The eCrozier

Nothing is enough for the one to whom enough is too little. – Epicurus

When my son John was still an only child of about two and half years, Kelly was away for a few days and it was just us two. I remember making pancakes for supper one night (because I could) and John and I feasted until we couldn’t eat anymore. It was then bath time, but before a book at bedtime, he asked for a snack. I decided to run a small social science experiment (because I could). At our kitchen table there were two chairs. At one place I set a stack of ten fig newtons. At the other, I placed only two. I told John he could sit at either place for his snack. You guessed it. He sat in the chair in front of the ten fig newtons, of which he could only manage to eat two (after all he and I had just wolfed down tons of pancakes). Even at that early age, he had already concluded that more was better than less. He’s wasn’t and isn’t alone. We all believe it. We’re suckers.

There’s a powerful scene in the film, “The Hurt Locker,” where an Iraqi War veteran returns home and accompanies his wife and baby to the grocery store. His wife asks him to go to the cereal aisle to choose a box for the family. He gets there, stares at the choices and freezes. Not a word is spoken. The camera slowly draws back as he is paralyzed by the hundreds of cereal choices. Soon he re-enlists in the army to go back to the war because the choices there are simple and binary: life or death.

Our culture leads us to believe that having more choice is better than having less. But social science research has repeatedly shown (see Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less) that having more choice doesn’t equate to more happiness or life satisfaction. In fact, repeated research shows that an abundance of choice actually exhausts us. And yet, even knowing that reality, we still think more choice equals more happiness. Our brains lie to us and we think that we’ll be different than everyone else. Having more choice won’t exhaust us. We think it’ll make us happy, but it won’t.

Does having over ten varieties of Coca Cola rather than just two bring us more contentment? I think not. This truth is a subset of a larger question about “enoughness.” How much is enough? One wag responded to that question by saying: “just a little bit more than the next person!” In our culture, having more than the next person is the way we keep a diabolical score.

Back to the social science research: It consistently shows that while having more choices doesn’t bring us happiness, gratitude for what we have and for who we have in our life does bring us happiness. Put simply, grateful people are happier people. So, rather than worrying whether we have enough (or more than the next person), maybe we should be wondering: Do we have enough gratitude in our lives? Can we be content with our lives as they are now knowing they will always be messy and imperfect? Are we doing enough to nurture our relationships with others? Are we giving enough love or are we rather always demanding more than enough from others? Can we simply be thankful that enough is truly enough?

+Scott

It’s always just been better to keep your head away from that kind of stuff.
– Sean Clifford, Penn State Quarterback

Penn State’s football team was undefeated until recently. On November 9, the Nittany Lions travelled to Minnesota to play the Golden Gophers (an outstanding nickname, by the way) who were also undefeated at the time. In a hard-fought game, Penn State came up short, losing 31-26 to Minnesota. It wasn’t Penn State Quarterback Sean Clifford’s best game. While completing over 20 passes for over 300 yards, he still threw three interceptions. That’s the nature of sport. You’ll have your good days and you’ll have your bad days, just like in the rest of one’s life. Clifford had a bad game. It happens. He’s 20-years old after all. He’s still growing up.

While Clifford is barely an adult (his baby face makes him look younger), after the loss to Minnesota he had to learn some hard, adult lessons in our mean-spirited, caustic culture. Clifford needed to delete all his social media accounts on the day after the loss, because he received death threats and nasty messages from, of all people, Penn State fans. He said: “I usually delete it closer to games, but I completely deleted it after the Minnesota game. It’s kind of sad to say, but you know how fans sometimes get … it gets a little crazy. I was kind of, I guess, sick and tired of getting death threats, and some pretty explicit and pretty tough-to-read messages.”

Clifford showed remarkable restraint in his comments when he said: “You know how fans sometimes get…it gets a little crazy.” Really? With all due respect that’s more than “a little crazy.” When did we decide in our culture it was acceptable to make death threats to a 20-year old young man for his part in losing a football game? From the top down in our culture we’re normalizing name-calling and the threatening behavior that often follows it. These crude, twittered pejoratives give permission for others to join in and act similarly. For example, once someone has been labeled “human scum” on Twitter, it’s a logical step to conclude such a person doesn’t even deserve to live. After all, they’re mere “human scum.” Such behavior further erodes our social fabric.

