Politics Archives - Sam Harrelson

Project Spero and Spartanburg’s New Resource Question: Power, Water, and the True Cost of a Data Center

Spartanburg County is staring straight at the kind of development that sounds abstract until it lands on our own roads, substations, and watersheds. A proposed $3 billion, “AI-focused high-performance computing” facility, Project Spero, has been announced for the Tyger River Industrial Park – North.

In the Upstate, we’re used to thinking about growth as something we can see…new subdivisions, new lanes of traffic, new storefronts. But a data center is a stranger kind of arrival. It does not announce itself with crowds or culture. It arrives as a continuous, quiet, and largely invisible demand. A building that looks still from the outside can nevertheless function as a kind of permanent request being made of the region to keep the current steady, keep the cooling stable, keep the redundancy ready, keep the uptime unquestioned.

And that is where I find myself wanting to slow down and do something unfashionable in a policy conversation and describe the experience of noticing. Phenomenology begins with the discipline of attention…with the refusal to let an object remain merely “background.” It asks what is being asked of perception. The “cloud” is one of the most successful metaphors of our moment precisely because it trains us not to see or not to feel the heat, not to hear the generators, not to track the water, not to imagine the mines and the supply chains and the labor. A local data center undermines the metaphor, which is why it matters that we name what is here.

The familiar sales pitch is already in circulation as significant capital investment, a relatively small number of permanent jobs (about 50 in Phase I), and new tax revenue, all framed as “responsible growth” without “strain” on infrastructure.

But the real question isn’t whether data centers are “the future.” They’re already here. The question is what kinds of futures they purchase and with whose power, whose water, and whose air.

Where this is happening (and why that matters)

Tyger River Industrial Park isn’t just an empty map pin… its utility profile is part of the story. The site’s published specs include a 34kV distribution line (Lockhart Power), a 12” water line (Startex-Jackson-Wellford-Duncan Water District), sewer service (Spartanburg Sanitary Sewer District), Piedmont Natural Gas, and AT&T fiber.

Two details deserve more attention than they’re likely to get in ribbon-cutting language:

Power capacity is explicitly part of the pitch. One listing notes available electric capacity “>60MW.”

Natural gas is part of the reliability strategy. The reporting on Project Spero indicates plans to “self-generate a portion of its power on site using natural gas.”

That combination of a high continuous load plus on-site gas generation isn’t neutral. It’s an ecological choice with real downstream effects.

The energy question: “separate from residential systems” is not the same as “separate from residential impact”

One line you’ll hear often is that industrial infrastructure is “separate from residential systems.”

Even if the wires are technically separate, the regional load is shared in ways that matter, from planning assumptions and generation buildout to transmission upgrades and the ratepayer math that follows.

Regional reporting has been blunt about the dynamics of data center growth (alongside rapid population and industrial growth), which are pushing utilities toward major new infrastructure investments, and those costs typically flow through to bills.

In the Southeast, regulators and advocates are also warning of a rush toward expensive gas-fired buildouts to meet data-center-driven demand, potentially exposing customers to higher costs.

So the right local question isn’t “Will Spartanburg’s lights stay on?”

It’s “What long-term generation and grid decisions are being locked in, because a facility must run 24/7/365?”

When developers say “separate from residential systems,” I hear a sentence designed to calm the community nervous system. But a community is not a wiring diagram. The grid is not just copper and transformers, but a social relation. It is a set of promises, payments, and priorities spread across time. The question is not whether the line feeding the site is physically distinct from the line feeding my neighborhood. The question is whether the long arc of planning, generation decisions, fuel commitments, transmission upgrades, and the arithmetic of rates is being bent around a new form of permanent demand.

This is the kind of thing we typically realize only after the fact, when the bills change, when the new infrastructure is presented as inevitable, when the “choice” has already been absorbed into the built environment. Attention, in this sense, is not sentiment. It is civic practice. It is learning to see the slow commitments we are making together, and deciding whether they are commitments we can inhabit.

The water question: closed-loop is better but “negligible” needs a definition

Project Spero’s developer emphasizes a “closed-loop” water design, claiming water is reused “rather than consumed and discharged,” and that the impact on existing customers is “negligible.”

Closed-loop cooling can indeed reduce water withdrawals compared with open-loop or evaporative systems, but “negligible” is not a technical term. It’s a rhetorical one. If we want a serious civic conversation, “negligible” should be replaced with specifics:

What is projected annual water withdrawal and peak-day demand?
What is the cooling approach (air-cooled, liquid, hybrid)?
What is the facility’s water-use effectiveness (WUE) target and reporting plan?
What happens in drought conditions or heat waves, when cooling demand spikes?

Locally, Spartanburg Water notes the Upstate’s surface-water advantages and describes interconnected reservoirs and treatment capacity planning, naming Lake Bowen (about 10.4 billion gallons), Lake Blalock (about 7.2 billion gallons), and Municipal Reservoir #1 (about 1 billion gallons).

That’s reassuring, and it’s also exactly why transparency matters. Resource resilience is not just about what exists today. Resilience is about what we promise into the future, and who pays the opportunity costs.

Water conversations in the Upstate can become strangely abstract, as if reservoirs and treatment plants are simply numbers on a planning sheet. But water is not only a resource, but it’s also a relation of dependency that shapes how we live and what we can become. When I sit with the black walnut in our backyard and take notes on weather, light, and season, the lesson is never just “nature appreciation.” It’s training in scale and learning what persistence feels like, what stress looks like before it becomes an emergency, and what a living system does when conditions shift.

That’s why “negligible” makes me uneasy. Not because I assume bad faith, but because it’s a word that asks us not to look too closely. Negligible compared to what baseline, over what time horizon, and under what drought scenario with what heatwave assumptions? If closed-loop cooling is truly part of the design, then the most basic gesture of responsibility is to translate that claim into measurable terms and to publicly commit to reporting that remains stable even when the headlines move on.

The ecological footprint that rarely makes the headlines

When people say “data center,” they often picture a quiet box that’s more like a library than a factory. In ecological terms, it’s closer to an always-on industrial organism with electricity in, heat out, materials cycling, backup generation on standby, and constant hardware turnover.

