The Holy Land is supposed to be a far-away place. So it has been ever since Peter and Paul journeyed there from Rome, since “next year in Jerusalem” became exilic Jews’ sigh of resolve or resignation, since the prize of that city excused crusades, since London redrew the map of Palestine as a solution to the Jewish Problem, since Birthright trips have taken suburban twenty-somethings to sip tea in Bedouin tents. Thus the place can appear especially distant even after you go there, and meet the people for whom it is, simply, home. In some sense you’ve been there all along and can never leave.

I went to the West Bank last September with little eagerness or preparation of my own, but on the urging of a colleague who once wrote a book about the First Intifada. The place had always seemed, to my head, comfortably remote—a notorious source of trouble I preferred not to assume for myself. I went only because my colleague made doing so seem easier than the alternative. She arranged for me to join the Freedom Theatre, based in the West Bank town of Jenin, for a ten-day tour of performances throughout the region. After the arrangements were all settled, I mentioned them to friends familiar with Israeli-Palestinian affairs and was told, “Woah. Be careful.”

Because traveling to the West Bank makes one immediately suspect in the eyes of Israeli security, I prepared ahead of time a story about being a religious tourist in the process of finishing a book—technically true—about proofs for the existence of God. I rehearsed the fictitious details over and over in my head. With every word I wrote in my notebook, there was the superego of the Israeli intelligence officer watching over my shoulder. A fellow journalist told me about the time when a film he’d made in Palestine was erased from his hard drive as he was interrogated at Ben Gurion Airport. Another had just been banned from the country. These are some of the techniques of presenting distances as greater than they actually are, and of giving words meanings other than the reality to which they refer.

Read about the trip in a new essay published at Killing the Buddha called “The Hourglass.” It also appears in slightly different form at Waging Nonviolence.

Last week I had the chance to catch what was probably the biggest God debate of the year, in this genre of blockbuster, YouTubed, college-campus bouts. The topic was “Is Good from God?”—is religion necessary for objective morality? The debaters were William Lane Craig, the evangelical philosopher, and Sam Harris, who launched the New Atheism movement.?My report appears today at Religion Dispatches. Instead of focusing on the arguments per se—for them, see a play-by-play at Common Sense Atheism—I spent my time hanging out with the debaters and the student organizers before and after the event. Here’s a bit of it:

Controversy was the intent all along. “The main reason we did it was for the discussion in the dorms,” says Malcolm Phelan, a junior, who helped put the debate together and gave the opening speech. He’s tall, a bit lanky, steady with his eye-contact, and erring on the side of clean-cut. Around here, he’s someone who can get things done and get money out of the administration. Even professors talk about him with a shade of awe. As a freshman he was class president, but then he quit student government for greater things. He also has a visionary streak, and a knack for stringing winged words together into crescendos. Busy Notre Dame students need this, he says. They live in an “upper-class Catholic Disneyland” and need to be shaken up. “I wouldn’t necessarily call myself an instigator, but—” he says, trailing off. His word, not mine.

Phelan’s co-conspirator behind the scenes was Arnav Dutt. Someone introduced him to me as The Thinker. While he talks, he looks down and pauses mid-sentence if it isn’t coming out exactly right, his eyes covered behind glasses and a Justin Beiber-type mop-top. He’s the child of a Catholic and a Hindu, both non-practicing. Like Phelan, Dutt considers himself an atheist, though his education has been mostly in Catholic environments. “This issue”—that of the debate—“has thrust itself on me my whole life.” He takes it seriously and wonders whether some of the critics are right; maybe a big debate is the wrong approach. When I ask what he thinks it will do for people, he turns pensive again. “There’s a big difference between what I think they’re getting and what I hope they’re getting,” he says.

While I was at Notre Dame, I had the pleasure of a long afternoon’s conversation with John O’Callaghan, a philosophy professor there who specializes in Thomist thought, and who runs the Jacques Maritain Center. Before the debate even happened—I guess the same afternoon we met—he put together a very different kind of essay from mine, a reminder that the debate’s apparent choice between religion and science isn’t one we have to make.

The greatest among our Christian forebears certainly didn’t think we had to. Even if one remains unconvinced by the logic of Aquinas’ Five Ways, the attitude expressed in them is not one of natural explanations in competition with God. His natural science was almost unimaginably false with regard to what we now know or claim to know. But the reality of natural causes that allows for scientific understanding was for him the best and “most manifest” argument for the existence of a god, a god Who does not compete with His creatures but, rather, enables them.

The upshot of all this should be obvious enough: if you’re looking for the subtle truth, maybe a big staged debate like this isn’t the place to find it.

