Recently, a delegation of American nuns composed of leaders from a variety of religious orders left on a mission to Rome to explore and better understand reports of religious and spiritual profligacy among their church’s male hierarchy.

“The mission is not investigative, but exploratory,” stressed Sister Elizabeth of the Benedictine order. She cited reports of male clerics tinkering with canon law, restricting how and by whom the Mass is celebrated, arguing whether the pope’s shoes should be red or white, specifying what happens in the bedroom, and re-assessing the Vatican’s priceless art collection. The nuns worry that their Vatican brethren may have distracted themselves from Jesus’ directives regarding the poor, respect for women and the care and teaching of children. She also cited the nuns’ concern about the American bishops’ stated opposition to President Obama’s effort to provide health care for 45 million uninsured Americans.

According to Sister Irene of the Ursuline order, the nuns have decided to reopen a dialogue with their male brethren about the meaning of Jesus’ brief time on earth and how his own parables might better inform their behavior.

“It is not uncommon for male religious authorities in various faiths to repurpose their deity’s or prophet’s message for their own purpose,” she says, “As sisters, we try to live simply by Jesus’ teachings, which tell us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, care for the sick, comfort the afflicted, ransom the captive, teach the children, counsel the doubtful, bear wrongs patiently, forgive transgressions, and bury the dead. … This puts us in the difficult spot of having to choose between Christ’s teachings or the doctrinaire mandates of our apparently busy confreres.”

So many clerics have been led away in handcuffs recently, either for sexual abuse of children or elaborate efforts to hide such sins from public or prosecutorial scrutiny, that it’s tempting to wonder why the Vatican should decide to investigate the activities of nuns, especially now.

But whatever the motivation, it reflects an internal schism within the church regarding “liberation theology” as practiced in South and Central America. It has been roundly condemned by the Vatican, which tends to favor more expedient collaboration with wealth and power, though this strategy did little to enhance Pope Pius XII’s reputation for papal infallibility during the Holocaust; nor does it enhance the reputation of Mexican priests and bishops accepting and justifying large church donations from the same drug lords who distribute heroin-laced candy to Mexican children.

Sister Delano of the Dominicans sums up their initiative this way: “Christ teaches us to ‘counsel the doubtful” and this is the spirit in which our mission to Rome is conducted. … We seek only to reunite men and women of faith in doing the ‘works’ that our Lord called us to do. I guess we miss the good old days when ornately dressed men of the church sat around arguing over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.”

VTDigger

Dear Correspondents:

My VPR commentaries usually elicit 35 to 50 thoughtful responses, some supportive and some critical, as one would hope. I generally answer each individually but my recent commentary on UVM and the state college system required a longer, more thoughtful response. Most were supportive, and the roughly 35 percent that dissented vigorously raised points worthy of address.

First, I did not include CCV in the suggested integration as I wrongly assumed that its mission was more deeply grounded in geography than the other five systems. I was corrected in this misperception by several and agree that if integration were to happen, their infrastructure should be included.

I believe it is helpful to express one’s biases to provide readers with context for what is after all only an opinion. I believe in the power of good government and good leadership to improve our lives. I like practical solutions. I believe they are usually found in the complex center of our unique and individual biases. They call on leaders and thoughtful people to engage respectfully, to compromise, and to be willing to learn from one another and often to change opinions.

I have also decried the relentless polarization of wealth and employment opportunity for all but the well-heeled that has undermined our commitment to educational investment and to the economic aspirations of our young people. And lastly, a student with no access to dental, mental or physical health care or who comes to school hungry is, in my own teaching experience, usually distracted from study and learning.

Looking forward, I believe we will need to realign our aspirations more toward life’s less transient qualities than the consumer extravagance to which we have grown accustomed. We will probably pay more taxes but should require more accountability. I think our single most important community investment is in education and the wellbeing of our young.
In response to some of the feedback, I should add or clarify a few points.

I went to kindergarten and grade school in Morrisville, Phillips Exeter for high school, Kenyon for two years, where I achieved little through no fault of theirs, took a working year off and finished my final two years with a degree in Romance languages at UVM, working the nightshift at IBM, and supporting a wife and two children. I was grateful for my access to UVM. It was affordable and I carried forward no debt. I then taught French for two years at Mount Abraham.

