George Santos is a Trumpzi Frankenstein

Echo opinion published in the Seattle Times, by the New York Times columnist David Brooks:

Donald Trump's political Frankenstein:

George Santos is following the Donald Trump model - do ALL the political harm you can and the corrupt GOP will bring you back to life again. 

The Sad Tale of (Pathetic) George Santos (Maine Writer opinion- Santos is a phony!)

What would it be like to be so ashamed of your life that you felt compelled to invent a new one? (In other word "lie" about who you are and the heritage you inherited.  "Who knew?" 😏😝😡)

Most of us don’t feel compelled to do that. Most of us take the actual events of our lives, including the failures and frailties, and we gradually construct coherent narratives about who we are. Those autobiographical narratives are always being updated as time passes — and, of course, tend to be at least modestly self-flattering. 

Yet, for most of us, the life narrative we tell both the world and ourselves gives us a stable sense of identity. It helps us name what we’ve learned from experience and what meaning our life holds. It helps us make our biggest decisions. As philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once observed, you can’t know what to do unless you know what story you are a part of.

A reasonably accurate and coherent autobiographical narrative is one of the most important things a person can have. If you don’t have a real story, you don’t have a real self.

George Santos, on the other hand, is a young man who apparently felt compelled to jettison much of his actual life and replace it with fantasy. As Grace Ashford and Michael Gold of The New York Times have been reporting, in his successful run for Congress this year Santos claimed he had a college degree that he does not have. Moreover, ee claimed he held jobs that he did not hold. He claimed he owned properties he apparently does not own. He claims he never committed check fraud, though the Times unearthed court records suggesting he did. He claims he never described himself as Jewish, merely as adjacently “Jew-ish.”  A self-described gay man, he hid a years long heterosexual marriage that ended in 2019. 

George Santos is a fraud, ya' think?

All politicians — perhaps all humans — embellish. But what Santos did goes beyond that. He fabricated a new persona, that of a meritocratic superman. He claims to be a populist who hates the elites, but he wanted you to think he once worked at Goldman Sachs. Imagine how much inadequacy you’d have to feel to go to all that trouble.

I can’t feel much anger toward Santos for his deceptiveness, just a bit of sorrow. ("bit"? of sorrow?~ I don't think so...!)

Maine Writer- I disagree with David Brooks. I do NOT think Santos deserves any sympathy.

Cutting yourself off to that degree from the bedrock of the truth renders your whole life unstable. 

Santos made his own past unreliable, perpetually up for grabs. But when you do that you also eliminate any coherent vision of your future. People may wonder how Santos could have been so dumb. In political life, his fabrications were bound to be discovered. Perhaps it’s because dissemblers often have trouble anticipating the future; they’re stuck in the right now.

In a sense Santos is a sad, farcical version of where President Donald Trump has taken the Republican Party — into the land of unreality, the continent of lies. Trump’s takeover of the GOP was not primarily an ideological takeover, it was a psychological and moral one. I don’t feel sorry for Trump the way I do for Santos, because Trump is so cruel. But he did introduce, on a much larger scale, the same pathetic note into our national psychology.

In his book, “The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump,” the eminent personality psychologist Dan McAdams argues that Trump could continually lie to himself because he had no actual sense of himself. There was no real person, inner life or autobiographical narrative to betray. McAdams quotes people who had been close to Trump who reported that being with him wasn’t like being with a conventional person; it was like being with an entity who was playing the role of Donald Trump. And that role had no sense of continuity. He was fully immersed in whatever dominance battle he was fighting at that moment.

McAdams calls Trump an “episodic man,” who experiences life as a series of disjointed moments, not as a coherent narrative flow of consciousness. “He does not look to what may lie ahead, at least not very far ahead,” McAdams writes. “Trump is not introspective, retrospective or prospective. There is no depth; there is no past; there is no future.”

America has always had impostors and people who reinvented their pasts. (If he were real, Jay Gatsby might have lived — estimations of the precise locations of the fictional East and West Egg vary — in what is now Santos’ district.) This feels different. I wonder if the era of the short-attention spans and the online avatars is creating a new character type: the person who doesn’t experience life as an accumulation over decades, but just as a series of disjointed performances in the here and now, with an echo of hollowness inside.

This week Santos tried to do a bit of damage control in a series of interviews, including with WABC radio in New York. The whole conversation had an air of unreality. Santos was rambling, evasive and haphazard, readjusting his stories in a vague, fluid way. The host, John Catsimatidis, wasn’t questioning him the way a journalist might. He was practically coaching Santos on what to say. The troubling question of personal integrity was not on anybody’s radar screen. And then the conversation reached a Tom Wolfe-ian crescendo when former Rep. Anthony Weiner suddenly appeared — and turned out to be the only semi-competent interviewer in the room.

Karl Marx famously said that under the influence of capitalism, all that’s solid melts into air. I wonder if some elixir of Trumpian influence and online modernity can have the same effect on individual personalities.

David Brooks is a regular columnist for The New York Times.

Americans are proud descendent of immigrants

Don’t cry over spilled milk. 

It’s time to care for the migrants (echo letter to the editor published in Staten Island Advance)

By Dr. Mohammad Khalid: 

Dr. Mohammad Khalid, a longtime dentist, is the president of the Iron Hills Civic Association and the Pakistani Civic Association.

