The Green Thoreau: Pack it along for a perfect walk

September 30, 2012 by

CLICK THE COVER TO VISIT THE BOOK’S AMAZON PAGE.Millions of Americans own a copy of Walden, either in paperback or as a free (or nearly free) digital book on some hand-held reader. If you don’t have a copy, it’s free online from Project Gutenberg. It’s safe to say that most Americans could identify book and author if they encounter these opening lines:

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.

What most readers don’t recall is that Walden is a tough book to pick up for a short interval of inspirational reading with the reliable promise of a passage that will lift our spirits and spark our own reflections. There are long pages of digressions and rather wooden prose between the poetic passages we love to quote. What’s more? Many of Thoreau’s best passages aren’t in the book called Walden.

And that’s the best thing I can point out about The Green Thoreau: America’s First Environmentalist on Technology, Possessions, Livelihood, and More. That’s why you should, indeed, spend the money for an ink-and-paper copy of this handsome, handy book with its comfortable matte-finish cover and its easy-to-tote-anywhere, slim design. In the real world of autumn hiking, you’re likely to encounter moisture along the way and, although this book isn’t waterproof, it’s far more sturdy when wet than any electronic device.

This book is 100 pages of Thoreau’s greatest hits—sometimes just a line and sometimes a good fat paragraph—about the topics: Nature, Technology, Livelihood, Living,  Possessions, Time, Diet and Food and finally Aspiration. The book is guaranteed for quick inspiration drawing across the chasm of 150-or-so years from Thoreau’s mind and pen—to our lives today.

Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion and cultural diversity.

Review: Ian Cheney’s eye-popping film ‘City Dark’

June 30, 2012 by

New York City’s annual Tribute in Light is one scene in Ian Cheney’s ‘The City Dark.’ Photo courtesy of PBS.HOW TO SEE THIS FILM: The PBS premiere of “The City Dark” is July 5, 2012. However, check local showtimes in your region. We are aware than this series does not air everywhere, so visit the PBS POV website for information about watching the documentary online through August 5, 2012.

Review: Ian Cheney’s ‘The City Dark’
invites us all to rediscover our stars

Review by RTS Editor David Crumm

Are you one of the many viewers still choking on Ian Cheney’s 2007 documentary King Corn, now available on DVD from Amazon? Well, then—good. That was Cheney’s aim in his broadside against the dominance of corn in American life. Although a lot of farmers and ranchers didn’t care for that film, 82 out of the 99 reviews on the Amazon page for King Corn were 4-star and 5-star raves.

Now, “The City Dark” arrives as a kinder-gentler successor to Cheney’s earlier work. That doesn’t mean it’s any less troubling. Cheney shows us that—after thousands of years of global wisdom about the importance of the starry night sky—most Americans now are covering themselves in “a luminous fog.” The basic problem is light pollution: In our quest for safety, security and longer working hours, Americans have wired our world to shut out the night. In doing so, we create glowing domes above most of our cities, preventing the stars from shining through to us.

ReadTheSpirit has participated in two full-scale pilgrimages to the Isle of Iona, one of the world’s most revered sacred sites. I can tell you, first hand, that one reason Iona is described as a spiritual “thin place” is the lack of light from the ground at night. The lack of nighttime light pollution is a fact of life on Iona. But, during one pilgrimage we made to the island, an Atlantic storm knocked out power across northewest Scotland. Men and women standing on Iona that night were knocked to our knees by the spectacular show of stars after the storm passed. The Milky Way looked like a tidal wave of light flowing toward us.

That’s what Ian Cheney tries to show us in the opening of “The City Dark.” Of course, we are watching this on TV screens (and some of us on computer screens), so Cheney’s ability to wow us with his visuals is sorely strained. But, I must say: He does a darned good job! Partly, he uses lots of visual tricks: High-resolution images, shots taken from telescopes, elaborately timed photography. Plus, he selects fascinating examples to include in his brief hour-long version for PBS. One of the best sequences shows us the hatching of endangered sea turtles and the tiny creatures’ vigorous search for the ocean shore, theoretically guided by starlight reflecting on the waves. Of course, due to light polution some of the fragile creatures head inland by mistake. (Don’t worry: Cheney’s team rescues those stragglers, but the point is obvious—thousands more perish due to light polution each season, when friendly filmmakers aren’t hanging around to help.)

