13, 15, 20, and 33

On August 13^th, Melissa and I had been married for 33 years. And as of today, August 15^th, I’ve officially been employed at Friends University for 20 years (as the accopanying notification, given me this week, declares). Despite my occasional obsession with actuarial tables, I’m not a numerologist, and I have no idea how I might discover some mystical significance from those two dates and two anniversaries. But they seem to combine in my mind in ways important to me, nonetheless.

This has been a summer of challenges for me, health-wise (and since we’re talking about healthcare in America, money-wise too). It’s made me reflect rather intensely (probably too intensely, as both my wife and my cardiologist have frequently reminded me) on what I’ve accomplished and what I may yet accomplish—as a teacher, scholar, writer, citizen, father, husband, and human being—in however many years or decades I have left. Melissa and I have had plenty of ups and downs over the years, but I really do believe the ups, especially over the past few years, have outnumbered the downs. We’ve also been blessed when it comes to our four daughters—they all seem to genuinely like each other, and actually spend with and support and root for each another as they all, with varying degrees of success (though none have yet run up against any actually insurmountable obstacles; another blessing) navigate adult life. Mostly, whatever the financial struggles we over-educated, artsy, politically-radical-yet-culturally-bourgeois, suburban denizens of the (to steal from John Cleese) lower-upper-middle-class are facing, I think we’ve navigated past the worst of them, and things really will, probably, continue to get better (relatively speaking, of course).

As for my work as a college professor, I was lucky enough to find a job at a small liberal arts college that, while hardly a Swarthmore or a Pomona, seems situated well enough and lead wisely enough to be able to weather the demographic and administrative challenges facing it. As one of my colleagues said without a trace of irony at our recent faulty retreat, we folks teaching at Friends University are genuinely lucky people. Assuming I keep up my part of the bargain, and adapt as necessary to continue to teach those students whom arrive at this institution and want (or are required, as we faculty in our not-remotely-infinite judgment decide) to gain at least a little civic knowledge, to learn at least a little bit about the history and nature and functions of America’s political ideas and institutions, then I think that luck will hold out, and I’ll be able to do good work here for another decade or more. I have some ideas about pivoting, in the years to come, the major I’m in charge of—History & Politics— in the direction of something that more directly incorporates my long efforts to teach sustainability with what it means to participate responsibly in civic life; maybe those ideas will bear fruit, or maybe not. Either way, I can’t think of a better place to try.

As for being a Wichitan and a Kansan for two decades, I can’t separate that from my hopes to actually put my 20 years of observations together into a book, which is the whole point of my “Wichita and the Mittelpolitan” project, after all. (I note, upon linking to that introductory comment, that I’ve passed the then-years-in-the-future date which I stuck to it, so as to keep it at the top of the Substack. Obviously I must have figured out a way to maintain that even as the calendar has rolled on to 2026 and beyond. Good for me!) Sometime last summer, it occurred to me that framing my thoughts about mid-sized cities around a history of the past 20 years of Wichita as I have observed it might really work as a book. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that incorporating other first-person observations, through interviewing people that I’ve gotten to know over the past two decades and who can share thoughts about this city and its politics, its music, its businesses, its culture, its art and artists, its partisan contests, its demographic changes (or lack thereof), its government, its religion, its bureaucratic infighting, its natural and agricultural environment, and much more, would be even better.

I am, in the end, a political theorist, someone who wants to think through things on a level which exists between fundamental philosophy and motivating ideologies; I still believe in the insight I had 13 years ago, that Wichita doesn’t fit the dominant urban metropolitan model, but neither does it fit the rural micropolitan one either, and I think that there can be a theoretical language which can inform and provide insight to the way all the disparate topics above operate in the Air Capital of the World, right here in Kansas. I’ve gone back through many of the thousands of words I’ve written which touches on this insight in one way or another over the years, and started to organize them; maybe, in the final third of whatever amount of time I will, in the end, have enjoyed on this planet—years that will almost certainly be spent in this frustrating, struggling, but also (to me anyway) always delighting mid-sized city—I’ll finally be able to find the time and discipline to put together my (and others’) thoughts about it all.

Well, that’s about it. And wow, I kept all this navel-gazing under 1000 words. Pretty good for me! Maybe all that time writing Insight Kansas columns has paid off.

A Follow-Up on Christian Influence in Kansas (Democratic Edition)

[An expansion upon my latest Insight Kansas column, with the help of an image from The Active Age]

Two months ago, I wrote a column (which I later expanded upon) which addressed, among other things, on how Kansas Christians (which over two-thirds of the population of the Sunflower State identify as) have changed how they make use of their influence as citizens. Obviously the historical develop I was addressing had many causes—technological, socio-economic, and more—but still, it struck me just how many Christians, when they thought about the public-facing aspects of their faith, once regularly aimed to lift up Kansas society to the moral level they held to be scripturally mandated, whether in the form of prohibitions upon alcohol or Sunday closing laws or the abolition of slavery or women’s suffrage or so much more. Today, with a few notable exceptions—mostly pertaining to abortion, LGBTQ issues, and other matters involving personal sexual identity and behavior—the focus is more about providing financial support or legal protection to individuals, families, or businesses that affirm particular Christian standards, and less about presenting their moral message as relevant to social life itself.

