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.

We Were Never Spacemen (But Glen Definitely Comes Closer Than Me)*

I met Glen Henshaw 39 years ago, in the late summer of 1987, presumably in one of the hallways on the 4^th floor of V-Hall in the old Deseret Towers student housing complex at Brigham Young University, where we had both moved in for our freshman year. I don’t have a memory of that first meeting, but I have a memory of him. He was thin, smart, funny, athletic, and with a background in nature and agriculture I could relate to (even though Virginia forests aren’t at all similar to Washington wheat fields). Above all though, he was a geek, and it was on that level we truly connected. Not that our geekeries were entirely similar; mine ran towards Dungeons & Dragons and comic books and super-hero movies and getting philosophical about all of the above, while his ran towards the technical side of science-fiction and fantasy: he was a born tinkerer, a student of taking stuff apart and putting it together again, and his obsessive questioning expressed itself differently than mine did. Thank goodness we had our mutual passion for Star Trek (including the novels and comic books, but particularly Star Trek: The Next Generation, which premiered that year, and which he and I and a few other fellow geeks would crowd around whatever television sets were available in the freshman dorms and watch together); who knows how our friendship would have developed otherwise.

But develop it did. We weren’t inseparable friends—he had his gang, staying up to ridiculous hours and hitting Radio Shacks and assorted warehouses around Utah Valley, searching for parts for a robot dog they were determined to build, whereas my gang was mostly just a bunch of politically and culturally malcontented scribblers—but we hung out together pretty often, doing the Blues Brothers thing as the mood struck us. When Ray Bradbury came to campus to give a guest lecture, he and his gang staked out seats close to the stage; they kindly let me squeeze in beside them, and it turned out to be one of my fondest memories of that whole year. But whereas what I got out of it was a great story, Glen got a mission. As he wrote to me:

I remember Bradbury's talk. I remember sitting there with you and Aric and Rob and loving it. But I only remember one thing Bradbury said during that talk, which if I recall correctly was actually an answer to a question posed to him during the Q&A afterwards. What I remember him being asked had something to do with space exploration and poverty and tax money and its wise use. His answer was "I believe we have a spiritual obligation to explore the universe. It is yours if you have the head and the heart for it." That talk, and indeed that statement, gave me the courage to give up my current plans, to start treating college as merely my day job, to ignore most of what my professors suggested as a career path for me, and to start dreaming bigger than I had to that point.

Glen’s dreaming has continued for decades, through a proselytizing mission for our church (I’ve whined and wondered about mine a lot, but Glen’s was way worse: he served a Mormon mission in Salt Lake City, for heaven’s sake), through graduate school, through marriage and children, through moves and family transformations and challenges political and religious and economic. The home and the life which he and those whom he loves have managed to build together is really quite beautiful, rooted in a rural sensibility he’s carried with him throughout his life (his wife and he, among other things, raise Katahdin sheep on a farm in Maryland). But most relevant to this post, he has, for decades, commuted regularly from his farm into Washington DC, where he works as a roboticist for the Naval Research Laboratory—he is, in fact, now “Senior Scientist for Robotics and Autonomous Systems” at the NRL, as well as the lead roboticist for the Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites project. In that position, he has won awards and fought bureaucratic battles (not always winning those); he’s helped build upon his experience decades earlier to develop our understanding of robot dogs and, through them, how the programming and machine learning and motion of robotic limbs might be made to work in outer space. The result, after twenty years of work, is an RSGS robot capable of approaching, grasping onto, and repairing satellites while they are in orbit—an accomplishment whose implications, for those tasked with counting costs and determining parameters of space operations in the deep bowels of America’s scientific-industrial complex, are massive. As Glen put it:

Currently, industry designs satellites to be completely reliable, with zero room for error or unexpected failure, over their entire lifespan. Think of it like a car. If you had to build a vehicle to drive 1 million miles without a single breakdown, it would cost an astronomical fortune. But we don’t do that because we can easily take our cars to a mechanic. Because that safety net exists, our vehicles don’t need to be over-engineered to last forever. Satellites are so expensive because they lack that safety net; they must be built to survive that grueling “1-million-mile” journey alone. But if we had a mechanic in space, we could build satellites much more affordably, without the need for such extreme, hyper-exquisite engineering.