I remember an instance of good, anyway, with or without God, when Arnav Dutt and I were leaving the debate. A woman dropped her pocketbook as she started walking out into the rain. A handful of others around noticed, and called out—“Miss! Miss!”—and handed it to her. “That’s nice to see, after this,” I heard Dutt mutter. I think I also heard some irony.

The idea of martyrdom hasn’t been in very good shape lately. One common usage of it—“I’ll not be made a martyr!”—refers to the prospect of somewhat tragic but mostly useless suffering, perhaps in the service of a delusional cause, religious or otherwise. Another appears regularly in the news with reference to Islamist terrorists, especially suicide bombers. Still, despite these entrenched negative associations, the idea may be on the mend.

The reason I’ve got in mind is a recent French film that just arrived on US shores, Of Gods and Men. It tells the story of the seven French Trappist monks who were killed in the Algerian civil war in 1996. Not much of a title, but a great movie. I also happened to watch it in an especially fitting place.

As I write, I’m completing a two-week stay at Holy Cross Abbey, a Trappist monastery along the Shenandoah River in Virginia. We’re told that the film did well at Cannes and in European box offices, and that it’s now even drawing crowds in US cities. The excitement is palpable, if subtle.

A burned DVD copy is discreetly circulating and being watched on little screens with headphones, and reviews cut out from newspapers appear on the bulletin board, surrounded by exclamation points. Some of the monks here met Father Christian. One has a picture of him on his desk. Most of them remember praying for him and the others after their disappearance. I leafed through an overflowing file of news clippings and communiques between the order’s abbots from that time, full of updates, helplessness, reverence. There’s sorrow in martyrdom, but there’s also, actually, redemption.

Read the review if you like, but see the movie if at all you can.

I got a disconcerting message.

Texting from cop car

I asked, “Why? What happened?” It wasn’t until almost two hours later that he responded.

No no. I was just hanging out talking w a cop in her car outside the Capitol.

She said there have been zero arrests the whole two weeks. And we hung out in her car and a delivery guy tried to give us pizzas “donated from Washington” but she couldn’t accept them.

The cops have been marching with the protesters twice daily. And I just read some of the cop briefing emails. Which strike me.

Wait, I should be clear. There may have been arrests. Madison pd is NOT the Capitol pd or the state troopers.

Plan for tomorrow according to email I saw is that everyone’s requested to leave the Capitol for cleaning by 4pm but that no one will be forcibly removed. Same as is stated publicly.

Yeah. Egyptians have donated food and pizzas and have sent messages.

Tomorrow breakfast w my cop friend and a state assembly staffer and an in-home therapist in danger of losing his job, among others.

It’s really worth reading the whole thing. An amazing day.

I heard from Q again this morning. “Awoke to six state trooper boots ascending stone steps,” he wrote.

Like 30 more trooper boots kist as my eyes fell rest. Overhear “wr have it confirmed that theyre not supposed to be [here?]” Friend in the corner shakes his head after two walk past into a doorway. It’s the aftershave that kills you.

Krista’s going to hate me for this, but the whole second half of the play I couldn’t stop thinking about Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. I did consult our mutual friend Lily, my rare equal in knowledge of Star Trek and also in attendance, and she concurred that I wasn’t totally off-base. The whole intersection is no mere matter of trekkie trivia; it goes straight to the center of the intersection of freedom and suffering and faith and all that.

The relevant character in Phantom Band is Camille, the mysterious blonde from England, with the Queen’s accent, who takes people to the forest and plays them her beautiful siren song while they shout out all the things they don’t want to hear, Primal Scream-style:?the junk their parents and the mean football players are always saying to make them feel crappy. Afterward, they feel much better, but they’re also zombie-like; they don’t really hear much of anything and just keep saying, “What?” They’re free. Or are they?

Star Trek V is widely considered the worst of the original-cast Star Trek movies, not least because it was directed by William Shatner himself. Over the years, though, as I’ve dutifully watched it many, many times, I’ve come to like it more and more. Maybe that’s because it’s the “religion” one; the climax of the movie is going to the center of the galaxy to visit “God.” Or maybe because it includes the singing of my favorite song, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” while Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are eating bourbon and beans over a campfire in Yellowstone.