Though I don’t believe every student must go to college, I believe strongly in college education, but am troubled by the fact that much of current college work is remedial high school work.

Though I worry about both educational cost and quality, I’ve often said that the general decline in learning derives more from the intellectual culture in our homes than in our schools. Still I do feel that some teachers are complicit in the “feel-good” vs. “learn” dynamic.

The point of my commentary was only that I do not believe the trajectory we are on is sustainable. I believe that taxes must be the funding basis for K-12 public education and, to a lesser degree, higher ed. As students mature and approach employment age, they can bear some of the cost, depending on family circumstances, private scholarships, federal grants, and work-study programs.

Vermont has 620,000 people, 100,000 native students of all ages, roughly 25,000 non-native, higher ed students, and about 380,000 taxpayers. That constitutes one state college for every 100,000 Vermonters. The demographic math simply doesn’t support six college systems with attendant faculty, administration and infrastructure. Neither does our college and alumni obsession with building buildings as opposed to investing in exemplary teachers, endowing chairs and forging educational networks and digital libraries. When I look back at what made my education, I see only a few teachers who held me to higher standards than I thought possible and who were there for me when I needed help. They did not make me feel comfortable and I don’t see buildings.

Well-meant efforts by the state colleges to shame further legislative support from a state of 620,000 people and an HO-gauge economic engine, by correctly pointing out that our support of higher ed is among the lowest in the nation simply ignores economic and demographic reality.

Among the letters I received that were supportive of exploring the idea further, two were from private college presidents, some were from current professors within the state system, one was from an educational consultant to higher ed and several supported the idea, but did not want to harbor the five state systems within UVM because of its market ambiguity.

Finally, in an era wherein entertainment, opinion, journalism and advocacy have all merged into one sad mash-up called the “information age,” I would remind readers that I write only opinion pieces. I am not a journalist.

Many thanks for your patience with this over-long response and I am grateful that my commentary generated such articulate response – pro and con.

Best,

Bill Schubart

VTDigger

In this era of escalating and unaffordable college costs, if I were Vermont’s education tsar I would create a unified Vermont State College system under UVM, ending any duplicative expense or competition between our five institutions and implementing the cost efficiency of a single administration for non-academic affairs like purchasing, maintenance, accounting and admissions. I would honor existing tenure commitments but abolish the practice going forward, at least as we know it.

A state of 600,000 people with a $5 billion budget, of which only half is paid for by Vermont taxpayers, simply can’t afford to support five state colleges even with out-of-state tuitions. The system itself and its undergraduates are sinking under the weight of costs.

I would convene the academic leadership of Castleton, Johnson, Lyndon, Vermont Tech and UVM to meet and clarify their unique academic expertise and mission.

UVM would focus on three things: providing the best undergraduate liberal arts education in its class, expanding its nationally respected College of Medicine, and growing its research capabilities.

Vermont Technical College would focus on its established areas of expertise: technical, practical and applied education in technology, applied sciences and food systems. Vermont Tech would inherit the remnants of UVM’s once vital role in agriculture including the Extension Service.

Castleton, Johnson and Lyndon would work together to establish centers of undergraduate excellence for each campus such as the arts, communications and humanities. Local faculties would be vested with equal authority to enrich and develop curricula within their area of excellence. Think President Fogel’s “Spires of Excellence” but throughout the state system.

The Association of Vermont Independent Colleges know as “AVIC” is adopting the “Five College System” model in Massachusetts. This will allow matriculated students in any of their 19 Vermont colleges to take and get credit for any course or semester in any of the other 18 colleges. This should be true with the state college system as well and would include faculty exchanges and joint seminars on important topics.

Any student in the system could take courses or semesters at any other campus. This would free the student to craft a college education that would make the best of what Vermont has to offer. In time, the private and public college systems might decide to cooperate with one another in similar fashion.

Free marketers will carry on about the value of competition, but whereas consumers can choose where to shop, students do not always get to choose their college. In the case of state colleges, Vermonters would be better served by strategic collaboration than free-market competition in our taxpayer-funded institutions of higher learning.

As to the enduring myth of local control, I do see great value in keeping our elementary and middle schools local. I see reasons to consolidate regionally some of our high schools. But to better manage costs and focus limited resources, our state college system must unify, streamline, specialize and collaborate to succeed.