One problem with that essay, though, was that as it moved from Kansas’s Carrie Nation past into the present, it came to focus entirely upon Kansas Christians organizing on behalf of and arguing for or against issues and policies that map almost solely onto the interests of the Republican party. In some ways, that’s predictable; for decades, the public language of Christianity (particularly Protestant Christianity, which for a variety of reasons has long been the dominant religious faction here in Kansas) has been owned by the Republican party. But nonetheless, there are still plenty of religious believers in Kansas—especially if you look at Black congregations, or other multi-ethnic Christian churches and groups who aren’t part of the powerful and mostly White evangelical subgroup—who approach the question of how to engage in public life with a focus on collective causes that are more typically associated with Democrats. Some attention needs to be paid to them as well, so this month, for reasons I explain below, I wanted to do so.

Over the past five years, multiple church-based organizations have sprouted up throughout Kansas, sometimes standing on their own and sometimes joining with others that have had a long history within their local communities. Together, these groups could be seen as Kansas instantiations of a national revival of the religious left (which there is evidence for, but which has also been falsely predicted much too often in the past), giving new voice to groups of believers who feel a need to, first, drill down on specific public policy problems, and second, pressure city and county officials to recognize the problems that have been identified and respond to the solutions which these groups recommend. In this, they’ve been making a real, unglamourous difference in many communities across the state.

Some of groups—all of which are multi-faith, but within which Protestant Christian congregations (Methodists in particular) invariably provide the largest number of supporters—include Topeka JUMP (Justice Unity and Ministry Project) in Shawnee County, MORE² (Metro Organization for Racial and Economic Equity) in KCK and KCMO, Churches United for Justice in Wyandotte County, the Good Faith Network in Johnson County, and the organization I know best, Justice Together in Sedgwick County. I’ve written on the latter organization multiple times before, and I’m proud to be a supporter of their work. But all of these organizations, representing tens of thousands of believers in the Bible’s messages about inclusion, charity, compassion, and justice, have pushed for the creation of municipal IDs (which help homeless individuals begin to rebuild their lives by applying for jobs and aid), for setting up affordable housing funds (which helps bring downward pressure on home costs in genera), for holding corrupt city officials accountable for their crimes (which helps increase trust in government and thus makes more legitimate collective efforts to aid those suffering from abuse and poverty), for creating additional services for those struggling with mental health or facing gun violence, and much more.

Have they been successful in all their work? Not remotely. For example Justice Together, after much internal discussion, elected to throw their weight behind an ill-conceived (but still, in my opinion, defensible) sales tax proposal in Wichita, entirely because of the funding it would have guaranteed to anti-homelessness and affordable housing programs, a decision that ended with egg on their (and my, and many others’) faces. But that hasn’t dissuaded them. Here in Wichita, at a recent town hall on the city’s 2027 budget, Justice Together brought out over 130 people to press their case for the importance of trying once again to secure through the ballot a stable, enduring source of funding for affordable housing and homelessness support, as well as other issues. As Justice Together co-president (and old friend of mine) Rabbi Andrew Pepperstone said at the start of the meeting: “We will not avoid this crisis; we will not stop; we will not be silent.” The turnout was so large the meeting had to be moved to the main city council chambers, and the power of their voice (and vote) was acknowledged throughout the evening.

To some, of course, the efforts of these organizations, and the numbers of faithful Christians supporting these progressive causes, is easily dismissed. In their mind, Christian engagement in politics remains the natural property of conservatives, and they point to how some progressives across Kansas have reacted with hostility to the entrance of Methodist minister Adam Hamilton into the race to be the Democratic challenger to Senator Roger Marshall as evidence for their presumptions. That hostility is mostly online and isn’t terribly loud, in my judgment, but it would be foolish to pretend that it isn’t real. In a low-turnout primary election, it might even be enough to sink Hamilton’s chances with the Democratic electorate (despite some of those same voters supporting churches engaged in the social justice work mentioned above).

At an event where Hamilton met with local voters in Wichita last night, I was impressed with how forthright he was regarding this particular challenge. For decades, Biblical language has been publicly owned (at least among White voters and those soliciting their support) by folks on the conservative side of the aisle; Democrats have spent decades articulating secular self-justifications, and sometimes some outright defiance, in response. Given all that, there is bound to be some members of the Democratic primary electorate who will insist that no minister, and certainly no person who—as is obviously appropriate when one works in a pastoral context, as Hamilton has for more than 30 years—approaches some of those same “matters involving personal sexual identity and behavior” with a recognition of and respect for the “tensions” which surround them (he shared a story about his own family history which, in another context, would have sounded like a set-up for an anti-abortion rights argument, except he turned it around into a case for supporting reproductive rights) will ever win their vote. How can someone like Hamilton reach them? Certainly not by downplaying his Christian approach to political questions; he knows that would be impossible, in the same way that organizations like Justice Together understand that eschewing Biblical arguments when they make their case simply undermines the whole point of their existence. The ways in which those inspired by the progressive or egalitarian aspects of the Christian message express themselves publicly have to reckon with pluralism in a way that wasn’t the case decades ago. That’s a complication, to be sure, but also one that aligns the character of the society we live in today—and that, perhaps, is an advantage, however small.