But none of that’s important here, really. The relevant character in Star Trek V is Sybok, Spock’s long-lost brother. Rather than being a typical emotion-repressing Vulcan, Sybok left his homeworld, embraced his emotions, and became a cult leader. The way he gets cultists is much what Camille does in the woods: he makes people face their pain. Once they do, with his special formula, they become brainwashed and follow his orders. Here’s Sybok showing off his trick on Dr. McCoy:

This is, of course, a familiar feature of religious experience. Buddhism begins with the recognition of suffering in the world and shows it to be illusion. Christianity begins with the repentance of sin and ends with an executed savior. Scientology starts by telling you you’re stressed and ends with—TBA. Psychoanalysis begins on the couch and never ends. Simply confronting these pains at least somewhat more directly than we do in normal, repressive life is so shocking and cleansing that it can change the course of a person’s life for good. It can deliver pure, unshakeable beliefs about how the world works. The price of deliverance is conviction. It’s a simple, but really quite weird fact about human nature, and both Star Trek V and Phantom Band remind us of this.

Is facing your pain and getting it zapped away really such a great thing? I suppose it might be. But with Sybok’s zombies in Star Trek V we’re meant to see something familiar—in the kind of heavy-handed allegory so typical of the franchise, only sharpened by Shatner’s signature lack of subtlety. Maybe you’re meant to see the born-again relative who has figured everything out and wants you to figure it out exactly the same way. Or the suicide cults that folks were all so afraid their kids would join in the ’70s. Or maybe it’s something in yourself, I don’t know. But you know what I mean.

At the end of Phantom Band, the kids realize that they’d rather face the hard stuff in real life than keep being zombies. So they zap out of the trance by shouting?to themselves all the painful stuff they’d been la-la-ing out with Camille’s angelic music.

In another striking parallel, that’s almost exactly what Captain Kirk lands on in Star Trek V, with the line from the movie that fans end up quoting to each other probably more than any other: “I need my pain!” It comes a bit later in the same scene we saw earlier.

Dammit, Bones, you’re a doctor. You know that pain and guilt can’t be taken away with a magic wand. They’re the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. [If] we lose them we lose ourselves. I don’t want my pain taken away, I need my pain!

That’s good stuff, isn’t it? Those lines have nourished me a lot over the years. There’s a freedom of its own sort in giving up the hope of pain disappearing like zap. It’s inescapably us. And maybe your pain can drive you, too, to being a daring, reckless, but always successful and heroic starship captain like Captain Shatn—I mean Kirk.

Over the weekend I had an essay at Religion Dispatches about an elderly Irish woman who proposed just such a protest in order to take a stand for women in the church. While I support her cause, I don’t think that her methods do:

It’s clear that Jennifer Sleeman isn’t proposing to abandon the church altogether. But a protest should always be in the image of its goal, the means in keeping with the ends. When I heard of her plan, I couldn’t help but think of all the conscientious, passionate people who have already gone, leaving Catholic progressives to fend for ourselves, increasingly isolated. What feels like taking action from the outside can seem more like abdication from within. We need progressives, especially progressive women, in the church and speaking up.

A big part of the Catholic story over the last few decades, as the historic reforms of Vatican II have faded into a comparatively reactionary turn, is mass exodus. People disagree with aspects of church teaching, or they suffer at the hands of the clergy, and that’s the end. I don’t mean to minimize the significance of either — for so many people, enough really is enough. It’s too painful to go back. What I’m proposing is a struggle, but a necessary one. But their significance can be exaggerated. When progressives leave their counterparts shape the church more and more as they like it.

According to the Irish bishops, mass attendance held steady on Sunday. Despite my complaint, I think I feel a bit disappointed.

For a more stirring essay with much the same point, see Mary Gordon’s “Why I Stay: A Parable from a Progressive Catholic.”

If you don’t know the name Hypatia, you should. In the grand mythology of the Enlightenment (to which, on optimistic days, I subscribe), her murder at the hands of a Christian mob marks more or less the end of Greek philosophy and the beginning of the Dark Ages. Now, for those of you who don’t know her, there’s a blockbuster historical epic movie about Hypatia (though it has scored only limited distribution in the U.S.). And, for those of you who don’t trust blockbuster historical epic movies, I’ve got a review of it on Religion Dispatches today:

Hearing about Agora’s success in Spain last year—the highest-grossing film of the year, sweeping up awards—couldn’t help but bring to my mind the empty insides of so many of that country’s churches, still charred after the various anti-clerical mobs of the last few centuries. I wasn’t the only one to make that association. With predictable ressentiment, an open letter came to Amenábar from the Religious Anti-Defamation Observatory, a Catholic watchdog in Spain, warning him: “Your film is going to awaken hatred against Christians in today’s society.”