VTDigger

Life promises us nothing. The quality of our lives is determined as much by arbitrary circumstance as it is by our individual capacity for learning and enterprise. And if we go by our standards here in America, the arbitrary circumstance for most of the world is pretty rough.

Take those in Syria, or in other countries desperate for survival, food and a form of government that offers them a chance at modest prosperity. We already have those things, yet our sense of well-being seems to be “slip sliding away,” as Paul Simon sang in the ’70s. We worry about what the future holds for us.

Our high school graduates now have about the same chance of finding work as those coming out of college with a debt load that will consume much of their first decade of earnings. In Portland, Ore., where my daughter is a college senior, graduates make deli sandwiches and the sex trade is thriving.

Nationally, the job market is stagnant except in forward-looking industries. Employers are either flooded with applications for jobs they don’t have or with job openings for which they have no qualified applicants. Employment, like wealth, is polarizing, with menial service jobs at one end and higher-paying jobs in the sciences, technology and innovation industries at the other. Even the professions offer less opportunity for secure employment and retirement savings.

A good part of the problem is that our schools continue to educate for a waning economy, not the emerging one.

Furthermore, we ourselves have gotten lazy about education, less in our schools than in our own homes. Education’s failing grades begin in the home, not in the school. We aren’t engaged in our children’s education, we don’t hold them accountable for their work. We are incurious ourselves. Helicopter parents are not accountable parents. They look over the teacher’s shoulder rather than over the shoulders of their children. They curry favor with their children whose affection they seem to need more than their respect. But what our children think about our parenting is far less important than how well we motivate and exemplify their love of learning.

As much as we may need to reinvent our schools and colleges for the future, we also need to remember that life is what we make it, not what our government gives us.

Reviving our once exemplary economy depends on repairing the damage we have done to the culture of our once revered educational system. This is at the heart of why things seem to be slip sliding away. They are, and the fault is our own, not government, regulators, a welfare state, or any other sinister demon.

We must make education the number one topic in our homes and also in our schools, not carry on about job creators as if they were our only hope. We must regulate business fairly and strategically. We must rebalance the interests of our citizens and business. We must finally stop blaming everyone but ourselves.

VTDigger

Social conservatives like to use the phrase “moral relativism” to describe their liberal counterparts, perhaps because absolutes are simple and easy to remember, if not to live by. Our judicial system was designed for the reality of moral relativism. Whenever we try to impose moral absolutes they fail.

A judge must understand and act on the relative merits of each case. Remember the Rockefeller drug laws and their mandated sentencing? In the ensuing decades judges had little choice but to lock up more young adults than ever before in our history and drug crimes went from street to pharmacy.

A judge must have the same leeway to punish the “feel good” doctor, liberally dispensing opiates to patients as he or she has to punish the street drug dealer — the same leeway to sentence the well-heeled financial criminal as he or she has to sentence the street criminal who’s robbed a convenience store.

Life doesn’t respond well to absolutes. One might well argue that the sixth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” is interpreted more liberally in red states, by means of the death penalty and concealed-carry gun laws.

We like to make things simple, but then again, sometimes we don’t, when we ourselves feel the pain.

I attended a community meeting recently in which Vermonters discussed practical and impractical ways to express their anger against the Citizens United decision.

The principle behind Citizens United is free speech, the First Amendment to our Constitution and a founding principle of our democracy. Free speech, however, has always been subject legally to relative rather than absolute interpretation. The free speech that protects pornography does not extend to children. The freedom of expression that protects public proclamations does not include yelling “fire” in a crowded movie theater.

Currently, however, it does protect the cannonade of political rhetoric so riddled with made-up facts that fact-checking has become a growth industry.

The group discussed the legal evolution of how “free speech” came to include money and how corporations became “people.”

There was also concern expressed that Citizens United trumps the long-standing commercial speech doctrine that governs truth in advertising. If corporations are indeed people and their speech has the same protections, truth-in-advertising falls victim to corporate personhood as well. The sky’s the limit.

The judicial activism that conservatives love to condemn, in fact, underlies the evolution of Citizens United and it will take a groundswell of citizen outcry to again differentiate corporations from human beings. Life would be much simpler if we could live by absolutes, but the great challenge and beauty of life lies in its complexity. It places on us the responsibility to think and learn and listen before we act — because the right answers are hardly ever simple.