In any case, the history of Kansas shows us that Christian priorities were once as likely to be expressed by Democrats as by Republicans in this state. While that, obviously, has changed a lot over the years, it’s not like the language of faith as an important motivator for collective change ever entirely disappeared from the small liberal corners of Kansas. Expressing it today can’t be something done in same manner as decades past, but this election season, it’s heartening to see a variety of individuals and organizations looking for new ways to keep that expressive process going. I hope they succeed.

On Warren Farha, Cultural Renewal, and the (Too Few) Bookish Places Where It Happens

Last week Warren Farha—a devout Orthodox Christian, a soft-spoken descendent of Lebanese immigrants and merchants, a lifelong Wichitan, and most relevantly, the founder of the marvelous Eighth Day Books—passed away after a sudden illness. News of his death ricocheted throughout numerous churches, groups, and communities—religious, literary, cultural, ethnic, and more—both locally and far-distant. In retrospect, that kind of interconnectedness is a manifestation of his whole ecumenical and intellectual vocation, a manifestation that was made real yesterday evening.

Starting at 6pm, people started to gather at Eighth Day Books, at the corner of Douglas and Erie east of Wichita’s downtown. Who was there? Well, among the dozens I talked with, there were Orthodox priests, elementary school teachers, devout young entrepreneurs, Catholic nuns, burned-out hippies hawking exercise and acupuncture manuals, published poets, families with young children running around, former and current musicians, self-described socialist Jews, older folks sharing memories of their days with Warren in the Jesus Movement in the 1970s, before he returned to the Orthodox faith of his family heritage, and many more. It was simultaneously three things: a deeply pious religious honoring of Warren’s legacy and faith (complete with a public reading of the Paschal Sermon of St. John Chrysostom, a favorites of Warren’s); an ecumenical gathering of people who shared a common history with and belief in the power of God as something which can be experienced through the written word; a social celebration of a man and the friendships that emerged in the literary space he had built over nearly 40 years.

It was through the last one that I knew Warren best. Not that I knew him especially well at all—I didn’t have the church connections so many had with him, and since my wife has worked at Wichita’s Watermark Books, Wichita’s premier general independent bookstore, for nearly 15 years, the connections I have to Wichita’s many overlapping literary and educational groups and associations have gone through that store, rather than Warren’s. But that doesn’t mean I was a stranger to Eighth Day Books. It was there that my education in the Church Fathers and Mothers began, and whenever I was in the mood of searching through idiosyncratic classics of theology, mythology, history, or more, the crammed stacks of Eighth Day Books always invited me, and the advice of Warren or whomever was behind the counter was always valued. More importantly, Eighth Day Books, and the Institute which it inspired, has produced some of the most valuable gatherings I’ve ever been part of here in Wichita, whether they were large conferences (some of which I’ve presented at) or small reading groups.

Who attended, and still attends, these gatherings? Admittedly, it’s mostly people from religious traditions that have, at the very least, profoundly ambivalent feelings about my own Mormon Christian faith, as well as mostly people whose politics, especially when it comes to various “culture war” topics, are profoundly different from mine. In our present moment, with Christian nationalist ideas and Trumpian devotion having poisoned far too many sources of what ought to be voices of peace and inclusion and justice, I can understand how some might look upon the Eighth Day Institute, an organization of lay believers who take “cultural renewal” as their central conviction, and see it as a problem for the life of the mind, if not an actual threat.

“Renewal,” though, doesn’t have to mean anything reactionary, though obviously it can include such things. In my view, “renewal” when it comes to matters of culture is best understood as a continual recommit to, and a continual re-appropriation of, that which one has already been given. Such an interpretation doesn’t exhaust cultural renewal of all ideological content: nihilistic libertarians and individualists who insist they are entirely self-taught and self-made are pretty much outside the bounds of any kind of renewal sensibility. But anyone who recognizes that we are constituted by, and that our lives are an ongoing negotiation and evaluation of, all the inputs that we have known—spiritual, parental, educational, cultural, and more—can, I think, be moved to action by this conviction, and want to share in it.

In the space that Warren created, and in the connections those associated with him built both within and out from that space, those inputs were primarily presented in terms of God’s gifts, and the Christian writings and traditions which articulated them, and for people who struggle with conservative elements of such writings and traditions, there’s bound to be tension. But Warren himself once defined “ecumenism” as “a turning toward one another, looking one another in the eyes, recognizing each other as human beings made in the image of God, loving one another, and discussing our differences with respect and love”; once, when I was talking to him about the challenges of keeping Eighth Day going during the pandemic, he commented—and pointedly emphasized to me that his words had more than just an economic meaning—that when it comes to creating spaces for ideas as well as commerce, “the door has got to be open so that people can come in and be part of something larger than themselves.” In this way of thinking, I cannot imagine a better metaphor for, and a better invitation to, the forming and renewing of cultural connections and communities, than bookish places—libraries and, of course, bookstores.