Here are the footprint categories I want to see discussed in Spartanburg in plain language:

Continuous electricity demand (and what it forces upstream): Data centers don’t just “use electricity.” They force decisions about new generation and new transmission to meet high-confidence loads. That’s the core ratepayer concern advocacy groups have been raising across South Carolina.
On-site combustion and air permitting: Even when a data center isn’t “a power plant,” it often has a lot in common with one. Spartanburg already has a relevant local example with the Valara Holdings High Performance Compute Center. In state permitting materials, it is described as being powered by twenty-four natural gas-fired generators “throughout the year,” with control devices for NOx and other pollutants. Environmental groups flagged concerns about the lack of enforceable pollution limits in the permitting process, and later reporting indicates that permit changes were made to strengthen enforceability and emissions tracking. That’s not a side issue. It’s what “cloud” actually looks like on the ground.
Water, heat, and the limits of “efficiency”: Efficiency claims matter, but they should be auditable. If a project is truly low-impact, the developer should welcome annual public reporting on energy, water, and emissions.
Material throughput and e-waste: Server refresh cycles and hardware disposal are part of the ecological story, even when they’re out of sight. If Spartanburg is becoming a node in this seemingly inevitable AI buildout, we should be asking about procurement standards, recycling contracts, and end-of-life accountability.

A policy signal worth watching: South Carolina is debating stricter rules

At the state level, lawmakers have already begun floating stronger guardrails. One proposed bill (the “South Carolina Data Center Responsibility Act”) includes requirements like closed-loop cooling with “zero net water withdrawal,” bans on municipal water for cooling, and requirements that permitting, infrastructure, and operational costs be fully funded by the data center itself.

Whatever the fate of that bill, the direction is clear: communities are tired of being told “trust us” while their long-term water and power planning is quietly rearranged.

What I’d like Spartanburg County to require before calling this “responsible growth”

If Spartanburg County wants to be a serious steward of its future, here’s what I’d want attached to any incentives or approvals…in writing, enforceable, and public:

Annual public reporting of electricity use, peak demand, water withdrawal, and cooling approach.
A clear statement of on-site generation: fuel type, capacity, expected operating profile, emissions controls, and total permitted hours.
Third-party verification of any “closed-loop” and “negligible impact” claims.
A ratepayer protection plan: who pays for grid upgrades, and how residential customers are insulated from speculative overbuild.
A community benefits agreement that actually matches the footprint (workforce training, environmental monitoring funds, emergency response support, local resilience investments).
Noise and light mitigation standards, monitored and enforceable.

I’m certainly not anti-technology. I’m pro-accountability. If we’re going to host infrastructure that makes AI possible, then we should demand the same civic clarity we’d demand from any other industrial operation.

The spiritual crisis here isn’t that we use power. It’s that we grow accustomed to not knowing what our lives require. One of the ways we lose the world is by letting the infrastructures that sustain our days become illegible to us. A data center can be an occasion for that loss, or it can become an occasion for renewed legibility, for a more honest accounting, for a more careful local imagination about what we are building and why.

Because in the end, the Upstate’s question isn’t whether we can attract big projects. It’s whether we can keep telling the truth about what big projects cost.

Doomsday Clock Eighty-Five Seconds to Midnight: An Invitation to Attention

The news that the Doomsday Clock now stands at eighty-five seconds to midnight is not, in itself, the most important thing about this moment. The number is arresting, and the coverage tends to amplify its urgency. But the deeper question raised by this year’s announcement is not how close we are to catastrophe. It is how we are learning, or failing, to attend to the conditions that make catastrophe thinkable in the first place.

What the Clock reflects is not a single looming disaster but a convergence of unresolved tensions from nuclear instability, ecological breakdown, accelerating technologies, and political fragmentation (not to mention our spiritual crisis and the very real scenes we’re seeing with our own eyes in each of our communities with federal authorities and directed violence here in the United States).

These are not isolated threats. They form a dense field of entanglement, reinforcing one another across systems we have built but no longer fully understand or govern. The Clock does not merely measure danger. It reveals a world stretched thin by its own speed.

One risk of symbolic warnings like this is that they can tempt us into abstraction. “Eighty-five seconds to midnight” can feel cinematic, even mythic, while the realities beneath it, such as warming soils, poisoned waters, eroded trust, and automated corporatist decision-making, remain oddly distant. When risk becomes spectacle, attention falters. And when attention falters, responsibility diffuses (part of the aim of keeping us distracted with screens and political theater).

This is where I think the Clock’s real work begins. It presses on a crisis not only of policy or technology, but of perception. We have grown adept at responding to emergencies that suddenly emerge, and far less capable of staying with harms that unfold slowly, relationally, and across generations. Climate disruption, ecological loss, and technological overreach do not arrive as single events. They address us quietly, repeatedly, asking whether we are willing to notice what is already being asked of us.

In earlier posts, I’ve suggested that empathy is not first an ethical achievement but a mode of perception, or a way “the world” comes to matter. Attention works in a similar register. It is not merely focus or vigilance. It is a practiced openness to being addressed by what exceeds us. The Doomsday Clock, at its best, functions as a crude but persistent call to such attention. It interrupts complacency not by predicting the future, but by unsettling how we inhabit the present.

And here is where something genuinely hopeful emerges.

The Clock is not fate. It has moved away from midnight before, not through technological miracles alone, but through shifts in collective orientation, such as restraint, cooperation, treaty-making, and shared commitments to limits. Those movements were not perfect or permanent, but they remind us that attention can be cultivated and that perception can change. Worlds do not only end. They also reorient.

Hope, in this sense, is not confidence that things will turn out fine. It is the thing with feathers and the willingness to stay present to what is fragile without turning away or grasping for false reassurance. It is the discipline of attending to land, to neighbors, to systems we participate in but rarely see or acknowledge. It is the slow work of empathy extended beyond the human, allowing rivers, forests, and even future generations to count as more than abstractions.

Eighty-five seconds to midnight is not a verdict. It is an invitation to recover forms of attention capable of holding complexity without paralysis. An invitation to let empathy deepen into responsibility. An invitation to notice that the most meaningful movements away from catastrophe begin not with panic, but with learning how to listen again to the world as it is, and to the world as it might yet become.

The question, then, is not whether the clock will strike midnight. The question is whether we will accept the invitation it places before us to attend, to respond, and to live as if what we are already being asked to notice truly matters.

Pragmatism for Whom? Energy, Empathy, and the Limits of “All-of-the-Above”

A recent opinion piece in The Hill argues that Democrats should and are beginning to rethink their approach to climate and energy policy. Pointing to renewed support for natural gas infrastructure, oil and gas exports, and an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy, the author suggests that political realism requires prioritizing affordability, job creation, and national security alongside emissions reduction. The argument is presented not as climate denial but as maturity…a necessary correction to what is portrayed as ideological rigidity. It’s a case worth taking seriously, precisely because it names real pressures and real people. But it also leaves something essential unexamined.

In recent weeks, a familiar argument has returned to public discourse that Democrats, and perhaps climate advocates more broadly, must recalibrate their approach to energy. Affordability matters, jobs matter, national security matters. An “all-of-the-above” energy strategy here is not ideological retreat but political maturity.

