Cato Institute thoughts

[published in Muddy River News, June 24, 2026]

When I was growing up, the Catholic press, which was all we used to read in our Catholic world in Decatur, Illinois, was always attacking an association called “Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.”   If the Cato Institute had existed back then, our press would have had problems with it too.

The Cato Institute says unpopular things. If I had to summarize its philosophy, I would say that it believes that governments at all levels should do as little as possible. Catholic Social Teaching (in what it calls the "principle of subsidiarity") would agree, but would disagree about where the “as little as possible” line should be drawn. 

Recently I began reading daily news comments put out by the Cato Institute. I do things like that because, as a professional religious, I believe in mortification. Fasting is out of style, so I replace fasting with trying to listen to both sides of political debates.

Reading the Cato Institute is my daily penance. But on June 10 I read something I Iiked. In the Institute’s daily online message I read: “Courts have found DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] has likely violated at least the 1st, 4th, 5th, 10th, and 14th amendments to the US Constitution, as well as the spending power, the taxing power, and the writ of habeas corpus.”

The DHS has been threatening and upending the lives of millions of our fellow Americans, including some in Quincy. It has taken people into custody without judicial recourse, separated parents from their children so quickly that a child can go to school one day and come home without a parent. Then it has stored the parent in facilities that are little more than  concentration camps. Sometimes the parents get sent back to a country from which they fled because cartel violence had made life impossible for them there.

This is not America. This is not the home of the free. This is not “securing our borders.” We need to make our government stop doing it.

Pope Leo says that governments and businesses should always start by respecting the dignity of individual people. Even if a person is in our country without papers, the DHS must treat that person, and that person’s loved ones, with the dignity due to every human being. The rule should always be: Respect! Respect! Respect!

 

Brother Joe Zimmerman (Fr. Joe Zimmerman)

 

Unconditional Love

    The term has bothered me for a long time: “unconditional love.” To me, the term says that someone, usually God, is not able to not love. That means that God’s love is not free. But the most beautiful thing about God’s love is that it IS free. God does not have to love us, but God still does love us, freely.

    Theologians a few centuries ago got into an argument about the issue. They said that God is all-knowing. That means that God knows in advance what we human beings will do. But the theologians also said that human beings are free. That means that no one can know what a human being will do in the next moment, not even God. In other words, either God is not all-knowing, or we are not really free.

    The theologians argued about this for a century and then gave up.

    Some psychologists say that nothing we do is really free, that we are under so many different kinds of pressure that the experience of doing something freely is an illusion.

    Two things go against that view. First, the experience of doing some things freely. And second, many human plans have crashed and burned because the planners assumed that the people they wanted to control could be controlled by rewards and punishments.

        A psychologist named B.F. Skinner was popular in the 1960’s. He argued that all behavior is stimulus-response. He said that we can program society so that people will always do the right thing. Criminologists in Illinois tried to build a juvenile corrections institution (called “Valley View”) on that theory. The young offenders would be rewarded for correct behavior, and punished for bad behavior, and would become model citizens. We never hear about Valley View today. Surely if the model had been effective, corrections institutions all over the country would have adopted it. Controlling prisoners with treats must have made them feel like dogs.

    But we still punish people in prisons, because we think that will make prisoners do what we want them to do. The strategy does not go well.

    Influence is the ability to talk people into doing what you want them to do, without threatening them with punishment if they don’t do it. Political power is the ability to punish people who do not do what you want them to do. Political power loses its power when people accept the punishment rather than obey the orders. That is the basis for choosing nonviolent resistance  instead of violent revolution.

    God is not a politician. God loves us freely, and created us so that we can love God freely in return. That is the basis of our dignity as human beings. The smallest child can do that.

    We can say that God will freely never stop loving us, but we should not say that God’s love is unconditional.

Curiosity kills cats

        There was a proverb I used to hear when I was a kid: “curiosity killed a cat.” Lesson: “don’t get too curious—you can get hurt.”

        I am sad that the saying has become the motto for too many religious people, of all religions.

        The motto is bad. The Lord made us curious.

