Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Saturday, November 9, 2019

The Weakness of Divine Sovereignty Expressed in Love (Mr. Roger's Neighborhood)


Fred Rogers, late 1960s.jpg
Rogers on the set of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in the late 1960s

When watching the remake of Mr Rogers with Tom Hanks consider how this Presbyterian pastor spoke of love repeatedly in his shows and through his life. If we chose to love others with God's help we'll be given God's help; if we chose not to love others or ourself than God will not force us to do otherwise.

This is the meaning of libertarian freedom within that aspect of God's divine sovereignty. The real power of God lies not in doing something He can't do but in what He can do... boiled down to its simplest form, it is God's refusal to ever go back on His promise to love creation or not.

God will love and He will love always. But it takes two in this life to return love and to produce love amongst creation and to each other. God ever loves but it takes our acceptance of His love beginning with Jesus' atonement to pass it along.

The true power of God is not containing evil from its results but removing its affects and influences through the power of His love onto and throughout creation. This kind of sovereignty is therefore most notable for the "weakness" of its character and exercise. Love is ever frail before the might of sin and evil. Yet, like gravity, the smallest and weakest of all the nuclear forces, God's love reaches across the universe to accelerate, or pull back in, all stronger forces resisting it.

Throughout the bible both Jesus and the disciples speak to God's love as being weak in that He gave of Himself to destroy sin's power and in resurrection power declared that it will no longer rule forever. That through His sacrificial atonement to fallen creation this same creation may now be restored on the basis of His own atoning sovereignty... weak in form and in betrayal but strong in the actuating forces of selfless, sacrificial, serving love.

R.E. Slater
November 9, 2019



* * * * * * * * * * * * *


Was Mr. Rogers an open and relational theologian? In a new Atlantic article, he's quoted as writing this: "At the heart of the original creation is that Word (call it Love, call it Grace, call it Peace …) that essence which is lodged somewhere within each of us that longs for ultimate expression. If we choose to allow it to grow we’ll be given help. If we choose otherwise we won’t be forced. If there is such a thing as a “dark corner” of God’s nature then I think it’s God’s refusal to go back on the promise of “the creation’s freedom to love or not.”" (Thanks to JR Madill Forasteros for alerting me to this article.)

Thomas J. Oord


* * * * * * * * * * * * *



My Friend Mister Rogers

I first met him 21 years ago, and now our relationship is the subject of a new movie. He’s never been more revered—or more misunderstood.

A long time ago, a man of resourceful and relentless kindness saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. He trusted me when I thought I was untrustworthy, and took an interest in me that went beyond my initial interest in him. He was the first person I ever wrote about who became my friend, and our friendship endured until he died. Now a movie has been made from the story I wrote about him, which is to say “inspired by” the story I wrote about him, which is to say that in the movie my name is Lloyd Vogel and I get into a fistfight with my father at my sister’s wedding.

I did not get into a fistfight with my father at my sister’s wedding. My sister didn’t have a wedding. And yet the movie, called A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, seems like a culmination of the gifts that Fred Rogers gave me and all of us, gifts that fit the definition of grace because they feel, at least in my case, undeserved. I still don’t know what he saw in me, why he decided to trust me, or what, to this day, he wanted from me, if anything at all. He puzzles me now as much as he did when I first met him at the door of the apartment he kept in New York City, dressed, as he’d warned me when we spoke on the phone and he invited me over, in a shabby blue bathrobe and a pair of slippers. Fred was, let’s not forget, a rather peculiar man, and it is not just his goodness but rather the peculiarity of his goodness that has made him, 16 years after his death, triumphant as a symbol of human possibility, although just about everything he stood for has been lost.

I met Fred Rogers in 1998, when Esquire assigned me a story about him for a special issue on American heroes. I last spoke with him on Christmas Day 2002, when I called him to talk about an argument I’d had with my cousin; he died two months later, on February 27, 2003. In late 2014, I heard from two screenwriters, Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blue, who were interested in using my Esquire story as the basis of a movie, and in January 2018, I received a call from the movie’s producer with the news that Tom Hanks had been cast as Fred Rogers, which meant, emphatically, that the movie would be made. A few months after that, I visited the set in Pittsburgh, where I met Matthew Rhys, the actor who had agreed to play … well, me, or some variant of me, a cynical journalist who in the end proves amenable to Fred’s life lessons—his ministry.

I had been thinking of starting this story at one of those points of departure, at one of those beginnings or one of those endings. But stories don’t only speak; they are spoken to, by the circumstances under which they are written. And so I have to start by mentioning that I have begun writing a story about Mister Rogers the day after two young men armed with assault rifles killed a total of 31 people in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.

I am often asked what Fred would have made of our time—what he would have made of Donald Trump, what he would have made of Twitter, what he would have made of what is generally called our “polarization” but is in fact the discovery that we don’t like our neighbors very much once we encounter them proclaiming their political opinions on social media. I often hear people say that they wish Fred were still around to offer his guidance and also that they are thankful he is gone, because at least he has been spared from seeing what we have become. In all of this, there is something plaintive and a little desperate, an unspoken lament that he has left us when we need him most, as though instead of dying of stomach cancer he was assumed by rapture, abandoning us to our own devices and the judgment implicit in his absence.

What would Fred Rogers—Mister Rogers—have made of El Paso and Dayton, of mass murder committed to fulfill the dictates of an 8chan manifesto? What, for that matter, would he have made of the anti-Semitic massacre that took place last fall in his real-life Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill? The easy answer is that it is impossible to know, because he was from a different world, one almost as alien to us now as our mob-driven world of performative slaughters would be to him. But actually, I think I do know, because when I met him, one of the early school shootings had just taken place, in West Paducah, Kentucky—eight students shot while they gathered in prayer. Though an indefatigably devout man, he did not attempt to characterize the shootings as an attack on the faithful; instead, he seized on the news that the 14-year-old shooter had gone to school telling his classmates that he was about to do something “really big,” and he asked, “Oh, wouldn’t the world be a different place if he had said, ‘I’m going to do something really little tomorrow’?” Fred decided to devote a whole week of his television show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, to the theme of “little and big,” encouraging children to embrace the diminutive nature of their bodies and their endeavors—to understand that big has to start little.


Fred Rogers was a children’s-TV host, but he was not Captain Kangaroo or Officer Joe Bolton. He was an ordained Presbyterian minister who was so appalled by what he saw on 1950s television—adults trying to entertain children by throwing pies in each other’s faces—that he joined the medium as a reformer. He considered the space between the television set and the eyes of his audience sacred, and from 1966 to 2000 he taped nearly 1,000 episodes of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, trying to make that space less profane. And although he made his living speaking to children, his message and example endure because he found a way to speak to all of us—to speak to children as respectfully as he spoke to adults and to speak to adults as simply as he spoke to children. Such fluency was the result not of spontaneous enthusiasm but rather of the rigorous editing he brought to bear on himself and everyone around him. When I first visited The Neighborhood 21 years ago, one of his in-house writers, Hedda Sharapan, told me what had happened when he’d enlisted her to write a manual intended to teach doctors how to talk to children. She worked hard on it, using all her education and experience in the field of child development, but when she handed him her opening, he crossed out what she’d written and replaced it with six words: “You were a child once too.”


And that’s it, really—his message to doctors was his message to politicians, CEOs, celebrities, educators, writers, students, everyone. It was also the basis of his strange superpowers. He wanted us to remember what it was like to be a child so that he could talk to us; he wanted to talk to us so that we could remember what it was like to be a child. And he could talk to anyone, believing that if you remembered what it was like to be a child, you would remember that you were a child of God.