There is truth here, and it should be acknowledged plainly. Energy transitions are not experienced in the abstract. They are lived locally…in monthly bills, in the dignity of work, in the stability or fragility of rural communities. Any climate politics that fails to take this seriously will not only lose elections, but it will also lose trust.

And yet, there is a deeper question that this rhetoric consistently avoids. Not whether energy should be affordable, or whether people deserve good work. But whose experience counts when we decide what is practical?

Pragmatism and the Shape of Time

Much of the current defense of fossil fuel expansion rests on short-term accounting. Natural gas reduced emissions relative to coal, while fracking boosted GDP and export capacity, strengthening allies and weakening adversaries. These claims are not fabrications in that they are partial truths framed within narrow temporal windows.

What often goes unspoken is that infrastructure remembers. Pipelines, compressor stations, export terminals, and extraction fields are not neutral bridges toward a cleaner future. They are long-term commitments that shape what futures remain possible. Once built, they exert a quiet pressure on policy, markets, and imagination alike.

This is not ideology. It is systems thinking. What appears pragmatic in electoral time can prove costly in ecological time.

The Missing Dimension: Empathy as Perception

In my own work on empathy, I’ve argued that empathy is not primarily a moral sentiment or an ethical achievement. It is a way of perceiving and is how the world first comes to matter to us individually.

What’s striking in many contemporary energy debates is how narrow the field of perception has become. Voters, workers, markets, and allies all appear. But watersheds rarely do. Soil rarely does. Forests, species, and future bodies remain largely invisible.

This absence is not accidental. It reflects a failure of empathy…not emotional indifference, but perceptual narrowing. We have learned to see economic benefit clearly while training ourselves not to see cumulative ecological harm until it arrives as crisis.

Empathy, understood ecologically, resists this narrowing. It asks us to attend to what bears cost slowly, silently, and often without political voice.

Land Is Not an Abstraction

Extraction economies are often defended as lifelines for “overlooked” places. But land is not an abstract resource pool waiting to be activated for growth. It is a living field of relations between humans and more-than-humans that remembers disturbance long after boom cycles fade.

Anyone who has spent time with communities shaped by extraction knows the pattern. Initial prosperity with infrastructure investment and job creation. And then, often, degraded water, long-term health impacts, ecological fragmentation, and economic precarity occur when markets shift.

To name this is not to dismiss workers or romanticize poverty. It is to refuse a false tradeoff that pits dignity of labor against the integrity of place.

Beyond the Binary

The real failure of the “all-of-the-above” framing is not that it includes fossil fuels. It is that it treats energy as a menu of interchangeable options rather than as a formative relationship between people, land, and time.

A genuinely pragmatic energy politics would ask harder questions:

What kinds of work help communities remain with their land rather than exhaust it?
What forms of energy production cultivate care, skill, and long-term stewardship?
What do our infrastructure choices teach us to notice…and what do they train us to ignore?

These are not elitist questions. They are practical questions in the deepest sense.

A Different Kind of Realism

Climate politics does not fail because it asks too much. It fails when it asks too little…when it narrows realism to GDP curves and election cycles while ignoring the slow violence written into landscapes and bodies.

If empathy is how the world first comes to matter, then energy policy is one of the most powerful forms of moral formation we have. It shapes what we see, what we value, and what we are willing to sacrifice…often without saying so aloud.

The question before us is not whether fossil fuels have brought benefits. Of course they have. The question is whether continuing to expand systems that require ecological blindness can ever count as practical in a world already living with the consequences of that blindness.

Pragmatism worthy of the name would begin there.

Cold Wave, Hot Planet, and the Old Trick of “Whatever Happened to Global Warming?”

This morning, we woke up to a solid coating of ice and snow here in Spartanburg, SC. The kids are ecstatic, and we have a rare Sunday morning without attending worship at our church. “Snow Days” here in the Southeast USA are one of those rare treats that not only drive people to the grocery store for bread and milk but also remind us of the simple joys of meteorology, family, and bundling up to go make snowpeople and snowsquirrels.

President Trump recently posted a familiar taunt about this “record cold wave” hitting roughly 40 states, then demanded to know: “Whatever happened to global warming?” The line is designed to feel like common sense. It also relies on a category mistake so basic that it functions less as an argument and more as a test of whether we can still distinguish weather from climate.

Let me start with the obvious and non-negotiable point. A cold wave is weather. Global warming is climate. Weather is what your body meets when you step outside today. Climate is the long story of patterns, averages, extremes, and probabilities over decades. Confusing the two is like arguing that because one person had a bad afternoon, the whole biography is a lie.

And this matters right now because the cold is not theoretical. This weekend’s storm system has been described as sprawling and dangerous, with snow, ice, outages, and widespread travel disruption across large portions of the country. People and more-than-humans die in cold snaps. Communities can be immobilized. Grids and water systems can fail. None of that is diminished by insisting, clearly and calmly, that a warming planet does not mean the end of winter.

Why a warming world can still deliver severe cold

Here’s the part that seems to surprise people every year… global warming loads the dice, but it doesn’t remove variability. We are adding heat to the Earth system overall, especially into the oceans, and that shift changes the background conditions in which weather plays out. NASA puts it plainly in materials aimed at non-specialists… a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, which can contribute to heavier snowfall when temperatures are still cold enough for snow.

Then there’s the polar vortex, which is not a new invention but a real atmospheric feature that can, under certain configurations, stretch or wobble in ways that allow Arctic air to plunge south. NOAA’s explainer is useful here because it describes the mechanism without turning it into political theater.

The more contested question is whether, and how, Arctic warming may be influencing the likelihood of certain jet stream patterns or polar vortex “stretching” events. NOAA has highlighted research suggesting Arctic change can be associated with events that deliver extreme cold into the U.S., while also acknowledging this is an active research area with complexity and ongoing refinement. If you want a careful summary of the “some evidence, not settled, still being worked” reality, the National Snow and Ice Data Center has a sober discussion of how scientific findings have differed across studies and models.

So yes… a frigid outbreak can happen in a warming world. In some cases, warming can even intensify the water cycle and shape storm dynamics in ways that worsen impacts, including snow and ice hazards, depending on the temperature profile of the air mass involved.

What the best synthesis says about cold extremes

If we zoom out to the scale climate science is actually talking about, the headline is straightforward: as the planet warms, cold extremes generally become less frequent and less severe, even though they do not disappear. The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report explicitly treats this, including regionally, noting projected decreases in cold spells over North America under continued warming.

This is the mature way to hold the reality. Not “winter is canceled,” and not “it’s cold today so a warming planet is fake,” but rather: the distribution is shifting. The tails move. The overlaps remain, and the costs of getting this wrong are paid by real bodies in real places… especially the elderly, the poor, the unhoused, and anyone living in fragile infrastructure conditions.

