conservationists can learn a lot from TEK about successful resource management. Some experts argue that traditional knowledge needs a role in global climate planning, because it fosters strategies that are “cost-effective, participatory and sustainable.”

Part of TEK’s success stems from how it fosters trust. This comes in many different forms: trust between community members, between people and nature, and between generations.

Defining TEK

Looking more closely at the components of TEK, the first, “tradition,” is something learned from ancestors. It’s handed down.

“Ecological” refers to relationships between living organisms and their environment. It comes from the ancient Greek word for “house,” or “dwelling.”

Finally, the earliest uses of the term “knowledge” in English refer to acknowledging or owning something, confessing something and sometimes recognizing a person’s position or title. These now-obsolete meanings emphasize relationships – an important aspect of knowledge that modern usage often overlooks but that is especially important in the context of tradition and ecology.

Combining these three definitions helps to generate a framework to understand Indigenous TEK: a strategy that encourages deference for ancestral ways of dwelling. It is not necessarily strict “laws” or “doctrine,” or simply observation of the environment.

TEK is a way of looking at the world that can help people connect the land they live on, their behavior and the behavior of the people they are connected to. Indigenous land practices are based on generations of careful and insightful observations about the environment and help define and promote “virtuous” behavior in it.

As an American suburbanite living in a remote community in Siberia, I was always learning about what was “proper” or “improper.” Numerous times people would tell me that what I or someone else had just done was a “sin” in respect to TEK. When someone’s aunt died one year, for example, community members said it happened because their nephew had killed too many wolves the previous winter.

The author learning to cut up dwarf willow in the proper way for use in a summer chum, or tent, to smoke caribou meat.John Ziker, CC BY-NC-ND

Similarly, after stopping to assess the freshness of some reindeer tracks on the tundra, one hunter told me, “We let these local wild reindeer roam in midwinter so they will return next year and for future generations.” Here, TEK spells out the potential environmental impacts of greed – which, in this case, would mean overhunting.

Concepts like these are not isolated to Siberia. Much work has been done examining the parallels among ancestral systems of deference in Siberia, Amazonia, North America and other regions.

Trust and tradition

These examples illustrate how TEK is a set of systems that promote trust through encouraging deference for ancestral ways of dwelling in the world.

Moderation of self-interested behaviors requires such trust. And confidence that the environment will provide – caribou to hunt, say, or ptarmigan birds to trap – depends on the idea that people will treat the environment in a respectful manner.

Previously, I’ve studied prosociality – behavior that benefits others – in northern Siberian practices of food-sharing, child care and use of hunting lands.

These aspects of life depend on the idea that the “real” owners of the natural resources are ancestors and that they punish and reward the behaviors of the living. Such ideas are encouraged by elders and leaders, who commend virtuous and prosocial behavior while connecting negative outcomes with selfishness.

Trust is an essential component of reciprocity – exchange for mutual benefit – and prosociality. Without trust, it does not make sense to take risks in our dealings with other people. Without trust we cannot cooperate or behave in nonexploitative ways, such as protecting the environment. This is why it is advantageous for societies to monitor and punish noncooperators.

An abandoned reindeer sleigh, likely a grave, with several personal items. One is not allowed to disturb it, which would disrespect the dead, who are considered the true owners of the land.
John Ziker, CC BY-NC-ND

Put another way, minimizing one’s resource use today to make tomorrow better requires trust and mechanisms to enforce it. This is also true in larger social formations, even between nations. Groups must trust that others will not use the resources they themselves have protected or overuse their own resources.

Lessons from TEK

Today, many environmental experts are interested in incorporating learnings from Indigenous societies into climate policies. In part, this is because recent studies have shown that environmental outcomes, such as forest cover, for example, are better in Indigenous protected areas.

It also stems from growing awareness of the need to protect Indigenous peoples’ rights and sovereignty. TEK cannot be “extracted.” Outsiders need to show deference to knowledge-holders and respectfully request their perspective.

One idea societies can adopt as they combat climate change is the importance of trust – which can feel hard to come by these days. Young activist Greta Thunberg’s “Fridays for Future” initiative, for example, highlights the ethical issues of trust and responsibility between generations.

Many outdoor enthusiasts and sustainability organizations emphasize “leaving no trace.” In fact, people always leave traces, no matter how small – a fact recognized in Siberian TEK. Even footsteps compact the soil and affect plant and animal life, no matter how careful we are.

A more TEK-like – and accurate – maxim might say, “Be accountable to your descendants for the traces you leave behind.”

(John Ziker is a professor of anthropology at Boise State University. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

A new novel explores a post-pandemic religious world — in the 14th century

Peter Manseau’s latest book examines the Black Death for clues to our cultural moment.