Staten Island, N.Y. -- Dr. Mohammad Khalid arrived in the United States alone, at the age of 23, and settled into a small room in Manhattan.  Soon after, he returned to school to obtain the right to practice dentistry in the U.S., an occupation held in his native land.

Dr. Khalid has a passion for helping others -- while committed to the improvement and enrichment of Staten Island, he has gone well beyond our borough to try and make the world a better place.

I truly believe that it is the responsibility of our federal government to take care of these migrants. Whoever is controlling our southern borders should follow immigration and migration laws.

America is a great country, always helping people throughout the world, but this is too late.

We are crying over spilled milk. These migrants are here now.

I see Project Hospitality leaders, like the Rev. Troia, and other religious leaders who are helping these migrants with clothing and food. For many years, people have come to this great country of ours, legally or illegally, and finally have settled in this country of plenty.

I see stories in the Advance that people are giving these migrants food and clothing. Since these people are here now, we should help them the best we can, so some day they and their children can enjoy the American dream.

Just think about ourselves, our parents and our ancestors, who at one time came to America for a better life. I believe that nobody can deny the fact that what is happening at the southern border is totally wrong and we should have a way of stopping this influx, but every human being has the right to have food, clothing and shelter.

All of us waste so much food every day in our homes and restaurants, feeding these migrants will make us better human beings.

Dr. Mohammad Khalid is a Todt Hill resident.

Was born in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1948. 

Republicans put human migrants in the middle of immigration politics

Thousands of Migrants Are Now Pawns in Immigration Politics

Reported by the Marshall Project:  Stories aim at highlighting what other outlets miss or underestimate. Pulitzer prize winner for explanatory journalism & finalist in investigative reporting.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s policy of busing migrants to other states has ignited heated political debate. People are caught in the middle.

Two buses chartered by the state of Texas arrived in Chicago late Wednesday evening, carrying 75 asylum-seekers detained at the U.S. southern border. Some were confused as they disembarked and many were hungry and tired, according to news reports. 

Naydelin Guerrel, a 19-year-old Panamanian, told the Chicago Tribune she was scared on the journey but that she “couldn’t wait to get to Chicago.” Like most of those she traveled with, Guerrel said she was fleeing from extreme poverty and violence and seeking economic opportunity and a better life.

Guerrel is one of thousands who have now been shuttled hundreds — or thousands — of miles north from the border in a months-long campaign by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Since April, the state has bused more than 8,000 people to New York City, Washington, D.C., and now, Chicago. Arizona has shuttled another 1,500 people to Washington, D.C., in an effort that CNN reports has cost the two states at least $16 million combined.

Abbott claims the move is meant to force Democratic politicians, like New York Mayor Eric Adams and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, to “walk the walk” on their pro-immigration rhetoric. Both Adams and Lightfoot have fired back at Abbott for roping real people’s lives into what they and others have characterized as a political stunt. “They’re not cargo. They are not chattel. They’re human beings,” Lightfoot said Wednesday. Washington, D.C. has received the most migrants of the three cities, and Mayor Muriel Bowser has requested (and been denied) National Guard assistance in managing the influx.

Immigrant rights advocates in all three cities have complained that Abbott’s efforts seem to have been intentionally designed to sow chaos. Murad Awawdeh, the executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, described how his organization began receiving court notices to appear on behalf of clients they did not even represent. Then, migrants began showing up at their offices, saying that border officials had told them that the organization would provide them with shelter services and care.

While some migrants, like Guerrel, were happy with their destination, Awawdeh noted this isn’t always the case. He estimated that between 30% and 40% of migrants arriving in New York do not want to be there, often because they have family or other support networks elsewhere in the U.S. According to Pew Stateline, some people have started getting off the buses at stops along the way, in places like Tennessee and Georgia.

Historically, the vast majority of migrants attempting to cross the U.S. southern border have been from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. But a CNN analysis found that a dramatic increase in migrants from other counties, including Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela, is fueling the jump in border arrivals. The high numbers are one reason why the Biden administration has been rapidly turning to a parole system — granting migrants freedom from deportation and a one-year window to formally apply for asylum — in lieu of detention. It’s one of several changes the administration has pursued, in contrast to the Trump administration’s aggressive, zero-tolerance approach.

But while many more migrants than ever before are being paroled, tens of thousands still remain in detention centers, and the outcomes can be tragic. Kesley Vial, who came from Brazil seeking asylum, died by suicide in a New Mexico detention center last week. Local advocates and civil rights attorneys blamed “abhorrent conditions and treatment by ICE and CoreCivic, the private company that runs the detention center.”

A separate CoreCivic detention facility in Georgia was sued last week, with allegations that the company violated federal anti-slavery laws by forcing people to work by threat of punishment, including solitary confinement. CoreCivic denied the allegations in a statement.

Meanwhile, GeoGroup — CoreCivic’s largest competitor for immigration detention contracts (❗)— is facing allegations that staffers at a California detention center put four people in solitary confinement as punishment for supporting a labor strike in the facility. GeoGroup also denied the allegations. The claim came right before the state senate advanced a bill that would make California the first state to restrict the use of solitary confinement in detention centers.

Jamiles Lartey is a New Orleans-based staff writer for The Marshall Project. Previously, he worked as a reporter for the Guardian covering issues of criminal justice, race and policing. Jamiles was a member of the team behind the award-winning online database “The Counted,” tracking police violence in 2015, and 2016. In 2016, He was named “Michael J. Feeney Emerging Journalist of the Year” by the National Association of Black Journalists.