VTDigger

Life is a balancing act. Complex truths are easily overwhelmed by simplistic ideologies and yes-no answers. The currently popular debate that pits free-market capitalism against shared responsibility for our community’s well-being makes for juicy, gladiatorial media bytes but obscures the known fact that it’s always in a capitalist democracy’s best financial interest to support strong communities. If you don’t believe this, consider the alternative.

As communities degrade and finally collapse, the costs in health care, corrections, deferred infrastructure maintenance and remedial education skyrocket. Then the debate shifts to whether or not to spend ever more collective wealth managing the ills of a broken society on top of the costs of preventing further collapse. Pre-emptive investments have always proven more cost-efficient than the cost of managing disorder. An equitably shared commitment to maintain a rigorous public education system, accessible physical and mental health care, a blind criminal justice system and public infrastructure goes a long way towards maintaining social and economic order. Just as prenatal care costs less than postnatal illness, a strong military defense has always been cheaper than waging war.

People under stress in a collapsing society resort to expensive though often profitable anodynes to dull the pain of dysfunction like over-medication, over-consumption and over-stimulation, all of which contribute to further dysfunction.

It’s fashionable these days to argue that personal freedom should trump investments in community. But neither individual freedom nor community is paramount and both need our vigilance.

There is reason for our popular distaste for big government and its astronomical costs. But in our ardor for easy solutions, we hoist everything up on the same petard. We’re unwilling to parse out truth from myth, separating graft, corruption, greed and waste from the social and economic benefits that good government can provide. We’re arguing about whether government is good or bad when we should be discussing how to make it better.

The discussion we should NOT be having is whether capitalism and individual freedom are more important to our future than a shared commitment to community well-being. The discussion we SHOULD be having is how one contributes to the other and how we can enhance the prospects for both. But this takes candidates willing to engage in a debate of depth and substance, instead of promoting partisan ideology.

We face some very complex issues as a nation, such as whether or not it makes sense to prosecute two questionable wars — with a third on the horizon, whether to lower taxes on job creators who have not created any domestic jobs, and whether to keep two million plus Americans behind bars instead of in classrooms.

Truth needs to be sought out in personal experience, history, art, science, philosophy, and the wisdom and experience of the elders we sequester in nursing homes.

As a nation, we’re addicted to easy answers. Oh, if only life were as simple as a candidate debate!

VTDigger

A few of us carefully vetted drive-by, liberal media elites are waiting in the Mea Culpa Lounge at the Rouge Limburger Mansion in Palm Springs. We’re five in all, each wearing our “Rouge’s  Guest” badges. I’m in good company with NPR’s Maura Liasson, The Times’ Paul Krugman, Rachel Maddow from MSNBC and, to my surprise, Laura Ingraham, whom I’d always thought of as a conservative. I’m an occasional commentator on VT Public Radio and VTDigger.

Rouge enters the room with a broad smile, welcomes us warmly and apologizes for the mansion’s security measures that included pat-downs, full body scans and ultrasounds. Paul and I both rebelled at the ultrasound, but were assured that they would be superficial only and that, other than the gooey cream, we wouldn’t feel anything.

“Care for a Percocet?” Rouge asks with an insouciant smile. “Just kidding!” he jibes with a disarming smile. “They’re my gout pills, he says grabbing several and washing them down with a glass of vitamin water.

He then holds up the bottle and says, “Used to be one of my advertisers, but I had to let them go after my linguistic fluke.” His pun elicits no response.

Hurt that we didn’t see the humor, he insists, “It was a fluke you know. I had to apologize, but it wasn’t really my fault. I’d taken too many Lipitors with my mid-morning cheeseburger. You media elites just don’t understand down-home humor. Do you ever have any fun?”

We looked at each other. “Fair question,” I thought.

Maura Liasson leaned forward and asked, “Rouge, you’ve lost all your national sponsors. How will you continue?”

“Unlike you, I can’t extort taxpayer money to stay in business. Oh, a lot of the big advertisers abandoned me and my millions of fans. I guess they just don’t want their business any more. But I have three loyal sponsors who’ll never leave us. They believe in us. One’s ‘Diet Hat’ and the other is my own start-up called Moat-Canine Security. Diet Hat’s remarkable. I used their product one day and lost 30 pounds. You just wear the hat for seven days or less, depending on how fat you are, eat whatever you want, no restrictions and the lard evaporates like sins in a liberal church … just kidding. There’s one in your guest pack. Laura, wear yours home and you’ll be gone when the plane lands back in D.C.