In this Nov. 24, 2020, file photo, Kyla Harris, 10, writes a tribute to her grandmother Patsy Gilreath Moore, who died at age 79 of COVID-19, at a symbolic cemetery created to remember and honor lives lost to COVID-19 in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)

May 11, 2022

By 

Jana Riess

(RNS) — One million deaths and counting. It’s unfathomable, really — both the fact that the pandemic has stolen so many lives, and that American culture has mostly moved on.

How could we have rebounded so quickly when every 330th American is now dead from this virus?

For insights I turn to historians, and one in particular who is also, helpfully, a novelist. Peter Manseau, founding director of the Smithsonian’s Center for the Understanding of Religion in American History, is also an award-winning novelist whose most recent work of fiction, “The Maiden of All Our Desires,” takes place in Europe 20 years after the Black Death has ravaged the population.

Set in a convent that possesses a secret book of near-scripture containing the wisdom sayings of its founder, Sister Ursula, it focuses on the tensions between different kinds of religious authority. There’s also a generation gap: Those who survived the plague are still scarred by their memories of it, while the blithe young adults around them can’t relate.

This Zoom interview has been edited for length and clarity. — JKR

This novel was 25 years in the making. Where did it come from?

Novelist Peter Manseau

This was the first book I ever tried to write. I was an undergraduate and it was a four-page short story for a creative writing class, about a nun in a convent who fell in love with the wind. As a thesis, I expanded it to 100 pages. The idea followed me in my 20s and 30s, and it gradually developed into this kernel of a story about a generation after the plague.

It wasn’t until 2020 that I thought (the story) could allow me to write about many of the things we were all grappling with in the early days of the pandemic, without making it explicitly about COVID-19. I didn’t want to write about our own pandemic, but I felt like it presented a universal set of questions that could be approached through a story set in a time far different from our own, and yet so resonant: What does it mean to live through a plague, and what comes next? What happens for the generation that only vaguely remembers the plague, that lives with it as only a story?

Your kids are old enough to remember this time. What will this memory be like for them?

That’s why I wanted to have a kind of a folkloric or mythical frame around this story. It opens with the coming of a storm, which in the moment reshapes the world, but in the future is only this vaguely remembered thing. And that, I have been imagining, is what will happen with COVID-19. Fairly quickly, this moment that we’ve lived through, which upended everything in 2020 and 2021, will be in the rearview mirror. It may become a “remember when” in a matter of years rather than of decades, as I frame it in the novel.

So I’m interested in the way that these events that are disruptive in a daily, unignorable way become stories that are told. I’m fascinated by the act of making a story of catastrophe. I recently wrote a piece in Slate about the many uses we have made of the Black Death during COVID and the way our thinking about it has evolved.

How has it evolved?

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, articles would claim that the Black Death that killed half the population of Europe in the 1340s and 1350s may have had a bright side, in that it led to the Renaissance and the Reformation — that it changed labor practices and shifted authority in medieval Europe. As we were entering into this pandemic, which had (already) killed tens of thousands of people, we were desperate for the understanding that this might all work out OK.

It’s interesting to me, particularly as someone who writes about religion, to see in real time this desire to turn catastrophe into redemptive story. That impulse is obviously at the heart of so many religious traditions: “This terrible thing happened. But what does it mean for us? How can we grow from it?”

More recently, we have lost patience for that as the numbers rose. Even though we’re still nowhere near the loss that humanity suffered during the Black Death, it’s become more difficult to make those silver-lining arguments about a two-year-long pandemic with a million Americans dead.

Your novel features a crisis of authority about whether the convent should build a wall to keep out the plague. That certainly felt timely.

“The Maiden of All Our Desires” by Peter Manseau. Courtesy image

Probably my first return to this story after so many years was in the early days of the Trump administration when we were all talking about the building of walls and the fear of outsiders coming in. That was when I began adding in this dimension of a wall being built around this convent that hadn’t had a wall before because it was open to the world.

There’s a pivotal scene in which a sister has been instructed by the convent’s priest not to open the gates to strangers. But the abbess overrules him, saying that they’ve never rejected the Rule of St. Benedict before and shouldn’t begin due to the threat of plague.

I’m interested in the collision of different types of religious authority. So that is a moment when it’s really dramatized: the sacramental authority of the priest on the one hand and the local, relational authority of the abbess on the other hand. When they inevitably come into conflict in the story, there’s a real taking of sides. It splinters the community.

What is next for you in terms of your writing?