The deeper problem with the President’s rhetoric

The rhetorical move in Trump’s post is not curiosity. It is contempt for scale. It treats the climate crisis as a punchline and the public as if we cannot learn the difference between an experience and an explanation.

And that contempt has consequences. When leaders encourage people to dismiss climate reality as ideology, they create the conditions for underinvestment in preparedness and resilience in weatherization, grid hardening, public health capacity, and the kind of local mutual aid that becomes lifesaving when the lights go out and roads glaze over.

This is where I want to bring in a conviction that has been forming in my own work, what I’ve called ecological intentionality. The question is not whether we can win a snarky argument on social media. The question is whether we can train our attention on what is actually happening in the atmosphere, the oceans, our towns, and the lives most exposed to harm.

A cold wave is not evidence against climate change. It is evidence that our moral and infrastructural responsibilities do not pause for talking points. The atmosphere does not care about our slogans. The grid does not care about our sarcasm. The vulnerable neighbor down the street certainly does not.

So if we want a real question to ask in the wake of this storm, it might be something like:

If extremes are becoming more disruptive and more expensive, why are we still treating climate risk, energy resilience, and public safety as partisan props instead of basic obligations of governance and community?

Back to the tree line

In my backyard, the black walnut does not “debate” the cold. It receives it. It holds it. It keeps faith with time. That is not passivity but discipline and a kind of creaturely realism. It reminds me that perception comes first. Not as an excuse to avoid ethics, but as the condition for any ethics that might actually be honest.

We can do the same. We can tell the truth about the weather and climate at once. We can care for people in the cold without surrendering our minds to the cheap thrill of false equivalence. And we can choose, even now, to become the kind of communities that prepare, adapt, and protect because reality is not an opponent to be dunked on. It is a world to be inhabited responsibly.

Thinking Religion 175: Lamentations

Here’s Thinking Religion 175 with Matthew Klippenstein on the book of Lamentations and modern contexts to consider here in the United States. Challenging but fun episode!

Thinking Religion

Thinking Religion 175: Lamentations and American Trauma

00:00 / 00:56:29

Summary

Sam Harrelson, host of the Thinking Religion podcast, and Matthew Klippenstein, an engineer, discussed the Book of Lamentations and its connection to current US events, such as the killing of Renee Good in Minnesota, noting the resulting anger mirrors the trauma of conquest or occupation addressed in Lamentations. They explored the historical context of Lamentations as something liminal before post-catastrophe “reconstruction theology” following the Babylonian conquest around 587 BCE, and discussed scholarly challenges to biblical authorship, including the traditional attribution of Lamentations to Jeremiah. The discussion emphasized that lamentation, as described by theologian Walter Brueggemann, is a necessary “mode of speech that keeps faith alive by refusing to lie about the world” and serves as “trauma literature” for a community facing collective shock and institutional devaluation.

Details

Connection to Lamentations Matthew Klippenstein proposed discussing the Book of Lamentations, drawing a connection between the ancient text and recent events in the US, specifically the anger and sadness following the death of a woman killed in her car in Minnesota by an ICE officer. Matthew Klippenstein observed that the emotional reactions mirrored a desire for how things were recently, suggesting a similarity to the trauma of being conquered or occupied addressed in Lamentations (00:02:37).

