Archive - Nov 2017
November 30th
Two Psalms for the Modern World
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 11/30/2017 - 09:47This week, for my Old Testament class, I wrote two psalms for the modern world, attempting to mirror the content and poetic style as closely as possible, while writing about modern issues.
The first psalm, from the genre of personal laments, is based on Psalm 51. I wondered what it would be like if your leaders, particularly those recently accused of sexual abuse would respond more like David in this psalm.
Psalm 51
A Poem of Donald, when the investigator Robert (Mueller) came to him after he had fired Comey.1 Help me reinvent myself,
with all the self-help guidance in the world;
with all the ability to make personal changes,
do away with my faults.
2 Change all my error-filled ways
and clear my mind of all its troubles.3 I know all too well what I’ve done wrong,
and the media won’t let me forget.
4 My misdoings are an affront to all that is good
and I’ve caused more harm than imaginable.
The low approval ratings make perfect sense;
the voters can see all my faults.
5 Really, I’ve always been like this,
taking advantage of my privilege since before I was born.6 You want to really know what’s going on inside?
help me explore my sub conscience.
7 Show me my implicit biases,
that I might truly be ‘woke’.
8 Let us hear the rejoicing
that true racial equity brings.
9 Help me get past my own microaggressions
and all the ways I contribute to racism.10 Help me make real, lasting changes,
and not just revert to the jerk I have always been.
11 Do not let me be ostracized,
or be isolated and alone.
12 Help me appreciate what really makes America Great,
and keep me focused on loving all people.13 Then I can finally work with others,
and activists will show compassion as well.
14 Help me curb the violence in our country,
that people may feel safe again gathering in public.15 Help me find the right words
to talk about what really matters.
16 For the empty political rhetoric
and failure to take action pisses you off.
17 What really matters is recognizing our own faults;
the desire to fix what we’ve broken is always needed.18 God bless America, the way God wants it blessed;
help us feel safe and loved again.
19 Then we will say things that make you happy
and do good deeds to all people;
truly making American Great again.
The second psalm, from the genre of Torah psalms, is based on Psalm 1. It focuses on the way people interact online.
Psalm 1
1 The best online experiences
don’t come from being like everyone else,
from posting about self-serving exploits
or re-sharing outrage at others;
2 instead share gratitudes and things that are joyful
and constantly reflect on how to be kind.
3 These are the experiences
that bring many great responses
sometimes long afterwards;
they frequently comeback as good memories.
These are the posts that bring the most benefit.4 That is not how it is for trolls;
they are rapidly unfriended.
5 Their complaints get ignored
and they get shut out of larger discussions.
6 For goodness stays with those showing kindness
but the trolls are soon forgotten.
November 28th
Towards an Evolving Understanding of Media
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 11/28/2017 - 09:18This is another commentary that I wrote for my News and Religion course:
I remember those early days of blogging when we thought we would change the world. We compared the Internet to Gutenberg’s printing press and wondered what it would do to literature, politics, religion, and society. What would it be like to live in a truly egalitarian society where everyone owned their own printing press?
We were mostly optimistic, although even then there were some concerns. How would you determine truth and authority? What economic models would support news gathering and investigative reporting?
In 2004, Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson released EPIC, an eight minute video that explored the impact of digital technology on the news media. It was based on a presentation they had done for the Poynter Institute, and while the specific events it described did not end up happening, the conclusion seems frightening prescient.
EPIC allows us to mix and match their choices however we like. At its best, edited for the savviest readers, EPIC is a summary of the world - deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before, but at its worst and for too many EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow, and sensational, but EPIC is what we wanted.
Too many of us failed to consider the importance of the audience developing media literacy that kept pace with changes in media.
We did struggle with other issues. If everyone had their own blog, was their own publisher, what did this say about professionalism in the emerging media? Many of us would not be professional in the sense that it was our primary source of income. What standards and ethics would or should apply to bloggers?
2014 did not see the New York Times go offline as Sloan warned could happen, but it did see a court decision protecting bloggers against libel suits. In a commentary by Ken Paulson of the First Amendment Center, he writes
“The protections of the First Amendment do not turn on whether the defendant was a trained journalist,” Judge Andrew Hurwitz wrote.
While the Supreme Court has previously observed that the lines between traditional news media and native web content have become blurred, this makes the first time that federal appellate court has essentially said that journalists and bloggers are one and the same when it comes to the First Amendment.
Again, we see our understanding of media evolve, and the audience needs to keep up.
The issues that this ‘new media’, as many of us called it a decade ago, and as some still refer to it today, also includes the financial aspects. We see this in the news today as a Billionaire Owner Shuts Down DNAinfo, Gothamist Sites A Week After Workers Unionize. This goes one step beyond what is happening at Digital First Media, whom The Street describes as “the biggest cost cutter in the newspaper industry” when their CEO stepped down recently.