But, “The City Dark” is not another Threat-of-the-Week nail-biter. If you are reading this review, then you’re among the many readers who already understand: We’re seriously messing up our planet. Cheney isn’t trying to beat us over the head with another eco-disaster warning here.

At his best, Cheney is pointing us to the deeply spiritual human connection with the night sky. Several times in the film, you’ll meet men and women who understand this age-old link between faith, science and the stars. Again and again, “The City Dark” asks us whether we’ve forgotten that essential connection.

Cheney asks us: “What do we lose, when we lose the night?”

Turns out: We may be losing our guiding lights.

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Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion and cultural diversity.

Jonathan Merritt: Voice of the Right, pulling us to Center

May 21, 2012 by

In the dangerous 2012 campaign season, when any angry billionaire can blanket America with hate-filled attack ads—the rise of Jonathan Merritt may be an answer to prayer. Merritt, at 29, is heir to evangelical royalty as the son of former Southern Baptist Convention president James Merritt and a family friend of the late Jerry Falwell (as well as other Religious Right luminaries). Yet, Merritt is using his considerable clout as a hot young writer to urge evangelical friends nationwide to move “Beyond the Culture Wars.”

Why should we pay attention to Jonathan Merritt now? Every day, fresh headlines show the growing toxicity of politics in 2012. Today’s New York Times front page warns: “The intensifying flood of uncapped donations to outside political groups is transforming not just campaigns but the entire business of politics.” This is the first presidential campaign since the Supreme Court threw open the doors to Super PACs that are expected to pour huge fortunes into angry messages that, by definition, candidates cannot even try to moderate. Only days ago, news broke of one billionaire who was considering dumping millions into a no-holds-barred race-baiting campaign against President Obama.

In religious circles, there’s not a more important voice emerging than Jonathan Merritt, who is calling for religious calm from every public pulpit that welcomes him. From the Huffington Post to the Washington Post, from FOX News to network TV talk shows, Merritt is using his considerable connections to call for truly biblical compassion.

Many truly biblical issues fuel Merritt’s passion. Google up evangelical Christian advocates of abolishing nuclear weapons and you’ll find that Merritt has hung his shingle along side Rob Bell, Shane Claiborne, Brian McLaren, Tony Campolo and many others. Look for Christians who are preaching that we must all work together to save our environment and, once again, Merritt ranks among the top names.

PREVIEW OF OUR INTERVIEW WITH JONATHAN MERRITT

You can read the entire author interview in which ReadTheSpirit Editor David Crumm talks with Jonathan Merritt about his nationwide activism this year. For now, here are a few choice excerpts from that upcoming ReadTheSpirit Q and A …

Jonathan Merritt on Climbing out of Religious Bunkers: American Christians spend far too much time with people who are exactly like they are. In a pluralistic society that is becoming less and less possible—and the truth is that it’s also less and less helpful for America’s future.

Jonathan Merritt on Shedding a Bad Reputation: A growing segment of American evangelicals have grown disenchanted, disillusioned and disaffected from a church that is often partisan, reactionary and angry.

Jonathan Merritt on Acting Biblically: There are four special classes of people that Scriptures specifically charge the faithful to protect and advocate for: widows, orphans, immigrants and the poor. At least in the last 30 years, many conservative American Christians have not done a good job of protecting and advocating for any of those people.

