In 2009, if President Barack Obama had let it all go—allowed the banks to fail, GM to go out of business, the whole incipient Depression to descend as it would after the insistent anti-regulatory, tax-cutting machinations of the Bush administration reached their natural dark end—the American economy and the fortunes of its people would have gone into freefall. The suffering and dislocation would have been on a scale not seen since The Great Depression.

Many conservatives at the time were advocating just that—for the country to “take its medicine,” not rely on another government bailout that reeked of a dreaded “socialism.” They wanted Americans to snap up their big-boy britches and get on with the tasks awaiting an over-the-cliff, do-it-yourself, deregulated economy, in near total shambles by then but finally freed from the pseudo-protective shackles of government assistance and oversight...

There will always be Billy Sundays among us. Smooth, snake-tongued preachers talking up either the gospel of prosperity that creates prosperity mostly for themselves, or else painting pictures of heavenly hereafters with which their impoverished followers will be rewarded—provided they dig deep for what is in their meagerly endowed pockets to sustain the preacher’s enterprise.

The historical Billy Sunday was the latter, a ragingly successful turn-of-the-20th century evangelist who wowed crowds with theatrical religious oratory that he embellished with long slides across or dives off the stage, stunts that called upon his former career as a major league baseball player with a penchant for stealing bases.

Sunday soothed his listeners and their hollowed out lives with promises of heavenly days everlasting even as he himself became wealthy...

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnets from the Portuguese” has nothing to do with Portuguese or translations therefrom, and everything to do with Browning’s attempt, on behalf of ardent lovers the world over, to put into words what they often experience as the overwhelming, uniquely frustrating desire to bottle the wind, capture a star, cavort with the moon, and fully articulate the welter of emotions coursing through them at the sound, sight, touch and smell of their beloveds.

“There are no words…” lovers often say (if they are lucky), trailing off as they rock and roll, like an ocean liner atop roiling seas, with the emotion that both demands and makes impossible their word-bound expression...

The blog post below by my longtime friend and United Church of Christ Minister Jim Burklo so well encapsulates many of my concerns regarding the challenge to our Constitution and standing in the world posed by President Donald Trump that it felt redundant to fashion my own treatment of this same basic subject matter. Jim is the associate dean of religious life at the University of Southern California, the author of three books, a former church pastor, and prominent spokesperson for the movement known as “Progressive Christianity.” The only addition I will make to his essay below will be to add to the end of his quotes from President Trump a fourth one from the current (February 13 & 20) edition of The New Yorker magazine, which places in highly sobering context the seriousness of the concerns many millions of people across the country have after the troubling first three weeks of the new administration.

*...

The gist of the headline above represents the first of seven principles that lie at the core of my Unitarian Universalist faith tradition. During my congregation’s church service this morning, I delivered the following reflection on the subject.

I have always loved the human pageant. I remember as a young man sitting in coffee shops or on park benches, admiring the passing parade, the ceaseless flux of humanity like the most gentle and warm tides. Lovers strolling slowly by, kids gamboling across the grass like lambs in spring, and over yonder, a spirited soccer game between Ecuadorian and German immigrants.

I look into those wild frightening eyes, and I ask, ‘Is there some scintilla of worth and dignity in there? Is there anything recognizably human and good within that shell of a body and a life gone so horribly wrong?’

It’s easy to feel an almost overwhelming love of humanity in such settings...