Penn State Head Coach, James Franklin, also noted it wasn’t just Penn State fans engaging in such behavior. He said: “You hate to see it, but the sad thing [is] it’s a part of our reality of our society right now. You see that in a lot of areas; the last thing I want to do is get into other things besides football right now, but you see a lot of things that are behaviors in our society now that we accept that I don’t know why we’re accepting. You see some things from a violence perspective, you see some things that people in positions how they’re conducting themselves, just a lot of things that we’re accepting in our society that we would never have accepted before.” Thanks, Coach Franklin.

As a people, we become what we tolerate and accept. Sometime in the future (and I hate to even write this down), a college athlete will be murdered because he had a bad game. We’re reaping what we’ve allowed to grow.

“The idea of reading the Gospels and keeping Jesus’ commandments as stated therein has been replaced by a curious process of logic. According to this process, people first declare themselves to be followers of Christ, and then they assume that whatever they say or do merits the adjective “Christian.” – Wendell Berry

We’re all guilty of the sin of baptizing what we say or do as “Christian” so we can call whatever we say or do as “faithful.” We come by this sin honestly. We’ve been schooled in the celebration of the self all our lives, so it makes sense we’d understand that whatever we do must be what Christians do (or believe). After all, the great American poem is Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, the great American essay is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance, and the great American novel is Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, all of which insist on the self as the main source for truth and righteousness. Such selfism stands in clear contrast to Jesus’s plain teaching in the Gospel, so all we have to do is ignore Jesus, do what we want, and call it “Christian.” See how simple that is?

This tendency to baptize our beliefs, prejudices, and actions as “Christian” becomes especially embarrassing since by repeated research (e.g., PPRI’s American Values Atlas, Pew, Gallup, etc.), people who identify themselves as faithful Christians don’t seem to show any different behavior than the population as a whole (“different” = “look and sound a bit more like Jesus”). The traditional markers many have often used to name what they call “immoral” (e.g., premarital sex, adultery, greed, gambling, etc.) show that self-declared “Christians” aren’t any more “moral” than the general population. And when one looks at self-described “Evangelical Christians,” they are in cases like spousal abuse, actually worse than the overall U.S. population (See Ron Sider’s research in his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience: Why Are Christians Living Just Like the Rest of the World?).

The above news ought to prompt us to spend less time finding the speck in any other person’s eye (Christian or non-Christian) and spend more time dealing with the beam in our own. PPRI’s American Values Atlas also finds a significant number of white Christians are still holding onto long-ago, debunked racial stereotypes of African-Americans while also denying that the growing white nationalist movement is at all in conflict with their Christian faith. Really? And we continue to wonder why young people in this country aren’t attracted to the Christian Church. White Christian racism is a good place to start our wondering. And then we can also wonder why the denial of climate change science by many Christians creates problems for young people when, at the same time, we assure them that we really do stand for the truth.

In my church growing up, the way we lived our lives was called our “testimony.” Our life, whether we want it to or not, is always an unspoken sermon that’s constantly preaching to others. None of us will ever be free from wanting Jesus to agree with us and for him to see things our way, but humility and honesty demands we admit how our unrepentant selfism continuously hamstrings our witness to the Good News of God in Jesus.

+Scott

By and large, Christians understand brokenness in our culture from two different vantage points. More liberal Christians tend to see brokenness as primarily caused by social justice failures prevalent throughout our culture. More conservative Christians usually focus on individual brokenness (sinfulness) as the problem arguing we need to call people to repent of their personal character flaws so we can get things right in the culture. Both are correct, although neither side rarely acknowledges the truth the other side holds. The social and personal are so intertwined that trying to separate them is more confusing than helpful. Does social injustice lead to personal brokenness? I think history bears that out. Does personal sinfulness set in motion social injustices? Again, I think history proves it does. We create a false dilemma when we try to disconnect these rather than see them both as woven together in a complex whole.

As an example, let’s consider the issue of (dis)honesty. Laws help make dishonest folk behave better than their personal characters. Even crooks don’t want to be robbed by other crooks. So within limits, honesty can be enforced by having crooks watch each other. But as we learned from Prohibition, laws alone do little good unless they reflect community standards. For laws against corruption to work, most individuals must have an honest character. So how do we get honest persons unless we have an honest society to produce them? Likewise, how do we get an honest society unless we have honest persons to produce it? Which comes first the chicken or the egg? Society produces corrupt individuals. But it’s also true that corrupt individuals produce a corrupt society.