Beyond the legal and financial issues, we have the issue of “truthiness” as Stephen Colbert described it, or an epistemic crisis, as David Roberts writes in Vox.
The US is experiencing a deep epistemic breach, a split not just in what we value or want, but in who we trust, how we come to know things, and what we believe we know — what we believe exists, is true, has happened and is happening.
It is worth noting that conservatives on Facebook were quick to assert that this epistemic breach is fueled as much by news organizations they consider liberal as it is by very conservative news organizations they embrace, despite the research from Harvard. To further the epistemic breach, they go on to dismiss the research coming out of Harvard as not being trustworthy because it comes from a liberal university. This only serves to further illustrate the issues of the epistemic breach.
Perhaps more than issues of the legal rights of bloggers or the financial structures to support news gathering and investigative reporting is this issue of who we trust and how we come to know things. No matter how fair, objective, accurate, or unbiased any reporting is, if the audience chooses not to believe it, the reporting is ineffective.
All of this leads to the question of how we understand media literacy in a rapidly evolving media landscape. Keith Hamon offers a fascinating exploration of this in his blog post, Reading the "MeToo" Text as Hyperobject
I’m suggesting here that online texts—the billions of text messages, tweets, and Facebook messages, the currently dominant streams among countless others—function as a hyperobject, as Timothy Morton calls it, or a rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari), or noise (Michel Serres), or silence (Paul Goodman and the Buddhists). Approaching those texts from the perspective of hyperobjects may just help me engage them better.
As we move from a society whose news media has been broadcast oriented, distributed through television, radio, and newsprint, to a society whose news media is collaborative and digital, as we move from a modernist perspective to a postmodernist perspective, all of us must become literate in digital media and the hyperobjects that people like Keith Hamon are writing about.
Robin Sloan starts off EPIC with a quote from Charles Dickens, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Perhaps we were right in those early days of blogging. We are changing the world. Now, we are in a liminal time where our media has changed but the audience has not yet caught up. If our words are to have meaning the audience needs to become more literate in the media used.
November 25th
The Laodicean Times: Neither Cold nor Hot, a Commentary
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 11/25/2017 - 16:17Here is another commentary I wrote for my News and Religion course. I wrote it several weeks ago, but wanted to share it with the class first. Let me know your thoughts.
Many people on Facebook are participating in a 100 day gratitude challenge. Every day, for a hundred days, they post, “Day n (of 100) of Positive Thinking. What are you thankful for or makes you happy today? Please comment.” I joined in because it seems that a major contributor to the problems of our day is a lack of gratitude. A friend, who had shared this challenge a while ago posted on my first day,
The opposite of hate is not love or vice versa; it is apathy. As the adage goes: all it takes for evil to prosper is for good people to do nothing. The only way we can battle the negativity surrounding us is by a daily practice of peaceful and passionate speaking up against it.
For me, this ties back to my religious beliefs. It brings to mind the message to the church in Laodicea in the Revelation 3:15-16
I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth.
It does seem as if we are neither cold nor hot in our country, that good people are doing nothing, and that evil is prospering. There are exceptions, but they are too few. Yet standing up for truth and beauty can be challenging.
In 2008, The Quill published Keeping the Faith by Debra L. Mason. She wrote about the challenge religion reporters face holding onto their faith. She offers suggestions to help reporters handle their faith on the job.
One important suggestion she has is around avoiding conflicts of interest. Things religion reporters should avoid include: “Reporting on your own place of worship, Reporting on issues from which you cannot separate your religious beliefs…[having] Any leadership position (in a religious body) that would compromise your ability to report impartially about a religious tradition… Profiling people you know through your religious life and Reporting on issues for which you’ve advocated on behalf of your faith group.”
These are important issues to consider, but at the same time, we must avoid being neither cold nor hot. I remember being told that people feel what you feel when they read what you write. If you feel dispassionate or uninvolved in what you are writing, they will feel dispassionate or uninvolved with what you are writing.
The Society of Professional Journalists, which publishes The Quill has a Code of Ethics that I encourage everyone to read regularly whether they are a professional reporter, a communications professional with an advocacy role, an individual blogger, or some combination of these roles.
The code of ethics say journalists should “Act Independently … [and] Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived. Disclose unavoidable conflicts.” It also says that journalists should “Label advocacy and commentary.”
As a Post Structural Christian Mystic Poet, I question whether any of us can truly act independently. Our way of thinking, our way of speaking, or very language itself, is shaped by when and where we have been brought up, by our social location.
In this context, as opposed to the context of being a professional journalist, I need to find what works for me, as I write about religion. I believe I am called to write about how we reconnect the spiritual to our daily lives. I believe my words need to be “hot” words of advocacy, about places I worship, people I worship with, and even about leadership roles I take on. I also need to make sure that my words are properly labeled as advocacy and commentary and meet as many other of the ethical standards of the SPJ as possible.
