John Kass essay

Some prolife Christians I went to high school with are posting agreement and support for a recent John Kass essay which goes on a rant about pro-choice people being ritually loyal to a death cult. Written by Kass and posted on his self-published digital platform johnkassnews dot com. I don't want to link it here because of its harmful content. His essay is tapped in to the energy of recent viral outrage over an image of a full term pregnant woman, Amanda Herring, who painted "Not Yet A Human" on her pregnant belly as a protest message.

Kass is a Greek Orthodox Christian who resides in St. John IN. Christians who share his attitudes and support the rhetorical choices in Kass's article need to reflect a bit more on what he is really doing with his words.

He links to a news article with info about the protesting pregnant woman who painted her belly: she is also the mother of a year-old child and likely has given birth again very recently, as she was protesting 24 hours before her due date. According to the news article Kass hyperlinks to his essay, she is also a Jewish educator, and she is quoted explaining that her statement makes sense if seen as part of Jewish religious ideas about when human life status and soul is conferred upon people: at first breath after birth.

John Kass missed the church history lesson so many of us missed about the loooong Christian tradition of blood libels against Jewish people. We go on and on with ideals of US is meant to be a JudeoChristian nation, but have a shameful European history of portraying the people who are permanently part of a special tree of Abrahamic faith (to which believing Christians are precariously grafted) as having uncivilized beliefs and rituals that endanger innocent children who need to be protected by Christians. 80% of US Jewish people support for pro-choice policies, so it is very alarming to see Kass’s argument that pro-choice proponents are part of a blood sacrifice death cult. This wouldn’t be a new move for fervent Christians, this projection of violent traits outward on other people, which ironically and predictably leads to Christians enacting murderous violence against their Jewish neighbors.

He repeated uses the word hysteria to describe pro-choice people, a word invented to diagnose a mental disorder or demonic possession only afflicting people who have a hystera, or uterus. Women who did not want to get married, for example, were diagnosed with hysteria and institutionalized or tortured.

The byline photo (per usual in Prolife propaganda) is a detached floating unwrapped fetus, floating in celestial gasses, with no visible amniotic sac enclosure or adjacent placenta and uterine wall, purposefully ignoring any flesh existing beyond the umbilical cord. The woman and her uterus is not part of the image, influencing us to individuate the gestating life as its own detached yet alive person. Prolife activists always use unwrapped or unconnected fetusimages and even give out rubber unattached-to-uterus fidget toys to students at prolife training sessions. The fantasy is "if only a fetus were truly free from its uterus, that potential death chamber trapping someone stuck inside a potentially unloving or malicious mother."

And in true Chicago fashion, Kass makes sure to include the racist trope against single mothers by linking fatherless homes and urban communities to an outcome of gang children who slaughter other children. Single mothers who choose to give birth and raise children in harrowing circumstances are just as evil, in Kass's eyes, as this gloriously pregnant mother is in eyes: raising murderous thugs by neglecting kids while at work, or raising social leeches by being caregivers and receiving welfare assistance. This sweeping disdain and disgust for women, esp. Black, brown and Jewish women with leadership roles in their own households, churches, schools, and civic governments, is something to flee, and Christians need to be condemning rather than applauding this kind of essay.

There are many ways for Christians to help their communities acheive higher rates of fullterm pregnancies and healthy live deliveries in US if they are truly concerned about morbidity and mortality losses endured during pregnancy and labor. This ain’t it. Kass is mocking reasonable philosophical outlooks held by a variety of citizens who have equal rights as he does to their conclusions on complex philosophical topics.  Our fellow citizens include secular humanists,  as well as people subscribing to different faith traditions. A variety of reasonable answers to "when does human personhood begin?" are excellent attempts to balance the ethics and risks of existing as a mortal living being while our blood and oxygenation systems are intertwined with one or more developing mortal living beings. He is diminishing his unquestionably alive neighbors who are women, single moms, and Black and brown Congresswomen by saying they are hysterical, frothing at the mouth killers and mothers of killers. What signals does he show that he’d treat any of these women’s future offspring with respect and love at the developmental stages he would actually encounter them?  He will never have access to encounter them while they are in utero, but only when they become living, breathing, opinionated, active, and activist humans like their mothers currently are. 

My Book Review Summer: Mid-June is Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus

C. Christopher Smith and John Pattison. Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2014.

What does it mean to be part of a household that makes table conversation at mealtime a priority? Do we “grab a bite to eat” so that we can get on with our important projects as a household, or do we understand that time spent preparing and sharing mealtime food and conversation is the essential practice which forms us into family members? C. Christopher Smith and John Pattison expand these questions into the scope of the practices of a church family, which gathers several households into an organization in order to worship publicly together and integrate itself constructively within the broader local community. In their book Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, Smith and Pattison appropriate the Slow Food movement's concern with economic and ecological health and justice regarding daily food consumption practices in order to critique and celebrate various values and practices which are part of a church culture. The authors build their discussion primarily upon the eschatological vision of Christianity which celebrates and anticipates Christ's accomplishment of the reconciliation of all things (from the cosmic to the particular), and they argue that a local church congregation who wants to follow the way of Jesus needs to be attentive to the tangible, particular attributes and assets of the land, the neighborhood, the people, and the resources which make their own location a unique and prime spot for this slow work of reconciliation.

