From City Pulse: MSU journalism class breaks barriers through books

January 7, 2023 by

MSU School of Journalism Bias Busters team working on a book.

Our community of writers and readers was pleased, as January 2023 dawned, to read coverage of MSU Professor Joe Grimm’s Bias Busters team in the mid-Michigan-based news journal called City Pulse.

The profile of the Bias Busters was especially appreciated because it was prepared by Bill Castanier, Director of the Historical Society of Greater Lansing. Thanks Bill!

Bill’s story begins:

When Joe Grimm arrived on Michigan State University’s campus in 2013 as a visiting editor-in-residence, he had an idea for a new journalism class based on a project he had worked on in his career as an editor and reader advocate for the Detroit Free Press. While there, Grimm confronted racial biases and stereotyping of the Arab-American and Muslim populations of Detroit. Working with other journalists and the aforementioned communities, he published an in-house guide that answered questions about this group of people. Based on his experiences, he created a class called “Bias Busters” at MSU, which began to look at the stereotypes surrounding other groups, including the LGBTQ+ community, veterans, Indian-Americans and Native Americans.

Click here to visit the City Pulse website and read the entire article.

Want to See the Bias Busters’ Array of Books?

Click here to see Amazon’s index of all 20 books.

NOTE: Although that Amazon display defaults to the Kindle versions, all of the books are available in affordable paperback editions as well.

 

The life of Gustavo Parajón shows us how to multiply the power of justice.

January 2, 2023 by

How one crucial phone call spurred a movement

Our world desperately needs to learn from peacemakers! Just look at the global headlines, each morning, and you’ll agree: There must be a better way to live together.

That’s why—to start this new year—our publishing house is launching: Healing the World—Gustavo Parajón, Public Health and Peacemaking Pioneer. In this inspiring, true biography, readers will meet this seemingly ordinary fellow who stepped into situations that the most courageous warrior would fear—except that Gustavo Parajón was armed with his faith in his God-given talent to defuse confrontation with empathy.

Each week through January 2023, our Read The Spirit online magazine will be publishing inspiring true stories from Gustavo’s life. In this short video, the book’s co-author Daniel Buttry tells about one such moment in which a seemingly small intervention by Gustavo spurred people toward courageous action.

Gustavo Parajón shows us the art and courage of peacemaking

December 11, 2022 by

His courage was astonishing,
then his empathy built communities

Our world desperately needs to learn from peacemakers! Just look at the global headlines, each morning, and you’ll agree: There must be a better way to live together.

That’s why our publishing house is launching: Healing the World—Gustavo Parajón, Public Health and Peacemaking Pioneer. In this inspiring, true biography, readers will meet this seemingly ordinary fellow who stepped into situations that the most courageous warrior would fear—except that Gustavo Parajón was armed with his faith in his God-given talent to defuse confrontation with empathy.

This week, our Read The Spirit Cover Story is a 3-minute video in which co-author Daniel Buttry tells about one such confrontation and how Gustavo turned it into a moment of communal grace.

.

Yes, peace is possible,
if we act together as Parajon did.

Click the cover to visit the book’s Amazon page.

Get the book: Please support this effort to spread Gustavo Parajón’s wisdom around the world. Order your own copy of this book, which will ship to readers in January. Readers in North America, Central America and Europe already are pre-ordering their copies via Amazon. Please join them and you’ll discover a wise model for overcoming our fears and building healthy relationships.

Want to know more about Gustavo Parajón’s life? Here’s an overview of his life, including endorsements of the new book by former President Jimmy Carter and Jim Wallis of Sojourners.