Jesus saw the personal and the social as a seamless whole. Some people might say to Jesus about the current president: “Jesus, tell him to repent of his lying.” Jesus, I believe, would reply as he did in Luke 12 where a man comes to him and says: “Teacher, bid my brother to divide our inheritance with me.” But Jesus replies: “Who made me a divider or judge over you? Life does not consist in the abundance of money and power; repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” Jesus went way beyond our focus on the personal or the social, about souls or laws. He called people into something later called “the church” so they could daily repent and thus become just, compassionate, and merciful people. Jesus called people into community for repentance and discipleship.

It’s odd how different Jesus’s approach is from how we seem to go about it. We want to change society for the better (and we should), but we try to do it almost entirely through voting, lobbying, or a rant on social media. Thus, we’ve given up on changing people and we’ve settled for trying to change the government. How odd? We want to convert the government instead of the people. We’re probably the first people ever who hope to have virtues like mercy, compassion, and justice expressed in our government without having virtuous people who embody them. How could anyone imagine that corrupt people could produce honest government? No, the reality is that corrupt people produce corrupt governments, just as corrupt governments produce corrupt people. Our present circumstance bears out that truth. It’s time to follow Jesus and call ourselves and others to repentance and discipleship.

+Scott

Some humans ain’t human, some humans ain’t kind
You open up their hearts and here’s what you find
A few frozen pizzas, some ice cubes with hair
A broken Popsicle, you don’t wanna go there
– John Prine

I’ll leave the debate about the humanity of some humans to another time. I’m more concerned here with what the legendary John Prine believes we’ll discover inside some human hearts: “frozen pizzas, ice cubes with hair,” and “a broken popsicle.” As always with his anthropological observations, Mr. Prine is amazingly insightful.

In terms of connecting food to our hearts, I think it’s safe to say the relationship is complicated. In the developed world, particularly in western culture, we’ve never before had such a wide variety of food options available to us, at least to those who have the discretionary income to make those choices. We’re capable of appreciating wholesome, delicious food one minute and then wolf down a bag of potato chips the next. We can delight in the freshest of oysters and then ruin that delight by washing them down with a Budweiser (yes, I’m a beer snob…among my other sins). Take the potato, for example. It’s one of God’s greatest creations. It’s full of nutrients. If history is accurate, it kept the Irish alive for a generation or two. But what do we do with the potato? We slice it up, cover it with salt and grease, deep fry it so there’s absolutely nothing nutritious left in it, and then sell it to churches for their youth group meetings. If you don’t believe there’s a Devil, then that alone should convince you.

But even our irregular taste in food isn’t my primary concern. I’m more concerned with what happens when food becomes a type of religious devotion for us. This occurs in two ways. First, we can become obsessed with eating the most admirable foods (kale salad anyone?) thinking it’ll show others just how righteous we are. Or second, we can treat eating “right” with a misplaced religious zeal. Doctors even have coined a term for this. It’s called “orthorexia nervosa,” a psychological obsession that causes a person to restrict their food intake to particular foods, believing doing so will be the only way they’ll be healthy and happy. But like its twin disorder, anorexia, orthorexia leads to depression and death, if it isn’t addressed. These are both forms of self-sanctification. Both hold that if we just get our food choices right, then we’ll be happy and fulfilled.

Such efforts disorder our lives because they believe a necessity (in this case food) will do something it can’t possibly accomplish (make us whole). Now I’m not suggesting for a minute food is unimportant. We have a significant hunger problem in this country, particularly among children. Plus, eating a healthy diet is a way for us to be good stewards of God’s gift of our bodies (OK, even having some potato chips on occasion). But we should be really wary of what food can become for us. Like with so many other things, we can ascribe a worth to it beyond due measure. If that happens, then we’ll be sorely disappointed when it can’t deliver what we hoped for.

