It’s my sister’s birthday today. She lives in England, and sent this photo last week. This is the landscape I miss, living in California.

For the latest in Mikey Weinstein’s campaign for religious freedom in the US military check out this video “showing that US military forces in Afghanistan have been instructed by the military’s top chaplain in the country to “hunt people for Jesus” as they spread Christianity to the overwhelmingly Muslim population.” If this is all news to you, check out Jeff Sharlet’s lead article in Harper’s this month (online for subscribers only), or mine from last year in the UK’s New Humanist.

You and I know the most basic thing we could do on the mortgage crisis. We could go and stand with a bunch of neighbors outside people’s homes when the police come to evict them, and refuse the police entry. We know we could be doing that, don’t we? They did it in the 1930s. That was a major reason FDR changed the banking rules.

I mean, whatever else we dream of in terms of a banking system that serves the people and the biosphere, we know it won’t happen simply through the good heartedness of policy wonks in Washington DC. It will only happen if there is a huge groundswell of people who won’t put up with the scams perpetrated by the mortgage lenders.

The simplest, most heart-to-heart thing to do is stand with our neighbors who are being evicted. If every church stood with its members who face eviction, if every workplace, union, baseball league, knitting circle came out to stop the evictions, the groundswell would be under way.

I know that. I just have many reasons why I can’t do it. I don’t have time, don’t know who is being evicted when, am not on the right listserves.

So this time I actually read a listserve run by members of a church I am going to, and learned that the sheriff was due to evict a family in Oakland this morning, and could people show up at 6 am to stop it happening?

There was a small crowd there. Journalists–including a guy with a big camera from AP–made up maybe one in five. They know this is, or could be, critical. People were busy putting signs in English and Spanish up all over the small drab house. It was organized by Acorn. The homeowner is a foster mother and grandmother with a steady income, who succumbed to predatory lending. The newspaper today said California was the center of all subprime mortgage lending in the country. A teenage girl stood on the porch in her pajamas holding her tiny dog.

We stayed for an hour or more, talking with protesters, mainly with a man who is still in his home because Acorn rallied people to come out and prevent entry, just like this. Now he had showed up here. He said he was learning not to be so private about his private life: his housing troubles were not just his private problem.

Later: victory!

My family has had some close friendships with Sri Lankans over the years, my mother and sister especially. The first Buddhist I ever knew was Sri Lankan. Now we hear terrible things in the news. I get an email with loads of info. I write back after a week or more: “Raj, I didn’t reply because I didn’t know what to say: like the rest of the world you are rightly complaining about, I am too swamped to pay attention to Sri Lanka, or to know how to get my head around the issue. You sent a lot of info but I didn’t have time to read it. I’m sorry.”

Raj replies: “Understand Dave! What about this short posting?”

So here it is. I wasn’t entirely honest in my email above: it’s not truly time or info I lack: it’s that I want to avoid the pain of hearing about more tragedy. I think of Alice Walker in a Buddhist magazine saying “You know, what are hearts for? Hearts are there to be broken.” I click on the BBC video…

“What the Govt of Sri Lanka doesn’t want you to see: video from BBC 4

“What a leading independent expert recommends in Foreign Policy magazine

“WHAT YOU CAN DO:
“As with South Africa, Israel and elsewhere, we have to get moderate Sinhalese to care and to give them a voice in the debate which has been taken over by Sinhalese extremists
Campaign against the IMF loan going through – it can still be stopped if enough people stand up and say no!
Lobby the EU to remove special trading privileges.“

About Raj: Raj Thamotheram qualified as a doctor, then helped to start the UK Nuclear Freeze Campaign, was founder director of Safeworld and then was head of advocacy for ActionAid. He now works in the responsible investment field. This posting reflects his personal interest – his family left Sri Lanka after the first anti Tamil pogrom in 1958. Many Tamils have been less fortunate.

For someone who is so steeped in the horrors of what we are doing to our environment, Roger Gottlieb is amazingly upbeat and positive.

I loved the passion in his review of Poisoned Profits in the current Tikkun and I expected an angry man on our Phone Forum last night. Instead I heard him say that the greatest good news story of recent decades has been the rise of religious environmentalism. Listen to it here.

[Roger Gottlieb is professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts. His recent books include A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and our Planet's Future and The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Ecology.]

Stanley Fish gives a beautiful appreciation of Terry Eagleton’s book explaining why science and rationality can not replace religion. He quotes Eagleton:

… we are where we always were, confronted with a choice between a flawed but aspiring religious faith or a spectacularly hubristic faith in the power of unaided reason and a progress that has no content but, like the capitalism it reflects and extends, just makes its valueless way into every nook and cranny.

Eagleton doesn’t reveal his own religious preference. A seminary student said to me this weekend that he thought any intellectual person today has to be in some way agnostic. Of course that isn’t true on the ground: there are plenty of intellectual believers. But I think there will be more and more intellectual agnostics in future who, like that seminary student, search for religion that does not offend them intellectually, but that does offer them a basis for claiming love, hope, equality and joy in the universe as the basis of their rational thought. Those things cannot be proven, only embraced in faith. Even by agnostics.

In this intellectual future, I have no doubt that a thinker to whose writings intellectuals will return again and again will be Rabbi Michael Lerner. He, of course, is also the reason that thinkers like Terry Eagleton are associated with Tikkun (he’s on the masthead). May many more voices come out boldly, like Lerner and Eagleton, to say these things! Take heart, it will get easier as more people come out.

