The UmBlog

At times in its past, the United States of America has found money to make restitution for things gone wrong. For example, 9/11 "The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund of 2001, created by Congress, distributed $7 billion to survivors and victims' families. There have been 2,983 families of those who died and received an average of just over $2 million tax-free per claim, according to Kenneth Feinberg, former pro bono administrator of the fund." ABC news The 9/11 memorial in NYC? "The foundation that runs the memorial estimates that once the roughly $700 million project is complete, it will cost $60 million a year to operate." NBC news Americans are paying for this, not Saudi Arabia where the 9/11 bombers came from. But America wants to "never forget." When the US violated the constitutional rights of Japanese Americans on the west coast after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the entrance to the 2nd World War, it recognized the wrong and President R...

In the early 1600's religious separatists fled their country from fear of persecution. The location was known to other explorers, but an epidemic had left the native population decimated and weak. The immigrants considered the epidemic and the stores of food left behind as God's blessing. However, they suffered terribly adjusting to the new world, nearly half of them died. The indigenous people had mercy on them and helped those remaining. Other immigrants came and joined the struggling outpost. They made treaties with the people who owned the land and cared for it for hundreds of generations. Then they violated those treaties, over and over and over. Not one treaty was kept. Natives were captured and sold into slavery in the sub-tropics where they died. Since they were no good as agricultural slaves, african slaves were imported. The natives were continually pushed out of their land, even the ones who converted to the immigrant religion. Natives were promised an entire ter...

to be a decent human being! I think many of us use Bible verses to be selfish though. Sometimes Christians can be the greatest humanitarians and sometimes the worst. My country has elected Abraham Lincoln and Donald Trump. One freed millions of enslaved humans and the other, when he speaks from his heart, not a teleprompter, can't find a problem with white nationalists who think Lincoln was wrong. Our country is deeply religious. But it was the religious convictions of the Christian progressive, Harriet Beecher Stowe , author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, who fanned the abolitionist flame into the conflagration of the Civil War. She was "progressive" because she rejected the bible proof texts that permitted slavery and empathized with the humanity of the enslaved humans in her country. via the Naked Pastor Some biblical proof texts that are used to end a debate are merely proof that the bible was written by humans who wrote in the context of culture they were famili...

World War 2 was started by agressive nations motivated in part by racial supremacy. Hitler told Germans and Austrians that they were the superior race of Aryans. He also used the European Jewish population as a scapegoat for all the ills they had brought on themselves when they lost WW1. The Japanese also considered themselves a superior race and saw a distinction between themselves and all other Asian people in China, Korea, and the Pacific islands. In Japan, anyone not Japanese was sub-human. In central Germany, anyone not "Aryan" was sub-human as well. The United States sent to the slaughter nearly 300,000 Americans to defeat these racist ideologies. Ironically, the United States had its own racist ideologies to defeat within. Eighty years prior to WW2, over 200,000 Americans died in conflict over this very issue in the Civil War. Before and after that war, the US used genocidal means to eradicate it's own aboriginal population. A footnote in American history Hitle...

Jesus talks about generosity in terms on not letting your right hand know what your left hand is doing. The metaphor works on his teaching to not trumpet our charity but rather to keep it quiet, so that our Father who sees in secret will reward us. However, there are some things the church does in disconnect that should not be. Take the story of the African American christian man Richard Allen. Richard Allen was born into slavery in pre-revolutionary America. However, he was allowed to work side jobs by his owner in Delaware to purchase his freedom. He became a free man in 1786, in the newly independent United States. Before his freedom he became a Methodist. He became a preacher and attracted a growing congregation of black men and women to a small white church, whose white elders grew uncomfortable with their diminishing racial ratio. Allen asked the church to let him have a place for his swelling black congregation. They refused him, but offered to let he and other black church...

I am a conservative white christian and I fled Europe for religious freedom. In 1635 I banished Roger Williams from Plymouth because he exercised religious freedom and thought differently. As St. Paul says, if anyone preaches a different gospel, let him be accursed. In 1692-93 I supported the execution of 20 people, most of them women, for the crime of witchcraft. I continually applied rules of property exchange to the indigenous tribes who did not operate in the same way. When they realized we were taking advantage of them, and subsequently lashed out at us, we killed their women, children, and old in places like Mystic Connecticut. I converted the indigenous people to my Christian faith which necessarily included a culture that looked and acted like mine. But my fellow white American christians did not like living near them, so we gathered them into "praying towns." As we encroached on their homelands, we forced them farther away. When they didn't convert, we wo...