My next book is narrative nonfiction that’s set in a 19th-century almshouse in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, the town where I grew up. A poorhouse and lunatic asylum built mainly to house immigrant Irish was alleged to be actively starving and maltreating its patients and letting them die — for the sake, it seems, of selling their bodies to medical schools. In the 1880s it was the biggest public health scandal in the country. 

It’s a fantastically dark story, and what’s interesting to me is that for the most part, no one remembers this in the town. The only part of the story that some people will know is that Anne Sullivan, the teacher of Helen Keller, was a patient at the Tewksbury Almshouse as a child. Her brother died there, but she was eventually able to escape.

When I was in high school and I ran on the cross-country team, we ran through the woods at the foot of the hill where the state hospital is. Those woods were full of bodies, thousands of unmarked graves. Literally running over graves and not knowing what is just beneath your feet is a metaphor for uncovering this history, which may be my own attempt to turn catastrophe into a story.

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US annual conferences can’t just leave the United Methodist Church, rules top court

The decision by the Judicial Council, the denomination’s top court, comes just over a week after the launch of the Global Methodist Church, a new denomination formed by theologically conservative Methodists.

Attendees of the Kentucky Annual Conference raise their arms in prayer during a morning session on June 13, 2017, at the Sloan Convention Center in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Photo by Kathleen Barry/UM News

May 11, 2022

By 

Emily McFarlan Miller

(RNS) — No, an annual conference in the United States can’t just up and leave the United Methodist Church. At least not yet.

While the denomination’s Book of Discipline has provisions for individual churches wishing to leave the United Methodist Church with their properties, there’s nothing within church law that would allow an annual conference — one of the United Methodist Church’s 53 regional networks of churches and ministries within the United States — to do the same, according to the denomination’s Judicial Council.

The Judicial Council ruled Tuesday (May 10) that only the General Conference, the denomination’s global decision-making body, can determine the process and conditions for annual conferences to disaffiliate from the United Methodist Church.

And the General Conference hasn’t done that. 

“There is no basis in Church law for any annual conference to adopt stopgap policies, pass resolutions, take a vote, or act unilaterally for the purpose of removing itself from The United Methodist Church,” Decision 1444 reads.

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RELATED: Florida churches among first to begin exit from UMC to new, conservative denomination

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The decision by the Judicial Council, the denomination’s top court, comes just over a week after the launch of the Global Methodist Church, a new denomination formed by theologically conservative Methodists.

The name and logo of the Global Methodist Church. Image courtesy of Global Methodist Church

It also comes ahead of annual conferences’ yearly meetings, which take place in May and June.

At least two annual conferences — Northwest Texas and South Georgia — were set to consider resolutions to disaffiliate from the United Methodist Church at their meetings this summer, the Judicial Council noted in its decision. The Northwest Texas Annual Conference also approved a nonbinding resolution last year indicating it planned to leave the United Methodist Church for a conservative denomination should the General Conference pass a proposed Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace through Separation, according to United Methodist News Service.

And the Bulgaria-Romania Provisional Annual Conference already has voted to leave and join the Global Methodist Church over its bishop’s objections, according to United Methodist News Service.

Bulgaria-Romania Bishop Patrick Streiff has requested the Judicial Council rule on whether an annual conference in one of the denomination’s central conferences — including those in Europe, Africa and the Philippines — has the authority to vote to separate from the United Methodist Church. That question remains on the council’s spring docket.

Keith Boyette, who chairs the Transitional Leadership Council of the Global Methodist Church and will step into the role of its chief executive next month, told Religion News Service he was “very disappointed” by the Judicial Council decision.

The Cross and Flame is the official logo of the United Methodist Church. Image courtesy of United Methodist Church

The ruling, he said, will lead to the kind of litigation the 16 United Methodist bishops and advocacy group leaders who negotiated a proposed Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace through Separation — including Boyette — had hoped to avoid. Now churches and annual conferences potentially will challenge the denomination’s trust clause, which maintains that the denomination — not the churches or their conferences — own church properties, he said.

“We have worked so hard to have a different witness to the world,” said Boyette, referencing the challenges faced by other denominations that have split over differing beliefs about the ordination and marriage of LGBTQ members.

The 2020 General Conference was set to consider the proposed protocol, which would create a pathway for churches and annual conferences to leave with their properties to form new denominations. Conservative United Methodists had announced preparations to launch the Global Methodist Church after a General Conference vote.

But when the General Conference was pushed back to 2024 by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Global Methodist Church pushed up its timeline.

“Unfortunately, what is transpiring is exactly what we have tried to avoid through the protocol,” Boyette said.

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RELATED: New denomination urges United Methodists to walk out of the wilderness