The question, then, isn’t what Fred would do, what Fred would say, in the face of outrage and horror, because Fred was the most stubbornly consistent of men. He would say that Donald Trump was a child once too. He would say that the latest Twitter victim or villain was a child once too. He would even say that the mass murderers of El Paso and Dayton were children once too—that, in fact, they were very nearly still children, at 21 and 24 years old, respectively—and he would be heartbroken that children have become both the source and the target of so much animus. He would pray for the shooters as well as for their victims, and he would continue to urge us, in what has become one of his most oft quoted lines, to “look for the helpers.”

There is no doubt that he would try to be one of the helpers. The question is whether a man who saw evil in terms of big and little would be able to help.


What do you think is going on here?” Bill Isler asked me one morning when we were driving to Fred’s hometown of Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Bill was the president of Fred’s company, Family Communications, and he hadn’t wanted Fred to cooperate with my story, because he had read my stories and knew the cruelty I was capable of. I had not yet emerged from the state of disrepute I’d entered when, in the first cover story I wrote for Esquire, I did an elaborate rhetorical dance around the sexuality of Kevin Spacey, a story of coy ill will that fooled no one. We’d been out to make a splash, and we did, earning national opprobrium and prompting Spacey’s agent to urge a Hollywood boycott of me and the magazine.

Indeed, I was assigned the story about Fred because one of the editors at Esquire thought it would be amusing to have me, with my stated determination to “say the unsayable,” write about the nicest man in the world. I was too old to have grown up watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and knew him primarily as the parodied version of himself. Now Fred was in the passenger seat of the car in front of us, writing scripts for his show, and I was with his brusque protector, who’d had no better luck protecting Fred than I’d had getting Fred to answer my questions.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m writing a story about Fred and he’s cooperating?”
“Come on,” Bill said. “Do you think this happens all the time?”
“ ‘This’?”
“This! Latrobe! The time he’s given you! He’s taking you to his parents’ grave, for God’s sake!”
“He’s Mister Rogers. Isn’t that what he does?”
“Don’t act naive. We have reporters come through here all the time. They come in the morning, they talk to Fred for 20 minutes, they go home at the end of the day and write their stories. You’re different. He’s taken an interest in you.” And here he emitted a mischievous chuckle.
“There’s nothing I can do about it, but there’s nothing you can do about it either,” he said, and an hour later I saw Mister Rogers urinating behind a tree in a cemetery.

To this day, I have no idea why Fred Rogers decided to be my friend, other than the obvious: I got lucky, and I was a child once too. But not only was his friendship enduring; his interest was abiding, and he frequently expressed it in the emails he sent from his AOL account, ZZZ143. Like the choreographed gestures he used every day on his show, his email address was intended to signify, the “ZZZ” attesting to the pacific fact that he slept soundly through the night, the “143” expressing both the number of letters required to say each word in “I love you” and the Planck’s constant of his weight every time he stepped on a scale.


For as long as I knew him, we corresponded, and recently some of that correspondence resurfaced when I did a data recovery on a 21-year-old laptop moldering away in my attic. I found 70 emails in all, each from the first year of our friendship, and each very much in keeping with the man I met, profiled, and eventually asked my deepest and most troubling questions. The emails are revealing in exactly the way Fred was revealing and obfuscatory in exactly the way he was obfuscatory. He disclosed very little about himself, even to his wife, Joanne—“Oh, he never told me anything,” she says now. But as a correspondent he was emotionally forthcoming and intimate, closing often with the assurance that he kept me in his thoughts and his prayers—“And, I guess you know, each morning I pray for you; I really do”—and sometimes with ministerial ardor. “You are loved with a greater love than anyone could ever imagine, Tom. I trust that you’ll never ever forget that.”

His emails were, like so much of what he wrote to so many he wrote to, love letters. Occasionally, he reported on his worldly endeavors—for instance, sharing the question he asked when he met the Dalai Lama: “When you were taken to Lhasa at age 5 were your parents allowed to come along?” But mostly, he wrote about faith, risking “heretical” notions in answer to what he called my “big questions.” Was God good? Was I? Fred’s faith in God was unshakable, and so was his faith in goodness itself. “God’s nature has grown and grown and grown all through the ages,” he wrote on October 25, 1998.

Yet at the heart of the original creation is that Word (call it Love, call it Grace, call it Peace …) that essence which is lodged somewhere within each of us that longs for ultimate expression. If we choose to allow it to grow we’ll be given help. If we choose otherwise we won’t be forced. If there is such a thing as a “dark corner” of God’s nature then I think it’s God’s refusal to go back on the promise of “the creation’s freedom to love or not.”

He was more overtly religious in his emails than he was in conversation or on television. “You’re moving very close to the Eternal, Tom,” he wrote on November 11, 1998. “And what’s more you’re recognizing that presence.”

It is a truism by now that there was no difference between Fred Rogers and Mister Rogers, that Fred was always Fred. It also happens to be true. He was implacably on message, because the message was in the fiber of his friendships. He worked hard on his friendships; he prepared for his friendships; he took notes on his friendships; he even kept files on his friendships, and not long ago I found out that he’d kept a file on me. The files are in his archives, at Saint Vincent College, in Latrobe; apparently they are extensive—box after box of information and inspiration concerning those he loved—and in one of those boxes are the names of my wife, my dogs, and one of my nieces, who was facing trouble and for whom he prayed. There are also printouts of our correspondence and notes he took on our phone conversations, written on yellow legal pads in his eerily calligraphic hand.

Does this freak me out? No, because I used to wonder how he did it—how he was available to so many people, on so many different occasions. Now I know. I also remember that for all his scrupulous preparation, his conversation was never canned, but rather questing and free. Once, when I called to tell him the story of five people stopping their cars to help an ancient and enormous snapping turtle across a highway exit ramp in Atlanta, he asked if I was going to write about it. I said no, and asked him why he thought it might make a good story. And this was his response: “Because whenever people come together to help either another person or another creature, something has happened, and everyone wants to know about it—because we all long to know that there’s a graciousness at the heart of creation.”

I was 40 when I first met him, unsure that the work for which I was celebrated had not come at the cost of my humanity. I was 44 when I spoke with him for the last time, grateful that he had helped give my wife, Janet, and me the courage to finally begin the process of adopting our daughter. On Christmas Eve 2002, one of my cousins called our house, in his holiday cups and outraged that the year before I had chosen to obey an exacting deadline rather than attend the funeral of his father, whom I loved. Janet answered, and when she told him I wasn’t home, he took his anger out on her. I talked with him later; we argued and called it a night. But Janet couldn’t sleep, and in the small hours she found solace by asking, as both of us sometimes did and to this day sometimes do: “What would Mister Rogers do?”

The spirit of Mister Rogers counseled her to forgive the insults, and after she told me her story in the morning, I called Fred. “Thank you for calling, my dear,” he said, in a voice whose frailty I assigned to age and the morning hour. “How like you, to call on Christmas morning. How like you, to tell me that story.”

How like you. He had different things he told different people, and “how like you” was one of the things he told me, in his ongoing effort to convince me that I was a good person. It was the last thing he said to me, without telling me that he was already sick, that he was already in pain, that he was already dying. He told very few of his friends, as it turned out, and from the first time we spoke to the last, I was the kind of friend who told him things. I was not the kind of friend he told things to.