EXCERPT FROM JONATHAN MERRITT’S A FAITH OF OUR OWN:

Click on the cover to visit the book’s Amazon page.In his new book, A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond the Culture Wars, Meritt says in effect: Enough is enough! The mean-spirited political brawls and name calling that pass for political dialogue these days are ignoring truly biblical mandates for activism on behalf of the world’s dire needs. Along the way, we are destroying whatever welcoming reputation Christianity ever had around the world. Here are some of Jonathan Merritt’s own words from his new book …

Christian leaders who claim to represent the larger movement often so thoroughly misrepresent the rest of us that many would cherish clearing the deck and starting from scratch. Today’s Christians believe we all need to learn how to disagree without being disagreeable. To listen more and speak less and perhaps infuse our debates with a modicum of respect. Turning imperative debates into an episode of The View doesn’t help anything.

People crave a civil society for both personal and pragmatic reasons. Most of humanity feels the offense of harsh words even when they are directed at others. … A coarse culture is also an unproductive culture—especially in a democratic society whose engine runs on compromise and coalition building. When incivility reigns, progress is stymied and compromise is replaced by stalemate. … Christians need a rapid infusion of what Peggy Noonan calls “patriotic grace,” which is to say, “a grace that takes the long view, apprehends the moment we’re in, comes up with ways of dealing with it, and eschews the politically cheap and manipulative.” Many of the folks I’ve spoken with want exactly that. They desire what John Murray Cuddihy called a “culture of civility.” They long for the day when the American public square will be a place of passionate but reasonable discussion—resembling the Greek agora more than the Roman Coliseum.

In addition to our sour tone, Christians must confront the brutal tactics that often walk hand in hand with the culture wars. Freud said, “Humans are wolves to fellow humans,” and culture warriors seem to be particularly adroit at destroying their prey. Entrenched in political ideology and armed with a political strategy, culture warriors make use of political tools to achieve political goals. In this mode, enemies are abundant and victory is paramount.

Then, Merritt shares an anecdote about Ed Dobson, who we welcomed to the pages of ReadTheSpirit recently. The danger of advocating compassion and civility is that other culture warriors are not yet ready to lay down their arms. In his own recent years as an activist, Merritt explains that he has been targeted by angry voices from the Right more than once. Merritt writes:

Don’t expect to be embraced because you are a good person trying to accomplish a worthy goal or even because you’re “right.” Expecting culture warriors to leave you alone because you are a good person is like expecting a bull not to charge you because you are a vegetarian. Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson, once high-level leaders in the Moral Majority, say they saw this kind of marginalization employed on people who stepped out of sync with the movement. “Those who doubted or questioned our power were dismissed. Those who warned of danger were ignored, ridiculed, or condemned,” they write.

Ed Dobson admits that he was the victim of such treatment despite faithful service and conservative commitments. After leaving the Moral Majority, Dobson and several other religious leaders were invited to the White House to meet with President Bill Clinton. When interviewed by Christianity Today, he made some favorable comments about the president. Dobson later received a faxed copy of the article from Jerry Falwell. Across the margin, his former employer scribbled, “Unforgivable compromise. Don’t ever call me again.”

Ousting is a typical culture-war tactic. We take someone who has different thoughts or convictions and declare them anathema. We cut them off. Then we chop off anyone who likes that person. Then anyone who likes the person who likes that person also has to be cleaved. The result is an insulated group in an isolated echo chamber where conservatives become more conservative and liberals become more liberal. No one has permission to think for themselves.

Here’s a link to read the entire author interview with Jonathan Merritt.

Please help us to reach a wider audience

We welcome your Emails at [email protected]
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Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion and cultural diversity.

Review: Make a date with a ‘Chimpanzee’

April 27, 2012 by

Chimpanzee photo by Mark Linfield for Walt Disney.We love the natural world! That’s a statement of fact for millions around the world—and a statement of faith, as well. ReadTheSpirit provides lots of eco-friendly coverage, ranging from book reviews like this one to news coverage of Arbor Day to interviews with leading animal-friendly authors like Marc Bekoff. We also work with friends, including this overview of faith-based resources from the Humane Society of the US.

This weekend, families nationwide are buzzing about Disney’s latest feature film, Chimpanzee. Movie reviews by major newspapers and magazines are mixed. The Village Voice’s Benjamin Mercer is among the critics who praise the film: “Disneynature’s latest Earth Day release hunkers down in an Ivory Coast rain forest, taming its beasts-in-the-wild raw material into a family-friendly—though not totally sugarcoated—heroes-and-villains adventure, as did the brand’s previous film, African Cats.”