Cruelty by Texas Governor Greg Abbott - his political stunt turned boon for migrants

 Echo opinion letter published in The Washington Times by John Huerta:  (Maine Writer- I'm thinking those desperate migrants at the Southern Border are quickly figuring out how to get themselves into the next available bus going to the U.S., sanctuary cities.)

What may have been a nightmare for the governors of Texas, Florida and Arizona has turned into a major boon for migrants, who are now willing to leave Latin America for the freedom of the United States (“Texas migrant busing crosses 10,000 mark,” Web, Sept. 9).

What (cruel!) Texas Governor Greg Abbott did to distract migrants from entering the country has not actually worked in his fight to get Donald Trump’s wall built. It has not gone over well within his political base.

Governor Greg Abbott;"..'heartless' Christmas Eve drop-off of migrants, children" reports the Houston Chronicle. 

Nor has the same tactic worked for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who put 50 migrants on a bus to Washington, only to have them show up at the Naval Observatory residence of Vice President Kamala Harris.

Texas Tribune: Fight over border security escalates after governors send migrants to VP Kamala Harris’ home and to Martha’s Vineyard.

The real horror show will be them facing the wrath of Texas, Florida and Arizona voters. This was their legacy, and it has turned into a major boon for the Democrats.

John Huerta 
Merced, California

Maine libraries providing access to telehealth services

Reported in Maine.gov:

Residents in 10 communities across Maine will have a new, convenient way to connect with a healthcare provider. 

The Maine State Library's "Libraries Health Connect Program" provides the technology and training needed for telehealth services through the public library. The State Library dedicated funds it received through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) to create the statewide telehealth initiative.

Participating libraries include Alice L. Pendleton Library (Islesboro), Caribou Public Library, Cary Library (Houlton), Fryeburg Public Library, Henry D. Moore Library (Steuben), Paris Public Library (Paris), Peabody Memorial Library (Jonesport), Pittsfield Public Library, Skowhegan Free Public Library, and Thompson Free Library (Dover-Foxcroft). Libraries were selected based on endemic community health issues and a lack of ready access to healthcare. Low-income and rural individuals as well as people of color disproportionally bear the costs of inadequate healthcare which also impacts the economic prospects of these individuals and their communities.

"Maines libraries are committed to ensuring their communities have access to equitable services," said Jamie Ritter, Maine State Librarian. "This means offering programs that you might not associate with your library, like telehealth. We strongly believe that where you live should not dictate the quality of your healthcare. These libraries are leading the way for establishing libraries as another way Mainers can connect with a healthcare provider."

Telehealth uses technology to provide access to real-time appointments with healthcare providers from a distance. Individuals who opt to receive telehealth care from their healthcare provider can now book the Telehealth Room at one of the participating libraries for their appointment. The library provides a private room equipped with a laptop, camera, computer, mouse, lights, headphones, and other technology relevant to telehealth needs. Services are provided at no cost to the community.

Types of care that can be provided through the Maine Libraries Health Connect Program include wellness visits, requesting or renewing prescriptions for medications, follow-up appointments, consultations with specialists, nutritional counseling, mental health counseling, and other non-urgent conditions.

"The Maine State Library recognizes that there is a need in Maine communities to provide better access to quality healthcare and this program helps address that need. Especially as the desire for virtual appointments has increased following the COVID-19 pandemic." stated Ritter.

Telehealth Rooms at participating libraries will be available for appointments by May of this year. For more information, contact, Marijke Visser, marijke.a.visser@maine.gov at the Maine State Library.

About the Maine State Library

Established in 1837, the Maine State Library strives to help people, make Maine libraries stronger, and transform information into knowledge. The Maine State Library delivers services through three central programs: Public and Outreach Services, Collections and Digital Initiatives, and Library Development. The services provided by the Maine State Library are available to all Maine residents and are free of charge.

The ME Libraries Health Connect Pilot Program is supported by funds awarded to the Maine State Library by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the agency that administers the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) as part of the LSTA American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.

International Rotary support for ambulances in the war ravaged Ukraine

Rotary members, Ukraine friends deliver ambulances to Ukrainian officials: published in Rotary Magazine by Ryan Hyland.

A convoy of nearly 40 ambulances wound its way from Slovakia, around mountains and through roadblocks, military checkpoints, and torrential rain to arrive in Kyiv, bringing the critically needed vehicles to Ukrainian government officials.

A convoy of 40 ambulances wound its way from Slovakia, around mountains and through roadblocks, military checkpoints, and torrential rain to arrive in Kyiv, bringing the critically needed vehicles to Ukrainian government officials.

The US$600,000 initiative was the first joint project between Rotary and Ukraine Friends, which agreed in July to collaborate to provide resources, organize logistics, and distribute funds for high-impact projects that help Ukrainians affected by the war with Russia. Each organization donated US$300,000 to get the ambulances, and Rotary districts in Ukraine and Slovakia coordinated the delivery.

After a journey of about 870 kilometers (540 miles) that took more than twice as long as it would have in normal circumstances, the convoy arrived on 27 September at Mariinsky Park in Kiev.

Brock Bierman, the CEO of Ukraine Friends and a member of the Rotary Club of Staunton, Virginia, USA, says the logistics of moving that many vehicles to another country would always be difficult, and doing it across a border into a war zone was especially complex. 

Yet the ambulances were delivered without any major incidents.

