The Questioning Christian

Story Mutation: Superdome Savagery

Among many other lessons, Hurricane Katrina provides yet another example of how quickly stories can mutate in the retelling, especially in stressful situations.  That’s totally understandable.  People under stress can imagine, and say, a lot of things that they believe to be 100% correct.  But oftentimes, things later turn out to be different.

For example, we read in today’s paper that the stories of savagery in the New Orleans Superdome may not have been completely accurate.  (I’ve seen a number of those stories in emails circulated by friends, with some of the emails purporting to come from people who supposedly got the information from eyewitnesses.)  In an Associated Press piece published in today’s Houston Chronicle, Michelle Roberts reports:

NEW ORLEANS - On Sept. 1, with desperate Hurricane Katrina evacuees crammed into the convention center, Police Chief Eddie Compass reported: "We have individuals who are getting raped; we have individuals who are getting beaten."

Five days later, Mayor C. Ray Nagin told Oprah Winfrey: "They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."

The ugliest reports — children with slit throats, women dragged off and raped, corpses piling up in the basement — soon became a searing image of post-Katrina New Orleans.

The stories were told by residents trapped inside the Superdome and convention center and were repeated by public officials. Many news organizations carried the witness accounts and official pronouncements and in some cases later repeated the claims as fact, without attribution.

But now, a month after the chaos subsided, police are re-examining the reports and finding that many of them have little or no basis in fact.

An Understandable Explanation of Natural Selection

In today’s Washington Post, writers Rick Weiss and David Brown offer a succinct, readable explanation of how natural selection works:

By some accident of nature whose workings neither man [Darwin and Wallace] could explain, an organism may exhibit a variation in shape, color or body function new to the species.

Although most of these new traits are damaging -- probably lethal -- a small fraction actually help. They may make it easier to hide from predators (like a moth's coloration), exploit a food source (an anteater's long tongue), or make seeds more durable (the coconut's buoyant husk).

If the trait does help an organism survive, that individual will be more likely to reproduce. Its offspring will then inherit the change.

They, in turn, will have an advantage over organisms that are identical except for that one beneficial change.  Over time, the descendants that inherited what might be termed the "happy accident" will outnumber the descendants of its less fit, but initially far more numerous, brethren.

*  *  *

What is hard to understand about this process is that it is essentially passive. The mechanism is called "natural selection" because the conditions at hand -- nature -- determine which accidents are beneficial and which are not. Organisms do not seek ends.

Giraffes do not decide to grow long necks to browse the high branches above the competition. But a four-legged mammal on the savannah once upon a time was endowed with a longer neck than its brothers and sisters.  It ate better.  We call its descendants giraffes.

(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

Weiss and Brown also report on recent developments that “put the very theory of evolution to some  tough new tests.”

Read it all.

We're Getting the Kind of Leadership We Deserve

In “Over-Ruled” in tomorrow’s Washington Post, David Brown observes that in a crisis, too many people fail to do the sensible thing because they’re afraid of being criticized.  Instead, they limit themselves to doing the “safe” thing by following rules and procedures. 

IMHO, Brown nails it.  Here’s an excerpt (with emphasis added):

The other reason many Americans in authority hesitate to make risky decisions is the fear of criticism and even public humiliation -- at the hands of the news media, late-night comedians, and now the nonstop cacophony of the blogosphere.

Many members of my profession make a living, pay mortgages and send children to college in part by telling people how they could have done things better. We make a point about conflicts of interest, whether real or merely perceived, and whether or not they would make any difference. We get on the case of people who do too much, and we get on the case of people who do too little. We are obsessed with motive, and in general assume self-dealing, questionable competence or bad faith among public servants.

Except in the rare case where action is immediately deemed heroic and subjected to little criticism -- the behavior of fire and law enforcement officials on Sept. 11, 2001, is a notable example -- there are few functions of government that, in their minds at least, reporters, editorial writers and columnists couldn't do better. Not to mention Jon Stewart.