+Scott

Throughout the summer in our Daily Office lectionary we’ve read the narrative arc of King David rising from the obscurity of a shepherd boy, the youngest of Jesse’s sons, to eventually become King of the united tribes of Israel. Even though he was anointed to be king by the Prophet Samuel as a boy, he didn’t gain prominence until, as a young man, he slew Goliath with a well-placed stone from his sling. From that act, he insinuated himself into King Saul’s inner circle, married Saul’s daughter, and slowly accumulated power. When Saul finally recognized David as an internal threat (even Saul’s paranoia had some basis in reality), David fled, organized a guerrilla army, and began a civil war that would eventually see his army victorious and Saul and his sons dead. When David became king, he had won everything. He was God’s anointed.

Not long after, David was in his palace one day and saw a young woman named Bathsheba bathing on her roof top across the way. David was smitten. He sent for her, and because he was king, he could have his way with her and he did. Soon after, she informed him she was pregnant and since her husband, Uriah, was a soldier in David’s army and off fighting for David in battle, everyone would know it wasn’t Uriah’s child when born. So, David concocted a scheme to have Uriah come home on leave, unite with his wife, and then the problem would be solved. But Uriah, when he arrived home, refused to go to his wife since none of his fellow soldiers currently in battle were able to be with their wives. David even got Uriah drunk hoping that Uriah would visit Bathsheba then, but all Uriah did was fall asleep outside the palace door.

David’s plan then grew even more sinister. He wrote a sealed letter to his general, Joab, and gave it to Uriah to give to Joab when he returned to the battle. The letter said, “Set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, so that he may be struck down and die” (2 Samuel 11:15). Joab did as his king commanded and Uriah died in battle the next day. David thought his deceitful cover-up had worked, so he, after the official mourning period, took Bathsheba as his wife. Why would David do such thing? The answer the Bible gives is clear: He was king and assumed he could get away with it. It wasn’t until Nathan (his National Security Advisor) confronted him with his adulterous and murderous behavior that he confessed his sin.

David’s story, embedded in Israel’s larger history found in 1st & 2nd Samuel, continues long after his death. This week in the Daily Office we’re in the middle of 1st Kings, long after David has died, but his presence is still felt because his actions set in motion another future civil war between Solomon’s sons, and the further degradation of Israel’s morality and exceptionalism as God’s chosen people. One might have thought that Solomon and his sons, Jeroboam and Rehoboam, would’ve learned from the morality tale of David’s life, but they didn’t.

I hope all this isn’t what people mean when they talk about “biblical family values.” It’s remarkable how one man’s behavior as a leader could drag down the entire nation. To be sure, David was just one man. Yet, he was the king chosen by God.

+Scott

The Rt. Rev. Scott Anson Benhase
10th Bishop of the Diocese of Georgia

We wish our national debates were nutritious and substantive, but we have an insatiable craving for insults to the other side. As much as we know we should ignore the nasty columnist, turn off the TV loudmouth, and stop checking our Twitter feeds, we indulge our guilty urge to listen as our biases are confirmed that the other guys are not just wrong, but stupid and evil.
-Arthur Brooks’ in his book Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America From the Culture of Contempt.

I’m occasionally on the receiving end of what Mr. Brooks writes about. After all, I regularly write about what’s happening in the world and how current events relate to our moral and theological grounding in our Anglican tradition of the Christian faith. For doing so, some of my fellow Episcopalians have not stopped short of claiming I’m “not just wrong, but stupid and evil,” as Brooks writes. These emails usually begin with: “I’m appalled! How dare you!” The emails usually go downhill from there where the writer makes all sorts of assumptions about me. Their emails (and this is just my hunch) might display more about their own character than they do about mine.

Others accuse me of inappropriately mixing politics and the Christian faith. The two, of course, can never be separated. Our faith, if it’s grounded in the universal truth of the Gospel, must shape our political choices since those decisions have moral and human consequences. The central claim of our faith is the gift of grace and forgiveness from God imputed by Jesus and his cross, so operationalizing that claim requires us to make choices, individually and communally. So, we always should ask: “What does Jesus’ grace and forgiveness look like when applied to” and here we can fill in the blank of the latest event or context. Extending mercy and compassion to others is the way we, individually and as a society, make manifest God’s grace and forgiveness in the world. But the converse of that is dangerous. That is when our politics shape our Christian faith. When we take that route, we’ll most certainly turn practicing our faith into just another act of partisan hackery; where we hold a political position and then find a way to justify such a position somewhere in the words of Jesus. We’ll end up, as Brooks writes, looking and sounding no different than that Twitter or TV loudmouth.