“I don’t think the trip could’ve gone any better,” says Bierman, who was at Mariinsky Park for the arrival. “The way people worked together to get this done was spectacular.”


Ukraine Friends secured the ambulance drivers, while Rotary District 2232 in Ukraine and Belarus bought the fuel. The ambulances are equipped with oxygen tanks, defibrillators, electrocardiogram machines, mechanical ventilators, and other medical equipment.

Eighteen of the ambulances were procured by Rotary clubs in the Czech Republic and Slovakia and went to the Department of Health for civilian use. Ihor Kuzin, Ukraine’s deputy minister of health, was there to see the transfer of ambulances.

“Updating the fleet of fast vehicles (ambulances) is one of the most urgent tasks on the agenda for Ukraine,” Kuzin says. “We are very grateful to our international donors and partners for joining such an extremely important cause.”

The 22 ambulances supplied by Ukraine Friends were given to military personnel, Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces.

Rotary members and Ukraine Friends are also working together to rehabilitate two schools in the Bucha region that were damaged by shelling. Ukraine Friends is organizing the logistics involved to rebuild the school’s infrastructure, while Rotary clubs are buying and providing books, school supplies, and computers.

Mykola Stebljanko, a member of the Rotary E-club of Ukraine and past governor of District 2232, said the ambulance project is part of comprehensive program under which clubs in the region provide specialized equipment for emergency vehicles, including firefighting trucks. “When good deeds are done in partnership,” he says, you can have a greater effect and find more opportunities to plan effectively in crisis situations.

Ambulances procured by Rotary and U.S.based nonprofit Ukraine Friends are delivered in September to Kyiv, Ukraine. The $600,000 US initiative is the first joint project between Rotary and Ukraine Friends.

“By combining the connections of both Ukraine Friends and Rotary, tremendous strides can be made to alleviate and mitigate the suffering endured by the people of Ukraine,” Bierman says.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, more than 13 million Ukrainians have been forced to flee their homes, the United Nations refugee agency says, which created a humanitarian crisis. 

Rotary has awarded more than 353 disaster response grants totaling more than US$11.7 million since the war began. These grants, for club projects in 29 countries, support people in and around Ukraine who have been affected by the war. Rotary and Rotaract clubs have donated millions more directly to Ukrainian clubs that are providing people with food, shelter, medicine, and clothing.

Texas is embarrassed by cruel Governor Abbott and inhumane treatment of desperate migrants

People- human beings- are being treated inhumanely!

The Washington Post reported Sunday that volunteers who greeted the migrants received word that (cruel!) Gov. Greg Abbott had sent about 110 to 130 men, women and children on three buses that arrived at the Naval Observatory on Saturday night. Videos shared on social media show many of them clutching blankets over their shoulders in the 18-degree weather after the two-day trip.

Editor, the Victoria Advocate:
https://www.victoriaadvocate.com/site/contact.html

Migrants cross the Rio Grande into the US from Ciudad Juarez on December 18, 2022.

I don’t care how you feel about immigration, but how people — and I did say people — are being treated by sending busloads of people to be dropped off in below freezing temperatures is inhumane. Anyone doing this should be punished. From the driver to as high up as the governor.

“Multiple busloads of migrants were dropped off at Vice-President Harris’s residence in Washington, D.C., on Saturday — Christmas Eve — leaving migrants on the streets in below-freezing temperatures, according to multiple reports.”

“2 U.S. Code § 2000dd — Prohibition on cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment of persons under custody or control of the United States Government

(d) Cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment defined

In this section, the term “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” means the cruel, unusual, and inhumane treatment or punishment prohibited by the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, as defined in the United States Reservations, Declarations and Understandings to the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment done at New York, December 10, 1984.”

From Espiridion Castillo, in Victoria Texas

Republicans can run from the January 6 report but they cannot hide from the result

Echo opinion by Eugene Robinson published in The Washington Post:

The January 6 report said of the attack on the Capitol: “The central cause was one man.”  Republicans can try to run from the January 6 committee report but they will never be able to hide the result.

Representatives Bennie G. Thompson (D-Mississippi) and Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) have radically different political philosophies and life experiences. But, with Thompson as its leader and Cheney as his second-in-command, the House January 6 committee conducted one of the most impressive congressional investigations the nation has ever seen.

Rep. Thompson, 74, is a Black liberal Democrat from Mississippi who grew up during the civil rights movement and remembers how racist Jim Crow repression denied his father the right to vote. Rep. Cheney, 56, is a White conservative Republican from Wyoming,who grew up in the halls of power with her father serving as a member of Congress and as vice president.

January 6 Committee shines light on The Big Trumpzi Lie

Writes Thompson: “The Capitol’s shining dome, topped with the statue of goddess Freedom, was built partially by the labor of enslaved people in the 18th and 19th centuries. Dark chapters of America’s history are written into the building’s marble, sandstone, and mortar. And yet in the halls and chambers of this building, leaders of courage passed amendments to our Constitution and enacted the laws that banned slavery, guaranteed equal rights under the law, expanded the vote, promoted equality, and moved our country, and her people, forward.”

The responsibility of learning and telling the story of the  2021,  Capitol insurrection brought these partisan opponents together as chair and vice chair of the January 6 committee. Their separate forewords to the committee’s final report, released Thursday, tell what united these unlikely partners.