While this critic-and-second-guesser role is an important part of journalism, in practice there's too much of it, and it comes at a price. The price is that people have become afraid to do things that fall outside their job description without explicit permission and implied forgiveness for possible bad outcomes.

Go Find a Church

(This post is for Anon, a seeker who has been a regular commenter in recent weeks.)

Anon, it's early Sunday morning.  Let me reiterate my suggestion of a few days ago:  Go to church this morning.  Use the Episcopal Church's parish finder to find a parish near you. 

(Keep in mind that not all Episcopal parishes are the same.  Some are quite conservative in their theology, and a few can be rather judgmental in their preaching.  If you happen to find yourself in one of those parishes this morning, don't sweat it; just look for another one for next time.)

You might also consider going to a United Church of Christ congregation; see their congregation-finder Web site (its search button is in the upper left corner).

Again, don't feel you have to participate in the worship any more than you want to.  Just go. 

Let us know how it turns out.

A Communion of Praxis, Not Belief

A week ago, my wife and I (and a bunch of other parishioners) participated in an interfaith meeting at the George R. Brown Convention Center to organize the next stage of assistance for Hurricane Katrina evacuees here in Houston.  I'm sure most present were Christians, but I'd be surprised if there weren't some Jews and Muslims there too.

There was no shared meal, no "communion" as we would normally think of it.  There were simply brief, more-or-less nondenominational prayers, and some matter-of-fact mentions of God in the course of the proceedings.  We had not come together because we necessarily shared any particular set of detailed doctrinal beliefs; our theological views probably were widely divergent.  We were there, instead, in obedience to what Christians and Jews would call the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law. 

It was, if you will, a communion of praxis.

The Fifth Stage of Crisis Management

Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch wrote in the WSJ OpinionJournal this past week that Hurricane Katrina is illustrating the five stages of crisis management, with the fifth being that of learning from our mistakes:

History shows us that crises almost always seem to give way to something better. Maybe that's because crises reveal how and where the system is broken in ways that make denial no longer feasible. They have a way of forcing real solutions to happen.

Hurricane Katrina has the potential to do that in New Orleans--to compel leaders in government and business to find ways to break the city's cycle of poverty and corruption. The opportunities are huge because the losses were.

There is a blank slate for change to begin, and it most likely will. Just watch the entrepreneurs rush in with ideas and energy, revitalizing old and creating new businesses with the help of the money politicians will be outbidding one another to throw at the problem. Just watch the residents of New Orleans flock to the jobs that are created with a new spirit of optimism.

Crises like Katrina have a way of galvanizing people toward a better future. That's the fifth and final part of the pattern--the best part.

(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.) 

We see this pattern throughout human history:  We get hammered, by a nature that we don't fully understand — or that we ignore — and by conflicts among ourselves.  In response, both individually and collectively, motivated not just by our self-serving desires but also by empathy and concern for our neighbor:

• we struggle to grasp, often dimly and incompletely, what is revealed to us;
• we adapt our thinking and our ways, at least somewhat;
• stumblingly, haltingly, we manage to make the world just a bit "better."

Does God Really "Allow" Evil?

In a discussion about Katrina, a commenter alluded to the age-old question, how could a powerful and good God have allowed so much suffering?   Before we can credibly explore that question, we have to confront a preliminary topic. 

We can't very well say that God allows suffering unless we're confident that he could have acted to prevent it.  But Christianity and other religions haven't done a good job of explaining (at least not plausibly) how God might intervene in the world. There seems to be a spectrum of belief:

• At one extreme is hard-core deism:  God supposedly set the universe in motion like a wind-up toy, and has been more or less letting it run by itself ever since.  In theory, this view absolves God, at least to a certain extent, of any moral responsibility for suffering. .
• At another extreme is hard-core theism:  Everything that happens in this world results from God somehow pushing buttons, pulling levers, and otherwise manipulating his creation to make it so.  A lot of Christians seem to believe this; every time something good or bad happens, they attribute it to God's action, or at least to his will.
• Then there are the folks who doubt God's omnipotence and question whether he even has the power to intervene in the world in the way we might wish he would.  Political and social commentator Gregg Easterbrook addresses this question in his intriguing book, Beside Still Waters.