American “Catholic evangelist” Fr. Robert Barron adds in his Catholic New World review, “I wonder if it ever occurred to Amenábar that his movie might incite violence against religious people, especially Christians.” One can only hope that it’s not a good enough movie to drive people to the streets.

In an interview with the New York Times, though, Amenábar turned the tables on his pious critics. “Fundamentally, this is a very Christian film about the life of a martyr,” he explained. “Jesus would not have approved of what happened to Hypatia, which is why I say no good Christian should feel offended by this film.” In this respect, at least, his sentiments have historical basis.

Keep reading to find out why.

Ever since the Israeli strike on the Gaza Freedom Movement’s Freedom Flotilla on Monday, I and the rest of us at Waging Nonviolence have been exploring ways of understanding what happened. My first essay, “Nonviolence and the Gaza Freedom Movement,” simply raises some questions that we might be asking as new information about the incident slowly trickles out. “Were the activists really acting nonviolently?” “How are the mission’s success and failure being measured?” “Whose suffering is the media considering grievable?” “What laws were violated, and why?” —and more. I’ve been glad to see that piece gaining some traction around the web; it has been picked up at Common Dreams, In These Times, and Sojourners.

Today, I added a further discussion of that first question and its consequences: “Gaza, the Mavi Marmara, and the Prospects of Fighting Back.” There, though the facts of the case are still far from clear, I address the reasons and ramifications of activists attempting to fight back against Israeli soldiers—particularly for the fledgling nonviolence movement in the Palestinian territories.

See also our initial post about the events, a wrap-up of early news coverage, and a report about a solidarity march in New York.

The future of the cause for justice in Palestine-Israel is very much riding on how the story of what happened that night in the Mediterranean is told. If there is to be a future, really, it means thinking through the problems in ways that get beyond the familiar intransigence.

A couple weeks ago I was riding my usual route from home in Clinton Hill to the Williamsburg Bridge when I saw that the ground had shifted beneath my bicycle gears. As I crossed Flushing along Bedford Avenue, into the heart of Hasidic Williamsburg, Brooklyn, my bike lane was gone. Only a faint, sandblasted remnant remained.

That’s an excerpt from a new essay of mine in The Huffington Post, one of two pieces I published today on the controversy about the lane’s removal. Since it’s a corridor I bike along regularly, and since I’ve long been curious about the religiosity of those who live along it, I did what I could to understand what happened and why. Most of my fellow cyclists believed that religious prudishness was mostly to blame, but what I learned from conversations with Hasidic men on Bedford convinced me that we cyclists have to share some of the blame for the lane’s removal as well. I write in my piece for Religion Dispatches:

That’s what nearly everybody walking up and down Hasidic Bedford in daytime says as well. When asked directly about it, they concede that they believe many cyclists to be inappropriately dressed, even while insisting that that alone was not reason enough to remove the lane.

An ambulance driver said that there had been a lot of accidents with children, though he had never personally seen with one. A man named Moshe, however, said he did once see a child hit by a bike. “It’s terrible,” he said. A yeshiva school bus driver complained, in an extended conversation aboard his bus, “bikes don’t obey any laws.” He doesn’t think religious concerns about clothing were the motivating force at all. “It is a free country,” he said.

“The problem is how they ride on it,” added a Hasidic man named Abraham while checking his mailbox on Bedford. “They don’t care about the kids.” Both a bicyclist and a school bus driver, he enjoyed using the bike lane but now is glad, for the sake of safety, that it is gone.

I go on to call for a new sense of responsibility among bicyclists for their own behavior, especially where neighborhoods provide lanes for us on their streets—both for myself and my fellow cyclists. Again, in HuffPo:

The city has added hundreds of miles of bike lanes in recent years, and bicycle commuting has more than doubled since 2000 as a result. I see new lanes being added all the time and feel grateful every time I do. Each one lowers my chances of getting whacked by a taxi.

As the city finally starts investing in keeping us safe, it is time for cyclists to do our part. “There is not a single community board meeting about bike lanes where cyclist behavior is not an issue,” says Wiley Norvell of Transportation Alternatives. His organization has launched Biking Rules!–a program to encourage more responsible riding in New York City.

The rules are simple and, from now on, I’m going to do my best to follow them: Pedestrians come first. Stop at red lights, and don’t ride against traffic. Obey the laws. Wear a helmet, and use a light in the dark.

Read the rest of these at Religion Dispatches and The Huffington Post.

“If you look in the scripture,” explains Linda Hanick, Trinity’s V.P. of communications and marketing, “the last words of Jesus are almost written in Tweets, less than 140 characters.” Okay, so maybe they’re a match made in heaven.

Check it out.