Writes Cheney: “In April 1861, when Abraham Lincoln issued the first call for volunteers for the Union Army, my great-great grandfather, Samuel Fletcher Cheney, joined the 21st Ohio Volunteer Infantry. He fought through all four years of the Civil War, from Chickamauga to Stones River to Atlanta. ... At the heart of our Republic is the guarantee of the peaceful transfer of power. Members of Congress are reminded of this every day as we pass through the Capitol Rotunda.”

Both Cheney and Thompson understand the building where they work as an embodiment of our democracy and its long, halting and at times bloody struggle toward a more perfect union. Both refer to the Civil War era, the nation’s second founding. And both lived through a day that involved a sacrilege unseen even in Lincoln’s time: insurrectionists parading the Confederate battle flag across that sacred Rotunda.

This is not to slight the committee’s other members: Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), Elaine G. Luria (D-Va.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.). 

Indeed, all on the committee did something unnatural for any member of Congress and impossible for quite a few: they suppressed their egos to further a common cause.

The traditional format for hearings, in which each committee member gets five minutes to strut and preen, would have been like dosing the country’s water supply with Ambien. 

Each member had moments in the spotlight and brought perspective, experience and expertise that shaped the panel’s work. But each also sat through entire sessions without uttering a word. 

Republicans can run but they cannot hide!

And Kinzinger’s patriotism — like Cheney’s — cost him his House seat and halted a promising political career.

The essential dynamic of the hearings, however, was the one-two combination of Thompson and Cheney. Their opening and closing statements at each session did more than demonstrate the committee’s bipartisan bona fides. They established the themes of that day’s presentation and the panel’s overall findings.

Thompson painted the big picture — the threat to our democracy from a violent, marauding mob that overran the Capitol in an attempt to nullify the result of a valid presidential election. Cheney zeroed in on the man responsible, the man who summoned the insurrectionists, fired them up, sent them off and then for more than three hours refused to make any effort to quell their bloody rampage: Donald Trump.

Cheney’s final statements, especially, were like a prosecutor’s closing argument to the jury. She wasted few words on those who aided and abetted the assault — lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and Sidney Powell; leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers; elected officials including even fellow members of Congress. Her laser-like focus was on Trump, on what he did and failed to do, and on his unfitness for any public office, let alone the highest in the land.

The committee’s purpose was not to damage Trump’s political standing or spur the Justice Department to prosecute him, though I hope its work has those effects. The mission was to discover and reveal as much of the truth as possible about an unspeakable day and to find ways to ensure such a thing never happens again.

House Republicans will end the committee’s work, but never erase the indelible mark it has made. Thompson, Cheney and their colleagues did their duty. And they did it well.

Maine Writer: A skeptic who believes in miracles- that's me!

How Would You Prove That God Performed a Miracle?
Dec. 24, 2022- Echo essay published in The New York Times by Molly Worthen:  Dr. Worthen is a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who writes frequently about America’s religious culture.

(While reading this echo by Dr. Worthen, the essay reminded me about a short book I recommend titled, "The Secret World of Saints", by Bill Donahue.  

When the Mohawk Saint Kateri Tekakwitha (feast day July 14), a Mohawk Indian, converted to Catholicism in 1676, she did it with gusto. She slept on a bed of thorns. She had a friend whip her. She put hot coals between her toes. She suffered from smallpox, and the disease left her almost blind. Yet she still fasted, in penitence, and ministered to the sick and elderly. When she died, it was said, the smallpox scars instantly vanished from her face. It wasn’t long before people began to credit her with miracles. "St. Kateri Tekakwitha, Lily of the Mohawks, pray for us!"

Also, because this essay references the miracles at Lourdes in France, I am including this link to a blog I published in The Bangor Daily News here.

Josh Brown directs the program in neuroscience at Indiana University Bloomington. He has published dozens of articles on topics like the neural basis of decision making in the brain. He has wire-rimmed glasses and a calm, methodical way of speaking. And after almost two decades of keeping relatively quiet, he is now speaking openly about his most surprising research finding: He believes that God miraculously healed him of a brain tumor.

Christmas is a time when miracles happen, according to the Hallmark cards and cartoon specials. But Dr. Brown and his wife, Candy Gunther Brown, who did her doctorate in religious studies at Harvard and is also a professor at Indiana, believe that God does intervene to cause miraculous healing, all the time. Partly to understand the healing that shocked their family, they have traveled as far afield as Brazil and Mozambique to collect documentation purporting to link Christian prayers and revivals to sudden, inexplicable medical recoveries. But is it possible to prove that a miracle happened? Is it dangerous to even try?

We are not talking about metaphorical, wow-what-luck, “I can’t believe I got that parking space” sorts of miracles. The Browns seek out stories of healings that are impossible to account for by natural means, based on current medical knowledge (although they believe that God mostly heals through modern medicine). “I don’t see a conflict between investigating matters of neuroscience and investigating claims of divine healing,” Josh Brown told me. “The question is always empirical: What does the evidence say about what happened?”

Polls suggest that about half of American scientists and three-quarters of doctors believe in a higher power. But the Browns are among the few who refuse to compartmentalize their faith — who treat God’s supernatural action as a legitimate object of research. This can be unnerving, especially in an era of anti-vaxxers, climate change denialism and the replication crisis that has shaken the social and medical sciences. 

Public trust in scientific expertise is already wobbly.