A note Fred Rogers sent to the author after they met in 1998 (Photograph: Grant Cornett; Courtesy of Tom Junod)

It was just the sort of providential timing that Fred enjoyed—that made him believe the universe was not only a loving place but also a humorous one. I was in Florida, in the spring of 2016. I had parked in front of the house where I was about to do the first interview for the book I had decided to write about my father. I was getting out of the car when my phone rang, with a call from an excited Micah Fitzerman-Blue about the Mister Rogers movie.

“Noah and I finished a draft of our script! We’re very happy with it!”
“That’s fantastic!” I said.
“And we want you to read it with an open mind!”
“Open mind?” I asked.
“Well, basically everything in the script that’s about the relationship between you and Fred is very accurate!”
“That’s good!”
“But everything else—the relationship between you and your father and you and your wife—is made up!”

I read a copy of the script over the weekend, with an open mind. On Monday morning, I wrote Micah and Noah back, along with Peter Saraf, the producer at Big Beach, the company that had optioned my Esquire story, and asked them to change my name and the names of my family members. And that’s how I became Lloyd Vogel.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like the script. I did, especially the innovation of making the entire movie an episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, with the character of Fred Rogers speaking directly to the audience about the character of Tom Junod. And it wasn’t that I objected to the script’s fundamental premise, which was that my relationship with Fred was driven by the complexities of my relationship with my father, portrayed as a boozy philandering lounge act so down-at-the-heels that he sleeps in his Cadillac. My father, Lou Junod, was a boozy philanderer, to be sure. But he was also a fetishist of his own fragrant masculinity, the glories of which he expounded upon and prevailed on me to accept and evangelize in turn, as when, dressing for work, he would coat himself with oil, splash himself with Jean Naté, and then stand between me and his enormous mirror in nothing but black bikini underwear and implore me to “look—look at this body.”

I was well aware of his eccentricity, but unlike my character in the script, I had never rejected him or his message, which was that nothing is more important about a man than the way he looks, the way he carries himself, and the mystery of what my father called his “allure.” I hadn’t become a hard-bitten investigative journalist consumed by anger, but rather an ebullient charmer concerned by my capacity for silken cruelties committed in the name of revelation. I idolized my father, despite my mother’s warnings. I was seduced by him, and once I attained a degree of success I worried that I had no choice but to follow in the Bally-loafered footsteps of the man who had caused me—and my serially betrayed mother—such pain.

I responded to Fred’s entreaties not only because he offered me a different way of being a man but also because he was a seducer in his own right, with a different brand of charm. Fred gave me what I needed then and still need now: a choice. He allowed me to choose between two visions of manhood, a choice I suspect I’ll have to continue making for the rest of my life, which is why I’m writing my book and which is why I asked the producers of the movie to change the names. I’m writing the truth about Tom and Lou Junod. I decided to let Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blue tell the truth about Lloyd and Jerry Vogel.

That’s what I told myself, anyway, because what I really thought was that it wouldn’t matter—the movie wasn’t going to get made. Then one morning in January 2018, my phone rang again, with a call from Peter Saraf, the producer at Big Beach. “I just wanted to tell you that we’ve cast the role of Fred,” he said. “It’s Tom Hanks, and it changes everything.”


It wasn’t the only thing that changed everything. Fred had been dead for nearly 15 years, and the changes in the world since then meant that the stakes were so much higher now. The story was no longer just about a midlife journalist choosing what kind of man he wanted to be; it was the story of a people choosing what kind of country we want to live in. And yet I kept my distance from the movie, and the character of Lloyd Vogel, even when the part went to Matthew Rhys, who, as the uxorious Russian spy in The Americans, expertly played the tortured nice guy capable of cruelties not just silken but appalling. He’s not me, I kept assuring myself, and the story is no longer mine.

But then I traveled to the set in Pittsburgh, where I met Matthew, with his abashed smile and his watchful spaniel eyes, and, um, Mr. Hanks, with his professional good cheer. They were obliging, and sat with me for obligatory photographs in the meticulously reconstructed milieu of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. And that, strangely, was the encounter that moved me most of all—the encounter with the past. Matthew Rhys might have been playing Lloyd Vogel, but he was dressed as I used to dress back in the late ’90s, in a black mock turtleneck and an Armani blazer. The Neighborhood had been worn, almost seedy, when Fred was opening the door each day and trying to turn it into sacred ground. But there it was again, rebuilt from scratch, at once brand-new and 20 years longer in the tooth. And there I was, overwhelmingly aware that the only part of my life that someone had bothered to put back together piece by piece was the set of a children’s television show. It was part of my life. And now, once again, so was Fred.

I saw a rough cut of the movie this summer. I was alone in a screening room in New York City. I found a place in the array of red-leather seats and sat down. Suddenly the screen filled with light, I heard a familiarly tinkling piano, and Mister Rogers was talking to me—to us. Now, I should note that I was a paid participant in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. I have a financial stake in its success. I am not an objective judge of it. But I have to admit as well that I had been worried about it after I visited the set in the fall, because Tom Hanks seemed too hale and hearty—too big—to play 143-pound Fred Rogers, and Matthew Rhys too dour and hangdog to play “Lloyd Vogel,” emphasis on the quotation marks. Those qualms disappeared as soon as Tom started talking, and as soon as I saw Matthew’s eyes. They were the same watchful eyes I’d seen when I met him in person, so dark they were almost black, but now they were brimming with something recognizable, at least to me—hurt, hope. It wasn’t that he was me; it was that he had something of mine, as though he were a pickpocket, or as though I’d gone to Ancestry.com, stumbled on the page of some distant cousin, and discovered that we were born in the same hour of the same day.

I had counted on the plot’s many departures from my life to insulate me from the emotional effect of seeing some version of myself up there, but in the screening room I had no such protection, because the director, Marielle Heller, had been so faithful to the essence of the story. A long time ago, a man had seen something in me I hadn’t seen in myself, and now I was watching him see something in me and couldn’t help but ask, all over again: Who was he? Who was I? And what did he see? “You love people like me,” Matthew Rhys tells Tom Hanks. And when Hanks asks, “What are people like you?,” Rhys answers, “Broken people.” And that broke me, though I had never uttered those words to Fred in my life. He saw something in me, yes. Did he also see through me? Was my brokenness so obvious to him back then? Was Fred’s offer of friendship also a form of judgment?

When the lights came up, I staggered out of that theater like a drunk, my eyes still wet, relieved but also exhausted, and took a seat on a park bench where truly broken people were slumped. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again I saw the afternoon sunlight of New York City shining on the bald head of my friend David Granger, who’d edited my original story for Esquire 21 years earlier. He wasn’t supposed to be there; he wasn’t scheduled to be there; he had no reason to be there, except for the reason Fred liked to offer when the universe gave him a surprise: “You just never know.”

Puppet: Andy Gent; photograph: Grant Cornett; prop styling: Anna Surbatovich

It was the summer of 2018, and so it was the summer of Fred. It was also the summer of incivility—the summer when the very idea of civility was up for debate—and one night, in Tampa, Florida, the two converged.

It was the summer of Fred because of the release of Morgan Neville’s beautiful documentary about him, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, which became the highest-grossing biographical documentary ever. It was the summer of incivility because some progressive activists had decided that civility was a luxury we could no longer afford, an instrument of an intolerable status quo. How could we bother with civility when children were being put in cages? Two members of the Trump administration, Stephen Miller and Kirstjen Nielsen, were publicly scolded and shamed when they ate at restaurants in Washington, D.C., and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, then Trump’s press secretary, was refused service in Virginia.