‘Shining Brightly’ Foreword by Dr. Robert J. Wicks: ‘Learn anew about the American Dream’

August 29, 2022 by

EDITOR’S NOTE—Just in time for Rosh Hashanah, we are publishing one of the most inspiring books our team has had the pleasure to prepare. With the release of Shining Brightly by Howard Brown, we’re all thinking: New Year? New Hope! In the weeks leading up to that launch, we also are going to take readers inside our publishing house for glimpses of the many ways we share such good news with the world. This week, for example, we are publishing the book’s Foreword by best-selling author and psychologist Dr. Robert J. Wicks. And, over in our Front Edge Publishing website this week, we are sharing a sample email we encourage authors to send to their readers to build excitement about a new book. If you care to help in spreading this good news into the world, please start right now by visiting Amazon and pre-ordering your copy.

.

Foreword

By Dr. Robert J. Wicks

Click the cover to visit the book’s Amazon page.

From the opening story in Shining Brightly there are teachings that are both simple and difficult. Filled with tradition and insight, Howard Brown shares stories not only about the persons he describes but, upon reflection, about ourselves and our stories of life. He speaks about the koans (puzzles that have no right or wrong answers) all of us face, the dangers we must confront, and the ultimate decisions we must make each day—sometimes without knowing it!

The lessons in this book stand out even more because the author is not a mental health professional, professor or in ministry. Instead, he is an “educator of life” in the wisdom tradition of mentorship. To accomplish his goals, he communicates through the lives of people that might have lived next door to us as a volunteer fireman, truck driver or as exotic as a war correspondent. In his vivid and colorful description of them, Brown regales us with stories that make us reflect on the relationships in our own lives and even the ongoing developing relationship we have with ourselves.

In this book, we learn anew about the “American dream” in ways that reflect the character of young and seasoned persons alike who live humbly and share wisdom that allows others to flourish as well. They are persons who enjoy a challenge, love the freedom of independence while simultaneously respecting the import of interdependency. Such persons see themselves as a part of nature and are sensitive to the dangers when they are—even in their minds—apart from it. Moreover, as adults, the “street sages” in this book who walked with Howard Brown, and now journey with us if we let them, model, rather than simply speak about, ways we can impact the young who are the future of America and the world.

In Shining Brightly, Brown’s stories and guidance also help us to meet suffering and uncertainty in new ways. In the pages and chapters that follow, his own story of confronting death is one we now refer to as an example of “post-traumatic growth” (PTG). This occurs when someone facing serious stress or trauma actually deepens as a result of it in ways that would not have been possible had the trauma or stress not happened in the first place. It is very similar to what for ages was known as “the spirituality of suffering” in which the person did not seek the undesirable, play it down, or romanticize it, but was also open to where such frightening events might take them. In other words, they did not see darkness as the final word but possibly the first step in new meaning-making and personal depth.

This new sense of perspective on life, as you will read further on, indicates that it is not the amount of darkness in the world or even in yourself that ultimately matters. It is how you stand in this darkness that turns out to be crucial going forward. As you will also sense in the words of Howard Brown and others, humility—which is not very popular today—is a key element in dealing with vulnerability and fostering resilience.

With a healthy attitude, the author also notes that we shouldn’t be surprised by failure or get discouraged by it because of our ego, but instead to expect it. This is not a defeatist stance but a realistic one because statistically the more you are involved in life, the more you will miss the mark at times. Instead, we are called to energetically march on with respect, compassion, integrity, perseverance, a sense of intrigue and hope.

A contemporary of Jesus, Rabbi Tarfon once said, “The day is short, the work is great, the laborers are sluggish, the wages are high, and the Master of the house is insistent. It is not your duty to finish the work, but you are not free to neglect it.” Ultimately for me, that was one of the messages I took from this book.

Brown, who casts himself like one of his role models, Roger Babson, is truly an “angelic troublemaker” in this work. He seeks to have us face our lives with complete clarity and kindness. Much good can be gained from reading and reflecting or even meditating over its contents. However, in the end, Shining Brightly is more like an unstructured projective device such as the ink blot (Rorschach) projective personality test. What you make of it and take from it will say more about you than the challenging themes and enchanting stories it contains.