But the Browns’ experiences and research — not to mention the abundance of healing testimony from other witnesses, especially outside the West — deserve serious consideration. Watertight proof of divine causation may be an impossible goal, but the search for it forces us to confront the assumptions that prop up our own worldviews — whether one is a devout believer or a committed skeptic.

Candy Brown was nine months pregnant when her husband had a seizure in the middle of the night. “I went to bed, and when I woke up the next morning, I was in an ambulance,” he said. Two and a half weeks later, newborn in tow, they got his diagnosis: an apparent brain tumor called a glioma. (He provided The New York Times with medical records to support this account.) He was 30 years old. “Chemo, radiation and surgery don’t statistically prolong the life span with what I had. There was nothing to do but get ready to die, basically.” Doctors prescribed no treatment other than anticonvulsant medication to manage symptoms.

The Browns grew up in Christian families, but not the sort that expected God to intervene ostentatiously in modern life. 

Still, he was desperate. He started traveling the country seeking out Christian healing revivals, dragging along his wife and baby daughter. “I needed to find out what was going on,” he said. “If there was any reality to it, I wanted a miracle.”

Candy Brown recalled more disturbing details: the morning after her husband’s diagnosis, they began to pray together, but mentioning the name of Jesus seemed to trigger a frightening physical response. “Josh shoots out of bed, starts turning somersaults,” she said. “I’d say, try worshiping Jesus, and he couldn’t say the name Jesus. I was thinking of the herd of pigs,” she said, recalling the unlucky swine run off a cliff by demon possession in the Gospels. “He was hoarse and exhausted. For that 45 minutes, there was such a palpably evil presence in that room that hated the name of Jesus. If I ever had doubted whether Jesus was real, I couldn’t now.”

Josh Brown began traveling with healing missionaries. He told me he saw things he couldn’t explain — like a blind man on a street in Cuba, who appeared to instantly regain his sight after missionaries prayed for him. Months later, after many sessions of prayer for healing and deliverance, an M.R.I. revealed that his tumor had turned into scar tissue.

He quickly volunteered to me that he never had a biopsy, but doctors often diagnose this type of tumor on the basis of M.R.I.s and the patient’s symptoms. “One way or another, the tumor went away,” he said. “I’ve been symptom-free for 19 years. The doctors said very little.” The Browns felt grateful — and perplexed. “At that point I wondered why, when I had seen so many things that seemed miraculous and difficult to explain, why was there so little careful investigation of these things?” he said.

In 2009, on a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, the Browns flew to Mozambique to investigate the healing claims of Global Awakening and Iris Global, two ministries focused on healing and revival. They brought audiometry equipment and eye charts to test people who requested prayer for deafness and blindness. The sample size was small — they tested 24 people — but they found statistically significant improvement beyond placebo effects and hypnosis.

“I was standing right there next to this woman who could not tell how many fingers were held up when you were a foot in front of her,” Candy Brown told me. “Then five minutes later, she’s reading an eye chart with a smile on her face.” She and her colleagues published the results in The Southern Medical Journal — not a prestigious publication but a respectable one with peer review — and she drew on the research for her 2012, book, “Testing Prayer.”

Skeptics complained about the Browns’ methods and field conditions. They pointed out that the hearing tests were in a noisy setting, there was no control group and test subjects would naturally want to please those who prayed for them by showing results. “That simple trick explains why both hearing and sight appears to have dramatically improved among these poor, superstitious villagers,” one critic declared. (The study explained in detail how the researchers did their best to weed out false data.)

If you want to evaluate people’s experiences at a revival in rural Africa, you probably need to give up on double-blind studies in a perfectly controlled environment. But let’s imagine for a moment that researchers could meet such standards (and that an all-powerful deity humors us and submits to this scrutiny). They might persuade skeptics that something strange happened. But is there any evidence that would persuade a nonbeliever that God was behind it — that we do not live in a closed system in which all causation is a matter of natural laws?

Christians have sought to scientifically evaluate miracle claims at least since the 16th century, when the Council of Trent tightened up the verification process for canonizing saints. But the Christian God does not work in randomized, repeatable trials. He works in history. So maybe medical histories are a more appropriate approach. “Medical case reports rely on a different epistemology, which is more of a historical epistemology,” Josh Brown said. “It’s not something you can necessarily recreate, whatever the time course of a disease.”

In 2011, the Browns helped found the Global Medical Research Institute, which publishes case studies on the small number of inexplicable events that its staff members can scrupulously document — like a blind woman who, while praying one night with her husband, regained her sight and a teenage boy who depended on a feeding tube until his stomach suddenly healed itself during an encounter with a Pentecostal minister. “When we write these case reports, we’re not claiming these must have been a miracle of God, but these are the facts of the case,” Josh Brown told me.

Most professional scientists won’t go for this. “Case methods are fine as a way to start,” Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and a historian of science, told me. “But how do you shift from case studies to more experimental protocols that are the gold standard?”

Dr. Shermer sometimes asks believers about all the times prayer fails to heal. “Their answer is, ‘God works in mysterious ways.’ It’s just hand-waving,” he said. Divine mystery is central to Christian faith, but it creates problems for a scientific method premised on the assumption that the laws of cause and effect are uniform — and will yield up their mysterious ways if you test and measure again and again.

The Browns’ experiences are striking because they operate in one of the most antisupernaturalist subcultures in the modern world: secular academia. But in a global context — and we are in the midst of a worldwide Christian revival — stories of unexplained healing in response to prayer are common. (Although healing is central to Christianity, other religions claim their share. One Christian response is that God shows himself to non-Christians in partial ways, and some Christians I interviewed described non-Christian healings that, they claimed, later proved false.)