Then, on June 22, Florida’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, attended a showing of Won’t You Be My Neighbor? in downtown Tampa, and was confronted by protesters who condemned her for her legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act and her silence in the face of the administration’s family separations at the southern border. They yelled at her and called her a “horrible person,” and when I spoke with her a year later, she told me that they’d tried to stop her from entering the theater, shouted in her face with such vehemence that she was flecked with spit, and bullied her boyfriend in an attempt to provoke a fight. She watched the movie, but she was “shaking the whole time,” and when she was on her way out of the theater they accosted her again, videotaping her as she attempted to go to her car. On the tape, a woman is heard yelling: “Would Mister Rogers take children away from their parents? Would Mister Rogers take away health insurance? … What would Mister Rogers think about you and your legacy in Florida, taking away health insurance from people with preexisting conditions? Pam Bondi, shame on you!” Remembering him as a nice man is easier than thinking of him as a demanding one.

Fred Rogers was not a particularly political man, despite the fame he won for going to Capitol Hill in 1969 and fighting for the survival of public television. In all the conversations we had over the years, I can remember only one about politics, when in the last year of his life he worried about the inevitable buildup toward the inevitable war in Iraq. In our correspondence, he limited political discussion to a single email about Bill Clinton’s impeachment, which came as an answer to one of my questions:

Last week I woke up thinking how I would like to go on the air and say something like “Whoever is without sin cast the first stone” or “The Lord’s property is always to have mercy” or some other outlandish thing, and then ask for a minute of silence to think about forgiveness for those who want it. In fact if our country could dwell on forgiveness for a while I think that would be the one real positive outcome of the pain which must be pervasive in the White House and beyond. I’ve already written letters to both the Clintons and the Gores saying that often “enormous growth comes out of enormous pain.” I trust that will be so for all of us. The attitude which makes me (sometimes physically) sick is the “holier than thou” one.

It was not a political answer, because it was an answer to everything. And yet from that email—from that everything—one can hazard a guess about Fred’s answers to the questions shouted at Pam Bondi in Tampa. It’s obvious that he would have been saddened by our country’s continued refusal to provide health care to all its citizens. It’s obvious that he would have been devastated by the cruelties committed in our name at the border, and shaken by our lack of mercy in all things, particularly our policies toward helpless children. But even more obvious is what his position would have been regarding the civility debate.


Fred was a man with a vision, and his vision was of the public square, a place full of strangers, transformed by love and kindness into something like a neighborhood. That vision depended on civility, on strangers feeling welcome in the public square, and so civility couldn’t be debatable. It couldn’t be subject to politics but rather had to be the very basis of politics, along with everything else worthwhile.

Indeed, what makes measuring Fred’s legacy so difficult is that Fred’s legacy is so clear. What he would have thought of Pam Bondi’s politics is one thing; what he would have thought of Pam Bondi is quite another, because he prayed for the strength to think the same way about everyone. She is special; there has never been anyone exactly like her, and there never will be anyone exactly like her ever again; God loves her exactly as she is. He repeated this over and over, and that his name was invoked as a cudgel by activists who probably shed tears over the documentary has haunted me since I first saw the video from Tampa. It isn’t that he is revered but not followed so much as he is revered because he is not followed—because remembering him as a nice man is easier than thinking of him as a demanding one. He spoke most clearly through his example, but our culture consoles itself with the simple fact that he once existed. There is no use asking further questions of him, only of ourselves. We know what Mister Rogers would do, but even now we don’t know what to do with the lessons of Mister Rogers.



I remember where I was when I found out he was gone. I sat at my desk early in the morning and opened up my laptop to AOL, which I still used, in part because Fred did. I hadn’t heard from him in a while, but kept expecting to, and then I did: There was a picture of him on the “AOL News” page. I didn’t even read the headline. I began to weep, and woke up Janet: “Mister Rogers died!”

But I also remember where I was when I realized he was not coming back. It was just this year, and I had gone to my alma mater, SUNY Albany, which had been rechristened the University at Albany, for a showing of Won’t You Be My Neighbor? I was watching the movie for the third time, and toward the end Fred said something in a late-in-life interview I somehow hadn’t heard before—that “the real job that we have” was to “make goodness attractive in the so-called next millennium.”

His words struck me as prophetic, but also, because they were some 20 years old and I knew how it all turned out, as an epitaph. Of course, we have failed the challenge, and failed it utterly, to the extent that nobody except perhaps Ellen DeGeneres will even take it up. And that’s when it hit me: He has no successors.


"Won’t You Be My Neighbor?" became so popular because it makes people cry unashamedly, because it shows what radical kindness actually looks like, because it depicts a man who gave his life to what turned out to be a hopeless cause—the cause of sacralizing mass media. He was a genius; he had superpowers; he might as well have been a friendly alien, thrown upon the rocks of our planet to help us find our way to the impossible possibility that we are loved. But he lost.

He knew what he was up against; he knew from the start that the fragmentation of the jump cut would lead to the fragmentation of everything else, and that the fragmentation of everything else would lead us to the first and final temptation, the temptation of hatred. He lost, because the great conceit of the internet is that it has unveiled and unmasked us, that it shows us as we really are and our neighbors as they really are, and that hate is more viral than love. How would Fred Rogers have responded to Twitter? He would have signed up for an account, @ZZZ143, #YouAreSpecial; he was not one to back away from the fray. But Twitter is a platform consecrated to the eternal pie fight—to the purposes of protest, complaint, and particularly punishment—where nobody is special and nobody is invulnerable. Who would have been Fred’s first troll? Who would have taken it upon themselves to “school” Fred, to “call him out,” to “educate” him? Who would have told him that his faith in us was misplaced, and informed him—and us—that Mister Rogers was wrong?

We went out after the movie, a bunch of us convened by the "New York State Writers Institute," sitting at a long table in downtown Albany. I sat at one end, and toward the close of the evening a woman named Theresa Bourgeois came over from the other end and sat next to me. She introduced herself and said, “You don’t know me, but I have a question to ask. What are you going to do now?”
“What am I going to do?”
“Yes. What are you going to do with this moment? Fred Rogers gave it to you. What are you going to do with it?”

In 1998, I wrote a story about Fred Rogers; in 2019, that story has turned out to be my moral lottery ticket. I’d believed that my friendship with Fred was part of my past; now I find myself in possession of a vast, unearned fortune of love and kindness at a time when love and kindness are in short supply. I keep telling myself that I don’t know how to answer Theresa’s question, that I don’t know what to do next, because Fred never asked anything of me. But of course he did. I have read his old emails, and I can see that he was very clear about what he wanted from me and everybody else. He never stooped to proselytizing. But he lived a life of prayer, and he wanted us—he wanted me—to pray.


On September 5, 1998, Fred Rogers wrote an email after I asked him whether he had seen the big movie of the day, Saving Private Ryan, and whether he had ever contemplated the possibility of military service. He answered as follows:

Dear Tom,
No, we didn’t see Pvt. Ryan. Joanne didn’t want to and I guess I didn’t either. I remember so well those days when we huddled around the radio listening to the news of battles and finally the war’s end. I remember the V days and the release of the prisoners. In fact I remember crying when I heard about the release of the prisoners. I think we all have certain prisons within us, and such news “releases” are sometimes … in some hearts … taken very personally.
I have no idea how I would have responded to a call to the war. I may have had to do alternate service … as did the "Friends". I have a friend (not a Quaker friend) who was in the Ambulance Corps. I would have probably been good at something like that. I would not have been good at shooting people though; I don’t think I could have done that.