“Moat-Canine Security combines medieval wisdom with nature’s tooth and claw. Animal rights Nazis have been all over us, but that’s life in the US of A today. First, we dig a moat around your home and fill it with pit bulls. There’s a trace of meth in their kibble and this keeps them on the qui vive for intruders.

“Our oldest sponsor is Meager Capital Investments. They manage investments in commodity plastic. Gold, silver, platinum have all run their course and peaked. The new gold standard is recycled plastic. It’s risen over 17 percent just since you got here. Where else can you get such a return? My fans love it!

“See those young women behind the glass. That’s the ovary office. They’re standing by to take orders now for our sponsors.”

A bit nervous, I ask Mr. Limburger what he thinks of Vermont’s single payer health care initiative.

“Aren’t you the state that forced Walmart to open small downtown bookshops, deports shoppers from Quebec, and hires illegals to milk your cows?” he asked. “You guys should sell moonshine on the interstate the way your tax-free neighbor does, then you wouldn’t need a health care system.

“Hey, I’m taping my show in a few minutes and you’re welcome to watch. My guest this week is Hamid Kharzai. He’ll be telling my adoring fans his thoughts on the place of women in modern society. You can watch on that monitor right there.”

We all thanked Mr. Limburger for his hospitality and left clutching our gift packs.

VTDigger

The most expensive service our government provides to its citizens, other than heroic health care in Medicare, Medicaid and the VA, is to lock them up.

According to the Bureau of Prisons, the annual average cost per prisoner in 2008 was $26,000 at the federal level and $24,000 at the local level. Small states like Rhode Island and Vermont estimate their costs much higher at $35,000-$45,000 a year. This is two to three times our per-pupil costs for public education.

At 743 prisoners per 100,000 citizens, the U.S. incarceration rate is roughly six times greater than that of England, Australia or China. It’s even significantly greater than that of Russia. The “Land of the Free” now incarcerates more of its citizens than any country in the world.

The term “penitentiary,” meaning a place to do “penance” derives from the early Shaker belief that confining one in solitary would afford them time to consider and repent for their transgressions. Today’s massive penitentiaries sprang from that belief and help explain why we are so out of sync with the rest of the world.

There are three reasons given for putting people in jail: public safety, deterrence and retribution. Statistically, only the first is effective. Most crimes occur in a fit of testosterone, rage, desperation or panic. About-to-be criminals don’t pause and reflect on outcomes.

In Christianity at least, Old Testament retribution gave way to Christ’s admonition to forgive. But that persistent Old Testament demand of an eye for an eye is hard to quell and usually trumps the rationale that sending an offender to what amounts to a crime academy doesn’t serve the victim, the criminal or society.

Most experts agree that economic crime and incarceration increase as more people fall into poverty. But the conservative right seems curiously untroubled by the erosion of our once robust middle class and reluctant to acknowledge the increasing number of Americans losing economic ground. They point instead to the tiny minority clawing their way into the rarified world of wealth derived from interest and dividends.

Furthermore, they complain about the cost and size of government, specifically the social safety net and its mandates, but we hear little from them about the skyrocketing cost of incarceration, perhaps because it’s been privatized into a highly profitable business. It’s hard to deny the correlation between economic stability, equal opportunity and the distribution of wealth — and crime and the cost of corrections. Property crimes occur along a spectrum from need to greed. A parent will steal food to feed a starving child; a kid may kill simply for a pair of designer sneakers. With this in mind, we need to differentiate and invest more in programs like reparative justice, court diversion and early release. We cannot sustain the high cost of corrections, especially when it corrects so little.

P.S. Vermont is one of the highest incarcerating states in the country.

VTDigger

In this pre-electoral season, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Republicans older Vermonters will recognize as having run Vermont effectively for a hundred years. This species of Republican still survives in Vermont and continues to add wisdom and intelligence to our generally civil political discourse.

Those we see on national TV, however, are different, self-described as “Tea Party  conservatives,” “social conservatives,” or “the Christian right.” Their debates have become so  predictable that, like many, I’ve stopped watching the main events and only catch the sound-bite summaries on the following day’s news.