That robot will be launched into orbit later today (weather permitting) on as a Northrop Grumman MRV-MEP mission. You can watch the livestream here, if you’re so inclined; I definitely will be. Glen is in Florida for the launch, as he should be: while he won’t be going into space, years of thought and sweat and technological experimentation and budgetary infighting and just plain old hope that came out of him will be. No one involved in America’s various space programs over the decades ever truly believes that anything is ever done alone; even the most arrogant flyboys and test pilots of America’s earliest efforts in the 1950s and 1960s knew that their accomplishments depended more upon the programmers and number-crunchers and engineers on the ground than anything they could do in the air or in outerspace; indeed, that’s why most of them, over time, became more the latter than the former. I look at my old friend; he’s not a military hotshot, but a man skilled with all things terrestrial and digital as well as celestial, someone who has taken those skills and put them to, well, spiritual work. For me, science-fiction at its best (and Star Trek only rarely was, but its occasional best was some of the greatest science-fiction ever, or so Glen and I would both agree) is exactly that kind of work; as I once wrote, it is “human-science-meets-the-infinite, I-put-on-my-space-suit-and-plug-in-my-time-machine-and-touch-the-face-of-God.” Glen won’t be doing the touching this afternoon, but something he touched, inside and out, for years and years, will…and that’s more than enough reason for me to sing his praises here. As the man at the end The Right Stuff says, go Glen—go!

*The title of this short essay is a reference to the wonderful podcast by Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk—of Firefly fame, most obviously—which my wife Melissa and I listen to pretty obsessively. Our appreciation of Nathan and Alan has everything to do with their comedy and their charisma, and nothing whatsoever to do with their science-fiction chops—which frankly, despite frequent involvement with that genre, they have none to speak of. This is, as I’m hardly alone in discovering, not at all uncommon amongst those performers and artists and directors who bring writing about space, time, and all that technology and exploration has opened up to us to the screen (though William Shatner’s thoughts about going into space are worth listening to, again and again—which is something that old geeks from the 1980s that Glen and I do, and happily so).

 

On (Not) Losing Our (Civil) Religion

On April 3, 1890, in Lehi, Utah, my maternal great-great-grandmother, Martha Mercer Kirkham, joined with other women to form a local chapter of the Woman Suffrage Association of Utah, an affiliate of the National Women’s Suffrage Association. Women in Utah had been granted the right to vote in local and territorial elections in 1870, but the Edmunds-Tucker Act, passed by Congress and signed by President Cleveland in 1877, disenfranchised Utah women as part of the national government’s effort to crush the Mormon defense of plural marriage. Kirkham wasn’t a plural wife, but she was a voter, and was deeply frustrated at this right being taken away from her. A humble 19th-century Utah woman, she stood and was recorded as saying:

Mrs. President, Ladies and Friends: 

In my weak way will try to address you a few moments. I believe we are in a good cause. We have our rights but have had one great right taken from us. I, for one, felt bad when my vote was taken away. I only had the privilege of voting a few times. If we live as we should do we would vote the same as our husbands, and he, being the head, should know how to lead, which I believe is his place, and woman to follow. I have always believed that if that good feeling that should be between man and wife existed they should be able to walk along together and be one in council with their family, and also in business; otherwise there is confusion. But the woman should not be looked upon as below the intelligence of man. She has the need of it and should try to keep herself posted with the spirit of the times for her benefit and also for the good of her family. How can she impart what she does not know herself? We have need of all we can learn, for how great is the mission of woman, and why should she not be able to have a voice to make law, to govern her sons and daughters? I, for one, would be pleased to have my vote again; it looks rather gloomy now, but no excellence without labor.

Kirkham never did get her vote back; she died at 37 years old in November that same year, and Utah women didn't get the opportunity to vote once again until Utah was admitted as a state in 1896. And of course, I strongly suspect that no one reading this (unless one of those readers are Secretary of Defense War Pete Hegseth and his sometimes-spiritual advisor, the anti-feminist and Mormon-suspicious Christian nationalist, Doug Wilson) would be fully comfortable embracing Kirkham's acceptance of patriarchy and headship when it comes to family roles. Still, her insistence that she was not "below the intelligence" of her husband--and, by implication, any other person--and thus should enjoy the same legal rights as he is, I think, the deepest, truest aspect of America's whole experiment with self-government, its whole civil religion, that one can imagine. The fact that hundreds of millions--and not just American citizens--have been inspired by this particular principle ought to be evidence enough of that, unless you're one of those reactionary or postliberal conservatives who thinks the very idea of popular sovereignty is an unfortunate canard.