Yes, we’ll sometimes disagree on how mercy and compassion should be extended to others, but Christians should never be against offering mercy and compassion. That would deny our core identity as Jesus’ disciples. As we disagree then, we should avoid ascribing motives to others. We get ourselves in trouble when we assume we know what’s motivating another person. Just because a fellow Christian disagrees with us on a matter of public policy doesn’t mean that person is in league with the Devil. They may be trying to operationalize mercy and compassion differently than we are, but that doesn’t mean they’re against mercy and compassion. Let’s show some restraint; not quickly jumping to conclusions about what’s motivating others. And let’s listen to one another. If we take the time to do that, we may just learn more deeply what’s motivating that other person. And we can hear them say it in their own words.

+Scott

What the heart desires, the will chooses, and then the mind justifies.

The above unattributed quote succinctly describes how sin so often works its way through our hearts and then into our behavior in the world. We’re moved to desire someone or something, we go after the desired someone or something, and then (and only then) do we concoct in our minds a justification or a defense for why it is we were right in choosing who or what we desired.

Our Book of Common Prayer is full of prayers that recognize this pattern in all of us. In the 5th Sunday in Lent we hear: “Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise.” The Prayer Book assumes our “unruly wills and affections” need the intervention of grace before we can love what God desires as opposed to what we desire. On the 6th Sunday of Easter, we pray: “Pour into our hearts such love towards you, that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire.” This Collect assumes human desires is marred by sin and require God’s love to be poured into our hearts before we can begin to love God “above all things.” These are just two examples. Read through the Collects of the Church year and you’ll see this pattern.

In 1957, in his “A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance,” psychologist Leon Festinger described a psychological phenomenon where the heart, will, and mind play this game of justification trifecta. Festinger argued the human mind doesn’t like inconsistencies. He wrote: “Cognitive dissonance can be seen as an antecedent condition which leads to activity oriented toward dissonance reduction just as hunger leads toward activity oriented toward hunger reduction.” So, just as a hungry person will seek food to alleviate hunger, Festinger argued, people who experience mental contradictions will work to rationalize them and thus reduce the dissonance. Such cognitive dissonance, then, works out this way when it comes to our moral behavior: If our heart’s desire conflicts with our moral code, then our mind will find some way to justify this dissonance away. In other words, we need a way to rationalize our choices as “moral,” even when they aren’t, in order to align them with our heart’s desire. And we’ll often go to great lengths inventing new mental or spiritual yoga moves to do so.

So, how does this work when we apply it to the problem of racism in America? (1) We support a particular person’s action because it benefits us or we generally approve of it; (2) We don’t support racists because racism is immoral; and, (3) That particular person regularly engages in racist words or behavior. Those three don’t jibe, so our mind seeks a way to justify our support of that person’s action. Voilà! The Cognitive Dissonance stew has just been served. There’s no real cure for Cognitive Dissonance other than the Christian spiritual practice of self-examination and repentance where we take a serious personal inventory and open ourselves to the possibility we may be wrong in God’s eyes. After all, our capacity to justify ourselves is, as the Bible might say, “legion.” Read Acts 10:1-11:17 to see St. Peter’s Cognitive Dissonance and how he ends by vulnerably asking, “Who was I that I could hinder God? (11:17b).

+Scott

One hundred years ago this month, 38 people were killed in what became known as the Chicago Race Riot of 1919. The riot was years in the making; a result of the combustible combination of racism and demagoguery by white leaders in Chicago. For years, African-Americans in what became known as the Great Black Migration had been moving from southern states (escaping the Jim Crow south) to Chicago in order to make a better living for their families. Many of these African-Americans took the low wage jobs being offered. Nicholas Lemann tells this story of mass migration in his excellent book, The Promised Land (1991). Working-class white people in Chicago were told to see this migration differently. They were warned to view it as a threat to their own livelihoods because employers could hire African-Americans at a lower wage. Rather than address the choices employers were making, they hyped up the “Negro Invasion.”