The current Republican front runner is a man richer than 99% of his fellow Americans. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it begs the question of how much empathy he’ll be able to muster for sustaining a social safety net that protects those of us in the other 99% should we fall out of the economy, sometimes for reasons brought about by the privileged 1%.

The other leading candidate is a man spinning his past into a tale of hard work, allegiance to conservative values, intellectual honesty, and to Christian ideals — whatever they’ve become in the context of modern politics.

Both men represent different aspects of what is emerging as a new definition of Republican virtue. But personally, I’d rather see a George Aiken, Jim Jeffords, Dick Mallary, Phil Scott or Randy Brock as president.

I think it’s the “Christian” supremacy stuff that’s most troubling to me. A founding tenet of  this country was religious freedom in which all law-abiding people might practice their faith openly and freely. It didn’t happen overnight, but in time we learned to live together — Jews, Catholics, Puritans, Calvinists, Lutherans, Mormons, Animists, Hindi and Muslims. We’re still learning to live together racially but we’ve made steady progress. Our allegiance to racial equality and religious tolerance appears often in our headlines, but not always in our news.

We need to remember that the current president and his family in the White House are exemplars of Christian values, too. I will not presume to measure their Christian values against those of the two emerging Republican candidates. Nor would I, if they were Muslim, as half the nation still seems to want to believe. But then, of course, they’re also an African-American family, which for some still does not fit their image of Christians in the White House.

The beautiful parables of the Jesus I grew up with in our small church in Morrisville, taught that spiritual well-being came from being among and helping the poor and the sick, teaching children and seeing to the well-being of others as well as ourselves. That world is very different from the one reflected so often in politics today — one that elevates consumerism, commerce and accumulated wealth above community.

If I were casting my vote in any of the Republican primaries today, I think I might just have to write in a Vermonter.

VTDigger

Whether I am ushered into the next world by a choir of cherubs or a bevy of trident-bearing imps, or whether I just compost quietly in nature’s great recycling system is not a matter on which I spend a great deal of thought.

I am, by genetic endowment half-Jewish, by upbringing Roman Catholic, and by choice, agnostic. I neither deny nor assert the existence of God.

I have seen the great comfort and goodness wrought by small churches of all persuasions in the small communities in which I have lived.

I also see the hell-born misery ultra-orthodoxies of all religious types wreak on people the world over. Be it the Taliban, ultra-Orthodox Jews, the far-right Christians or the Sunni-Shiite internecine wars, you name the orthodoxy, and history books and news archives will drown you in tales of persecution, torture and death.

Throughout history there have been oases of peace and sanity where Jews, Christians and Muslims or Buddhists, Muslims and Hindi have flourished in mutual respect. For four centuries prior to the 11th century, Jews, Christians and Muslims lived together under moderate Muslim rule in Cordoba, Spain. During the European Holocaust, Muslim Morocco prided itself on defying Vichy’s order to its French colonies to round up their Jews. The Islamic monarchy instead sheltered them from German and French persecution. But examples like these have been rare. And human carnage done in the name of various deities or “with God on our side” as Dylan sings, is common. The subjugation of women across all orthodoxies and the persecution of religious minorities and homosexuals is as prevalent today as the burning of non-Catholics was in the streets of Seville during the Spanish Inquisition.

The recent news coverage of Ultra-Orthodox Jews spitting on an 8-year-old girl and calling her a “whore” even though she wore the modest uniform of the orthodox school she attended resembles Puritan extremism. And the requirement that women in Ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods ride in the back of buses recalls our hard-fought civil rights battles here at home.

The slaughter of Muslims by former neighbors with whom they had lived in peace for decades in the former Yugoslavia, the genocidal rampages in Africa, the multi-century cover-up of sexual abuse of children in Catholic parishes, all in the name of religion must cause doubt about the existence of God or, at least, about his earthly designates.

I believe in a higher power. I am open, as I was as a young altar boy, to the loving and forgiving God who teaches that the meek shall inherit the earth.

But in observing the ongoing persecution and slaughter conducted on religious grounds, I can’t embrace or even trust religions managed by man in God’s name. I miss the spiritual discipline I knew as a child, but I can’t muster enough faith to forgive institutions willing to fight to accumulate earthly riches and political power — while at the same time perpetuating sexual subjugation of women and children.

VTDigger