Attribution and Authorship in Biblical Texts Matthew Klippenstein noted that Lamentations is historically attributed to Jeremiah, but modern scholarship suggests otherwise, which led to a broader discussion on common quotes being falsely attributed to famous figures, citing the Japanese admiral Yamamoto’s widely-believed but unsaid quote about “awakening a sleeping giant” (00:03:47). Sam Harrelson concurred that similar issues exist with biblical authorship, noting that figures like Daniel, Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John are not believed to have written the books attributed to them, and referring to the concept of “deutero-Isaiah” and “trito Isaiah” in scholarly circles (00:05:49).
Host and Guest Introductions Following the initial discussion, Sam Harrelson formally welcomed Matthew Klippenstein to the Thinking Religion podcast, providing a brief introduction to their guest (00:06:49). Matthew Klippenstein introduced themself as an engineer in Vancouver who grew up in a non-religious family but later developed a love for religious texts, positioning themself as someone who approaches religious thought from an atheist standpoint (00:08:06).
Connecting Lamentations to the Current US Context Sam Harrelson connected the book of Lamentations to the current political and spiritual situation in the United States, based on Matthew Klippenstein’s earlier suggestion (00:09:09). Matthew Klippenstein elaborated on the trigger for their connection: articles stating it would take a generation to recover from cuts made under a previous administration, juxtaposed with the killing of Renee Good in Minnesota, creating a sense of loss and anger over a constitutional order people feel they no longer have (00:10:19).
Historical Context of Lamentations Sam Harrelson corrected the historical detail, clarifying that the conquest relevant to Lamentations was by the Babylonians around 587 BCE, not the Assyrians who had conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel earlier (00:11:44). Sam Harrelson explained that Lamentations is thought to have come out of the tradition surrounding Jeremiah, noting the term “Jeremiah” is no longer common in popular talk. The text is situated around 500 BCE, after Cyrus the Great allowed the elites to return from Babylon to a ruined Jerusalem, leading to socioeconomic tensions with the people of the land who remained (00:12:54).
Lamentations as Post-Catastrophe Reflection Sam Harrelson emphasized that Lamentations is particularly interesting because it is not about the fall of Jerusalem in the heat of battle but is a post-event “reconstruction theology” addressing the trauma after the temple was destroyed and political sovereignty was lost (00:15:11). Matthew Klippenstein compared Lamentations to a “lessons learned analysis” in industry, reflecting on the causes of a generational disaster after the recovery period (00:17:20).
Personification and Meaning of Lament in the Text Sam Harrelson highlighted the personification of Jerusalem in Lamentations, citing a verse that describes the city as a lonely widow and a princess who has become a vassal (00:18:09). Matthew Klippenstein noted that using interpersonal relationship terms makes the trauma more emotionally affecting than dry historical terms (00:19:20). Sam Harrelson cited theologian Walter Brueggemann’s view of lament as a “mode of speech that keeps faith alive by refusing to lie about the world,” distinguishing it from optimism or silence (00:20:37).
Structural Details and Symbolism in Lamentations Matthew Klippenstein pointed out the structural detail of the five chapters in Lamentations having verses corresponding to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet (22, 66, 22), suggesting a poetic and symbolic intention (00:21:40). Sam Harrelson linked this to the US’s reliance on symbols, such as the flag and the eagle, and the often-misunderstood origins of national symbols like the Pledge of Allegiance (00:22:46).
Hope and Simplicity in Lamentations Sam Harrelson discussed how popular culture often extracts verses like “the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases” from Lamentations 3 to create slogans, but argued that the text pushes back against simple optimism, offering a view of hope as “survivability” amidst ongoing devastation (00:26:07). Matthew Klippenstein related this to Hindu and Buddhist texts on accepting the current uncomfortable situation while maintaining faith, and mentioned Viktor Frankl’s observation that survivors in concentration camps maintained hope by focusing on future purpose (00:28:27).
Lament as Trauma Literature and Community Shock Sam Harrelson introduced Kathleen O’Connor’s reading of Lamentations as “trauma literature,” where a community learns to speak after collective shock (00:33:31). Sam Harrelson connected this to contemporary shock felt by events like the shooting of Renee Good and the constant stream of distressing news, noting that Lamentations does not explain suffering but rather accompanies it (00:34:45).
Erosion of Rights and Othering in the US Sam Harrelson reflected on the shock of increased demands for identification by officials like ICE, contrasting it with memories of previous norms against such practices (00:36:20). Matthew Klippenstein noted that indigenous Canadians had historically required permission from white bureaucrats to leave their reservations, underscoring systemic injustices (00:37:48). Sam Harrelson and Matthew Klippenstein agreed that the text’s focus on sin allows for different political interpretations of how the US reached its current state (00:39:06).
Historical Disparities in Rights Sam Harrelson and Matthew Klippenstein discussed historical inequalities, noting that women in the US and Canada required a male co-signer for basic financial services like checking accounts well into their lifetimes (00:40:12). Sam Harrelson connected this history of prioritizing one group (historically white males) and “othering” others to current issues like ICE detention camps and the reaction to the murder of Renee Good, where attempts are made to dismiss her as “not mainstream” (00:41:22).
America as the New Jerusalem and Institutional Devaluation Sam Harrelson addressed the historical ideal of “America as the new Jerusalem” or “city on a hill” promulgated by figures like Jonathan Edwards (00:44:57). Matthew Klippenstein suggested that the American fundamentals creed fits this backdrop as a “new Nicene creed” (00:46:08). Sam Harrelson concluded that Lamentations teaches communities how to speak after realizing that their institutions—such as the president or federal agencies—cannot save them, which is relevant to the current “devaluation of those institutions” (00:48:20).
The Dangerous Memory of Lamentations Sam Harrelson cited Lamentations 4:1-2, which speaks of gold growing dim and holy stones scattered, as a “devastating image of devaluation” where what once mattered is now treated as disposable (00:50:40). Sam Harrelson referred to the concept of “dangerous memory” from German theologian Johann Baptist Metz, which posits Lamentations as a necessary prophecy for a civilization to recover from collapse and reckon with its history (00:52:50).
Atomization and Susceptibility to Influence Matthew Klippenstein reflected on the Lamentations verse about people becoming cruel, like ostriches, while jackals still nurse their young, suggesting that the atomization facilitated by mass media and the internet makes it easier to “other people” (00:54:12). Sam Harrelson agreed that everyone is susceptible to the influence of algorithms and unbalanced media consumption, even those who consider themselves smart and capable (00:55:35). Matthew Klippenstein concluded that humility about one’s expertise is necessary, echoing Socrates’ view that wisdom is knowing what one does not know (00:57:28).
The Role of Lamentation and Withstanding Suffering Sam Harrelson discussed how people often defend their political side, whether it’s related to Trump, AOC, or others, but they argued that the work of Lamentation offers no such defense of God or political figures, instead keeping company with suffering (00:58:51). They suggested that engaging in the hard work of lament must happen at an individual level before reaching the community level, particularly in a world full of distractions. Matthew Klippenstein affirmed that the text is cathartic and helpful for processing and surfacing what needs to be surfaced, even without offering a specific prescription (01:00:07).
Lament as a Discipline of Presence Sam Harrelson emphasized that lamentation offers no resolution, rebuilt temple, or answered prayers; rather, it is what faithful communities practice when they refuse denial and despair, occupying a middle ground. They defined lament as a discipline of staying present to what is broken without pretending to know how it will be fixed or healed. Sam Harrelson reflected on the current shocking circumstances for their five children, contrasting their 18-year-old’s challenges today with the world Harrelson experienced at the same age in 1997, highlighting the shift in ease of travel and feeling American abroad (01:01:11).
Call to Presentness and Reflection Sam Harrelson urged people to stay in the present moment of shock rather than immediately reacting, advocating for the hard work of lament to prevent repeating past mistakes. They reiterated that the discipline of staying present to what is broken is a personal reminder to themself in the face of shocking events like a TV shooting or a story of deportation (01:02:17). Matthew Klippenstein and Sam Harrelson concluded the discussion, with Harrelson expressing appreciation for Klippenstein’s input in helping them sort through things and mentioning that Klippenstein has exciting developments coming up.

Before We Decide What Matters: Minneapolis, ICE, and the Work of Attention

If you’re like me, you are tired of being told what matters. Every day arrives already crowded with urgency from cable news to social media to our email inboxes. There is always something demanding a response, a position, a statement, a judgment. The crises are real and here at home, as we’re seeing in Minneapolis, but also here in Spartanburg. Ecological collapse, technological acceleration, political fracture, spiritual exhaustion. And yet the constant pressure to decide, to weigh in with friends or on social media, to declare allegiance or outrage over Trump’s latest missive, even which news outlets to consume… often leaves us less capable of genuine care rather than more. Moral life begins to feel like triage, and eventually like performance.

I have been wondering whether this exhaustion has less to do with a lack of ethics and more to do with how quickly we rush toward them.

Before we decide what matters, something quieter has already taken place. The world has appeared to us in a certain way. Something has shown up as worthy of concern, or not. Something has addressed us, or passed unnoticed. That prior moment, the way the world first comes into view, is rarely examined. Social media algorithms are designed to outrage us before we have even a moment to process an event. And yet this initial moment of appearance may be the most decisive moral act we ever perform.

Attention is not neutral. It is formative.

We often speak about ethics as if it begins with principles, values, or rules. But those only function once something has already been perceived as meaningful. I cannot care about what I do not notice. I cannot respond to what never appears. Long before moral reasoning begins, there is a posture of perception, a way of being present to what is other than myself.

This is where empathy has become important to me again, not as a sentiment or virtue, but as a mode of knowing. Empathy, understood phenomenologically, is not agreement or emotional fusion. It is not a projection of myself into another, nor a collapse of difference. For Edith Stein, empathy names the experience in which another’s interiority becomes present to me as other, irreducible, and real. It is a way of perceiving foreign consciousness without possessing it.

Crucially, empathy in this sense is not something that follows understanding. It is what makes understanding possible in the first place.