And so, in the following journey you are about to take, I wish you well. How you respond will determine which fork in the road you take.

.

Dr. Robert J. Wicks received his doctorate in psychology from Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital and is Professor Emeritus, Loyola University Maryland. Dr. Wicks has lectured on the importance of resilience, self-care, the prevention of secondary stress, and maintaining a healthy perspective in 20 different countries around the world as well as at the Mayo Clinic, Harvard Divinity School and on Capitol Hill to members of Congress. He has written and edited dozens of books, including Bounce: Living the Resilient Life and Riding the Dragon: 10 Lessons for Inner Strength in Challenging Times.

.

 

.

Care to learn more?

This is a perfect moment to become one of Howard’s growing global community of friends by ordering your copy of his book.

Here are other articles we have published, exploring the launch of this book:

Take a look at the book’s Foreword: ‘Shining Brightly’ Foreword by Dr. Robert J. Wicks: ‘Learn anew about the American Dream’

We ask these timeless questions at each New Year: ‘Who shall live and who shall die?’ In this moving and inspiring column, Howard Brown writes about the powerful spiritual resources in our religious traditions that can help families struggling with cancer renew their resiliency.

Download printable and shareable resource guides for discussing Shining Brightly:

.

.

.

.

‘Land Acknowledgment’ is a first step toward justice for our Native American neighbors

October 24, 2021 by

JOY AND HEARTBREAK—This 1585 watercolor painting of a traditional dance among the Roanac (spelled Roanoke by settlers) is both joyous and heartbreaking, because it is one of very few images we have of this Algonquian-speaking people who once lived in present-day Dare County on the far eastern coast of North Carolina. English visitor John White, an explorer, cartographer and artist made a series of watercolor illustrations in 1585 to accurately educate the British about Roanac culture. Today, his watercolors, including this one in London’s British Museum, are among the few traces left in the world of this once-vibrant community. (NOTE: This image is in the public domain and can be shared along with this story.)

.

Learning from Our Native American Neighbors, today

EDITOR’S NOTE: This year, our magazine is highlighting emerging stories about our relationships with our Native American neighbors. We have been reporting on both the tragic challenges and the multi-faceted opportunities, right now, in establishing such cooperative relationships. As residents of North America, today, we have an enormous amount of work ahead of us, including coming to terms with centuries of trauma in North American Indian boarding schools, which we have reported on earlier. This week, we asked journalist and author Bill Tammeus to report on an important nationwide effort to open up these relationships with a small first step: land acknowledgments.

.

Learning to take the small first step of ‘Land Acknowledgment’

.

By BILL TAMMEUS
Contributing Columnist

In the midst of racial unrest around the nation last year, my Kansas City congregation, which began at the end of the Civil War as an anti-slavery church, started a renewed anti-racism effort.

As part of this, I was especially drawn to explore how to educate ourselves about—and respond to the needs of—Indigenous people in our area. The gaps in my knowledge about American Indian history and culture were and remain legion. (Most of what I knew about “Indians” came from living for two years as a boy in India, but that wasn’t much use for this.)

EARLY NATIVE AMERICAN LANGUAGE GROUPS: This U.S. government map is in the public domain. Remember that this is just one visual representation of lands that once were home to native peoples. Many smaller tribes were not included in this map. This map is also a snapshot from one era. Over many centuries, groups of people moved across the continent and these rough boundaries changed. As Bill Tammeus reports, the way to authentically explore land acknowledgment in your own part of North America begins with contacting Indian leaders in your region. (NOTE: Clicking on this map will display a much larger and more readable version. You also can right click on this map and save a copy on your phone or computer.)