The subtitle is important to appreciate Inskeep's aspiration, Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab . It's a good reality check to read American history. Dirty politics? Check. White privilege? Check. Abuse of minorities? Check. Broken promises? Check. Political doublespeak? Check. The Cherokee Trail of Tears was caused by the implementation of Andrew Jackson's first political policy when he became President in 1828, get them out of Georgia. Did the Cherokees have treaties signed by the federal government protecting the right to their land? Yes. Did Georgian land speculators want the land in order to line their pockets? Yes. Did Georgia threaten nullification if the federal government stepped into their constitutionally proper role? Yes. Am I asking to many rhetorical questions? Yes. Jackson campaigned with a platform of limited government, not unexpected for a slave owner. Georgia was able to throw that in his...

In 2014 I embraced podcasts. Some of them give me hope theologically, usually the anabaptistic chaps, orthodox protestants who are not evangelicals. The peace Christians. Brian Zahnd at Word of Life Church Greg Boyd at Woodland Hills Church Bruxy Cavey at The Meeting House The liturgical Christians.  Nadia Bolz Weber at House for All Sinners and Saints . The Daily Office Some preachers are no longer at their churches and I miss their podcasts. Jonathan Martin at Renovatus Church Ken Wilson at the Ann Arbor Vineyard , I still listen to his associate pastor though, Donnell Wyche. Some Christians do not speak for a church but podcast about grace, life, and hardships. They talk with each other, scrap with each other, and talk gracefully to those they disagree with and then learn there is very little to disagree about. They also use language not normal in church, but plenty normal outside of church. Drunk Ex-Pastors Bad Christian (Great Savior) I also like stori...

I took vacation days before the Thanksgiving break to enjoy an entire week of vacation. Enjoyment for me includes reading big and difficult books. This week I read the final installment of Rick Atkinson's World War 2 trilogy, The Guns at Last Light . In light of this week's riots in Ferguson, Missouri after the grand jury conclusion, this observation of Atkinson's struck me. Liberated prisoners from German work/prison/extermination camps were asked to "'Keep disclipline ...Let your behavior be a credit to your national honor.'" Instead, starvation, revenge, indiscipline, and chaos often created what Allied officers called a "liberation complex." SHAEF had presumed refugees "would be tractable, grateful, and powerless after their domination from two to five years as the objects of German slave policies." As an Army assessment concluded, "They were none of these things...newly liberated persons looted, robbed, murdered, and in so...

Summer time is normally a time for lighter reading, books that finish quickly. For many people, these books are usually fiction. For me, however, I am interested in historical narratives of natural disasters. Here are the four I've read so far. Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938 by R. A. Scotti is fast paced and well written. Scotti is a fomer journalist for the Providence Journal and is intimately familiar with the coastline and people of Rhode Island which lost the greatest number of lives. My section of southeastern Connecticut was also hit hard in 1938, and I appreciated her local perspective. Her collection of anecdotes helps us remember this event changed the lives of families and not just impersonal towns. Category 5: The Story of Camille, Lessons Unlearned from America's most violent hurricane by Judith A. Howard and Prof. Ernest Zebrowski, Jr. includes some more science behind these storms. It was published soon after Katrina repeated it's path of de...

When I was in high school in the late 1980's, I worried about Mutual Assured Destruction (M.A.D.). The commies in Reagan 's 2nd term were the bogeymen, and  our very real fear had to do with our proximity to a nuclear attack submarine base in Groton, Conn. I trace my fascination with Russia back to an elective class I took when I was a high school senior called Modern Russia. I keep coming back to this fascinating nation. It's history is full of horribleness. Stalin contribution to the horror is unmatched. His paranoid war against his own people, in pursuit of a utopian communist world, cost as many Russian lives as his war with Nazi Germany , 25 million each. It's this body count in World War 2 that has also attracted my attention. As I've read more World War 2 history, and as Russian archives have been opened to Western historians, my understanding with the war's center of gravity has shifted east. The Nazi Reich's defeat came on the Russian fron...

I listened to all of the Acts of the Apostles today in today's Lenten reading . I did not read a word. Nevertheless, it's a great aural experience. Luke tells a good story. He flashes back a little before the end of his gospel. Before Jesus departs to heaven, he tells the disciples to wait for the Holy Spirit . While worshiping, the Holy Spirit comes on the community and crazy stuff happens. They worship God in new languages. Flames flicker over their heads. It's wild and it draws a crowd, to whom Peter preaches. Thousands are converted to following Jesus after this sermon and they start living communally like a bunch of hippies. But the religious establishment that tried to kill Jesus doesn't like it at all. So they commence the beatings and jailings. One of their chief Capos is a Pharisee named Saul. He presides over a spontaneous stoning of a Christian deacon named Stephen. But Jesus personally intervenes and confronts Saul on his way to Damascus. He also temporar...