Seen this way, empathy is not primarily ethical. It is ontological. It concerns how beings appear to one another, how the world is allowed to disclose itself, how alterity is either received or flattened. Stein is careful here. Empathy does not erase distance. It preserves it. The other is never absorbed into my own experience, but neither is the other sealed off from me. Relation becomes possible without domination.

For example, this matters deeply for how we think about ecology. Much contemporary environmental discourse quickly shifts toward solutions, metrics, and outcomes, from AI data center debates at city council meetings to creation care initiatives once a group decides to engage locally. These are necessary, but they often skip the slower work of learning how to see. Ecology becomes a problem to manage rather than a field of relationships in which we already participate. The natural world is framed as a resource, a threat, or a victim, rarely as a presence capable of addressing us.

Stein herself did not write ecological theory, but her account of empathy offers a discipline of attention that easily extends beyond the human. If empathy is the experience of encountering another as a center of meaning, not of my own making, then it trains us to resist reducing the world to what it can be used for or controlled. It teaches restraint before response. Attention changes this.

To attend to a tree across seasons, to notice how it sheds, scars, and persists, is not to solve anything. It is to be apprenticed into a different tempo of significance. Ecological time resists panic not by denying urgency, but by deepening responsibility. It trains us to remain with what unfolds slowly, unevenly, and often without spectacle.

This kind of attention does not produce immediate answers. It produces orientation.

I have come to think that much of our moral confusion stems from a failure of perception rather than a failure of values. We argue about what ought to be done while remaining inattentive to what is actually present. We leap toward ethical frameworks while bypassing the more difficult task Stein insists upon by allowing the other to show itself as it is, before we decide what it means or what is owed.

Attention is costly (and incredibly valuable, as social media algorithms have taught us over the last decade, as I noted in my 2015 post). It requires patience, vulnerability, and restraint. It asks us to linger rather than react, to receive rather than master. In a culture shaped by speed and extraction with news cycles lasting just a couple of days, this can feel almost irresponsible. And yet without it, our ethics float free of the world they claim to serve.

To attend is already to take responsibility.

Not because attention guarantees correct action, but because it establishes the conditions under which action can be something other than projection or control. When we learn to notice, to listen, to allow meaning to emerge rather than be imposed, we begin to recover a moral life that is responsive rather than reactive.

Perhaps the most urgent task before us is not deciding what matters next, but recovering the capacity to perceive what has been asking something of us all along.

Footnote: Edith Stein describes empathy not as inference, emotional contagion, or imaginative projection, but as a direct experiential act in which another’s consciousness is given as other while remaining irreducibly distinct from one’s own. Empathy, for Stein, is thus neither ethical evaluation nor moral sentiment, but a foundational mode of perception through which meaning first becomes accessible. See Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989), 10–12, 19–21.

After the Crossroads: Artificial Intelligence, Place-Based Ethics, and the Slow Work of Moral Discernment

Over the past year, I’ve been tracking a question that began with a simple observation: Artificial intelligence isn’t only code or computation, but it’s infrastructure. It eats electricity and water. It sits on land. It reshapes local economies and local ecologies. It arrives through planning commissions and energy grids rather than through philosophical conference rooms.

That observation was the starting point of my November 2025 piece, “Artificial Intelligence at the Crossroads of Science, Ethics, and Spirituality.” In that first essay, I tried to draw out the scale of the stakes from the often-invisible material costs of AI, the ethical lacunae in policy debates, and the deep metaphysical questions we’re forced to confront when we start to think about artificial “intelligence” not as an abstraction but as an embodied presence in our world. If you haven’t read it yet, I would recommend it first as it provides the grounding that makes the new essay more than just a sequel.

Here’s the extended follow-up titled “After the Crossroads: Artificial Intelligence, Place-Based Ethics, and the Slow Work of Moral Discernment.” This piece expands the argument in several directions, and, I hope, deepens it.

If the first piece asked “What is AI doing here?”, this new essay asks “How do we respond, ethically and spiritually, when AI is no longer just a future possibility but a present reality?”

A few key parts:

1. From Abstraction to Emplacement

AI isn’t floating in the cloud, but it’s rooted in specific places with particular water tables, zoning laws, and bodies of people. Understanding AI ethically means understanding how it enters lived space, not just conceptual space.

2. Infrastructure as Moral Problem

The paper foregrounds the material aspects of AI, including data centers, energy grids, and water use, and treats these not as technical issues but as moral and ecological issues that call for ethical attention and political engagement.

3. A Theological Perspective on Governance

Drawing on ecological theology, liberation theology, and phenomenology, the essay reframes governance not as bureaucracy but as a moral practice. Decisions about land use, utilities, and community welfare become questions of justice, care, and collective responsibility.

4. Faith Communities as Ethical Agents

One of my central claims is that faith communities, including churches, are uniquely positioned to foster the moral formation necessary for ethical engagement with AI. These are communities in which practices of attention, patience, deliberation, and shared responsibility are cultivated through the ordinary rhythms of life (ideally).

This perspective is neither technophobic nor naïvely optimistic about innovation. It insists that ethical engagement with AI must be slow, embodied, and rooted in particular communities, not divorced into abstract principles.

Why This Matters Now

AI is no longer on the horizon. Its infrastructure is being built today, in places like ours (especially here in the Carolinas), with very material ecological footprints. These developments raise moral questions not only about algorithmic bias or job displacement, important as those topics are, but also about water tables, electrical grids, local economies, and democratic agency.

Those are questions not just for experts, but for communities, congregations, local governments, and engaged citizens.

This essay is written for anyone who wants to take those questions seriously without losing their grip on complexity, such as people of faith, people of conscience, and anyone concerned with how technology shapes places and lives.

I’m also planning shorter, reader-friendly versions of key sections, including one you can share with your congregation or community group.

We’re living in a time when theological attention and civic care overlap in real places, and it matters how we show up.

Abstract

This essay extends my earlier analysis of artificial intelligence (AI) as a convergence of science, ethics, and spirituality by deliberately turning toward questions of place, local governance, and moral formation. While much contemporary discourse on AI remains abstract or global in scale, the material realities of AI infrastructure increasingly manifest at the local level through data centers, energy demands, water use, zoning decisions, and environmental impacts. Drawing on ecological theology, phenomenology, and political theology, this essay argues that meaningful ethical engagement with AI requires slowing technological decision-making, recentering embodied and communal discernment, and reclaiming local democratic and spiritual practices as sites of moral agency. Rather than framing AI as either salvific or catastrophic, I propose understanding AI as a mirror that amplifies existing patterns of extraction, care, and neglect. The essay concludes by suggesting that faith communities and local institutions play a crucial, underexplored role in shaping AI’s trajectory through practices of attentiveness, accountability, and place-based moral reasoning.