The riot began after a young black man who was swimming with his friends in Lake Michigan drifted near a beach “reserved” for white people. A white man, spotting this young African-American, and having been “warned” of the “Negro Invasion,” threw rocks at him. The young man was knocked out and drowned in the lake. Word spread fast in the African-American community about the murdered young man and a powder keg of repressed resentment exploded. African-Americans who were tired of being on the receiving end of violence regrettably resorted to violence themselves. White people responded in kind, which surprised no one. In addition to the 38 killed, hundreds were injured during the riot that followed.

The language used by the demagogues one hundred years ago in Chicago said it all. Chicago was experiencing a “Negro Invasion.” They accompanied this inflammatory language with other descriptors (e.g., “they’re going to rape our women and take our jobs”) to frighten and arouse the white residents of Chicago. It’s the exact same language used today by our President and others to describe immigrants from Latin America and other non-white countries. There’s an old saying: “It’s funny how history repeats itself.” But there’s nothing funny about this repetition. It’s sadistic and mean, and it places the blame on the shoulders of the wrong people just like 100 years ago in Chicago. It’s classic demagoguery.

So, we’ve been here before. 1919, not uncoincidentally, was also one of the peak years in the U.S. for lynchings. Do we really want to repeat that brutality today? We allowed demagogues then to lead us in all manner of despicable behaviors in this country. Those of us who are white look back from the perspective of today and ask: “How could white people just like us have done such things?” Will white people 100 years from now look back and ask how we tolerated in this generation the violence toward and scapegoating of people with a different skin color as ourselves? Or, will we choose a different course this time? The playbook of demagogues is always the same: Exploit people’s insecurities whatever they are and then tell those same fearful people who they need to blame and punish. History shows us that violence and murder always follow. We must reject such demagoguery if we’re to have hope for a just future as a people.

+Scott

What are we becoming as a people? Our unbridled political partisanship is making us unable to see where politics must end and basic human decency must begin. I refer first to the case of Scott Warren who was charged with a crime last year for providing food, water, and beds to undocumented immigrants near his Arizona home. All he did was respond to two men who asked for food, water, and a place to rest. He gave them all three. He never hid the men or encouraged them to break any law. For that he was arrested and charged with a crime. The jury (thankfully) was unable to reach a verdict on whether he was a criminal. When we criminalize compassion, we’ve reached a level of moral indifference that ought to alarm all of us. To be sure, we should debate immigration policy. There are people who make strong points on the many sides of this complex issue. But criminalizing compassion? Bless our hearts.

This moral issue is also marked by the growing number of unaccompanied minors that the Customs & Board Patrol is holding in detention under sub-human conditions. While the problem has reached crisis proportions, it’s hardly new. Four administrations (two Democrat and two Republican – how’s that for bipartisanship?) have failed miserably to address this while it was a smaller problem. Now it’s become a major crisis. In 1997, The Flores Decision set basic humane standards to care for migrant children in government custody. This legal decision came about because such humane standards weren’t being kept then. And while it’s an historic bipartisan embarrassment, it’s become a crisis under the current administration’s stewardship because they’ve ignored the facts and blamed everyone but themselves. As a veteran advocate for migrant children put it: “In my 22 years of doing visits with children in detention, I have never heard of this level of inhumanity.” Is this some sort of deterrence policy? Does the administration think that if we make the conditions so inhumane that it’ll somehow deter children from crossing the border undocumented? I’d like to know who thought that line of reasoning up? “If we just make things awful enough for them here, then the children will stay in Mexico.” I’d expect such moral reasoning from the Marquis de Sade, but isn’t this country supposed to have higher moral standards than a sadistic sociopath?

This is where certain folk reading this will retreat to their political tribes, blame the other side, and then engage in self-absolution. Sorry, that doesn’t hold any moral water. We can’t absolve ourselves of our moral duty to care for these children. And we can’t justify our government’s behavior by saying the children are just getting what they deserve. Really? How do these children “deserve” such appalling treatment? That’s ascribing a level of agency to them that’s ludicrous. Children are dying in government custody. They’re needlessly suffering deprivation and psychological harm. We have a moral responsibility to end this now.

This shouldn’t be about anybody, especially children, “getting what’s coming to them,” or, in moral theological terms, their so-called “just deserts.” In fact, in some ways, this isn’t even about these children. This is about us and who we are as human beings. So, I ask again: What are we becoming as a people?

+Scott