So I began reading such books as An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, by Rosanne Dunbar-Ortiz; Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World, by Simon Winchester; How the Indians Lost their Land: Law and Power of the Frontier, by Stuart Banner, Diné: A History of the Navajos, by Peter Iverson, and Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Learning and Listening

Along the way we invited Native Americans to teach us about food sovereignty as well as land acknowledgements and other matters that were mostly unfamiliar to many of us. (Note: This link to “land acknowledgements” will take you to the Smithsonian’s informative website; a second “land acknowledgments” link below will take you to the Native Governance Center’s website.)

In that journey, we found that it was important to let the Indigenous people we were contacting know that we were there to learn—and not to assume we knew what they needed and wanted.

So, when we learned of the Kansas City Indian Center’s practice of providing food and other necessities to people in need, we asked if we could help. The result was a collection of more than 250 pandemic-era items, such as wipes and hand sanitizers. Then, when we learned of the organization’s hopes to build a new commercial kitchen to process Native-grown crops, we asked again if we could help. The result was that our members donated more than $15,000 toward the kitchen’s construction.

Let me repeat this point, because it is important: We don’t go to Indigenous people to tell them what they need and what we’ll do about it. We go to learn and listen. And, where appropriate, to walk with them.

So when I learned about land acknowledgements, the idea especially intrigued me. This practice provides a chance for the current (usually white) owners of particular parcels of land to recognize in public ways that the land they own—or the land on which, say, their church building sits—is considered ancestral tribal land by Indigenous people from whom it may have been stolen or taken via broken treaties.

‘A Very Small Gesture’

Click on the cover to visit the book’s Amazon page.

I used a land acknowledgement statement in September when I preached and led a discussion of my new book, Love, Loss and Endurance, at a church in Chicagoland. I told people that such acknowledgements are a very small gesture—but they’re not nothing.

And by “very small gesture,” I mean exactly that.

As Ed Smith, a staff member of the Kansas City Indian Center told me about land acknowledgements: “I don’t think much of them. If all they do is acknowledge that you’re on stolen land but aren’t going to do anything else after that, it wouldn’t be much different than me driving by after my grandpa stole your grandpa’s car—admitting that my grandpa stole it years ago and leaving with it anyway.”

Well, what “car” are we talking about?

The quick answer: The land that makes up the U.S. today.

As Banner writes in How the Indians Lost Their Land, “Between the early seventeenth century and the early twentieth century, almost all the land in the present-day United States was transferred from American Indians to non-Indians.”

True, but it’s more complicated than that. For one thing, his verb “transferred” makes it sound like it was a simple sale of land from Indians to whites. As Banner notes, however, “Indians had different conceptions of property than European settlers had. . .so they couldn’t have understood what the settlers (“settlers” refers mostly to European invaders) meant by a sale. The Indians were really conquered by force.”

But he acknowledges that even that’s an over-simplified version.

Banner again: “At most times, and in most places, the Indians were not exactly conquered, but they did not exactly choose to sell their land either. The truth was somewhere in the middle. . .Whites always acquired Indian land within a legal framework of their own construction. Law was always present, but so was power. The more powerful whites became relative to Indians, the more they were able to mold the legal system to produce outcomes in their favor—more sales, of larger tracts, at lower prices than would have existed had power relationships been more equal.”

That’s a lot to say in a simple land acknowledgement statement!

‘Architects of Removal’

And yet there’s more. As Winchester notes in his 2021 book, Land, “(W)estward was. . .the direction to which white men moved to fulfill their promised destiny. Westward to the ever-shifting frontier, with the Indians moved ahead and into the unknown, beyond their own Pales of Settlement, and to places where, in the white men’s eyes, they could do no harm except to their savage and miserable selves. There were many architects of the removal plan.”

Among those architects he mentions Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, “(b)ut then, and most notoriously, came the seventh president, Andrew Jackson, a Democrat who would have no further truck with an evidently recalcitrant aggregation of Indian feeling in the fertile settler country of the American southeast. He wanted all to go—particularly those acknowledged to be advanced, settled and self-governing, and condescendingly known as the Five Civilized Tribes. They were told. . .go head out. . .”