Film critics who don’t like the movie have one complaint: They want their nature films to be documentaries without an explicit storyline. Variety’s Andrew Barker argues both points of view in a single paragraph: “From his groundbreaking work on the BBC’s Blue Planet and Planet Earth series, Alastair Fothergill has established himself as the foremost auteur of nature documentary filmmaking. Directing here with Mark Linfield, he turns his attention to the social structure of chimpanzees, with visually stunning, almost impossibly intimate results. Unfortunately, this footage is welded to a creakily executed story and narrated by a schticky, frequently bellowing Tim Allen, too often betraying the beauty of the imagery.”

So, what’s a moviegoer to do? What’s a nature-lover to do?
We turned to ReadTheSpirit resident expert Benjamin Pratt, who literally wrote the book on finding spiritual themes in one major genre of pop culture—the James Bond series. Benjamin and his wife went to see the film, not as parents, but as adult moviegoers looking for a good film. Here is what Benjamin concludes …

Why You Should Make a Date
with a ‘Chimpanzee’

By BENJAMIN PRATT

Chimpanzee photo by Mark Linfield for Walt Disney.Chimpanzee is an excellent movie. It’s Good versus Evil! Everything Ian Fleming wrote, from his James Bond 007 tales to Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang focused on this theme.  Good versus Evil underlies our most basic lore and is once again central in a captivating tale released for the big screen. It is Scar and his rampaging thugs versus Freddy, the family patriarch and hero of Chimpanzee.

You will be thrilled with exquisite photography, magical music, enchanting time-exposure sequences, and penetrating jungle vistas. The evil Scar and his thugs will attempt to overwhelm Freddy’s family territory. But Good shall prevail over Evil!  Prepare to become attached very personally to a little guy named Oscar and his mother, Eesha, who lovingly nurtures her child until her death. Then, hold your heart! Your soul will be moved as the mightiest, Freddy, humbles himself to care for the weakest, Oscar!

It is a poignant and relevant parable for our troubled times.

A sincere word of appreciation to the men and women who spent four years filming this gem in the deepest jungles of Africa, to the Jane Goodall Institute, to Tim Allen who narrates, to Disneynature, the producer, directors and, of course, the cast of chimpanzees whom we hope shall thrive. 

CARE TO READ MORE?
Benjamin Pratt is the author of Ian Fleming’s Seven Deadlier Sins & 007’s Moral Compass, A Bible Study with James Bond. We also recently posted faith-and-film coverage of the remarkable new nature documentary Facing the Storm, Story of the American Bison. And, author Jane Wells just reported on Hunger Games from a spiritual perspective.

Please help us to reach a wider audience

We welcome your Emails at [email protected]
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Plus, there’s a free Monday morning Planner newsletter you may enjoy.

Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion and cultural diversity.

Humane Society of the U.S. offers a bounty of resources

April 22, 2012 by

Click this screenshot to visit the Humane Society website. Or, click the internal links listed in this article for specific faith-related resources.Animal protection movements date back centuries and so does their connection with religious leaders. In the 18th Century, Methodism’s founder John Wesley worked with the leading British anti-cruelty activists of his day. Over the past half century, the Humane Society of the United States has taken up the cause and now is backed by 11 million American supporters.

Among the HSUS
faith-related resources

The HSUS Food & Faith Recommended Reading page suggests books that “examine factory farming and other food and animal issues from the standpoint of human ethics. Even where they are not specifically Christian, they provide a good starting point for considering these topics in light of a Christian faith perspective.” That HSUS list includes Year of Plenty, the memoir written by ReadTheSpirit friends, the Goodwin family.

An April 2012 story on Compassionate Campers reports news about a faith-based camp that was facing serious flooding from dam-building beavers. Instead of harming the beavers, camp officials worked with HSUS to deter the beavers’ relentless building in an animal-friendly way.

