God and Evolution at the National Institutes of Health

Sam Harris, a prominent "strong" atheist, recently questioned the appointment of Francis Collins to head the National Institutes of Health.

Mr. Harris wrote, ironically: "It would seem a brilliant choice. Dr. Collins’s credentials are impeccable: he is a physical chemist, a medical geneticist and the former head of the Human Genome Project. He is also, by his own account, living proof that there is no conflict between science and religion. In 2006, he published 'The Language of God,' in which he claimed to demonstrate 'a consistent and profoundly satisfying harmony' between 21st-century science and evangelical Christianity."

However, Mr. Harris used Dr. Collins's own words to demonstrate disturbing inconsistencies. For example, Dr. Collins flip-flopped in asserting when God stands inside Nature and when God stands outside Nature. Mr. Harris also insinuated that Dr. Collins helps foster an epidemic of scientific ignorance by inserting God's intervention in the midst of evolution.

In my estimation Mr.Harris's article raises a variety of issues, including the contentious relationship between Science and Religion and first ammendment rights regarding freedom of religion (as it relates to public policy and an implicit religious test for office).

Was Barack Obama'a July, 2009 appoinment of Dr. Collins a stroke of brilliance--a bridge across the abyss of the culture war?

The Elders Speak: Woman's Equality

Nelson Mandela has organized an independent group of world leaders called The Elders. They advocate peace building, address human suffering, and promote the shared interests of humanity. Among their ranks is Jimmy Carter.

This week, as a representative of The Elders, Mr. Carter published a declaration in the Guardian criticizing all religious outlooks that reduce women to a second class status. He wrote of his own break in 2000 with the Southern Baptist Convention, after a sixty year relationship: "It was ... an unavoidable decision when the convention's leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be 'subservient' to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service. This was in conflict with my belief - confirmed in the holy scriptures - that we are all equal in the eyes of God"

Mr. Carter lifted up The Elders' clear call for sexual equality: "The justification of discrimination against women and girls on grounds of religion or tradition, as if it were prescribed by a Higher Authority, is unacceptable."

In my estimation this pronouncement fits into a larger issue of religion and civilization. Religion in various manifestations bears considerable responsibility for the historic and continuing subjugation of women. Is then the beneficent, global, yet nevertheless religious outlook of The Elders enough to reform deep and continuing forms of religious abuse? Is religion the answer to the problem it helped create? In this regard pundits are asking, why did it take Mr. Carter sixty years to break with the Southern Baptists in this matter?

Michael Jackson's Memorial

Tuesday, I viewed MJ’s memorial in my office on a computer—via the CNN website that offered streaming video side-by-side with scrolling Facebook comments from across the country and around the world.

The snippet comments added a weird dimension to an already weird phenomenon—the death of a weird mega-celebrity. (Weird was the chosen word of commentators who wanted to insinuate MJ’s real-life personality yet not deal with the unsavory allegations.)

We’ve seen live, media-event memorials on TV before: notably Princess’s Di’s and Ronald Reagan’s. But the website business took the evolving experience to a new place.

I’m a student of death practices and rituals. I’ve literally written the book for UU observances.

So, MJ’s public memorial riveted my attention. First, it became a funeral when the Jackson brothers—each wearing the same suit festooned with matching yellow tie and red lapel rose, with a signature sequined glove on the left hand—escorted the casket into the arena and positioned it in a bed of flowers at the foot of center stage. The coffin was gilded gold—custom fabricated by the Batesville Casket Company, Batesville IN. Some disputed that the body was really in the casket. The casket’s presence was enough to wring extra emotion from the performers.

Scant formal religion marked the moment. (Some said MJ before his death had been on a personal journey toward Islam.) Nevertheless, several speakers alluded to MJ going through Christ-like suffering—performing, if not dying, for our sins. The Maya Angelou poem, read by Queen Latifah, in particular, referenced Christ’s life with Michael’s.

On the CNN website, after an hour the Facebook posters began to ask, “Is this going to end?” The program lasted two hours, a bit long perhaps, but, for my sensibilities, it moved spiritedly from performer to performer. The spoken tributes were relatively brief and to the point.

In total, the memorial clearly belonged to the category of “black” funeral. A learned commentator Melissa Harris-Lacewell of Princeton, in a Tribune oped, identified the elements that resonated to the black experience in America:

“African-American death rituals have long been celebratory as well as mournful. As a marginal people whose collective identity is rooted in struggle, death is celebrated as a release from pain, inequality and torment. As a deeply religious people, death is celebrated as an opportunity for reunion with God. As a people who were often denied dignity in life, the dignity of a proper "home-going" is a critically important sign of respect. Along with these celebratory aspects of funerals, death rituals among African-Americans are marked by loud, deep displays of emotion and public grieving that mark the sense of loss experienced by the whole community.”

When all the performers had left the stage and the memorial seemed over, the Jackson family stood in the spotlight before a single microphone. At the literal end an eleven year old girl presented the perfect note of humanity. MJ’s daughter Paris, spoke through tears: “I just want to say ever since I was born, Daddy was the best father you can ever imagine. And I just want to say I love him so much.”

All things considered, the actual memorial service seemed relatively restrained and respectful, in keeping with the obvious desire to accentuate the positive and downplay the negative. The African American community embraced MJ’s blackness. The well-orchestrated extravaganza offered a window into the black experience/community.