In a phone interview, Winchester described himself as uninspired by land acknowledgements, though he thought they had some small value. He called such acknowledgements “outwardly pointless but they get people thinking,” noting that acknowledgements began years ago in Australia and New Zealand.

Still, he said, “a lot of Native Americans are quite right to scoff at it. But in its defense, I think it means that some people are starting to consider the problem, which they’ve long glossed over and decided not to pay any attention to. I am hopeful that it will prompt a few people to consider what we’ve done to Native Americans.”

Indigenous People Still Live Among Us

So I plan to continue using land acknowledgement statements at appropriate times and my church will be using them to recognize the bloody history that has brought us to today and to acknowledge that Indigenous people are still here and have a future.

But if we don’t do more than that by, say, trying to respond in helpful ways to the needs of Indigenous people, such acknowledgements will barely be worth the paper on which they’re written.

.

Care to learn more?

One way to determine which Indigenous peoples once occupied any particular area of the U.S., the Native Lands app is useful. Native Land Digital, which produces this app, is a Canadian not-for-profit organization, incorporated in December 2018. Native Land Digital is Indigenous-led, with an Indigenous Executive Director and Board of Directors who oversee and direct the organization. Numerous non-Indigenous people also contribute as members of the nonprofit’s Advisory Council.

.

Bill Tammeus, a former award-winning columnist for The Kansas City Star, writes the “Faith Matters” blog for The Star’s website and columns for The Presbyterian Outlook and formerly for The National Catholic Reporter. His latest book is Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety. Email him at [email protected].

 

.

The ancient hero David is a doorway for timely interfaith dialogues on the values of leadership

May 21, 2021 by

David’s name is everywhere in the Holy Land. This photo shows a portion of the stone walls in Jerusalem’s Old City looking toward what today is known as the Tower of David. (Wikimedia Commons photo shared by Pudelek.)

.

By DAVID CRUMM
Editor of ReadTheSpirit magazine

“There is so much we share as Muslims, Jews and Christians—if we could only remember that God intended us to live peacefully as brothers and sisters,” said Victor Begg, author of Our Muslim Neighbors. He was one of many authors who called or Zoomed with the home office of our publishing house over the past two weeks and talked about the urgency of maintaining peaceful dialogue between the Abrahamic faiths.

“Most Christians and Jews don’t realize that Moses, or Musa as we call him, is the single most frequently mentioned individual name in the Quran,” Victor said. “There are even more references to Isa, our name for Jesus, in the Quran. These are just two of the major sacred figures we all share—like the great Prophet Dawud, as we call David—who we regard as a righteous messenger of God.

“Go into any Muslim community, and you’ll meet people named after these great figures. I know a number of Musas, Isas and Dawuds,” Victor said. “God truly made us brothers and sisters. For the future of our families, I continue to devote myself to telling anyone who will listen: We must find ways to peacefully live together.”

David as a Prophetic Doorway to Discussing Leadership

Click the cover to visit the book’s Amazon page.

At Victor’s mention of David to me—as Editor of ReadTheSpirit and also a bearer of David’s name for 65 years—I realized that I also should reach out to our resident expert on David: Larry Buxton, author of 30 Days with King David—on Leadership. I scheduled a Zoom with Larry and his colleague Ibrahim Anli, executive director of the Rumi Forum, a nonprofit that promotes interfaith dialogue from its home base in Washington D.C.

This summer, thousands of Catholic and mainline Protestant clergy nationwide (those who plan their preaching around the Revised Common Lectionary) are scheduled to read about and preach about the life of David for 10 weeks. That means millions of us will have an opportunity to recall the inspiring life of this ancient hero.

That’s also why Larry Buxton has just posted online a 10-week series of short videos that we invite men and women to use individually—or with their small groups—during this summer of David.