I’ve associated America’s civil religion with the extension of basic democratic rights—most centrally the right to the vote, and thus the right to participate formally in the kind of collective self-governance which the United States, when understood in light of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, is founded upon—many, many, many times. I recognize the theoretical complications with doing so. What I’m doing is trying to connect what some would call “sentimental,” or “bland,” or even “anemic” liberal practices (and voting can certainly seem like all of the above, sometimes) with something tied up with deeply communitarian or cultural or even spiritual understandings of identity and belonging. Much of the scholarly writing on these topics tends to focus on “nationalism” or “patriotism,” and pose the question as to whether or not such feelings can ever be purely “civic,” or whether there needs to be (or inevitably, however unknowingly, must be) some kind of historical or ethnic or religious or linguistic or racial character to those senses of identity and belonging. Those in the latter camp (Vice President J.D. Vance quite obviously is, or at least wants to present himself as such) look upon the articulation of a civil religion or a sense of American identity that involves mostly just individuals exercising democratic freedoms and choices as nonsense.

My response to that—the response that makes me want to both keep those liberal freedoms and expand them and reclaim them when taken away, as my great-great-grandmother did—is to say that Vance, et al, have an exceptionally narrow understanding of how social ties and senses of belonging are formed in the first place. It is, I would argue, an unavoidable facet of human nature to want to understand the actions of individuals (including oneself) as embedded in some sort of collective, morally (and often religiously) substantive—that is, “truthful”—cultural order. This is the fundamentally dialogic character as human beings coming out: our ability to speak, think, associate, and judge impels us to retrieve from or construct through our social lives an arrangement of meaning. The result, as numerous religious historians have pointed out, is that the arguably “unsubstantive” civic actions that we take—like voting—themselves develop over time (through rituals and practices and terminology and traditions and more) into what might be called "voluntary national religious establishments." Not in the sense of an established church, but in the sense that there are forms of life and routines of expression that we come to rely upon, that we come to view as ordinary, or normal. And yes, as such norms develop and put down their roots, the question of defending them (as well as regularly critiquing them) becomes a part of the equation.

The paranoia some feel about how the changes which extending the notion of equality into ever more arenas and ever more aspects of life (from property and religion to race and gender, from voting and military service to marriage and participation in high school sports) may threaten those norms is not unreasonable. But what is unreasonable is the claim that the push and pull over our norms and social constructions, over the bonds and beliefs which constitute our civil and religious order(s), is itself somehow beside the point, and that really all that matters is some kind of sovereign declaration of identity. (Which necessitates a nation-state with a unified executive capable of issuing such declarations, perhaps.) Robert Putnam, the scholar who developed the idea of social capital, essentially concluded that the difficulties people like Vance highlight are short-term ones, ones that—in particular in immigrant societies like the U.S.—is always being negotiated by the emergence of “cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities.” That is substantive stuff—that’s what makes for strong citizens, and thus strong families and strong neighborhoods. (As my great-great-grandmother Kirkham put it, “how great is the mission of woman, and why should she not be able to have a voice to make law, to govern her sons and daughters?”)

As a matter of theory and history, the complications in making these connections are many. Saying that America’s Jeffersonian creed, the affirmation that “all men are created equal,” and that therefore—especially once the U.S. Constitution was forced, following the Civil War, to bring the principles of the Declaration into its fundamental law—the affirmation that American citizens by right enjoy the ability to vote and act and build lives unconstrained by some natural hierarchy, itself constitutes our civil religion, our “voluntary establishment,” in an entirely substantive and not merely “civic” way, is to claim a lot. Some would argue that it claims too much, and that it would be much better to seek to articulate a liberal vision of equality and democratic participation and anti-hierarchy without messing around with claims which necessarily require a faith in an establishing “people” who are substantively articulating themselves in the first place. I find those arguments fascinating. But I’m enough of a liberal republican, a believer in both individual democratic rights and in the places and communities—the many diverse publica of the American nation—wherein we collective exercise them, to trust that, whatever else was wrong with the Founders original understanding of this American experiment, these principles, the principles that my great-great-grandmother humbly hoped to be able to exercise again before she died, are ones that this country can still run with, can still both defend and critique, can still build upon.

