1. I enjoyed a new approach this afternoon to my listening routine while I huff and puff at the Fitness Center. I decided to listen to podcasts and began by returning to an episode of Throughline that I put on the other night when I went to bed. I slept through parts of it and knew I wouldn't fall asleep while exercising, and I was right! I stayed awake for the entire episode entitled, "The Right to Bear Arms". In each episode, Throughline ventures to look at different questions with an historical perspective, working to develop a throughline from points in the past to the present.
"The Right to Bear Arms", for the most part, tracked the history of the Supreme Court's rulings on firearm ownership and how, in 1977, the National Rifle Association's focus shifted from being an organization largely concerned with responsible gun ownership and gun safety to a political one, to advocating for the loosening, if not the elimination, of restrictions on firearms possession.
The Supreme Court also shifted. For many years, the court's rulings on the right to bear arms focused on the opening of the amendment and the relationship between gun ownership and a well-regulated militia. More recently, however, the Supreme Court has focused its rulings more on the second half of the amendment, "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
Want to listen? Just go here.
2. I still had more huffing and puffing to do and tuned into a second podcast from Throughline. It focused on the proliferation of public apologies in recent years. The episode explored three different cases. It looked all the way back to the Salem witch trials. It then moved to the 20th century, examining German Chancellor Willy Brandt's spontaneous and silent falling to his knees while visiting a 1970 memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, an act of public contrition for the horrors Germany perpetrated upon Warsaw. Its third chapter detailed Bill Clinton's repeated apologies for his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
The podcast also explored the practice of restorative justice and began and ended with a criminal who decades after he was incarcerated honestly confronted the atrocious nature of his crimes and wrote letters of apologies to the victims, never knowing if the victims received or read the letters.
Just as I listened twice to Throughline's episode on the right to bear arms, and will return to it, I plan to listen to this study of apologies again and continue to wrestle with whether, in any way, the harm we do to one another can be alleviated by apology and what impact apologizing has on us when we have perpetrated harm on others.
Interested? Click here.
3. I knew I'd be getting up much earlier than usual on Tuesday morning to drive Debbie to Coeur d'Alene for a routine medical procedure, so I went to bed much earlier than usual and listened to two episodes of Fresh Air.
The first featured Ann Marie Baldanodo's interview of Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker, the two founders of the feminist punk rock band, Sleater-Kinney, to discuss Sleater-Kinney's latest album, Little Rope, and to look back over the last thirty years since Sleater-Kinney emerged as what Rolling Stone called the best American punk band ever.
You can hear this interview here.
Then I listened to a second Fresh Air interview, another I will return to again.
Tonya Mosley interviewed NPR Politics Correspondent, Sarah McCammon about her recent book, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church.
Immediately, in this interview, Sarah McCammon's intelligence and generous spirit struck me as making her an ex-evangelical (or exvangelical) I could listen to. She reminded me in one important way of the comparative religions scholar Karen Armstrong. Debbie and I traveled to Portland years ago (pre-kellogg bloggin') to hear Karen Armstrong lecture on worldwide Fundamentalism. Central to her lecture was her insight that Fundamentalism rejects, on the whole, modernity. Sarah McCammon separated from the evangelical church, in part, because of its rejection of modernity -- one example would be a rejection of a modern approach to science, including evolutionary theory as well as more modern understandings of, say, the age of our planet.
In this way, my listening to the podcast on the right to bear arms and to Sarah McCammon's interview about her spiritual development converged. As the podcast on the right to bear arms drew to a close and focused on the current Supreme Court, the discussion turned to Constitutional originalism, the idea that legal text should be interpreted based on the original understanding at the time of the text's adoption, not in terms of how society and technology and other aspects of modern life have changed over time. To me, at least, originalism is a kind of rejection of modernity, of change.
I puzzle over this conflict between change and resistance to change, between modernity and resisting modernity all the time. I seek sane voices that examine the resistance to modernity and try to understand this resistance better, even as I embrace (for the most part) modernity and change.
You can listen to Sarah McCammon being interviewed here.
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