I’ve always loved bookstores, both new and used. I love being able to go into well-curated spaces for readers, thinkers, and people who wish to share what they’ve learned from and experienced through all that they’ve read and thought about. When I was an undergraduate at Brigham Young University in the 1990s, people like Don Fossum and Linda Brummett ran a bookstore that sold not only the textbooks which professors assigned us students, but maintained an active—if subtle—presence in the intellectual life of the university, hosting talks and issuing newsletters and keeping books that challenged the university’s religious mission available behind the Information Desk for those who knew who to ask. Sadly, by the early 2000s, university bookstores were going the way of the dodo, as cost-cutting imperatives and internet delusions convinced most colleges and universities to use their bookstores primarily as a way to sell merchandise to visiting alumni and prospective students, and to move most of the actual business of placing books in the hands of those who need them online. The bookstore here at Friends University was never large, but Michael Sullivan oversaw it successfully for years with a wry and knowing attitude (knowing, in particular, what to say and what not to say, and when); when Friends finally closed it—turning the space into an exercise room for students—in 2022, Michael recognized the move as inevitable, but still tragic all the same.

 [Don Fossum, BYU Bookstore (L); Michael Sullivan, Friends Bookstore (R)]

The tragedy of a bookstore closing, and the reason why various trends suggesting that the brick-and-mortar bookstore may have weathered the worst that the online world can throw at them are a cause for celebration, is assured not because bookstores are the only place one can find collections of writings on whatever particular topic interests you. Rather, it is because bookstores have often been—and in hands loving readers like Warren, absolute were—places where one can find collections of people: people reading, yes, but also seeking, learning, sharing. Warren assuredly understood such connectivity as an instantiation of ecumenical Christian grace—the spirit moving through and among us all, building chains between living people and thoughtful observers of the human experience and God’s work long dead. But if that’s not your sort of acculturation, if that’s not how you experience renewal, it takes nothing away from the simple necessity of spaces where people, and books, can find one another, and that which is out in God’s creation—in all its scientific, poetic, historical, literary, and cultural glory—can be taken up by a reader once again…and, of course, recommended to any of the readers sharing that common space together. That, in the end, was, to my mind anyway, the true secret of Warren’s Eighth Day Books, and of any great library or bookstore: it’s a space where everyone, even the oddest and most oppositional of persons, can find someone to recommend to them a book to read and be renewed by. Warren did that better than most, and for that I, like thousands of others, am grateful.

Stella, My Dear

Martha my dear, / Though I spend my days in conversation, / Please remember me.

At roughly 12:30am this morning, the fog and pain and confusion and frustration that Stella, our pet for over 9 ½ years, has been moving through since at least last October was taken away. She’s gone.

I have an old and dear friend, who is both far more adept at all things technological than I (I mean, he builds robots for a living), but also far more adept at connecting with the flora and fauna of God’s creation than I am as well (despite my pretension to being an actually skilled gardener). Not long ago, he and his family lost a beloved family pet to cancer, an English Sheepdog named Mieka. (Martha, the nominal inspiration for Paul McCartney’s composition “Martha My Dear,” was also an English Sheepdog, who lived to the ripe old age of 15.) Mieka, my friend wrote, despite her pain and weakness in her final days, would still try to lick the hands of those who sat beside her, “reaching across vast distances of brain architecture and genetic selection to make a direct emotional connection.” Mieka, my friend wrote, “is teaching me how to die....We were created to leave our mark on the hearts of others and for them to leave their marks on us....When my time comes, I hope I'll be strong enough to follow her example.”

Stella, unfortunately, was not blessed with a death that allowed her the cognitive power to follow through on whatever buried instinct, the fruit of perhaps 40,000 years of social selection and evolution, had previous impelled her to love and want to connect with her humans. She was a rescue dog, so we never knew for certain how old she was; when we brought her home on December 4, 2015, her handlers put her age at 2 or 3 years old. So when her end came very early this morning, she was perhaps around 12 years old. She’d been slowing down some for a few years; she couldn’t jump up on our bed any longer, and her hearing may have been far enough gone that the summer fireworks no longer terrified her as they had every year before. But she was still mostly the same animal we’d known and made part of our lives for most of a decade. 

But then came her first seizure last September, which terrified us. Then came another, and then came the anti-seizure medication (phenobarbital) which dulled her senses even further and completely changed her personality. She became a dog that slept frequently, didn’t respond well, and wandered the house, following the same circular path over and over; she still ate, but she couldn’t control her bowels very well any longer, and when we’d get her to take walks outside–once her favorite thing, but increasingly harder as the months went by–she’d often be listless, leaning to one side and going in circles if we didn’t pull her along. The last walk of her life, last Sunday, she moved so slowly, her hindquarters often giving out underneath her, with even stepping up on a curb posing a challenge. And then yesterday afternoon, when I helped her outside to do her business after work, it was almost impossible to get her to move; she seemed to have no sense of her location, and she tumbled down steps and walked into walls as though she could no longer see. In a single evening, she had three seizures, and her breathing was labored. She struggled to stand, and couldn’t; she had no interest in food. We decided it was time, and called the emergency hospital after 10pm. We waited until Kristen returned from work, and then off we went, after first allowing our other children, in Wisconsin and New Mexico, to Facetime with her; I hope she could at least hear their voices. In the end, at the hospital, she lifted her head and turned toward us as we hugged her goodbye; I want to believe she knew we were there.