How would I have framed a memorial service for MJ? I would have been compelled to offer a moral lesson or lessons. (The Unitarian way is heir to a Puritan tradition that admonishes the hearer to be forewarned, if only about the indelible preciousness of life.) In this regard a human life in death offers at least one lesson for survivors. MJ's life offers a quagmire of moral lessons. And they’re not all negative, though the weight is on the negative side of the scale.

In the end I’d affirm that a human life, however flawed, is sacred.

And I’d affirm Ellie’s refrain after we visited the Jackson Family’s Gary Home on Sunday: “He was just a kid, once.”

Realityland: Michael Jackson's Boyhood Home

At the turn of the century, Gary, Indiana had the moniker of the White City. Its sandy beaches sparkled at the bottom of Lake Michigan and the new phenomenon of electric lights spangled the night. Named after a US Steel executive, the White City became the Miracle City, the Heartland home of Big Steel. Gary prospered through the 1960s, when the industry foundered and white flight took half the population to suburbs south of the city.

Broadway Avenue runs south from the still functioning US Steel Works on the Lake, a wide swath of macadam lined with derelict buildings waiting to be demolished and mostly boarded up businesses. Decay renders poverty palpable.

Evenly spaced avenues demarcate Broadway Avenue. They reach into neighborhoods of post war bungalows with postage stamp front lawns—the stuff that the American dream was once made of. The contemporary residences appear more abandoned than not. An imaginative mind imposes what was onto what is. Sadness swells and anger/shame disturbs the conscience, unsettling like thunder in the distance.

Count the avenues ascending from the Lake. At 23rd Avenue turn right or west. In a few blocks, at the corner of 23rd and Jackson Street, stop. Here’s the Jackson Family Home, where the Jacksons lived through 1968.

Here the properties share a similarly sized patch of front yard, each house set back the same distance from the street. The back yard is a mere strip. The original steel worker owners had the front-facing illusion of prosperity that property represents.

Unlike the adjacent house with boarded windows and wild lawn plus a host of other forlorn houses in the neighborhood, the square Jackson Family Home, one level with horizontal siding and a roof pitched to the center, though shabby, at least looks inhabited. The Jackson Family Home’s front yard is carpeted with grass turned dun by the feet of pilgrims who’ve paid homage to the King of Pop, Michael Jackson. He lived here through his first eleven years. How could nine children and parents have squeezed into such a small space?

For now it’s the setting of a makeshift shrine behind a thin band of yellow crime scene tape, imprinted “do not cross.” Stuffed toys, convenience store flowers in cellophane sleeves, home drawn posters, American flags and of other countries, too, mylar balloons, and bodega candles tumble together in spontaneous order.

Across the street a few vendors have set up tables and canopies. Michael Jackson music plays. The tee shirts and posters portray either the young or the thirtyish Michael Jackson of “Ben” or “Billie Jean.” There are no recent images.

It’s late on the Sunday afternoon following Michael Jackson’s death. The hundred-some pilgrims respect one another’s camera space. Everyone wants to digitally document the moment—an early summer moment strangely raw from unexpected death and for me, at least, strangely raw from Gary’s decrepitude.

After a week of media-hype (“’Neverland’ and more”), the Jackson Family Home provides a welcome corrective. Call it “Realityland.”

“Realityland” surely isn’t a cipher for boys who won’t grow up. Quite the opposite. It’s about a hard truth: change, what the old poet called mutability. And change breaks the heart, especially Life’s greatest change, death, the reality hurtling toward everyone. (Every death presages our own.)

The King of Pop is dead. That Michael Jackson has been figuratively dead for quite a while, two decades or so, the iconic star that fans mourn in resonance to their own days-gone-by.

Could there be a better place to materialize America’s “Realityland,” to observe the change of cities and families and pop icons and self, than the corner of 23rd Avenue and Jackson Avenue in Gary, Indiana?

Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson. What to make of him?

Is he a cultural icon—a transformative figure, the King of Pop, who had a gentle soul and a good heart, who paved the pay way for Oprah and Barack Obama?

Or was he a tormented man-child distorted by parental physical and emotional abuse—the denizen of an aptly named Neverland who publicly asserted that sleeping with children (only boys, in fact) was a loving thing and that’s what the world needs is more love?

How should his life-in-death be observed?

In my estimation certain aspects of a person’s life outweigh other aspects. (For example, John McCain’s treatment of his first wife, following his return to America and her disfiguring accident, for me, cast a shadow on his overall character; and he made a campaign issue of his character.) For Michael Jackson the shadow on his character is pedophilia. The narrative arc of his fifty years appears to have bent in that direction, from the "island of lost boys" implications of Neverland through his assertion that sleeping with boys was a good thing.

At a wedding reception, I once had a casual conversation with a woman who had been a Norridge neighbor of John Wayne Gacy, the notorious serial killer who buried his victims in the crawl space of his modest home. She declared, enthusiastically, “He was a really good neighbor.” Was that declaration a kind of compensation; was it a non sequitor; was it implicit musing?

Is it like saying, “Michael Jackson slept with young boys, but then again he really could dance?”

Certain social issues are too big not to confront. Pedophilia is one. In Michael Jackson's life it can't be discounted, certainly not ignored.