On Facebook, visit the Faith Outreach page to keep up with regular updates and links. That Facebook page is the social-networking arm of the main Faith Outreach portal within the HSUS website.

Also, check out the HSUS collection of interfaith statements about treatment of animals. The Christian portion of the list ranges from Catholic, Southern Baptist and United Methodist to Seventh-day Adventist and Assemblies of God. The Judaism area contains Reform, Conservative and Orthodox sections. Other faiths represented here include Hinduism and Islam.

 

Review: Facing the Storm, Story of the American Bison

April 21, 2012 by

Can the buffalo survive?
In this new century, we all are asking: Can America survive as the world’s greatest democracy? Instead, we ought to be asking other urgent questions, including: Can we preserve the American bison—better known as the buffalo—the symbol of American majesty and the true fruit of America’s plains from sea to shining sea?

This is a perfect season for releasing the documentary, “Facing the Storm: Story of the American Bison.” Millions of Americans are thinking about Earth Day, marveling at rebirth across the northern hemisphere—and are planning for summer travel. You can see a shortened version of the film, this week, on the PBS Independent Lens series (that is, if your local PBS affiliate carries the series, which you can check here). Better yet, you can purchase the entire Facing the Storm documentary on DVD from Amazon (and get another half an hour of this gripping slice of American history and contemporary culture—78 minutes on DVD vs. the slightly more than 50 minutes that PBS will show in the film’s network debut).

WHY WE SHOULD CARE ABOUT THE BISON a.k.a. BUFFALO

Click the cover to visit the film’s Amazon page.THE HISTORICAL REASON: As we quickly learn in this dramatic retelling of the American bison’s story, there is no greater symbol of America’s wasted abundance than the buffalo. Through relentless hunting, the population went from more than 30 million to a tiny handful left in a remote valley of Yellowstone, before preservation efforts began in earnest. Certainly, Americans ran dry on other natural resources and drove other animals toward extinction through the centuries, but the buffalo’s value to the first Americans makes it a different case. The buffalo defined—and made possible—the daily life of the Great Plains’ original human inhabitants. Yet, by the late 1800s, the Kansas-Pacific railroad was selling tickets for kill-a-buffalo tours of the plains. The trains would slow to about five miles an hour, the windows would open and passengers would blaze away from the comfort of their seats, slaughtering and leaving buffalo carcasses to rot in vast quantities. Filmmakers Doug Hawes-Davis and Drury Gunn Carr argue in their film that the destruction of millions of buffalo was a deliberate part of U.S. policy to force Indians into reservations. So, the first reason we should care about the American bison a.k.a. buffalo? Because Americans collectively committed crimes against the natural world and against the people who depended on that ecology. Now, we need to encourage serious efforts to repair that damage.

Pawnee Bill’s 1903 poster.HISTORICAL NOTE: The antique design of the DVD cover actually is borrowed from a Wild West poster that celebrated the buffalo as the crowning symbol of the American West. The original poster was used by Pawnee Bill, who did work for a while with Buffalo Bill, but mainly produced his own shows.

THE CONSERVATION REASON: In short, this is the hunters’ and ecological-activists’ rationale for preserving the buffalo. Hunters are eager to bag the huge prize—even though one critic who appears in the film calls the “sport” of buffalo hunting about as exciting as “going out and shooting a couch with lots of people to help you find the couch.” Nevertheless, big-game hunters are among the Americans pushing to save bison for future generations. The film’s segment on hunters and their confrontations with ecological activists is unsettling enough that viewers might want to consider whether small children or people sensitive to graphic scenes of big-game hunting should watch the film. This footage is not as gruesome as gory scenes in some recent food-related documentaries, but we do see real film footage of animals being killed—and scenes of activists risking their lives to prevent that from happening.