There are a lot of people who still believe what they read about Fred on the internet—that he was a Navy SEAL who wore sweaters to cover the tattoos on his arms, each one celebrating a proud kill. I saw him standing in a locker room after his daily swim, naked as a jaybird, and can attest that his arms remained innocent of ink. But I guess that people have to call him a warrior simply to account for him, for the peculiar power of his pacifism, and in some ways they have him exactly right, as well as his wife, Joanne. Though they both called me “My dear,” they were warriors, the both of them, and Joanne remains so at 91, with her gap-toothed smile and her mobcap of curls and her twinkling eyes and her merry chuckle. I traveled to Pittsburgh for the premiere of Won’t You Be My Neighbor? simply to see her again, and when I did see her she was bleeding from a gash on her cheek. She had fallen on her way to the car sent to pick her up, but she had gotten up and now she was exchanging greetings with friends and well-wishers without any alarm or even self-consciousness about the rivulet of bright-red blood flowing down her face. “Oh, that,” she said when I asked about it. “You don’t think I’m going to let a thing like that get in the way of watching the movie, do you?”

As for Fred: It’s true that he lost, and that the digitization of all human endeavor has devoured his legacy as eagerly as it has devoured everything else. But that he stands at the height of his reputation 16 years after his death shows the persistence of a certain kind of human hunger—the hunger for goodness. He had faith in us, and even if his faith turns out to have been misplaced, even if we have abandoned him, he somehow endures, standing between us and our electrified antipathies and recriminations like the "Tank Man of Tiananmen Square" in a red sweater. He is a warrior, all right, because he is not just unarmed, outgunned, outnumbered; he is long gone, and yet he keeps up the fight.

And now he is being played by Tom Hanks, who also played the doomed hero John Miller in Saving Private Ryan. When I met Tom on the set of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, I was struck by how cordial he was and how hardworking—that he worked as hard on his cordiality as he did on everything else. He has this in common with Fred, who was a good man who worked very hard at goodness. Tom’s presence on the set moved me, because I kept thinking of John Miller, a character in a movie Fred and Joanne Rogers couldn’t bring themselves to watch. He dies to save the life of the eponymous private, to whom he says, with his last breaths, “Earn this. Earn it.” The last thing Fred Rogers ever said to me was “How like you.” He gave so much to me, so much trust and friendship, without asking me to earn it. But still I wonder whether I have. Still I find myself asking for his blessing, and like the aged Private Ryan after he walks away from the grave of the officer who rescued him, I issue a plea that sounds a little bit like a prayer:

Tell me I’m a good man. Tell me I’ve lived a good life, then tell me what to do now.

*This article appears in the December 2019 print edition with the headline “What Would Mister Rogers Do?”



The Best of Mr. Rogers





Mr Rogers Interview Love




Saturday, October 5, 2019

Thomas J. Oord - Where Is God When We Need Him?



The Shack (2017 Movie) Official Trailer – Believe



The Shack is Right, But…

by Thomas Jay Oord
October 1st, 2019


Wm. Paul Young’s best-selling book, The Shack, tackles questions about God, love, and evil. Young weaves positive themes to offer helpful answers. The book (and movie) continues to spark helpful conversations. (Click the video photo for my theological review).



The Plot

The plot of Young’s fictional story revolves around the abduction and murder of young Missy. The dreadful event devastates the family, especially her father Mac.

Mac cannot understand why a loving and powerful God would allow this evil.

One day, Mac receives a mysterious letter with an invitation to the shack where police found his daughter dead. He accepts the invitation and returns to the scene only to find no one. In despair, he nearly commits suicide.

Upon leaving the shack, Mac encounters a young man who invites him to meet God. Mac accepts and spends several days talking with God, portrayed as a Trinity of three people. He also meets Wisdom personified.

The majority of the story depicts Mac in conversations with God and those who have died. Many of his questions are answered, and Mac begins to transform.

The Shack portrays God as warm, personable and loving rather than stern, wrathful, and aloof. When the Trinity is present, we find joy, laughter, dancing, understanding, and openness.

The Shack asks hard questions, and the answers it offers are mostly helpful. God is not portrayed as evil’s cause, for instance. “I work incredible good out of unspeakable tragedies,” says God. “But that doesn’t mean I orchestrate them.”

God is present with those who suffer: “I’m in the middle of everything, working for your good.” In response to Mac’s anger over Missy’s death, God as Trinity says, “We would like to heal it, if you would let us.”

And when Mac says, “Everyone knows you punish the people who disappoint you,” God corrects him: “No. I don’t need to punish. Sin is its own punishment.”


The Unanswered Question

The Shack doesn’t answer a key question those who suffer often ask: “Why didn’t God prevent the evil I endured?”

Mac asks God, “What good comes from being murdered by a sick monster? Why don’t you stop evil?”

He gets no answer.

“God may not do evil,” says Mac, “but He didn’t stop the evil. How can Papa allow Missy’s death?”

Again, no answer.

“You’re the almighty God with limitless power,” Mac says. “But you let my little girl die. You abandoned her.” God ignores “let my little girl die” and replies to the charge of abandoning, “I was always with her.”

Mac asks the right question. But he receives no answer.

Despite the positive aspects of The Shack, the story offers no believable reason why a good and powerful God fails to prevent genuine evil.


The Problem with Mystery

Several times in The Shack, God says to Mac, “You misunderstand the mystery.”

At one point, the Spirit says, “You’re trying to make sense of the world looking at an incomplete picture.” Wisdom questions Mac’s ability to judge good and evil, implying that he’s not competent to make such judgments.

People who think God could stop evil often appeal to mystery. They rightly say God is smarter than we are. But they mistakenly think our lack of knowledge is the best answer to questions of evil.

When it comes to knowing God, we only know in part. So some ignorance is unavoidable. Our views of God are never 100% true. We see as if looking through a distorted windowpane.

But appealing to mystery on whether we can judge good and evil undercuts belief in God’s love!


Let me explain.

Is God’s Love Evil?

The major idea of The Shack is that we should accept, deep down, that God loves us. I endorse this idea. In fact, believing God loves us, others, and all creation is the most important idea of our lives!

In The Shack, God scolds Mac for thinking he can judge good and evil. Mac is told that has an incomplete picture of life, so he can’t know what is ultimately loving.

But it’s unfair to encourage Mac to believe in love and then question his ability to know what love is. That kind of mystery makes no sense!

If we cannot know what is good, it makes no sense to say God is good. If we don’t know the difference between love and evil, we should feel no joy in thinking God loves us.

After all, this love may be evil!

We should be wary of worshiping a God whose love is mysterious, because we never know whom the Devil he may be!

If The Shack had said God could not prevent evil singlehandedly, it could have avoided the mystery card. It could have answered the central question survivors ask.

I explain the details of what this entails in my book, God Can’t: How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils (SacraSage 2019). I encourage you to read it for the details.


A Loving Papa

The Shack’s greatest strength may be the picture it paints of an intimately loving God. The book’s characters call God “Papa,” even though God the Father is depicted as a Black woman and the Spirit is an Asian woman.

Papa often talks about being “especially fond” of people. I like that!

Depicting God as a loving parent helps us understand God’s persuasive influence as uncontrolling love. Some people mistakenly think that if God doesn’t control us or creation, God must do nothing. To them, God’s action is either all determining or nonexistent. God either rules all or influences none.

But there’s a middle way between control and absence. That’s the way of love.

Caring parents – Papas – express loving influence that neither overrules nor withdraws. Loving mothers and fathers don’t micromanage or rule with an iron fist. But they aren’t absent either.

Loving fathers and mothers guide, instruct, persuade, call, correct, convince, encourage, nudge, teach, warn, and more.