In the opening pages of Larry’s book, Ibrahim Anli has written an endorsement of Larry’s work on David that begins:

We are navigating through a period that calls for exceptional leadership. This book is a fascinating guide that brings King David’s story to the help of contemporary individuals trying to achieve a virtuous life rewarded with success. Larry Buxton seamlessly connects landmark scenes from the King’s life with challenges that test the contemporary individual’s leadership qualities. This is a timely journey in the footsteps of King David, particularly for those in search for renewed determination to face their own Goliaths, whatever they might be.

Ibrahim could have written that same endorsement—about “a period that calls for exceptional leadership”—as recently as the past two weeks.

LARRY and IBRAHIM PREVIEW AN INTERFAITH CONVERSATION

Where would a dialogue with Muslims about the life of David begin? What similarities and differences could that conversation explore?

Both Christians and Muslims agree that God chose David as a divine representative—and that David’s Psalms are sacred hymns. Where Christians and Muslims disagree is that Christians tend to talk about David’s passionate desire to remain close to his divine calling, despite temptations and some epic failures. In Islamic tradition, where great prophets are viewed as sinless, accounts of David’s life omit any stories of sinful behavior.

“He is one of our major figures in Islam,” Ibrahim said. “But as we begin to talk in interfaith conversations about him, the big difference for Muslims is that we do not associate our prophets with anything that might be considered disrespectful.

“In Islam, we focus on a different view of David’s role—as a great leader both in the day as a commander and field marshal defending the realm of monotheism and also at night when he was deep in prayer asking for God’s guidance. David is an example of a leader who is constantly tempted by the desires that may come with worldly success—and yet he also is constantly in prayer that his military career not lead him to these temptations.”

“That’s what makes David such a good example of the tensions of leadership,” Larry said. “What Ibrahim is describing is discussed in my book. The life of David is very rich in insights as we wrestle with what it means to be wise and faithful leaders today.”

Care to Read More?

Larry is correct about directing readers, next, to the actual book about David. If this column is intriguing to you, then please order a copy of his book.

Because of the 10-week focus on David in thousands of congregations, this summer, Larry is freely sharing 10 videos. Visit www.LarryBuxton.com/Preaching-David to find all of the videos.

Please help with this peacemaking effort. Share that link with friends. Encourage your pastor, lector, small group leader or Sunday School teacher to check out these videos. They’re easy to share—and easy to show to friends as a brief “video clip” to spark discussion in your congregation or small group.

And, YES, for those of you who pay careful attention to intellectual property: You do have our permission to stream these clips in your community.

AN EASY REMINDER: If you want to make the videos’ location even easier to remember, just go to www.LarryBuxton.com and you’ll find a link to the Preaching David video series right there on the opening page.

Interested in placing a group order of books for your class or circle of friends? Amazon ordering is quick and easy for most of us. If you are interested in 10 or more copies, email us at [email protected] 

Care to have Larry or Victor visit your group?

Click the cover to visit the book’s Amazon page.

Are you interested in scheduling a time when either of these authors could virtually visit your group this summer or autumn?

FOR LARRY BUXTON—Visit the Contact page on Larry’swebsite. Depending on schedules, Larry welcomes such invitations and may be able to arrange something.

FOR VICTOR BEGG—The same is true of Victor Begg. His Contact page is on the website he maintains for his book, Our Muslim Neighbors: A Muslim Immigrant’s Memoir of Pursuing the American Dream and Serving Our Communities in Turbulent Times.

AND, PLEASE, encourage the peacemaking work of these authors by sharing news of this story with friends and members of your congregation, class or Sunday School group.

Duncan Newcomer’s Abraham Lincoln: Remember when a president’s 1st value was Kindness?

July 26, 2020 by

This entry is part 17 of 33 in the series Duncan Newcomer's Quiet Fire

The stone relief symbolically depicting Lincoln’s boyhood in Indiana from the National Park Service center at Pigeon Creek, Indiana.

.