(Of course, Lerner employs me, so my estimation of his long-term stature may not hold much weight–except that the only reason I sought the job and moved my family across the country to take it, despite Lerner’s rep as an uncomfortable prophet [are there other kinds of prophet?], is that I said the same things before I was lucky enough to get the job. The book that first blew me away about Lerner was Spirit Matters, by the way. )

THE FACE OF FORGIVENESS: Salvation and Redemption. By Steven Katzman. Katzman, raised as a conservative Jew, photographs religious ecstasy at Christian revivals around the world, like this one in Tampa, Fla.

Why did the Quakers stopped quaking, the Shakers stop shaking and the holy rollers stop rolling?

Why did the vibrant tent meetings of the early Methodists become the sober respectable Methodists churches my grandfather went to?

The main theory I picked up in my postgrad studies was that it’s about class. Any number of emotionally expressive lower class sects became more middle class. As they did so, became more emotionally restrained and theologically centered on this world. The idea is that material gain turns people’s minds to this world, and away from the next. So the middle classes are always more into worldly progress. Cue down the hellfire and holy rolling, cue up the internalized self-discipline.

It wasn’t until I read Neil Postman’s short book The Disappearance of Childhood that I saw how deeply this might connect to restrained body language. He writes about how unnatural it is to learn to read: to teach a restless child to sit still for long periods and transfer all their activity into the mind. It became the mark of the middle class, this ability to still the body and focus the mind. All aspects of behavior were affected, including table manners: the pre-modern rich used to throw bones to the dogs and belch and sing rowdily, just like the poor. And a famous 1920s Punch cartoon (which I can’t find on the web!) showed the upper and lower classes still behaving wildly–on their way to the horseraces–while the middle class folk were all prim and proper.

By this theory it was the reading classes who learned decorous manners first. Naturally they brought their sensibilities to church. The most intellectual churches–e.g. the Unitarian Universalists (the UUs)–became the most bodily restrained.

Recently Peter Dunlap has persuaded me of another aspect to this. He says the 18th century Enlightenment leaders who promoted rational thought, science, and business found widespread emotional resistance to their ideas. People had deep emotions around King and Church, God and tradition. If you gave too much credence to your emotions at that time, when modern thought was barely making headway, you might too easily revert to supporting the divine right of kings and priests against democracy, liberty and capitalism. Freedom from those deep traditional, conservative emotions required the progressives to disparage emotion in general.

But that meant that progressive intellectuals and politicians cut themselves off from understanding and using their own emotions intelligently. The Romantics had a fling, and rabble-rousing socialists and feminists knew a thing or two about using emotion to create social change. But the academy and the sober liberal mainstream never worked out how to engage the emotions of the people for their political programs as well as the conservatives have. Hence Gore, and Kerry, who were no match for Bush in projecting their emotions.

In private, in therapy, many liberals learned how important their emotions were, as information about their lives, needs and blind spots. But that awareness remained private. It’s time to reintegrate, Dunlap and others argue. It’s time to learn how to understand, attend to and intelligently evoke emotions in public. Stop being so afraid of being emotional in public. Not that I know how to do that. But that’s the challenge. Dunlap wrote a fine piece in Tikkun about how emotionally intelligent Obama is.

Bishops of the AME Church pray over Obama on the campaign trail 7/5/08. Men who know how to use emotion for healing the nation. Photo: Vashti-Jasmine McKenzie

I loved Barbara Ehrenreich’s book about the middle class, Fear of Falling, which detailed how many middle class people of our time have tried to become more emotionally expressive, from rock concerts to aerobics, and I would add the charismatic movement in mainstream churches. And that’s what I think is happening to the UUs, the most intellectual and liberal of churches, who in recent years have been searching for how to bring a warmer spirituality and more recognition of emotions–joy and sorrow, wonder and awe–in their services. And that’s why you find a website like this, that wants a return to ecstatic Quakerism. And beautiful churches built for liturgical dancing, like this. And posts from a UU like me, like this one.

Hmm. Church could get fun. And more interesting.

Thank goodness for Pete Seeger.

He’s 90 today.

The popularity of “We Shall Overcome” owes as much to Seeger as anyone: I’d forgotten that until going to a moving service full of Seeger’s songs at the Oakland UU Church today.

“No one can prove a damn thing, but I think that singing together gives people some kind of holy feeling. And it can happen whether they’re atheists or whoever. You feel like, ‘Gee, we’re all together’.” Pete Seeger.

We had that holy feeling today.

Amina Khalid and Musa Aliyu

My friend Howard Grace, a gentle, innovative Christian, wrote to me about his recent work in high schools in Liverpool, UK, with two Muslim colleagues (at right).

Musa led the sessions and started by asking why two young African Muslims and a relatively old English Christian would want to work together to visit schools like this. It was to build trust across what is often perceived to be the divide of Muslim/Christian/Western relations.

Amina Khalid, who arrived in England at 13 as a refugee from Somalia, told about the racial abuse and bullying she had endured at her English school, and asked what she should have done. Some of the bigger boys said “Fight back.”

Amina shared with us that she had fled from a terrible conflict in Somalia, and she didn’t want to be part of conflict in her new home country. She feels that as a Muslim her faith does not permit violence and revenge, it is said that “Revenge is like a poison that flows through a diseased soul.”

Howard Grace

Howard read a passage from a memoir about a boy at a new school who is ridiculed by the children for what they see as his weird name and appearance: “I spent the rest of the day in a daze. A redheaded girl asked to touch my hair and seemed hurt when I refused. A ruddy-faced boy asked if my father ate people.” Whose memoir? In two of the seven schools they visited students said, correctly, “Barack Obama.”

…the students quickly got the point that although he had many instances in his life which could have radically disaffected him, Barack Obama eventually decided to rise above all this

I felt ridiculously happy reading about this. All over the world this unsung work goes on across ethnic and religious divides, and we rarely hear of it.