Perhaps the best word to describe ongoing parental love is “nurture.” Nurturing involves cultivating the lives of children by providing positive experiences, wise instruction, and forgiveness. And nurturing implies working alongside the agencies of others, not controlling them.

Jesus called God “Abba,” a word for an intimately and consistently loving Father. Abba is Papa. If you want to read more on this, check out John Cobb’s book, Jesus’ Abba: The God Who Has Not Failed.

God acts like a loving parent who nurtures children.

[i] Wm. Paul Young, The Shack (Windblown, 2008).







Friday, September 20, 2019

R.E. Slater - A Call to Social Justice




This morning I find myself mulling over this past week's thoughts, decisions and commentaries both written, unwritten and read. The complexity of life perplexes why so little progress is made locally as national and international constructs wash over us like so many destabilizing tidal waves. Many of which are unhealthy while some few are healthy. Issues such as witnessing how many forms of social unrest has taken us to those more poignant moments requiring actionable movement only to see one-and-all floundering in the wake of a strong backwash knocking us over unable to keep our footing to be pulled away from the shorelines of reason and goodwill. Which I think explains why focusing on controllable moments around us by participating in recurring life experiences are the only points of sanity we have left to us or feel empowered by.

The issues are too large, too deep, too complex, as we are discovering, leaving us with the only thing we can do which is to reorganize ourselves into larger, more cohesive regional blocks of social networks to systematically address the tidal washes of change confronting us to large scale world action. We can no longer live in our little bubbles pretending all is well. Rather, we each have obligations to fulfill in resolving societal detractors, destructive earthly practices, and the social injustices around us.

How? By counterbalancing those negatives with the good things the bible urges us to enact amongst each other and into the world beyond. Such Spirit things as peace, love, mercy, forgiveness, and unity. Our natural tendencies bespeak our fragility as a species - if not the weak mindedness bourne our humanity that we stand up to disinformation to create constructive moments of rightful actions. And yet, if we do nothing but sit and judge nothing is done.

Whether enacting better democracies or Spirit-based resolves, each requires a personal and generational duty to the larger society around us to contribute to its health and healing according to the social networks and livelihoods we each have and bear a responsibility to address regarding the weighty issues pressing in on us from all sides. Fear, isolation, and anger are the poorest constructs to build upon. Much better we respect each other, listen to one another, and build a future we might be proud. One that is good, morally strong, and vibrantly cohesive in the face of so many societal and earthly negatives.

Peace,

R.E. Slater
September 20, 2019


Amazon Link


Book Blurb

In 1934, Confessing Christians in Germany declared that support for the Nazi regime violated the basic principles of the Christian faith, thereby creating a status confesionis (confessional situation), requiring a binding doctrinal stance on sociopolitical questions. In this book, the result of a lifetime of engaged religious, philosophical, and critical inquiry, David Ray Griffin declares that with regard to American Empire, the church in America is in a similarly dire situation and must stand up for the integrity of the Gospel. He writes: “Our Christian faith at its best would lead us, both as individual Christians and as churches, to oppose the American Empire in the name of God. As long as the church does not explicitly oppose this empire, it is, by its silence, a de facto supporter.”Chapter by chapter (in some cases, verse by verse) Griffin argues that Christians in America must deal with the darker side of their country, especially its imperialism, racism, and nuclear and climate policies. With clarity and insight, Griffin points out ways in which the American Empire is similar to the Roman Empire—the empire that crucified Jesus—and urges Christians, “publicly and unequivocally” to reject it.To that end, Griffin has written a theology that aims always to keep in mind the meaning of “gospel”—good news. That is, it focuses on the primary doctrines of Christian faith, which are unqualifiedly good news, as distinct from secondary and tertiary doctrines, some of which have delivered bad—sometimes horrible—news. The primary doctrines are rooted in the Bible, especially the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Written from the perspective of process theology, the book is “liberal in method and conservative in content.” “Liberal in method” means that all appeals to authority to establish truth are rejected. Theology, like philosophy, can argue for the truth of its doctrines only on the basis of evidence and reason. So although the reality of revelation can be affirmed, theologians cannot make claims for the truth of events or doctrines by claiming that this truth was revealed. It is “conservative in content” by virtue of employing a constructive postmodern worldview, based on the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Being “conservative in content” does not mean affirming the types of conservative theology that allow secondary and tertiary doctrines to distort the gospel’s primary doctrines. It means reaffirming primary doctrines of the Christian gospel, such as God’s creation of the world, God as actively present in us, and divinely-given life after death. American Christianity is in crisis. In this timely book, David Ray Griffin preaches the Gospel—not interpreted for the convenience of Americans, but to remind Americans of what the Gospel actually says and what it calls us to do.



Thursday, September 19, 2019

R.E. Slater - Ancient Rhythms


Ancient Traditional Japanese Music - Mountain Pass

Image result for ancient japanese
Additional Images




Ancient Rhythms
by R.E. Slater

Hot yellow clouds cry
But cannot see looking down
Earth awaits her death.

Scattered blossoms flow
Along dying streams choked
Living waters unsung.

Seeing, we see not
Not earth, not others, blinded souls
Once ancient, forgot.

Mouldering petals
Like forgotten joys, rotting
Fled creation's memory.

Joyless hearts beating
Sing of lands of summer blooms
Echoing of lament.

Remembering home
Nourishing Edens, now barren
Timeless paths flowing.

Embracing oneness
Fellowships bound land to soul
Divine grace gifts all.


R.E. Slater
September 18, 2019


Note: A traditional Japanese haiku is a three-line poem
with seventeen syllables, written in a 5/7/5 syllable count.
Often focusing on images from nature, haiku emphasizes
simplicity, intensity, and directness of expression with
no rhyming.

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved


Notes to Haiku

Having come across a foreign concert segment on the Internet I became curious as to why it was so moving to the well dressed audience gasping and swooning during its emotional performance. It seems that the song being sung by the young lady in white was lamenting the losses of childhood and of that of the ancient Japanese culture having forgotten its meaning and identity when absorbing Western practices, capitalism, and consequentially separation from the cradling arms of the earth (sic, earth spirits of nature) in its mimicry. The song, like the film it originated from, layers its hopes upon a succeeding generations which might remember the old ways in finding a way back to what once was treasured in its ancient traditions - cultural vitality, fellowship, earth care, and the social identity which came from these traditions. Themes universal to the ancient human breast itself.

Modern Western critics like Wendell Berry, Aldo Leopold, and a host of others ranging from poets to theologs have echoed these same sentiments in observing how industrialized Western progress has created great loss to humanity's inherent cardinal values imaged upon our souls by the divine granting the life-giving qualities of identity and meaning when in fellowship with the earth and one another. Specifically, both concert, song, and film, recall the primal longing of creation as an ancient longing we have too easily dismissed as an insignificant thing when pompously disrupting or destroying both our own past as well as the pasts of other native American cultures, aboriginal cultures, and non-European civilizations by Westernizing standards having become deaf-and-blind to the accumulated wisdoms of the ancients over the centuries in succeeding echoes of enforced religious and doctrinnaire superiority.

Consequently, in this present day we must now repair the renewing cycles of divine life by listening to, and learning from, one another as from the earth and Spirit themselves, each once heard in the sublime symphonies of our distant souls now lost within the graves we have wantonly dug as memorials to our sins, greed, and follies. This loss of divine rhythm must somehow be recovered from what was carelessly destroyed and now deemed worthless in our pride and short-sightedness. Soul qualities we are only now realising granting life, hope, purpose, and fellowship with the earth and with one another. And it is in this  divine revelatory light we must hear again those ancient lyrics to restore, renew, steward, and cultivate earth's primal Edens which had once nurtured both creation and the human spirit in practices of wisdom, selflessness, silence, love, and community.