She was, from the beginning, a hyper-territorial and defensive dog. We didn’t know what breed she was until one day when she–after I foolishly left the backyard gate unrepaired and capable to being pushed open by a strong 60lb. animal–heard a lawnmower in the field behind our house, jumped against the gate barking furiously (her barking was always furious!), pushed through to the field, and attacked (though, I suspect, never actually broke the skin of) the man on the mower, which resulted in a visit from animal control and Stella having to spend a week in the city pound, during which she got a genetic test. A Pointer and Australian Cattle Dog mix, it turns out, which explains some of the aggressiveness. What a hysterical, overflowing creature she often was back then! Her licks, her insistence on getting the right number of pets, her ability to go completely still and focus entirely on whatever squirrels or bicyclists or dangers lurked right outside our living room window, ready to explode in deafening barks if any human being or rabbit or loud car or, sometimes, anything, came into her sight. Having guests over to the house was all but impossible for years. 

Perhaps in retrospect we should have always suspected that something just wasn’t quite right with the poor creature’s brain. We would laugh at and take delight in her strange way of thinking (or unthinking, as the case may often have been). If we had been a different family–a wealthier one, perhaps, or a more disciplined one, or one that managed our time better, or a dozen other things–maybe our too often desultory efforts at discipline and training in her early years with us might have stuck better. But then again, perhaps not. She quickly figured out a job–protecting the house from intruders, meaning everyone who wasn’t us–and sometimes including us, as Caitlyn, who slept in the downstairs bedroom during these years, discovered; she was convinced Stella forgot who she was overnight and accordingly responded defensively whenever she came upstairs in the morning. When we’d load her in the car to take her on walks or expeditions elsewhere–Buffalo Park, Swanson Park, Pawnee Prairie Park, even El Dorado Lake–she’d calm down slightly, but only slightly. Holding on to her leash tightly, to prevent her from leaping out at passing cars or charging other dogs (or, of course, any other small mammals) became necessary, both for her own safety and to save us from lawsuits. When we first brought her home and Kristen was the one who most often held her leash, there were times when Stella would win out, and nine-year-old Kristen would be dragged along behind her.

Stella was always, first and foremost, Kristen’s dog. She had begged for some sort of pet for years; it really almost didn’t matter what (at different times, she was infatuated with gerbils, rats, ferrets, and more). Once Megan had moved out, Melissa and I became a lot more receptive to the idea that the family had passed its peak in size, and as it shrank the youngest, Kristen, would always be tagging along behind her older sisters. So one December, despite our resistance–mostly because of the expense–we finally responded to her pleas; we would get a dog. And Kristen was (mostly) great as Stella’s companion; she was responsible for her food, and she and I would walk her together around the neighborhood, twice a day, so regular that on a couple of occasions folks whom we didn’t know would call us out while driving by the house or seeing us walking home from church, complementing us on how good we treated Stella. Kristen attempted to teach Stella tricks, with very moderate success (she would put together obstacle courses for Stella to navigate in the backyard; with the appropriate treat incentives, she would). She stayed in Kristen's room for years, frequently joining her on her bed (in some ways a frustrating choice, since Stella, when she spread out, could take up a lot of space, and Kristen got used to sleeping curled up in a ball).

Time changes everything, of course. The Covid-19 pandemic upended our household, and then changes in daily schedules–Melissa working full-time, Kristen in high school and then working herself–upended them further. In later years, it was far more common that she’s sleep on our bed, especially if there were a storm or people blowing off fireworks or anything else that made her nervous or concerned or scared. Stella truly became a family dog, one more of our children, rather than, as she had been originally, something of an appendage to our youngest. Melissa had always been the Alpha, the one most capable of getting Stella to respond and obey, particularly when her behavior got really egregious. Stella mostly respected that (though getting her to stay behind an invisible line and not enter the kitchen or dining area until we were finished eating was a constant struggle, one that, for some years, resulted in a successful detente between Melissa and our garbage dog, though even then her waiting behind the line or beneath the table, staring at us, waiting for permission–or for us to waver in our attention, which was really the same thing–to start eating any scraps she could find on the floor or, when we weren’t looking, on the table or counters themselves, was a constant as well.

Over the last few years, it was basically I that was walking Stella once a day, feeding her, taking her to the vet. I actually don’t think I was ever her favorite, assuming she even had one, but we got along well. I was the goofy male in the household–well, the only male, actually, which I guess allowed me to be ridiculous with her whenever I could. She was relaxed around me. When we walked, she no longer pulled at the leash to chase squirrels or threaten to leap into traffic to confront some noisy garbage truck or innocent cyclist; instead we would just walk together, wandering all around our neighborhood, following the Cowskin Creek runoff or intruding on the Rolling Hills County Club’s golf course. It came to be an important part of my routine, in humid summer heat and bitter winter cold. Like I did with the cows I milked long ago, I would talk to Stella, run through whole conversations with her as we walked. I could never tell if she was listening, but the whole arrangement felt agreeable to me. I hope she felt the same.