Unfortunately, too many otherwise-faithful Christians assert beliefs like this without ever asking whether those beliefs are supported by evidence — the revelation of what God (by hypothesis) has actually done, as distinct from we wish, or hope, he has done.

Nigerian Anglican Church "Redefines" Communion

It’s hard to do more than yawn over the Church of Nigeria’s redefinition of who it will regard itself as being in communion with:

With a careful rewording of her constitution, the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion) redefined her relationship with all other Anglican Churches.

All former references to ‘communion with the see of Canterbury’ were deleted and replaced with another provision of communion with all Anglican Churches, Dioceses and Provinces that hold and maintain the ‘Historic Faith, Doctrine, Sacrament and Discipline of the one Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church’.

Emphasis was also placed on the 1662 version of the Book of Common Prayer and the historic Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion.

The Constitutional change also allowed the Church to create Convocations and Chaplaincies of like-minded faithful outside Nigeria. This effectively gives legal teeth to the Convocation of Anglican Nigerians in Americas (CANA) formed to give a worshiping refuge to thousands in the USA who no longer feel welcomed to worship in the Liberal churches especially with the recent theological innovations encouraging practices which the Nigerians recognize as sin.

[Hat tip: Thinking Anglicans]   

The traditionalist blogosphere is of course a-twitter about this development, even though it’s nothing new.  Some traditionalists seem especially excited about speculation that Nigerian archbishop Peter Akinoloa may become the de facto pope of a “realigned” group of “faithful” churches.

Did You Hear the One . . .

In a discussion last week, Barry Fernelius suggested to Anon that:

You seem strongly attached to the idea that there's no God. Perhaps you'd be happier as a Buddhist. Of course, Buddhism might lead you to let go of attachments, so it might be too dangerous...

Which for some reason reminded me of a Robin Williams joke:  A Buddhist walks up to a hot dog vendor and says, make me one with everything.

(This joke was in his utterly-charming 1999 movie Bicentennial Man.  When I heard it, I laughed so hard I was in tears.  My wife, sitting next to me in the theater, looked over quizzically and shook her head in bemusement.  But then I have the same reaction about some of the stuff she finds hysterically funny.)

Neighbors2Neighbors - Settling Katrina Evacuees in Houston

Last night a group from our parish met at the George R. Brown Convention Center here in Houston.  That’s where a lot of Katrina evacuees are being temporarily housed.  We were very much an ad-hoc group, assembled by email by one of our priests on about 24 hours notice.

We were there for an organizational meeting of Neighbors2Neighbors.  This is a new interfaith grass-roots effort, reportedly instigated by Houston mayor Bill White, to help get Katrina evacuees get themselves settled in “real” housing.  If you’re a Houstonian, go to the group’s home page to sign up as a volunteer neighbor. 

The home page, apparently thrown up hastily at an e-commerce site, describes its mission thusly (extra paragraphing is mine):

Neighbors2Neighbors.org is a program commissioned by The City of Houston that mobilizes local volunteers to provide a personal touch of Houston hospitality to new neighbors who have been displaced by Hurricane Katrina. 

The mission we have been tasked with is to match 20,000 volunteers with 20,000 individual new neighbor families to help them settle into life in our local communities for as long as they wish to stay. 

We work with and through the Nieghbors2Neighbors.org Consortium, a group of faith-based leaders from diverse regligious [sic], ethnic, and cultural communities across the Greater Houston Area.

The organizers stressed that volunteers are not expected to make financial contributions to our “new neighbors” (what a great term), but simply to help them get settled in Houston, temporarily or permanently — to help them deal with getting their utilities turned on, putting their kids in school, and all the other chores that go along with relocating, and to meet them periodically to check on how they’re doing.