R.E. Slater
September 16, 2019


Related image
Westward Expansion into California
(Early California Exploration, Colonization, and Immigration Gallery)


Joe Hisaishi 2011.jpg

Joe Hisaishi in Budokan was a concert commemorating
both the Japanese theatrical premiere of Ponyo and the 25 years
of musical collaboration between composer Joe Hisaishi and film
maker Hayao Miyazaki.



Lyrics: The Name of Life

The whiteness of the clouds left behind by a plane
Draw a line across the blue sky
Always, no matter to where, always continuing
As if it knew tomorrow.

In my chest I breathed in a shallow breath
I remember the breeze that blew on my hot cheek.

The hands and feet which are bound before the future
Are freed by a quiet voice
So nostalgic that I want to scream out, is
One life, the midsummer light
At your shoulder, swaying, the sunbeams streaming through the leaves.

The white ball at rest
The petals which have been scattered by the wind
The invisible river which carries both
Singing while flowing on.

Secrets and lies and joy
Are the children of the gods who created this universe.

The heart which is bound before the future
Someday, will remember its name
So loved that I want to scream out, is
One life, the place to return to
At my fingertips, the summer day which doesn't disappear.



Inochi no Namae (The Name of Life)
Joe Hisaishi in Budokan - Studio Ghibli 25 Years Concert



Futatabi [Reprise] (Spirited Away)
Joe Hisaishi in Budokan - Studio Ghibli 25 Years Concert




Spirited Away


Spirited Away (Japanese: 千と千尋の神隠し Hepburn: Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, "Sen and Chihiro's Spiriting Away") is a 2001 Japanese animated coming-of-age fantasy film. It was written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, animated by Studio Ghibli for Tokuma Shoten, Nippon Television Network, Dentsu, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, Tohokushinsha Film and Mitsubishi and distributed by Toho. The film stars Rumi Hiiragi, Miyu Irino, Mari Natsuki, Takeshi Naito, Yasuko Sawaguchi, Tsunehiko Kamijō, Takehiko Ono, and Bunta Sugawara. Spirited Away tells the story of Chihiro Ogino (Hiiragi), a moody 10-year-old girl who, while moving to a new neighbourhood, enters the world of Kami (spirits) of Japanese Shinto folklore. After her parents are mutated into pigs by the witch Yubaba (Natsuki), Chihiro takes a job working in Yubaba's bathhouse to find a way to free herself and her parents and return to the human world.

Miyazaki wrote the script after he decided the film would be based on the 10-year-old daughter of his friend, associate producer Seiji Okuda, who came to visit his house each summer. At the time, Miyazaki was developing two personal projects, but they were rejected. With a budget of 19 million US dollars, production of Spirited Away began in 2000. Pixar director John Lasseter, who is a fan and friend of Miyazaki, convinced Walt Disney Pictures to buy the film's North American distribution rights, and served as the executive producer of its English-dubbed version Lasseter hired Kirk Wise as director and Donald W. Ernst as producer of the adaptation. Screenwriters Cindy Davis Hewitt and Donald H. Hewitt wrote the English-language dialogue to match the characters' original Japanese-language lip movements.

The film was originally released in Japan on 20 July 2001 by distributor Toho. It became the most successful film in Japanese history, grossing over $361 million worldwide.[a] The film overtook Titanic (the top-grossing film worldwide at the time) in the Japanese box office to become the highest-grossing film in Japanese history with a total of ¥30.8 billion. Spirited Away received universal acclaim and is frequently ranked among the greatest animated films ever made. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards, making it the first (and so far only) hand-drawn and non-English-language animated film to win that award. It was the co-recipient of the Golden Bear at the 2002 Berlin International Film Festival (shared with Bloody Sunday) and is in the top 10 on the British Film Institute's list of "Top 50 films for children up to the age of 14".

In 2016, it was voted the fourth-best film of the 21st century as picked by 177 film critics from around the world, making it the highest-ranking animated film on the list. It was also named the second "Best Film of the 21st Century So Far" in 2017 by the New York Times.


Spirited Away Trailer



Plot

Ten-year-old Chihiro Ogino and her parents are traveling to their new home when her father takes a shortcut, leading them to what appears to be an abandoned amusement park that Chihiro's father insists on exploring. They find a seemingly empty restaurant stall stocked with food, which Chihiro's parents immediately begin to eat. While exploring further, Chihiro finds an exquisite bathhouse and meets a boy named Haku, who warns her to return across the riverbed before sunset. However, Chihiro discovers too late that her parents have metamorphosed into pigs, and she is unable to cross the now-flooded river.

Haku finds Chihiro and has her ask for a job from the bathhouse's boiler-man, Kamaji, a yōkai commanding the susuwatari. Kamaji refuses to hire her and asks worker Lin to send Chihiro to Yubaba, the witch who runs the bathhouse. Yubaba tries to frighten Chihiro away, but she persists, so Yubaba gives Chihiro a contract to work for her. Yubaba takes away her name and renames her Sen (千). While visiting her parents' pigpen, Haku gives Sen a goodbye card she had with her, and Sen realizes that she had already forgotten her real name. Haku warns her that Yubaba controls people by taking their names, and that if she forgets hers like he has forgotten his, she will not be able to leave the spirit world.

Sen faces discrimination from the other workers because she is still a human and not a spirit; only Haku and Lin show sympathy for her. While working, she invites a silent creature named No-Face inside, believing him to be a customer. A "stink spirit" arrives as Sen's first customer, and she discovers he is the spirit of a polluted river. In gratitude for cleaning him, he gives Sen a magic emetic dumpling. Meanwhile, No-Face imitates the gold left behind by the stink spirit and tempts a worker with gold, then swallows him. He demands food and begins tipping extensively. He swallows two more workers when they interfere with his conversation with Sen.

Sen sees paper Shikigami attacking a Japanese dragon and recognizes the dragon as Haku metamorphosed. When a grievously injured Haku crashes into Yubaba's penthouse, Sen follows him upstairs. A shikigami that stowed away on her back shapeshifts into Zeniba, Yubaba's twin sister. She mutates Yubaba's son, Boh, into a mouse, creates a decoy Boh, and mutates Yubaba's harpy into a tiny, flylike bird. Zeniba tells Sen that Haku has stolen a magic golden seal from her, and warns Sen that it carries a deadly curse. Haku attacks the shikigami, which eliminates Zeniba's hologram. He falls into the boiler room with Sen, Boh, and the harpy on his back, where Sen feeds him part of the dumpling she had intended to give her parents, causing him to vomit both the seal and a black slug, which Sen crushes with her foot.

With Haku unconscious, Sen resolves to return the seal and apologize to Zeniba. Sen confronts No-Face, who is now massive, and feeds him the rest of the dumpling. No-Face follows Sen out of the bathhouse, steadily regurgitating everything he has eaten. Sen, No-Face, Boh, and the harpy travel to see Zeniba with train tickets given to her by Kamaji. Yubaba orders that Sen's parents be slaughtered, but Haku reveals that Boh is missing and offers to retrieve him if Yubaba releases Sen and her parents. Yubaba agrees, but only if Sen can pass a final test.

