Here are a few things I’ve been reading and thinking about this week. As we head into an Independence Day weekend in the US, are we on the verge of another independence movement? This time instead of freedom from England, it may be freedom from ideas and policies which prevent equality for all persons. And what is the church’s role in all of this?

#1

“in those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.”

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail

The church as thermostat not thermometer. Not temperature takers but temperature movers. Rather than being left outside the conversation to be in the middle of them and even hosting the conversations. I feel that the church has a long ways to go to accomplish this, but let us not be dismayed. God is all about second chances and great come-backs.

#2

If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we cannot merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

There is a prayer from the Compline in the Book of Common Prayer that says, “let us never forget that our common life depends on each other’s toil.” We talk about togetherness because it is important. We struggle to do togetherness because it is costly and highly inefficient. It demands we sacrifice control. Togetherness takes patience through many starts and stops.

#3

There are big chunks of our population whose innate human capital is basically being squandered because they are not getting an education that enables them to take advantage of their natural talents and gifts. That not only hurts them, that hurts all of us. It hurts our society and our economy.” — 

Neel Kashkari, the Minneapolis Fed president, in an interview with The New York Times