David Montgomery is a geomorphologist at the University of Washington and has written a great historical explanation that any honest young earth creationists should read. Angry atheists should read this as well since Montgomery is a great model of irenic persuasion. He surveys throughout the book several flood myths , and notes their connections to historical events. He also notes how the myths change depending on the location around the world. For example, China does not have a world flooding story with a character like Noah who saves the animals. China's floods come from it's great rivers in deep valleys, not like Mesopotamia's great rivers through broad plains. Nor did China experience a great sea rising like the Black Sea's . He also goes into the development of the science of geology. It's an historical development that developed in the West alongside the influence of the rising Protestant church. As different hypotheses formed about how rocks formed ...

I'm always open to recommendations on war memoirs. Tim O'Brien 's The Things They Carried is one of those books. I could not believe that a book published 23 years ago is in such demand still, that I had to get on the waiting list, to borrow the digital version from my library. When I started it, from the cover, I noticed it was listed as a work of fiction and was not sure how to proceed. However, as O'Brien explains in the book, no war story is true, at least from the first person perspective, because that perspective is so limited and so warped by the intensity of the moment. His stories, and this is a collection of stories, are horrific. They are crafted and honed by a very good storyteller, he even tells how he added and took away elements from one story, Speaking of Courage , as he rewrote it for this collection. I believe his stories have plenty of truth, as I've found fiction hardly ever approaches reality in strangeness and capriciousness. But, by tell...

While I was watching the entertaining and informative History channel series The Men Who Built America , I wanted to hear more from one of the regularly consulted historians on the show, H. W. Brands . I found this book of his at my local library and spent the past few weeks enjoying it. My first mistake was expecting it to be just like the television show. Brands' focus is not just on the big name capitalists of the American Gilded Age , but also on the little people, the workers, some by name, who made the capitalists rich, who opposed the capitalists, and who exposed the capitalists. He also wove in and out the on and off again relationship of the government and the capitalists. The sub-title, The Triumph of Capitalism, is not very indicative of the theme of the book. While he does mention the different economic models attempted in America in the late 1800's,  share-cropping (serfdom), socialism, and communism, he doesn't spend enough time in this massive book showin...

One of my favorite things to do on holiday vacations is to read. Napping is the other, and they go together like hand and glove. Despite my napping, this book , which I had to borrow from the library after reading James Swanson's newest book , went too fast. Swanson writes history at a quick pace, it's only 12 days after all in this story, but adds so much color to the characters and their times. He incorporates the quirks, the dress, the songs, the headlines, the personal letters, diaries, sights, smells, and sounds into an immersive environment for the reader. In an afterword, incorporated into the Kindle edition, there is an author interview, where we find out Swanson, who shares Lincoln's birthday, grew up fascinated with Lincoln history, and was buying memorabilia when he was a teenager. He himself is fully immersed in Lincoln, but is able to write well enough to bring us, his readers along for the swim. John Wilkes Booth was a white supremacist, a secessionist, a b...

I borrowed from my local library the digital version James Swanson's book Bloody Crimes: The chase for Jefferson Davis and the death pageant for Lincoln's corpse , and I was so sad last night that I finished it. Swanson writes good history about a topic, the American Civil War , that I have read plenty about over the last dozen years. This was so good I already checked out his previous book, Manhunt: The twelve day chase to catch Lincoln's killer . Swanson certainly admires Lincoln, he was certainly admirable, but he does not hide Lincoln's warts. He is not a fan of Jeff Davis, but he does not hide his admirable qualities either. The following paragraph is a good example of Swanson's presentation. Lincoln, who was not an abolitionist, agreed with Jefferson Davis that the Constitution protected slavery. Thus, the federal government had no power to interfere with it wherever it existed. And like Davis, Lincoln—at least the Lincoln of the 1840s and 1850s—accepted...

I can't stay away from books on the American Civil War. Drew Gilpin Faust 's book, This Republic of Suffering was available in the library's digital lending section and seemed worth a shot. At first, I didn't know if I could push on through this book. The extended discussion in the beginning about the Victorian concept of the good death got old. Her examples piled on top of themselves about so many soldiers trying to die in a way that could comfort their families with memories of their devotion in their last moments. But it got better as I persevered. The facts of the war are brutal. (Instead of page numbers, the Kindle gives locations.) The number of soldiers who died between 1861 and 1865, an estimated 620,000, is approximately equal to the total American fatalities in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. The Civil War’s rate of death, its incidence in comparison with the...