I don’t think America has lost its civil religion yet. I still believe in the power of ordinary people to organize (as those women in the Lehi chapter of the Woman Suffrage Association of Utah were), to express themselves (as Martha Mercer Kirkham stood up to do), and to vote, thus placing themselves, as citizens, on the same level as everyone and anyone else. Understanding the challenge posed by those who threaten that which binds these practices, these perspectives, this power, together with their own personal demagogic declarations, whether as performers of anti-democratic epic theory or just plain old-fashioned bread and circuses, is probably the first step to making sure we won’t. 

 

 

Getting Direct About the Politics Behind Kansas’s August Amendment

Walking around my Wichita neighborhood over the past couple of weeks, I’ve noticed something about the yard signs encouraging people to “Vote No” on the constitutional amendment to allow for the popular election of Kansas Supreme Court justices come August 4. (Until just the past three days, I hadn’t seen with my own eyes any “Vote Yes” yard signs, but I have now seen a couple.) These yard signs are, in their color, font, and design, basically identical to many of the “Vote No” yard signs I saw around my neighborhood four years ago, when the vote to change the language of the Kansas state constitution so as to eliminate any judicial support for abortion rights was decisively defeated. Just look and see:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Relatedly, over the past few weeks my home has received about a half-dozen mailers encouraging a no vote this August. (We’ve received exactly one “yes” flyer thus far.) Two of those mailers were particularly emphatic, insisting that this vote is about keeping the Kansas Supreme Court “fair and impartial” and preventing “billionaire political donors” from influencing the justices by paying for the political campaigns judicial candidate would have to run to win a spot on the Court. I’ve no doubt about the sincerity of those who created these messages, and the arguments they’re making are entirely valid. But the fact that both were mailed by Planned Parenthood Great Plains, an organization dedicated to preserving abortion rights in Kansas, is worth noting nonetheless.

My point is simple. On the surface, the constitutional referendum Kansans will vote on this August 4 is simply a question about changing one of the elements of our state’s constitutional structure, a merit-based structure that emerged over 80 years ago, was first adopted in Missouri—Kansas adopted it about in 1958—and was quickly adopted by many other states concerned about corruption in partisan election judicial-selection systems that were then common (though in recent decades has been rejected by voters in multiple states seeking greater democratic accountability from their justices as well). But substantively, this constitutional referendum is actually a vote about possible policy outcomes—and while that’s usually not being said by those most engaged in the campaign both for and against the referendum, I suspect that pretty much everyone paying attention already knows it.

Earlier this month, Amii Castle, a law professor at the University of Kansas, said this quiet part out loud, using the very words of some of the strongest Republican backers of the amendment—Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, and Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson—to show that this proposed amendment is rooted explicitly in the failure of the 2022 anti-abortion amendment, and the desire to get different judges on the Supreme Court so as to get different rulings regarding abortion rights in Kansas. Knowing that, why shouldn’t those who want to defend those rights campaign on the same terms as well?

Castle, though, received some push-back on social media and elsewhere for being so explicit, with some of those opposed to the amendment insisting that constitutional principles of judicial neutrality supposedly protected through Kansas’s current, somewhat complicated system of choosing Supreme Court justices (nomination by a judicial commission, appointment by governor, and retention elections at the conclusion of a judge’s term) are the paramount concern.

As someone who teaches the arguments over those constitutional principles, I respect the claims of those—including some former members of the Kansas Supreme Court itself—who believe that Kansas’s procedure for choosing justices is worth preserving simply on its own terms. But as someone who is also theoretically suspicious of most efforts to keep the messiness of electoral politics out of the judicial side of our government, I find myself rather more appreciative of those who choose instead to present the possible policy consequences of electing the members of the Supreme Court more directly

Does this mean that I don’t respect Kansas’s system for choosing Supreme Court justices? Not at all—I can see the civic virtues of the prioritization of professionalism and at least nominal nonpartisanship in our selection process. But I can also see its democratic flaws. For example, the fact that despite numerous contentious decisions over the nearly 70 years during which this system has been in place in our state, not a single Kansas state Supreme Court justice has ever lost their retention election, provides—at least to my mind—just as much evidence of the limitations of the democratic checks upon our appointed state justices as do Kansas’s gerrymandered congressional districts when it comes to questions of democratic representation.