By DUNCAN NEWCOMER
Host of the ‘Quiet Fire’ series

This is Quiet Fire, a meditation on the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln and its relevance to us today. Welcome.

Here’s a Lincoln quote for you:
Abraham Lincoln
his hand and pen
he will be good but
god knows When

Do you remember that one from an earlier Quiet Fire episode? We are referring to a scrap of notebook paper from his few school days that has this little poem written out in his handwriting.

There are several things you can like about this. We can like that, as a bit of Lincoln’s spiritual DNA, he’s a pretty healthy minded kid. He capitalizes his name and leads off confidently with his big long name, Abraham Lincoln. He never liked just “Abe.” His Grandfather had been Captain Abraham Lincoln in the American Revolution.

We can enjoy that it is a poem. It may not be all that original, but it does rhyme: Lincoln with pen and when. And “god knows When” is a good money line. He does not capitalize “god” so we have a bit of rebel here as well, no?

And, the whole poem rotates around this one polar concept—Being Good. I will be good, but god knows when. So, being good is the be-all and end-all of the first poem by Lincoln. And it would be fair to say that when all is said and done being good was the be-all and end-all of his very life.

Walking Where Lincoln Walked

I had an experience once of walking down the hill on the Lincoln farm in Pigeon Creek, Indiana, and feeling that the very trees themselves held between the leaves fingered in all the branches the sheer goodness of Abraham Lincoln. My epiphany was that his goodness was so thick, so dense, so vital and long lasting that some of it was still lingering in the trees.

As if like a river fog it had lingered waiting for these very trees to grow up into it and hold it. I even felt that his goodness was like a trail of invisible light, like Wordsworth in his poem saying that “the Child is the Father of Man.” I felt that Lincoln had come into this world trailing clouds of glory and that his child really was the father of the man, at least of his kind of a man.

His relevance to us today is this: Being Good, while a life-long obsession with Lincoln, is for Americans, every once in a while, also our obsession. And these days it is.

So many things have gone wrong so fast and in such a big way that the idea is now very much in the air: Hey, let’s stop for a minute. What is life all about anyway, and what is it that we value. Truly value. What are our values and are we living them. Have they gotten away from us, or us from them?

Americans are pretty good at this kind of moral heart attack, and while we’re in the ICU we look at our values to how we want to live, if and when we come out.

What Were Lincoln’s Values?

At the top of Lincoln’s list, I believe, is what we might sum up as: Kindness. As Americans, that’s how we like to think of ourselves, isn’t it?

Americans, it turns out, hold “Kindness” as our No. 1 “character strength.” This finding is from a worldwide survey of over 50 nations, of whom none but the U.S. picked Kindness as No. 1.

Few presidents seem as kind, even kindly, as Abraham Lincoln. Among his notably kind acts, he forgave hundreds of deserting soldiers. Lincoln said in his First Inaugural Address, “We are not enemies. We must not be enemies.” He then appealed to the “better angels of our nature” so we would not become enemies. What shows the better angels of our nature more than our values?

10 Universal American Values

Not too long ago, I collaborated with University of Michigan sociologist Dr. Wayne Baker, comparing Lincoln’s true values with 10 almost universally held American values that kept turning up in Baker’s research. Remarkable, but true! Baker found that these 10 values are shared by the entire spectrum of Americans by a wide margin, over time.

