Healthy religion names what’s real, what’s true, what really works, and what works in the long run—here and later. This ultimate reality, the way things work, is quite simply described as love.
.. Forgiveness is an act of letting go. When we forgive we do not forget the harm someone caused or say that it does not matter. But we release bitterness and hatred, freeing ourselves to move on and make choices grounded in our strength rather than victimization. Forgiveness opens our closed hearts to give and receive love fully.
Jesus’ Teachings for the Second Half of Life
“Leave all things and follow me”You have to have it before you can give it away. You have to know yourself before you can move beyond yourself. Most people therefore just glaze over when they hear such impossible idealism.“Take up your cross”By and large, young people are not yet ready to understand “the cross.” It becomes a piece of jewelry instead of a real agenda for life. People in the first half of life are about growing up, not growing down. Most people are not psychologically capable of truly grasping the full need and importance of letting go until their fifties or sixties, and many not even then... In the first half of life, you can’t let go or turn around. You’re rightly focused on creating a name for yourself, finding a spouse and job, accumulating money and possessions. But you must eventually let go so you can fall into your True Self that was always there, but that you were just not ready to meet.“Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.”The first half of life uses the dualistic language of good guys and bad guys. The illusion is that some are all good and some are all bad, and the delusion is that we’ve got to kill all the bad ones. The first half of life is where we’re taught to separate from evil (see Leviticus 16-25). Paul says “Jesus became sin” (see 2 Corinthians 5:21). Jesus became the problem; he became the broken, imperfect one. He entered into solidarity with the sin of the world rather than stand above or apart from it. Jesus absorbed evil. He didn’t think for a moment he could kill it. He let it wreak its havoc on his body to transform it there, rather than perpetuate violence on others... Not willfulness but willingness.. I’m not surprised that a well-dressed, thirty-year-old man wants his titles and diplomas on the wall. I surely still carry some status symbols, but it doesn’t mean much now. If you’re my age and you still need external symbols of prestige to tell yourself and others that you’re important.. I don’t know why we picked and chose among Jesus’ teachings. But I think it reflects first-half-of-life morality. The church just wasn’t ready to follow Jesus all the way with his second-half-of-life wisdom.
Why Hamilton Matters
History is not a process of free association; nor can historical injustices be rectified by banishing offensive artifacts from view. History is a discipline—a gathering of evidence to reconstruct the past and a critical exploration of its contradictions and complexities. If there is a single unifying theme in American history, it is this nation’s ongoing struggle to live up to its founding ideals—a struggle that has played out on the battlefield, in the courtroom, in the political process, and in the shaping of popular sensibilities.
.. But the rapid-fire lyrics of hip-hop in Hamilton manage to evoke the fast-and-furious pamphleteering through which ideas were disseminated during the founding period, as well as the long historic provenance of those ideas.
.. The amendment process established under Article V yielded the Bill of Rights, the abolition of slavery, and other attempts to create “a more perfect union” over successive generations.
.. The “dead white men” of the founding generation are portrayed as complex, imperfect individuals by a largely non-white cast. Color-blind casting this is not.
.. Act One’s Marquis de Lafayette, that great friend of revolutionary America, becomes the Francophile Thomas Jefferson in Act Two.
.. This is called “doubling” in the theater, and in this case, doubling works to personify the transfer of American ideals from war to peace, rebellion to governance.
.. “The World Turned Upside Down” had become part of American apocrypha, as it was said that Lord Cornwallis’s troops grimly sang the song as their commander surrendered at Yorktown. While it is doubtful that this actually happened, the significance would not have been lost on earlier generations of Americans.
.. Hamilton is at its best when it addresses just how improbable it was that the American experiment survived its first few decades.
.. “Winning was easy,” Washington tells Hamilton. “Governing’s harder.”
.. Hamilton was mindful that future generations would judge him by what was written about him during his own lifetime, so he spared no ink in challenging his detractors. When a blackmail scheme surrounding his marital infidelities threatened to destroy his reputation, he did what any modern PR guru would recommend: He preempted his enemies by confessing the scandal, publishing details of the sordid episode in a pamphlet.
.. Miranda omits Hamilton’s final excruciating hours during which he pled for last rites from an Episcopal bishop, who doubted that his was a soul worthy of redemption. The bishop eventually relented, and one of Hamilton’s final acts was to forgive Burr.
.. By this account, it is not enough for the historian to attempt to reconstruct the past and understand it on its own terms. Rather, the historian has a moral responsibility to condemn the past and its role as the progenitor of present injustices. The historiographical focus turns from sweeping narratives, which are characterized as triumphalist or morally obtuse, to narrow accounts of disenfranchised peoples—subjects worthy of study to be sure, but not to the exclusion of all else.
.. The crowning achievement of Hamilton is that it encourages the audience to treat the past not as a moral affront to the present, but as a challenge to it. It forces the audience to view the founding generation as neither heroes nor villains
My Son Shot 10 Amish Girls In a Pennsylvania Schoolhouse
After her son committed a horrific crime, Terri Roberts expected rage and calls for vengeance. What she was greeted with instead healed an entire community.
It was a moment of sudden, healing clarity for me.Forgiveness is a choice. The Amish had made that very clear, but now I knew what it meant: Forgiveness isn’t a feeling. These sweet parents were as grief-stricken as I was, their hearts broken like mine. I did not have to stop feeling anger, hurt and utter bewilderment at the horrific decisions Charlie had made. I only had to make a choice: to forgive.