After_the_Crossroads_AI_Place_Ethics_v2 Download

SciFi Predictions

Fun read here for fans of science fiction like myself…

Among the Prophets | Nicholas Russell:

For the past few months, I’ve been researching how science fiction has been used as a guide for predicting the future. This has included reading interviews and speeches, the testimony of would-be prophets. Naturally, certain quotes pop up like weeds—but, in the case of the more platitudinal selections, no one can seem to agree on who actually said them. “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future” was either coined by Danish physicist Niels Bohr or mythic Yankees catcher Yogi Berra. It’s entirely possible both men did, in fact, say some variation of the quote, though it’s more likely that Bohr, who was forty years older, said it first. But then again, he may not have said it at all.

What If the Economy Was Modeled After Ecology?

I mean… this is pretty much what I do if they’d like to give me a call.

What If the Economy Was Modeled After Ecology? – Longreads:

What if we thought of the American economy as an organism, rather than a machine? For Atmos, Christine Ro talks with John Fullerton, a former J.P. Morgan banker focused on regenerative economics—which, in simplest terms, is the idea that the economy is a living system. The founder of a paradigm-changing think tank, Fullerton tells Ro he’s not anti-capitalist, but instead wants to build an economy that’s resilient as a whole, optimizes different forms of capital beyond financial capital, and celebrates human creativity within a healthier and less monopolistic market. He also thinks financial institutions like banks could do a lot of good—but they won’t. Reading their conversation, I couldn’t help but think of everything I’ve learned in school over the decades—about Adam Smith, about GDP, about growth—and imagine a world where future generations begin their economic lessons under the guidance of ecology’s wisdom.

Edith Stein’s Letter to Pope Pius XI in 1933

Edith Stein (later St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross as a Carmelite nun) would eventually be killed in a gas chamber by the Nazi’s because of her Jewish heritage. Her letter to Pope Pius XI remains relevant and fresh today, with many societal and spiritual ills and injustices, with government structures and religious organizations remaining either silent or complicit as we approach 2026 and almost 100 years since Stein’s imploring epistle…

EDITH STEIN: “Letter to Pope Pius XI” (1933):

Holy Father!

As a child of the Jewish people who, by the grace of God, for the past eleven years has also been a child of the Catholic Church, I dare to speak to the Father of Christianity about that which oppresses millions of Germans. For weeks we have seen deeds perpetrated in Germany which mock any sense of justice and humanity, not to mention love of neighbor. For years the leaders of National Socialism have been preaching hatred of the Jews. Now that they have seized the power of government and armed their followers, among them proven criminal elements, this seed of hatred has germinated. The government has only recently admitted that ex- cesses have occurred. To what extent, we cannot tell, because public opinion is being gagged. However, judging by what I have learned from personal relations, it is in no way a matter of singular exceptional cases. Under pressure from reactions abroad, the government has turned to “milder” methods. It has issued the watchword “no Jew shall have even one hair on his head harmed.” But through boycott measures–by robbing people of their livelihood, civic honor and fatherland–it drives many to desperation; within the last week, through private reports I was informed of five cases of suicide as a consequence of these hostilities. I am convinced that this is a general condition which will claim many more victims. One may regret that these unhappy people do not have greater inner strength to bear their misfortune. But the responsibility must fall, after all, on those who brought them to this point and it also falls on those who keep silent in the face of such happenings.

Everything that happened and continues to happen on a daily basis originates with a government that calls itself “Christian.” For weeks not only Jews but also thousands of faithful Catholics in Germany, and, I believe, all over the world, have been waiting and hoping for the Church of Christ to raise its voice to put a stop to this abuse of Christ’s name. Is not this idolization of race and governmental power which is being pounded into the public consciousness by the radio open heresy? Isn’t the effort to destroy Jewish blood an abuse of the holiest humanity of our Savior, of the most blessed Virgin and the apostles? Is not all this diametrically opposed to the conduct of our Lord and Savior, who, even on the cross, still prayed for his persecutors? And isn’t this a black mark on the record of this Holy Year which was intended to be a year of peace and reconciliation.

We all, who are faithful children of the Church and who see the conditions in Germany with open eyes, fear the worst for the prestige of the Church, if the silence continues any longer. We are convinced that this silence will not be able in the long run to purchase peace with the present German government. For the time being, the fight against Catholicism will be conducted quietly and less brutally than against Jewry, but no less systematically. Before long no Catholic will be able to hold office in Germany unless he dedicates himself unconditionally to the new course of action.

At the feet of your Holiness, requesting your apostolic blessing,

(Signed) Dr. Edith Stein, Instructor at the German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy, Münster in Westphalia, Collegium Marianum.

The Great Work Ahead of Us

Worth the time to read and process… The Great Work (to invoke Thomas Berry here) ahead of us is daunting. Still, we have the opportunity to create something where human and the more-than-human are encouraged not only to survive but to thrive (together), ultimately, if we only speak up…

Is This Rock Bottom?:

So yes, the fights over SNAP, ACA subsidies, and shutdowns matter — but they’re symptoms, not causes. You don’t get 40 million people needing food aid and 100 million drowning in medical debt because of one bad president or one unlucky decade. You get there because the institutions that were supposed to protect the public spent decades serving somebody else.

Magnolias Over Ballrooms

I’d rather have a magnolia or most any vegetal kin over a ballroom to honor my memory, but that’s just me…

Trump Rips Out Presidents’ Historic Trees for New Ballroom:

Satellite imagery shows that six trees, including southern magnolias commemorating presidents Warren G. Harding and Franklin D. Roosevelt, were axed or removed from the White House grounds this week as Trump abruptly demolished the East Wing.

Renewables Pass Coal’s Share in Global Electricity Generation

China is leading the way here in solar… It’s time for our leaders and economy here in the US to start waking up to reality. That won’t happen in the current scenario of our political landscape, obviously, but there needs to be intentional focusing on reducing consolidated power grid structures in favor of local (and flexible) sources of electricity and fuel (as well as our food supplies).

Global Electricity Mid-Year Insights 2025 | Ember:

Solar and wind outpaced demand growth in the first half of 2025, as renewables overtook coal’s share in the global electricity mix…

Solar grew by a record 306 TWh (31%) in the first half of 2025. This increased solar’s share in the global electricity mix from 6.9% to 8.8%. China accounted for 55% of global solar generation growth, followed by the US (14%), the EU (12%), India (5.6%) and Brazil (3.2%), while the rest of the world contributed just 9%. Four countries generated over 25% of their electricity from solar, and at least 29 countries surpassed 10%, up from 22 countries in the same period last year and only 11 countries in H1-2021…

PDF Report availalbe here

Inside the Fight Against Trump’s Alaska LNG Pipeline

Beautiful (but also depressing if you’re frustrated and anxious about such things like me) article here regarding the need to stop using extractive fossil fuels (that are now based on antiquated technologies and inefficient methods in order to prop up megaglobal corporations that pay our elected officials to keep the old narrative of “energy independence”) with voices from Alaskan Indigenous communities resisting the latest push from our backwards administration.