Sitting here, writing this, almost exactly 12 hours after we’d decided that the time had come to ease her out of her misery, I’m sad, as I think everyone in the family is, but also content knowing that her life, which had been irreparably changed by a tumor or synapse or congenital defect that could only be controlled by medication that could calm her mind, but not prevent the continued deterioration of her body, had run its course. It was terribly, terribly hard last night, as anyone who has ever put a pet down knows. But this morning, after waking with a headache, and feeling drained from our late night, I wandered the neighborhood, following some of the same paths that Stella and I (and Kristen, and Melissa, and at one point or another everyone in the family) had walked hundreds of times before. I was listening to some somber music, when to my surprise Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good” came on, with its long, slow, mellow sax intro. And though the songs have nothing to do with each other, I thought of McCartney’s simple ode: 

Hold your hand out, / You silly girl, / See what you've done. / When you find yourself in the thick of it, / Help yourself to a bit of what is all around you, silly girl. 

Stella was a silly girl, a dog who, when she was in the thick of her life, would happily, aggressively, determinedly, with a complete lack of guile or reservation, leap in to help herself of some of it. For nearly 10 years, we were able to give her a home to live that life in. She may not have been as brave or kind or wise as some dogs, like Mieka, have been. But she was ours, and we were hers, and for a good long time, that arrangement felt just great. Everyone needs a silly dog; thank God we had this one. I hope somewhere, while chasing a squirrel, she agrees.

 

Thoughts on Dylan

1) I saw Bob Dylan on Saturday here in Wichita, which was only the second show of his 2025 extension of his never ending tour (nominally supporting his most recent album, the excellent Rough and Rowdy Ways, but really just Bob being the traveling poet and song and dance man he's always been). It was a great show, with Bob sitting at the piano the entire time, playing pretty consistently, adding bluesy chords, rockabilly swing, and some romantic melody as the song required. And his four-piece band was tight, never showing off, but providing a solid foundation for a supremely musical evening. I wish I could have snapped some pics, as I have a very good seat, but it was a strict no-device show (including old cameras like mine!), and security was tight. But other than that, I had a wonderful time.

2) His set list? Almost exactly the same as his set list from Tulsa last Tuesday, where he kicked off this round of touring; the only change for us in Wichita was the addition of "Across the Rubicon," which was awesome, since I think that's maybe the best song on Rough and Rowdy Ways. ("Murder Most Foul" would outrank it, except I have a hard time considering it an actual song; more like some ancient bard orally capturing the whole gestalt of a particular society at a particular moment in time.) I was moderately disappointed with his significantly shorted version of "Desolation Row," and would have preferred almost any cut from Nashville Skyline aside from "To Be Alone with You," but I loved his harmonica work on "When I Paint My Masterpiece" and, especially, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," which he and his band made whimsical, upbeat, and almost sweet; on the basis of the couples I saw leaning into each other and swaying to the song, I'd bet that I'm not the only one who considered it the highlight of the night.

3) Speaking of Tulsa, Melissa and I took a day-trip there only two weeks back; we've lived in Kansas for going on 19 years, yet in all that time, Melissa had never seen this city only a little over two hours southeast of us, and I'd only been there once for a conference which didn't give me any time to explore. We had a grand time there--and for both of us (which is surprising for my wife, since she's not a Dylan fan), the highlight was the Bob Dylan Center. I had kept my expectations low, since I feared that it would just be a glorified add-on to the Woody Guthrie Center next door, which I've long heard raves about. But a bookseller at Magic City Books strongly encouraged us to check out the Dylan museum, and I'm glad we did. It really does a brilliant job at organizing its immense collection of photos, letters, films, notes, and more; the introductory videos do a great job situating Dylan as an artist and a cultural figure, and the main exhibit is filled with wonderful discoveries (the loopy, gushing letters Johnny Cash wrote to Dylan were charming). My favorite feature was a jukebox programmed with Dylan songs, Dylan covers, and "Dylanesque" tunes selected by Elvis Costello, but that just scratches the surface. It's not a huge museum, but after two hours there we still hadn't seen it all.

4) Becoming the sort of person who could spend most of an afternoon hanging around a Bob Dylan museum has been a long process. As I've detailed here on my blog many times over the years, my pop music sensibilities have always been, first and last, about the radio--and by the time I really started listening to pop radio around 1978, Dylan's time as someone who got much radio airplay were done and gone. So I was generally aware of him as a singer and song-writer, and occasionally recognized when other artists were covering his songs, but it wasn't until sometime in late 1993, when I picked up a double VHS tape copy of the 30th anniversary concert held for Bob at Madison Square Garden, that I really woke up to this astonishing and unpredictable artist. Besides all the wonderful music, just the range of the man's writings, both in substance and style, blew me away. I mean, "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35"? "My Back Pages"? "When the Ship Comes In"? I mean, it's folk, but also rock; it's political, but also personal; it's judgmental and dismissive, but also sneakily open-hearted. It's hardly an original realization, that Dylan contains multitudes, but it's what began my 30-plus years of recurring curiosity in the man. Being the political nerd I am, I dived into analyses of his lyrics, examinations of his interviews, reflections on his historical role--but more than that, I listened to his songs.