Lincoln certainly shared these values, himself. Here’s that Baker-and-Lincoln list:

  • Respect for Others. Lincoln’s single deepest value was his desire to earn the esteem of his fellow citizens, and he knew to do that he needed to be worthwhile to them. People felt this, his respect for them.
  • Symbolic Patriotism. Most people now love him partly because he loved this county with mystic fervor. We see him as an icon for that love.
  • Freedom. “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master, this expresses my idea of democracy.…” That was just one of Lincoln’s affirmations of freedom. His view of slavery was that taking away the freedom of another human corrupted the person who did the taking.
  • Security. He became the Commander in Chief over the largest use of force ever assembled in this country at that time. The war inflicted a total of 600,000+ casualties. He used force in an absolute way for the single purpose of re-establishing the authority of the national government, which he considered to be a sacred trust.
  • Self-reliance and Individualism. Lincoln may have heard Ralph Waldo Emerson in a Chicago speech. He felt the deep call to find the force of nature that was in him and to fulfill what his partner William Herndon called “the little engine of his ambition.”
  • Equal Opportunity. Five words, “All men are created equal,” described America’s common doorway to opportunity for Lincoln.
  • Getting Ahead. Lincoln admitted his desire for the presidency. He was ambitious in advancing his career. He was the smartest person he knew. He worked long hours and hard ones. He was lucky often. When he saw a chance to merge his failing career with his moral passion to stop the spread of slavery, he became a national meteor.
  • The Pursuit of Happiness. Lincoln made himself happy telling jokes, which he needed to relieve his melancholy. He deeply enjoyed the theater. As president, he learned to like opera. His chief pleasures were to read his Robert Burns and Lord Byron—and to read and recite Shakespeare. He had a frontier-man’s appetite for simple food, and he did not drink or smoke or lust after women. He did make money as a railroad lawyer in Illinois and had one of the better houses in Springfield. He was proud of his social achievement, but that was not what made him happy.
  • Justice & Fairness. Kindness and mutual help was the way people survived and children grew up in the small settlements in Indiana when Lincoln was a boy. There were eight other families within a mile of his home in Pigeon Creek, and another six within two miles. Within four miles of his home there were 90 children under the age of seven and 48 between seven and seventeen. That adds up to a lot of people to enforce fairness and the Golden Rule.
  • Critical Patriotism. In a speech to the New Jersey Legislature on his way to becoming president, Lincoln turned a crucial—and critical—phrase. He referred to America as “God’s almost chosen people.” That is what separates Lincoln from the glory gluttons of contemporary patriotism. He had a mystical awe for what self-government in a free land could mean for the human race. He was not ever in favor of the nativist American movement that wanted to slam the door on immigrants. Lincoln was poised to be critical of just about everything. He and Mark Twain would have been Mississippi riverboat soul mates joking with skeptical discontent in the service of a freer humanity.

We know from his life and words that his appeal to values failed in preventing the Civil War. Competing values themselves made the Civil War. Ironically, it was killer angels that made happen what our better angels failed to do. This was the tragedy of that failed conversation about values. Nevertheless it is by honor that we, too, like Lincoln can be lighted down to the latest generation.

.

.

Care to Read More in our Fourth of July 2023 series on Lincoln?

Whatever you choose to read next, you will find the following links to the other 2023 columns at the bottom of each page:

Lincoln scholar Duncan Newcomer’s introduction to this series includes a salute to Braver Angels, a nationwide nonprofit dedicated to de-polarizing American politics that is gathering from across the country for a major conference at Gettysburg this week.

Duncan also writes about: What were Lincoln’s hopes for our nation?

And, he explores: What were Lincoln’s core values?

Then, journalist and author Bill Tammeus writes about how Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address still calls us to reach out to one another.

Journalist and author Martin Davis asks: Are our battle-scarred American roads capable of carrying us toward unity?

Author and leadership coach Larry Buxton writes about: Growing up and growing wise with Abraham Lincoln

Columnist and editor Judith Pratt recalls: Hearing our Civil War stories shared generation to generation.

Attorney and community activist Mark Jacobs writes about: How Lincoln’s astonishing resilience and perseverance inspires me today

.

.

Want the book?

GET A COPY of Duncan’s 30 Days with Abraham Lincoln—Quiet Fire.

Each of the 30 stories in this book includes a link to listen to the original radio broadcasts. The book is available from Amazon in hardcover, paperback and Kindle versions.

 

.