Scholars estimate that 80 percent of new Christians in Nepal come to the faith through an experience with healing or deliverance from demonic spirits. Perhaps as many as 90 percent of new converts who join a house church in China credit their conversion to faith healing. In Kenya, 71 percent of Christians say they have witnessed a divine healing, according to a 2006 Pew study. Even in the relatively skeptical United States, 29 percent of survey respondents claim they have seen one.

You can quarrel with the exact figures, but we are talking about millions of people who say something otherworldly happened to them. Yet most secular people — and even many religious believers — are oblivious to this or shrug off miracle stories on principle as motivated reasoning, hallucination or fraud.

When Ifeanyi Chinedozi came to the United States for college in 2009, he “was shocked, as a young man from Nigeria, at the discomfort in talking about spiritual experiences and marvelous things that happen as part of routine Christian discourse in Nigeria and across the world,” he told me. (According to Pew, 62 percent of Nigerians say they have witnessed a divine healing; 57 percent say they have experienced or seen an exorcism.)

Dr. Chinedozi went to medical school at Tufts University and is completing his residency in general surgery at the University of Maryland, as well as a cardiac surgery research fellowship at Johns Hopkins. He also leads a ministry called Healing Vessels International, which brings both prayer and medical resources to people in need. He has been a healing evangelist since the age of 7, when, he said, Jesus appeared to him in a dream and asked if he would like to heal people. His family was not Christian at the time, but after his frightened parents heard him speaking English in his sleep (they spoke only Igbo- i.e., "Nigerian"), they took him to a local minister, who proclaimed that the boy was anointed as a healer.

In 2007, when he was in high school, a family sought his help to raise their mother, who had been declared brain-dead at a hospital. He told me that he initially refused because he had tried and failed to raise someone from the dead before. Finally, he agreed to pray over a bottle of olive oil for them. “I lifted it up and said, ‘Father, let this represent me and be unto this girl and her family as their faith has demanded, in the name of Jesus Christ.’ They didn’t thank me, just rushed out, and I thought, ‘I don’t have to go with them and be embarrassed. Whatever happens happens.’”

He heard later that the woman’s daughter poured the whole bottle onto her while praying; the woman coughed and opened her eyes. The family gave a party to celebrate her recovery, where Dr. Chinedozi said he met her.

God instituted prayer “to communicate to his creatures the dignity of causality,” according to Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century French philosopher. But for those whose prayers are answered, there is a temptation to take credit. Dr. Chinedozi told me that his family and friends address him as “man of God,” but he stressed that the woman’s recovery proved he has no special powers, not even superhuman faith. “People say God only works when you have faith,” he told me. “I don’t think that’s true. God sometimes overrides our unbelief and high-mindedness and proves himself to be God. He doesn’t need our faith to be God.”

Why are stories like this so much more common outside the West? Skeptics say that naturally, people pray more often and overinterpret lucky breaks when they don’t have antibiotics or doctors close by — although the raising that Dr. Chinedozi described took place in a hospital. In the Bible, humans see wondrous signs of God’s power where the Gospel is spreading to new lands, and Jesus refuses to perform magic tricks for skeptical Pharisees but heals those whose desperation drives them to faith.

J. Ayodeji Adewuya is a professor of New Testament at the Pentecostal Theological Seminary in Tennessee. He saw his share of miracles in his home country, Nigeria — including, he believes, the raising of his stillborn infant son after he spent 20 minutes shouting and pacing the room in prayer. “I joke, you don’t really need to pray the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Give us our daily bread,’ when you have everything provided by Walmart and your fridge is full,” he told me. “When you’re in a place where you have nothing, the only thing you can do is depend on God, and at that point you’re expecting something. The average white evangelical Christian doesn’t expect anything.”

Western skeptics have disregarded witness testimony from places like Nigeria at least since David Hume complained in his 1748 essay on miracles that “they are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations.” Such dismissal is more awkward for 21st-century secular liberals, who often say that Westerners should listen to people in the Global South and acknowledge the blindnesses of colonialism. “Some people claim that the best thing to do is to listen to people’s experiences and learn from them,” Dr. Chinedozi said. “Yet these people will be the first to find a way to disprove experiences in other cultures and contexts.”

Witness testimony in general has come in for a drubbing lately. Courts have overturned convictions when DNA proved that witnesses who sounded sure of themselves on the stand turned out to be horribly mistaken.

Yet we rely on it all the time in the course of ordinary life. “If your epistemology is that eyewitness evidence doesn’t count, then there goes most historiography, journalism, even anthropology and sociology,” Craig Keener, a professor of biblical studies at Asbury Theological Seminary, told me. (He included Dr. Chinedozi’s and Dr. Adewuya’s stories in his book “Miracles Today.”)

Among those who deny miracles, “the presuppositions are so strong,” Dr. Keener said. “There’s a dogmatism there, just like a religious dogmatism. It looks to me like it’s so ideologically driven — if you’re starting from the standpoint that a miracle claim is not true if we could possibly come up with another explanation and one of the explanations can be, ‘We don’t have an explanation now, but maybe someday we will.’” When I asked Dr. Shermer what he thought about this analogy, he objected. Belief in future scientific discovery “is not faith,” he said. “It’s confidence that the system works pretty well from experience.”