Many might challenge me right here—in what sense should “democratic checks” or “democratic representation” be at all relevant to the judicial branch in the state of Kansas, or anywhere else? Isn’t the judicial branch supposed to be counter-majoritarian, a set of referees and umpires who are not playing the political games of democracy, but who rather are simply imposing the apolitical rules and processes of the majesty of the law?

Responding to that challenge would require me to get into the “theoretical suspicions” I referenced above. Specifically, my two-fold suspicions that 1) the emergence of the idea of an independent judiciary actually does not match the historical struggle toward creating a system wherein the democratic sovereignty of the people was both recognized as legitimate and hopefully made somewhat compatible with good government (it is worth noting that, originally, judicial elections were seen as a way of ensuring judicial independence, by allowing “the people,” rather than legislative, professional, or political elites, to choose who will administer the courts); and 2) that the actual practices of preserving judicial independence from the messy political reality of a people working through their governing structure so as to exercise that sovereignty don’t actually accomplish what people—many of them judges—think they do. (As one scholar put it pithily over 25 years ago, stating calmly what millions who have watched the Roberts court rule on voting rights, presidential immunity, and more over the past 15 years, "The assumption that independent judges use their freedom to decide impartially according to the law is contradicted by the empirical evidence.")

But rather than hauling out my legislative supremacist bona fides and rehearsing my radical small-d democratic recriminations about judicial review and unelected and unaccountable judges, etc., etc., let me take the more reasonable route. If I might have at one time taken a more burn-it-all-down position, age—and the lessons of Donald Trump’s presidency—have made me more sympathetic to finding ways to preserve the accomplishments of bourgeois constitutionalism, even as we need to focus radical critiques more directly to where changes to its legal and socio-economic structures are most needed. In the meantime, I agree that it’s important that we retain at least some belief in the supposedly non-partisan, supposedly apolitical character of the judiciary—what another scholar called the “secular religion of constitutionalism,” the faith that the “rule of law” will continue to work so long as we “believe it works.” The complicated, practical question is, to quote one more legal theorist, “when (if ever) does the cost of enabling judges to act upon their political preferences or attitudes by insulating them from democratic accountability exceed the benefits of protecting them from threats to their tenure that compromise their capacity to adhere to the rule of law?”

Viewed this way, the proposed amendment to be voted on in Kansas this August really comes down to a specific accounting of likely political costs. For me, that means that Kansas’s merit-based system for selecting judges has, simply for a variety of unpredictable historical, political, and sociological reasons—the occasional tendency of Kansans, as an unconscious counter to the overwhelming Republican majorities elected to the state legislature, to elect Democrats to the judicial-appointment-making governorship? the concentration of Kansas lawyers (and thus possible members of the Kansas Supreme Court Nominating Commission, or for that matter actual possible Supreme Court candidates) in a handful of more urban, actually growing Kansas counties? something else?—worked pretty well, insofar as protecting basic liberal rights are concerned. Hence, my appreciation of those who look at the campaign over this proposed amendment, like the makers of the yard signs I mentioned above, and see it in terms of the substantive political possibilities inseparable from it.

When defenders of the current system make it a matter of high principle—judicial impartiality!—I can’t help but want to dive into the relevant theoretical and historical arguments, and ask for evidence why I should believe that the highest court in our state judiciary somehow would be fundamentally broken by obliging it to operate like the state supreme courts of more of more than 20 other states. But if you just make it all about the politics which arguably are unavoidably interwoven into any judicial decision anyway? Then my vote—especially since the language of the amendment gives no guarantee that any hypothetical election system that our Republican legislature may set up would be non-partisan or based on particular districts, both of which are in my opinion good balancing tools when it comes to electing judges—is clear. And my bet is that, remembering 2022, the votes of most other Kansas will be the same.

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.