We need more people writing about what is good, what is spiritual, whether it is a sunrise, a baby sleeping on our chest, a young child telling us they love us, a hug from a spouse, or the gentle breeze laden with God’s love rustling our hair. We need to find new ways of sharing this writing in our ever changing media landscape, and we need to help others communicate about their spiritual beliefs as effectively as possible.
The message to the church in Laodicea continues in Revelation 3:19-20
I reprove and discipline those whom I love. Be earnest, therefore, and repent. Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.
November 16th
“That's me in the Spotlight, Losing my Religion ”
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 11/16/2017 - 07:02Here is another commentary that I wrote for the News and Religion course that I am currently taking.
If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church
Matthew 18:15-17a
That’s all well and good if it is one person doing something clearly wrong against another person, but life is much more complicated and nuanced than this. While the sexual abuse of young boys by Catholic priests is something pretty much everyone would agree is wrong, one can easily argue whether keeping the details out of the press was important to protect the privacy of the victims, and perhaps even of those priests who may have been wrongly accused or have been treated and recovered from illnesses that lead to the abuse.
Underlying all of this are issues of systemic problems within religious institutions. How do we address them in a way that has meaningful impact? Where does the line lie between protecting victims and protecting institutions? How do we know when we are seeking truth and proclaiming it, something that is dear to both religious people and journalists, and when we are acting out of our own desires?
Within religious traditions, there is the practice of discernment; seeking to determine what God wants us to do. Likewise, journalists always struggle with discerning which story to pursue, how to report it, what details to include, and so on.
This week, for the News and Religion course I am in, we spent time reading the Boston Globe series of articles about sexual abuse by priests in the Catholic Church. We watched the movie, Spotlight about the coverage and are talking about “the media’s role as a watchdog, and … the pitfalls and challenges of performing this function when investigating religion news stories”.
One of the most obvious pitfalls is the pushback that those seeking to expose the truth face. Prophets and journalists who challenge religious institutions can expect to be told
Do not prophesy to us what is right;
speak to us smooth things,
prophesy illusions,
leave the way, turn aside from the path,
let us hear no more about the Holy One of Israel.
Isaiah 30:10b-11
There will be pushback, from people who love the religious institutions, including religious leaders we respect and perhaps even members of our own families. It will challenge our own faith. As we examine ourselves and our roles in investigating the stories, we will find ways that the issue has affected us or our loved ones. We will need to explore our own motives and our own complicity.
In an article in The Quill, Keeping the Faith, Debra Mason writes about the toll that covering the sex abuse scandal took on William Lobdell. Lobdell has written about this in his book, Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America and Found Unexpected Peace. This is a very big pitfall. Mason goes on to offer “tips for handling faith on the job” and thoughts on how to address “conflicts of interest”.
For the deeply religious, especially for those with strong ecumenical and inter-faith leanings, everything is a matter of faith tied to competing and conflicting interests.
Let us hope that we will not see a topic as deeply disturbing to as many people as the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. More often, we are likely to see more prosaic issues around misappropriation of funds. Yet there are two current topics related to the core of our religious institutions that warrant consideration; systemic racism and the selection of priests.
As our country addresses over 400 years of systemic racism, we need to explore the ways in which our churches have benefited from, and perhaps still benefits today, from systemic racism. On April 17, 1960 Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke about it this on Meet the Press saying,
“I think it is one of the tragedies of our nation, one the shameful tragedies that at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours if not the most segregated hours in Christian America”.
Fifty-seven years later, it continues to be a shameful tragedy and predominantly white churches today are still struggling with issues about to what extent they should continue to honor confederate leaders in their statutes, stained glass windows, and even in their names.
When and how do we cover, in an impactful way, ongoing systemic racism in our country and in our religious institutions?
Likewise, various religious institutions continue to struggle who should become priests. Should women become priests? Married people? Gays and Lesbians? Only people of a certain age, economic status, or level of physical ability? Only people that those interested in maintaining the status quo find acceptable?
While both of these issues may lack the intrigue and moral turpitude of the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, they both have the ability to cause deep spiritual traumas to people today.
How do we cover the ways in which religious institutions seek to perpetuate the status quo while harming individuals who work for change, as well as the institutions themselves? How do we manage the conflicts these issues bring up in our own lives?
It takes a willingness to put our faith and our friendships on the line. It takes a willingness to challenge the existing power structures, not only in organized religion, but in government, and even the press. The roles of prophet and journalists are challenging roles and don’t always end with vindication and accolades, like a Pulitzer Prize. It takes great discernment and courage to seek and proclaim the truth in the face of such challenges. It is also essential to the ongoing wellness or religion and our society .