Well-documented testimonies can suggest that something very strange happened, but they can never settle the crucial question of causation; this is, whether you are religious or not, a matter of faith. (Even Hume, in a way, granted this.) So do efforts to prove miracles miss the point — and miss other signs of God’s presence?

I put this question to Kim O’Connor, a nurse, and Hamilton Grantham, a pediatrician, who help lead the British Lourdes Medical Association, a group of medical professionals who accompany critically ill pilgrims to the Catholic shrine of Lourdes in France. They described startling cases of cancer remission and unresponsive people with dementia getting up to dance. But most of their stories emphasized internal transformation, the acceptance of approaching death by pilgrims and their families. “A lot of people we take are too humble for themselves. They don’t expect a miraculous cure,” Ms. O’Connor said.

The Catholic Church has officially acknowledged 70 miraculous healings associated with Lourdes since pilgrims began traveling there in 1858, but “they’re the small pinnacle of a much bigger blessing,” Dr. Grantham said. “The reality is that when we think of ourselves as doctors and nurses, as people who want to heal, healing comes in many different forms.”

If God can heal, why does he do it so rarely? The world is full of suffering people who pray with no relief. “Even people who believe in miracles often don’t pray for them because they’re afraid of disappointment,” Candy Brown said. “I’ve had people die on my watch. It’s incredibly painful. You ask, ‘Is it my fault?’” She speculated that many Christians’ belief that miraculous healing ceased after New Testament times springs from “protection against pain, protection against feeling ill will toward God or other people. It takes hope and vulnerability to be open to healing.”

For Christians, it also takes spiritual maturity to remember that miracles are not the point. Miracles are signs meant to help humans see the greatest miracle of all, the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ— God’s ultimate intrusion into ordinary life, by which he eventually “shall wipe away all tears,” according to the Book of Revelation.

For now, stories of suffering in this fallen world vastly outnumber reports of miraculous healing; believers must search out God’s power in all these things. William Dembski is a Christian writer and proponent of intelligent design who completed a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Chicago (and later one in philosophy). He is an expert in probability theory, so he is well aware that statistically rare things do happen randomly.

“I believe in miracles, but I think they require scrutiny,” Dr. Dembski told me. “I don’t tend to see things as flamboyant, as in the New Testament.” He published a moving account of his family’s disappointment at a healing revival, where he sought prayer for his autistic son. “There can be quite a bit of self-delusion on the part of people looking for miracles, and it troubles me,” he said.

Dr. Dembski’s family has learned to look for the miraculous in everyday loving encounters, like when a teacher’s aide made it her mission to help his son learn to use the bathroom on his own. “His life is so much better because of this person who wouldn’t give up on him,” he said. “It was no miracle, in terms of a magic wand that touched him and everything was fine. It was people who were willing to love him and do the hard work.”

Maine Writer Post Script:  As a practicing Roman Catholic, I believe in miracles because, frankly, the preponderance of evidence leads to the conclusion that these supernatural events actually happen.  Yet, as a Registered Nurse, I agree with what Worthen wrote about holding on to a healthy amount of skepticism regarding the causation.  

Power and ego cannot destroy the human condition

Letter to the editor of the The Post Star in Great Falls New York

Protecting what is precious in the world

UNESCO

The power of preserving cultural heritage to build a better world.
Why do we go to great lengths to preserve culture and make it bloom? Culture is a resource for the identity and cohesion of communities.

There are so many here, around the world, throughout history doing “good” — acts to protect endangered species; stop deforestation, fracking, fossil fuels, mining; to protect the ocean, rivers, drinking water; courageous people protesting dictators and repressive regimes in Hong Kong, Belarus, Myanmar, Iran, Syria; journalists protecting free speech in Philippines, Mexico; lawyers and religious leaders protecting separation of church and state; and our neighbors in food pantries, homeless shelters, welcoming immigrants. ... People doing good work.

But others do great harm — for power and greed, in hatred and ignorance — white supremacists killing innocent people; dictators using military might to mow down protesters against despotic rule, against protectors of sacred lands, women protesting “morality” restrictions, women protecting and teaching girls and women in Afghanistan. Dictators who would destroy countries, democracy, Earth, for their own ego power — Putin in Ukraine; Trump, here, trying to overthrow democratic elections; powerful corporations — fossil fuels, big pharma, gun dealers — spreading fear through propaganda, supporting legislators working for their greed and profits over the needs of people and Earth. 

It’s painful to witness the destruction of guns, bombs, money destroying Earth, cultures, homes, schools, hospitals, electric grids, and life.

The poet Unamuno said to Franco’s generals, ”You will win because you have brute force but to persuade you’d need what you lack — right and reason for Spain’s very soul”; Victor Jara, the Chilean guitarist, kept singing while being shot by Pinochet’s police. I hear their words with voices of survivors of gun violence in Parkland, churches, synagogues, Colorado’s gay bar, along with thousands of courageous people imprisoned — all proclaiming the power of love, the reality that “we are family.”

On my desk: “You thought you buried us; you didn’t know we were seeds.”

This Holiday season, 2022, from Thanksgiving to New Year 2023, let's thank all the seeds, hard work, resistance, and struggle for justice, diversity, love, life. Give thanks for those throughout history who have protected what is precious. 

Thank you to all those around the world who protect the human condition.

Bernice Mennis, West Fort Ann, New York (Washington County)