5) As for the songs, what can I say? I was delighted to finally be able to check seeing Bob in concert off my bucket list, but that doesn't change my most basic judgment about his music (one shared by my wife as well): the man just isn't ever the best interpreter and performer on his own material. I won't go as far as her (and, to be honest, many tens of thousands of others) in declaring that Dylan's voice grates. Like Mick Jagger, I think there's something distinctive and musical to his vocal instrument, even when it's not at it's best (and at the Wichita concert, as indecipherable as many of the words which came out of his mouth were, its sometimes wry, sometimes wistful, always gentle tone was quite engaging). But still, the point stands: he can write incredible songs, but there will always be someone (often many someones) who will be able to do those songs better than he. Examples? Oh man, don't get me started; I could list a couple of dozen. "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"? Joan Baez. "All Along the Watchtower"? Jimi Hendrix. "Boots of Spanish Leather"? Nanci Griffith. "Chimes of Freedom"? Bruce Springsteen. "Desolation Row"? Robyn Hitchcock. "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright"? Dolly Parton. "Forever Young"? The Pretenders. "Girl from the North Country"? Rosanne Cash. "Gotta Serve Somebody"? Shirley Caesar. "I Shall Be Released"? Joe Cocker. "If Not for You"? George Harrison. "It Ain't Me Babe"? Johnny Cash and June Carter. "Just Like a Woman"? Nina Simone. "Like a Rolling Stone"? Michael Hedges. "Knockin' on Heaven's Door"? Warren Zevon. "Masters of War"? The Staple Singers. "Mr. Tambourine Man"? The Byrds. "Positively 4th Street"? Bryan Ferry. "Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)"? Manfred Mann. "What Was it You Wanted"? Willie Nelson. "With God on Our Side"? The Neville Brothers. Just accept that, save for the towering exception of the Lennon-McCartney due (who only had about 12 years of collaborative production, whereas Dylan has been producing consistently for over 60), there simply isn't another English-speaking artist in the recording era that has written as many great songs as Bob Dylan has. You don't have to grant that he was the definitive interpreter of all these songs too!

6) Oh, and as for politics? Well, by all available evidence, the man's favorite president was Jimmy Carter. As another great story-teller once commented, 'nuff said.

Justice Together: Praying, Planning, and Partly (but Not Yet Entirely) Pushed Aside in Wichita

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

Before Christmas, I had some complimentary things to say about Wichita’s city council. Here at the end of the year, though, my thoughts are more critical—though this is really a story about an organization of citizens here in Wichita, one that has pushed and challenged the city council, with some (but not total) success.

Justice Together, an association of nearly 1500 volunteers from nearly 40 Wichita-area congregations, synagogues, and other religious bodies, made local history several months ago, when, at a major public assembly, they pressed and received commitments from various elected leaders that certain positive steps would be taken to assist the homeless population of Wichita. Their well-researched calls for 1) more free bus passes for those with mental health needs, for 2) more staffing for on-call psychiatric assistance, for 3) a sustainable budget plan for completing and operating the planned Multi-Agency Center (MAC) which aims to bring together resources for homeless individuals, and for 4) a free municipal ID program, all remain on the table. But two weeks ago a proposed set of changes to how the city deals with homelessness threatened to derail the compassionate efforts that Justice Together, along with many other municipal organizations (Wichita’s Coalition to End Homelessness deserves much credit here), had pushed for.

Fortunately, Wichita’s city council was convinced (or pressured) to bypass the worst feature of these proposed changes, and the role JT played in that effort (in over two hours of public comment before the city council on December 17, 21 of the 24 speakers opposed the proposed changes, and more than a third of those were associated with Justice Together) deserves praise. Still, the fact that the other changes which passed through the council on a 4 to 3 vote will increase the ability of law enforcement to treat homeless individuals from a criminal rather than a compassionate perspective is evidence of how much more, and perhaps how much further, the kind of activism JT represents has to go.

As was pointed out by multiple speakers (as well as a couple of members of the council from the bench), the proposed changes in Wichita’s policies were less rooted in local changes (though Wichita’s homeless population has increased, as it has in cities both large and small across the country, for dozens of often intertwined reasons) than they were in national decisions. When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its majority decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson last summer, making it clear that criminalizing “public camping”—a euphemism that we all know is ridiculous (“camping” is a voluntary recreational activity, while sleeping or residing outside without shelter in public places is practically never either of those) but seem doomed to use anyway—would not be considered an unconstitutional punishment someone for their condition, but would instead be considered a nominally constitutional punishment of an action, the door to more aggressive enforcement of anti-homelessness policies was kicked wide open. Honestly, those of us Wichitans who recognize both the increased costs as well as the lack of compassion which the further criminalizing homelessness entails should probably be grateful that the city’s proposals didn’t go any further than they did.