The book is served up as a thoughtfully planned meal might be, divided into three main sections called “courses.” Each course discusses an alternative or corrective approach in response to unhealthy attributes often found in church organizations which tend to be “attractional, dualistic, and hierarchical.” Whereas the church-growth movement tends to value business and marketing techniques to attract new members to a “developing” location, the first course of Slow Church encourages congregations to reorient their desire to the place they already are, using ecological and agricultural practices such as appreciation for terroir, stability, and patience. While church communities often contribute to the social blights of economic, generational and cultural segregation and rely upon dualistic divisions of work, time and place into sacred or secular categories, Slow Church aspires in the second course to celebrate wholeness, shalom, and reconciliation in human life by seeking a reintegration of social groupings, as well as a communal rhythm which honors the integration of work and rest. The final course discusses how church congregations can resist an economic paradigm of scarcity and a pyramid structure of leadership and instead move into an orientation to economic and ecological abundance and interdependence in order to respond with gratitude, reciprocal service, and hospitality in its organizational practices and routines.

Smith and Pattison season their text throughout with citations to other poets and scholars, which will benefit readers who are interested in a more extensive exploration of a topic which is presented. The book includes brief descriptions of several churches who have implemented Slow Church practices in their communities. Each chapter closes with two or three discussion questions which assists reading groups in conversing about ways to integrate Slow Church values into their own church practices.

As a 30-something mother who is part of an aging and dwindling church congregation in a re-segregating south suburb of Chicago, I feel encouraged through reading this book that our own local space and group will become a peculiar presence within its current and future community, not by following a franchise manual for a quick-fix performance-oriented transformation driven by the anxiety of achieving new member/visitor quotas and deadlines, but by practicing stability, hospitality and patience in the ordinary ways that are profoundly meaningful to the particular people we encounter, even if not flashy or dramatic. I experience “conversion” as a lifetime process of slow and steady transformation in my everyday habits and routines of ordinary life, so I appreciate that these authors are encouraging church groups to aspire to an ongoing conversion process that is akin to the pace of authentic human change and growth.

Sonic Complements to my Practicum Paper

Thanks for responding to my invitation,  this will be worth your extra time!

Following are a few audio-visual resources to enrich your encounter with the ideas in my paper:

1.   A song which laments that spoken words often do not carry the interior personal truths they are meant to carry.     "Sweet Nothing" Florence Welch, performer and  Calvin Harris, writer



2. Dramatic enactment of Mark Antony's speech.  Note his pauses and invitations for audience reflection, response and bodily movement, as well as where his own body goes as he progresses through his speech.  Note the visual and textual objects he uses as rhetorical aides: Caesar's will, Caesar's cloak.

Meaningful quote: Fictional narrative

This is from Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables (1851)
last paragraph of Chapter 8

Phoebe went, accordingly, but perplexed herself, meanwhile, with queries as to the purport of the scene which she had just witnessed, and also whether judges, clergymen, and other characters of that eminent stamp and respectability could really, in any single instance, be otherwise than just and upright men.  A doubt of this nature has a most disturbing influence, and if shown to be a fact, comes with fearful and startling effect on minds of the trim, orderly, and limit-loving class, in which we find our little country girl.  Dispositions more boldly speculative may derive a stern enjoyment from the discovery, since there must be evil in the world, that a high man is as likely to grasp his share of it as a low one.  A wider scope of view, and a deeper insight, may see rank, dignity, and station all proved illusory, so far as regards their claim to human reverence, and yet not feel as if the universe were thereby tumbled headlong into chaos.  But Phoebe, in order to keep the universe in its old place, was fain to smother, in some degree, her own intuitions as to Judge Pyncheon's character.  And as for her cousin's testimony in disparagement of it, she concluded that Hepzibah's judgment was imbittered by one of those family feuds which render hatred the more deadly by the dead and corrupted love that they intermingle with its native poison.

Douwe is 5

Our son turned 5 the same day that Jeff turned 40, so we had two special birthdays to celebrate on the same weekend.   Douwe's been enthusiastic for mini-golf ever since his aunts and grandma took him mini-golfing for the first time last month.   He wanted a mini-golf birthday celebration and that is what we did.  A great time was had by all four of the boys.

Jeff turns 40

Jeff wanted a very special celebration for his milestone birthday and special is what he got!

 He reserved a special table in The Library Room upstairs of Topolobampo, which is adjacent to a special chef's kitchen.  We had an unforgettable dinner for 12, with several courses, each one as delightful as the next, and a visit from proprietors Deann and Rick!  They came bearing gifts for all (a new cookbook), and we think the special greeting had something to do with Deann's original last name:  Groen.   She is a first cousin to Jeff's father.   The whole evening was fun and festive.  

5 months

In May June and July, it was a whirlwind around the house with our special "son" living with us again. He didn't stay as long as in other years but we were glad to host him while we could.

Highlights:  lots of fishing, a few Boy Scout events, canoe trip, beach visits, art lessons, golf lessons, sibling visits. . . it was a whirlwind, so very little blogging for me.

In August, we spend the first 10 days on a great trip in Wyoming and Idaho, camping, resorting and canoeing.

Then a week or so before back to school, for Jess and Douwe!  Douwe is back at Montessori for morning pre-K classes, and I am taking a Literature class at Purdue University.  So it has been a fun transition into fall, but also, very little time taken for blogging.  

But I cannot omit a very special event, which I will post next.