Don’t be misled about the energy issue by media manipulation. We can and should move to decentralized and community-focused solutions. It’s being done and done well and will save us all money, karma, and our children’s health.

Must read…

Inside the Fight Against Trump’s Alaska LNG Pipeline:

“We’re on the bust side of an oil and gas economy,” Native Movement’s Begaye tells me. She points to the relative youth of the industry — just 50 years — “and the jobs are already going away, the money is going away,” she says. Today, revenue from oil and gas accounts for less than 14 percent of the state’s annual budget.

Instead of investing in “fossil fuel distractions, we could be actively pursuing more local renewable energy, and Alaskans already know how,” Begaye and her colleagues wrote in their op-ed for the Anchorage Daily News. They cite Kodiak, which runs on nearly 100 percent renewable energy, and Galena, where a tribally owned and operated biomass system accounts for 75 percent of the community’s heating needs, with another 1.5 megawatts of solar power on the way.

Pope Leo’s Ice Blessing

We need to hear this in our Protestant churches in the United States every Sunday (and Wednesday and Sunday night and Tuesday during gatherings, etc.). Glad to see Leo taking on the ecological mantle from Francis.

Emphasis mine in the quote here…

Pope Leo XIV blesses glacier ice urging global leaders to act on climate change – India Today:

Citing Francis’s text, Leo recalled that some leaders had chosen to “deride the evident signs of climate change, to ridicule those who speak of global warming and even to blame the poor for the very thing that affects them most.”

He called for a change of heart to truly embrace the environmental cause and said any Christian should be onboard.

“We cannot love God, whom we cannot see, while despising his creatures. Nor can we call ourselves disciples of Jesus Christ without participating in his outlook on creation and his care for all that is fragile and wounded,” he said, presiding on a stage that featured a large chunk of a melting glacier from Greenland and tropical ferns.

Navigating Our Climate Crisis Without U.S. Leadership

Important piece here that gives voice to leaders from areas that aren’t usually covered by the mainstream press here in the USA when discussing climate issues and our ecological crisis in general… let those with ears to listen, hear…

Six World Leaders on Navigating Climate Change, Without the U.S. – The New York Times (Gift Article):

Debates around climate change often focus on the world’s largest economies and biggest emitters. But much of the hard work of figuring out how to adapt — both to a hotter planet and to a new geopolitical landscape — is happening in countries that have contributed relatively little to the problem yet are still navigating complex climate-related issues. Hoping to better understand how global warming and the changing world order are affecting some of these often-overlooked places, I spoke with six world leaders from different geographic regions. I heard some common themes: the ravages of extreme weather, the difficulties posed by the Trump administration’s retreat. But these conversations also illustrated the intensely varied predicaments facing world leaders right now.

Oceans Rise, Empires Fall

We’ve been listening to a lot of Hamilton lately. Our children have been playing (and memorizing and singing) the soundtrack on repeat this summer. Merianna has a great post about our Hamilton-era here:

“The World Turned Upside Down” – by Merianna Harrelson:

We might be a little late to the game, but we are definitely in our Hamilton-era. Maybe it was the trip to Washington, DC this summer or the Revolutionary War studies last year, but once we found the Hamilton soundtrack it is the only thing that can play in the car (besides the occasional Wheels on the Bus).

As we head into the cooler mornings of the Fall here in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Merianna and I thought it might be time to actually have them watch the full production… so this morning, I pulled up the show on Disney+ and hit play. I’m no stranger to shedding a few tears in front of our kids, but I was moved at the opening song as I sat there with our family.

A great deal has happened to us personally and in our global community of humans and more-than-humans in this last decade. It struck me that I don’t think Hamilton could be made, or at least received well, today in 2025 in this “post-woke” era of defining good jeans and AI slop. Hamilton captured something real and imaginative and visceral in 2015-2016 that we seemed to have already lost, forgotten, or glossed over (and are intent on erasing).

People of color portraying our “Founding Fathers” who shed blood to carve out a nascent republic with higher ideals than the established order sparks different emotions in a country of complexity-erasure and intentional forgetting. Take the outrage of Google’s AI depicting Washington, etc. as black a few years ago or the recent hand-wringing and outcry from some of our fellow citizens (no doubt due to the constancy of manipulative coverage by certain 24-7 “news” corporations and social media actors that feed into and from outrage engines) over a corporate hedge-fund controlled restaurant changing its logo.

I also shed tears when I first watched Hamilton with our older girls a decade ago… the imagination, the pointing to and away from and towards, the use of caricutre and spittle to prove points… and now those tears come from a different place in my consciousness that I feel we are all carrying… disappointment, loss, even despair… at where this country has been led, not from the whims of “a king on a spending spree” but from oligarchs who know that the time is short and the center cannot hold:

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

More tears ahead, but I hope I can continue to show our children glimpses of what can be while I rage against this machine. Lack of imagination got us “adults” into this, but imagination will get us out. Mark gives us the prescription to enter the Kingdom through the narrow Way, and as much as I stumble, I hope that we can see through this scanner even darkly and realize that we need eyes to see and ears to hear the imaginative call of grace in new ways and what can be…

People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.’ And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

Not throwing away my shot and all that jazz.

Remembering

Merianna says what a whole lot of us (myself included) have been thinking and feeling and anxious about (particularly about our young ones after our summer travels to D.C. and NYC)…

“The World Turned Upside Down” – by Merianna Harrelson:

As we watched the barricades go up and the monuments close so that a parade route could be established, I wondered what our kids would remember about our trip to Washington, DC. I hope they will remember the stories of those who fought for the silenced and the oppressed. I hope they will remember the leaders who rose up and spoke against injustice and capitalizing on the labor of others. I hope they will remember the beauty of the art and the curiosity that led to innovation.

Environmental Laws are also Laws

☀️ Bit of sunshine…

EVERGLADES WIN: We stopped “Alligator Alcatraz” — for now – Friends of the Everglades:

“This decision sends a clear message that environmental laws must be respected by leaders at the highest levels of our government — and there are consequences for ignoring them,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades.

You can’t have it both ways

I’m afraid the barn door is already flung very open for this sort of Solomon’s Dilemma thinking.

I’m also not sure what the point of this entire opinion piece is beyond making unrealistic statements like this…

Opinion | Allowing Churches to Endorse Politicians Can Be Perfectly Liberal – The New York Times (Gift Article):

For example, a pastor should be able to endorse a political candidate in a sermon, but not if that sermon is posted on a church website. Nor should the pastor’s church be allowed to publicly campaign for a candidate.