As someone who has been associated with Justice Together since its beginning in early 2023, I received word of the prayer meeting being planned for the day of the city council meeting. Multiple faith leaders set the tone for the dozens who gathered for the meeting by emphasizing that pushing back, in whatever peaceful way we can, against adding burdens to the lives of those suffering from whatever mix of causes—poverty, trauma, mental illness, drug or alcohol addiction, or all of the above—which had left them living without permanent shelter was a shared religious demand. As I’ve written before, JT is not a radical organization; rather, it is a serious, careful, realistic group of believers, who work in the tradition of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1) researching and proposing responsible plans premised upon compassion and justice, and then 2) presenting their plans before elected leaders in ways that create tension, thereby hopefully forcing action and progress. That was the plan a few weeks ago, with a summary of the changes Wichita’s government was proposing and an action plan laying out a bullet-pointed list of Justice Together’s primary concerns handed out beforehand. (The individuals in the photo above, from the Justice Together prayer meeting before the city council chambers on the morning of December 17, are, from left to right: Pastor Chad Langdon of Christ Lutheran Church; Deacon Lory Mills of St. Bartholomew’s and St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church; Justice Together Co-President Rabbi Andrew Pepperstone of Ahavath Achim Congregation; and Rev. Dr. Karen Robu of Plymouth Congregational Church.)

Topping the list of those concerns was that the city, in the wake of Grants Pass, intended to “remove a requirement that a shelter bed be available for anyone displaced by an encampment removal”—in other words, to no longer oblige law enforcement to confirm that there are beds available at public shelters before enforcing anti-“camping” rules and forcing a homeless person to move from whatever location of rest they’d found for themselves. This central issue was highlighted by Rabbi Andrew Pepperstone, the co-president of Justice Together, when he stood to speak before the city council (two other speakers, Revs. Travis Smith McKee of the Disciples of Christ and Jacob L. Poindexter of the United Church of Christ, later underscored Rabbi Pepperstone’s demand): the “removal of bed space verification” from those tasked with the often ugly task of disrupting the attempt of the homeless to find a secure corner or underpass somewhere in public space has, in his words, “no compassionate rationale that I can conceive of.” He challenged the city council to strip that policy change from the proposal, which resulted in some city leaders playing hot potato, suggesting that this odious proposal was really just a matter of police protocol. But thankfully, whomever ultimately owns this obligation, the result was a positive one. The policy changes voted on ended up preserving this restriction, thus making it at least still slightly difficult for those experiencing homelessness to be forced to move and to abandon many of their possessions like herd animals and not human beings.

Justice Together also opposed, along with other groups, expanding the number of city workers who could wield that kind of police power against the homeless, another proposed change which the city council was convinced to drop. Unfortunately, though, the other priority of JT—opposing “a change to shorten the notice to vacate period before an encampment is removed, from 72 hours to 48 hours, and in some cases, allow removal without notice”—went through. Perhaps that’s unsurprising; the city staff made it clear in their presentation to the council that there was, functionally speaking, only two elements of the proposed changes which they considered truly substantive: getting rid of the bed requirement, and allowing for the more immediate removal of homeless persons and the clean-up of their sleeping locations. Despite complaints that went far beyond the religiously motivated—there were speakers who challenged the proposed ordinances from libertarian perspectives on human rights, and conservative speakers who pointed out all the additional costs which ramping up enforcement requires—Wichita will, beginning probably in mid-January, join the host of American cities that are responding to the increase of the homeless population with even more criminalization, even if conjoining that with some additional compassion.

That additional compassion is obviously vital. Justice Together’s slogan for their (in retrospect, only partly successful) action was “Invest in a Fully Funded MAC, not Criminalization of Homelessness,” and there was much discussion of how to move forward with finding the funds necessary to keeping the plans for the MAC on track, and many supportive words from city council members for doing so. (There was an update on plans for the free municipal ID as well, which still seems to me likely the most important single non-structural action Wichita could take to assist the city’s homeless.) Ultimately, though, those who have dedicated so much time and effort to Justice Together must now consider their next steps.

Do they accept this defeat and continue to focus on pushing our elected leaders on the social justice issues which they have not foreclosed? That seems most likely; what JT’s volunteers are best at is speaking practically about policy options and researching how other cities have funded programs or dealt with changes in the legal landscape is the kind of action that appeals to their skill set best. But there is also the possibility of reconsidering what kind of, and how much, tension they can productively generate—perhaps while looking towards this year’s municipal elections, with the aim of changing one of those 4 yes votes. Becoming an interest group which actively promotes or opposes candidates would give Justice Together a very different and much more contentious vibe, yet political challenges are part of the toolkit of any successful advocacy organization, whether they’re used or not. (Sometimes, simply the knowledge that an organization could organize their forces—in this case, many hundreds of mostly middle or upper-middle class Wichitans in dozens of well-established religious congregations, the great majority of which are likely voters—can be persuasive enough.)

Justice Together has worked with and through the religious faith of thousands of Wichitans over the past 2 years to advance the conversation about social justice in our city. As a supporter, I am curious to see how its leadership will continue to try to advance our shared ideals, even as the opposition to some of what has been labored over pushes back. As in so many other ways, 2025 will be a very telling year.