Sen, No-Face, Boh, and the harpy meet with Zeniba, who reveals that Sen's love for Haku broke her curse and that Yubaba used the black slug to control Haku. Haku appears at Zeniba's home in his dragon form and flies Sen, Boh, and the harpy to the bathhouse. No-Face decides to stay behind and become Zeniba's spinner. In mid-flight, Sen recalls falling years ago into the Kohaku River and being washed safely ashore, correctly guessing Haku's real identity as the spirit of the Kohaku River. When they arrive at the bathhouse, Yubaba forces Sen to identify her parents from among a group of pigs in order to break their curse. After Sen answers correctly that none of the pigs are her parents, her contract combusts and she is given back her real name. Haku takes her to the now-dry riverbed and vows to meet her again. Chihiro crosses the riverbed to her restored parents, who do not remember anything after eating at the restaurant stall. They walk back to their car, which is now covered in dust and leaves. Before getting in, Chihiro is shown to still be wearing the hairband No-Face spun for her at Zeniba's home.


Hidden Meaning in Spirited Away (Miyazaki)
– Earthling Cinema



Themes

The themes of the film are heavily influenced by Japanese Shinto-Buddhist folklore. The central location of the film is a Japanese bathhouse where a great variety of Japanese folklore creatures, including kami, come to bathe. Miyazaki cites the solstice rituals when villagers call forth their local kami and invite them into their baths.

Chihiro also encounters kami of animals and plants. Miyazaki says of this:

"In my grandparents' time, it was believed that kami existed everywhere – in trees, rivers, insects, wells, anything. My generation does not believe this, but I like the idea that we should all treasure everything because spirits might exist there, and we should treasure everything because there is a kind of life to everything."

The film has been compared to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as the stories have some elements in common such as being set in a fantasy world, the plots including a disturbance in logic and stability, and there being motifs such as food having metamorphic qualities; though developments and themes are not shared. Among other stories compared to Spirited Away, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is seen to be more closely linked thematically.

The major themes of Spirited Away center on the protagonist Chihiro and her liminal journey through the realm of spirits. The archetypal entrance into another world demarcates Chihiro's status as one somewhere between child and adult. Chihiro also stands outside societal boundaries in the supernatural setting. The use of the word kamikakushi (literally "hidden by gods") within the Japanese title, and its associated folklore, reinforces this liminal passage:

"Kamikakushi is a verdict of 'social death' in this world, and coming back to this world from Kamikakushi meant 'social resurrection.'"

Yubaba has many similarities to The Coachman from Pinocchio, in the sense that she mutates humans into pigs in a similar way that the boys of Pleasure Island were mutated into donkeys. Upon gaining employment at the bathhouse, Yubaba's seizure of Chihiro's true name symbolically kills the child, who must then assume adulthood. She then undergoes a rite of passage according to the monomyth format; to recover continuity with her past, Chihiro must create a new identity.

Along with its function within the ostensible coming of age theme, Yubaba's act of taking Chihiro's name and replacing it with Sen (an alternate reading of "chi", the first character in Chihiro's name – lit. "one thousand"), is symbolic of capitalism's single-minded concern with value, reflecting the film's exploration of capitalism and its effect on traditional Japanese culture.

Yubaba is stylistically unique within the bathhouse, wearing a Western dress and living among European décor and furnishings, in contrast with the minimalist Japanese style of her employee's quarters, representing the Western capitalist influence over Japan in its Meiji period and beyond. The Meiji design of the abandoned theme park is the setting for Chihiro's parents' metamorphosis - the family arrives in an imported Audi car and the father wears a European-styled polo shirt, reassuring Chihiro that he has "credit cards and cash", before their morphing into literal consumerist pigs.

Spirited Away contains critical commentary on modern Japanese society concerning generational conflicts and environmental issues. Chihiro has been seen as a representation of the shōjo, whose roles and ideology had changed dramatically since post-war Japan.

Miyazaki has stated:

Chihiro’s parents turning into pigs symbolizes how some humans become greedy. At the very moment Chihiro says there is something odd about this town, her parents turn into pigs. There were people that "turned into pigs" during Japan’s bubble economy (consumer society) of the 1980s, and these people still haven’t realized they’ve become pigs. Once someone becomes a pig, they don’t return to being human but instead gradually start to have the "body and soul of a pig". These people are the ones saying, "We are in a recession and don’t have enough to eat." This doesn’t just apply to the fantasy world. Perhaps this isn’t a coincidence and the food is actually (an analogy for) "a trap to catch lost humans."

Just as Chihiro seeks her past identity, Japan, in its anxiety over the economic downturn occurring during the release of the film in 2001, sought to reconnect to past values. In an interview, Miyazaki has commented on this nostalgic element for an old Japan.

However, the bathhouse of the spirits cannot be seen as a place free of ambiguity and darkness. Many of the employees are rude to Chihiro because she is human, and corruption is ever-present; it is a place of excess and greed, as depicted in the initial appearance of the No-Face. In stark contrast to the simplicity of Chihiro's journey and transformation is the constantly chaotic carnival in the background.

There are two major instances of allusions to environmental issues within the movie. The first is seen when Chihiro is dealing with the "stink spirit." The stink spirit was actually a river spirit, but it was so corrupted with filth that one couldn't tell what it was at first glance. It only became clean again when Chihiro pulled out a huge amount of trash, including car tires, garbage, and a bicycle. This alludes to human pollution of the environment, and how people can carelessly toss away things without thinking of the consequences and of where the trash will go. The second allusion is seen in Haku himself. Haku does not remember his name and lost his past, which is why he is stuck at the bathhouse. Eventually, Chihiro remembers that he used to be the spirit of the Kohaku River, which was destroyed and replaced with apartments. Because of humans' need for development, they destroyed a part of nature, causing Haku to lose his home and identity. This can be compared to deforestation and desertification; humans tear down nature, cause imbalance in the ecosystem, and demolish animals' homes to satisfy their want for more space (housing, malls, stores, etc.) but don't think about how it can affect other living things.

Additional themes are expressed through the No-Face, who reflects the characters which surround him, learning by example and taking the traits of whomever he consumes. This nature results in No-Face's monstrous rampage through the bathhouse. After Chihiro saves No-Face with the emetic dumpling, he becomes timid once more. At the end of the film, Zeniba decides to take care of No-Face so he can develop without the negative influence of the bathhouse.


The Films of Studio Ghibli Trailer



Joe Hisaishi
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Joe Hisaishi
Joe Hisaishi 2011.jpg
Hisaishi in Paris in 2011
Background information
Native name
久石 譲
Birth nameMamoru Fujisawa
BornDecember 6, 1950 (age 68)
Nakano, Nagano, Japan
Genres
Occupation(s)
  • Composer
  • conductor
  • arranger
Instruments
Years active1974–present


Mamoru Fujisawa (藤澤 守 Fujisawa Mamoru, born December 6, 1950), known professionally as Joe Hisaishi (久石 譲 Hisaishi Jō), is a Japanese composer and musical director known for over 100 film scores and solo albums dating back to 1981. Hisaishi is also known for his piano scores.

While possessing a stylistically distinct sound, Hisaishi's music has been known to explore and incorporate different genres, including minimalist, experimental electronic, European classical, and Japanese classical. Lesser known are the other musical roles he plays; he is also a typesetter, author, arranger, and conductor.

He has been associated with animator Hayao Miyazaki since 1984, having composed scores for all but one of his films. He is also recognized for the soundtracks he has provided for filmmaker 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano, including A Scene at the Sea (1991), Sonatine (1993), Kids Return (1996), Hana-bi (1997), Kikujiro (1999), and Dolls (2002), as well for the video game series Ni no Kuni. He was a student of legendary anime composer Takeo Watanabe.