THE ECOLOGICAL REASON: The historical portion of the film is intriguing. The conservation segment is gripping. But, the section of the film about the work of Dr. Frank J. Popper from Rutgers and his growing network of Great Plains planners and activists is absolutely fascinating. This is almost certainly a fresh story for Americans who haven’t been living in the heart of the Great Plains controversy over the past couple of decades. What Popper, his wife and colleagues recognized in the 1980s has been documented by other sociologists, anthropologists and planners as well. The Great Plains has been losing population for years. Scholars draw this conclusion: The outward migration from farms and small towns is discrediting the 19th-and-20th-century notion that the plains could be turned into Indiana-and-Ohio-style farmland. Many entire plains communities have vanished. For more than a century, we now are realizing, Americans have been running counter to the overall ecology of the plains. Starting in the 1980s, the Poppers proposed restoring a wild bison herd in a natural portion of the Great Plains as the only pragmatic way to respond without further damaging the plains themselves. One terrific outcome of watching this film would be for groups nationwide to start talking more about the Poppers’ idea for a vast Buffalo Commons area in the Great Plains.

FILM REVIEW by ReadTheSpirit Editor David Crumm

Care to read more about Native American perspectives?

There are a number of Indian perspectives shared in Facing the Storm.
ReadTheSpirit actively encourages greater awareness of Indian teachers and writers who are working today. We publish Dancing My Dream, a memoir and reflection on restoring Indian culture by Great Lakes-area writer and activist Warren Petoskey. Click the book cover, at right, to learn more about Dancing My Dream and Warren Petoskey’s work.

Care to watch a trailer for Facing the Storm?

Click the video screen below for a 3-minute preview of the documentary, which collects a broad sampling from the film’s many scenes. This video clip’s soundtrack is mainly music; the actual film has lots of narrators explaining the history and contemporary issues.
(NOTE: If you do not see a video screen in your version of this story, click here to reload this story in your Web browser.)

Please help us to reach a wider audience

We welcome your Emails at [email protected]
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Plus, there’s a free Monday morning Planner newsletter you may enjoy.

Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion and cultural diversity.

Poet Ted Kooser gives us a House Held up by Trees

April 14, 2012 by

Pulitzer-winning former Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s birthday is close to Earth Day. To be precise, Kooser was born on April 25 way back in 1939, long before anyone thought of the annual observance. Nevertheless, Kooser has been writing about the tangled relationships between our lives and the natural world throughout his career.

Now, he gives us a wonderful picture book, House Held up by Trees (available from Amazon), which is memorable partly because its story is so simple: A family grows up in a sterile suburban yard with a perfectly manicured lawn, the children grow up, the father ages, the home is abandoned—and native trees soon reclaim the place like rising pillars of some ancient temple.

Of course, followers of Kooser’s work through the decades might read this new book for kids (and the adults who love them) as an offshoot of Kooser’s earlier family memoir, Lights on a Ground of Darkness: An Evocation of a Place and Time. Anyone who knows Kooser’s poetry and especially his family memoir immediately will recognize his voice within these new pages so beautifully illustrated by Jon Klassen.

Kooser wrote Lights on a Ground at the point when his own family was vanishing and their familiar haunts were fading. No, none of his family had a house consumed by trees, but Kooser makes it clear in his memoir that our human lives and our favorite family stories are woven through the places we love.

He opens the memoir with a poem to his late mother, Vera Delores Moser Kooser: Mid April already, and the wild plums bloom at the roadside, a lacy white against the exuberant, jubilant green of new grass and the dusty, fading black of burned-out ditches. No leaves, not yet … But clearly those leaves are coming in “the month of my birth … the best month to be born in,” Kooser writes. And how does he remember his mother best? By moving some of the irises she loved over to his own yard. Soon, they will blossom in the “feast” of spring. Then, he writes to his mother: “Were it not for the way you taught  me to look at the world, to see the life at play in everything, I would have to be lonely forever.”

What an elegy! For that reason, in recommending House Held up by Trees today, we also urge readers to pick up Kooser’s Lights on a Ground. Together, the two books are a full meal, as Kooser might put it, about the ephemeral quality of family, the ever-changing nature of what we consider to be “home”—and the potent place of nature in preserving what is best in all of us.

Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion and cultural diversity.