        Second bad motto: “People need certitude.”

        Certitude is a scientific mirage. Maybe it started with Descartes. He thought the only thing he could be certain about was that he was able to think. “I think, therefore I am.” But ever since, some people have gone off on the crusade to acquire certain knowledge. We call some of them “scientists.” But there are other kinds too. We call them “religious people.”

        Science is story-telling qualified by observation. Careful observation, like what we can do with a microscope, leads us to modify older stories we have told. They used to say that cholera was caused by bad air. When they could observe water with a microscope, the story changed: cholera is caused by microscopic bugs in the water. The effect of the changed story was miraculous—cholera disappeared. The miracle led people to look for certitude through science instead of religion.

        We ended up with a battle of certitudes.

        Some old poet, I think Alexander Pope, said “a little learning is a dangerous thing.”

        Both science and religion have men and women of little learning. They are the people who expect certitude from either science or religion. Religious traditions wisely expect “faith,” which is to know things without being certain about them. Science can lead people to believe that science gives certitude, or at least more certitude than religion gives. That is misguided faith in science.

        Both science and religion have people who know that we cannot have certitude. Such people acknowledge that even if they cannot have certitude, they believe that what they are doing can be good for people. They both operate with the assumption that faith can live side by side with questioning, with curiosity.

        For the last couple of hundred years, ever since people began applying scientific observation to the Bible, it has seemed that science corrodes faith. Seminaries can turn out sceptics, who go about destroying religious faith and emptying the churches. The sceptics make two mistakes: they think that science can give us certitude, and they think that religion should give us certitude. By making certitude a pre-requisite for the good life, they distort science and destroy religion.

        The thing is, we are all human beings who live by the worlds that the people around us create. We live by the stories that our tribes believe. Scientists cannot work without a community of fellow scientists—we call them “peer reviewers,” and their very existence tells us that nothing we publish is free from critique. Religious people cannot operate without a community of fellow religionists. Religion without community can become magic. There is no philosophical tradition (“natural law”) or infallible authority (the pope) to tell us which religious statements are true. 

        The fragility of knowledge does not lead to chaos. There is no way for a coach to develop a foolproof way to win games, yet we continue to play games. Games are rewarding. When they cease to be rewarding for players or fans, we modify the rules.

        The experience of “reward” in games is a good analogy for what religious people call “life.” Games are rewarding when the players treat each other with respect; disrespect can get you thrown out of the game. They are rewarding when each player can lose—every player is vulnerable. They are rewarding when people continue to play even after they lose—they are faithful to the game and its players. Respect, vulnerability and faithfulness are the components of love.

        Games do not offer certitude. Science does not offer certitude. Religion does not offer certitude. Yet all three are worth doing. All three can help us love.

        Science and religion both require curiosity. Curiosity is a gift. It does not kill cats.

Passion

Love is passionate, respectful, vulnerable, and faithful involvement.

“Passion” is the fourth component of the operational definition of love that I have been promoting. Fr. John Joe Lakers, who gave me these thoughts, argued that passion should come first in the list.

It took me a long time to get past thinking that the word “passion” means romantic love. But romantic love is just one kind of love.

Romantic love is beautiful but temporary. It is usually followed by disillusionment, and it cannot keep a relationship alive for the long haul. The word “passion” can point to a much deeper and longer lasting form of love.

Dorothy Day began what she called a “house of hospitality” in New York City in the 1930’s. She deliberately chose to locate it in a slum area of the city, an area characterized by homeless people, drugs, and crime. Her basic rule was to welcome anybody into the house, let them eat there and stay as long as they needed to. When she quoted the Russian novelist Dostoyevski, “Love is a harsh and dreadful thing,” she was surely thinking of what it costs to live so vulnerable to suffering people. But her way of living was a fruitful form of love. Today there are over 180 “Catholic Worker” houses around the world, all following the pattern she set in New York City. Her vision had staying power.

But passion is not limited to such a dramatic way of life. Passion is what causes people to practice a musical instrument many hours a day for years on end. Passion is why people welcome a severely disabled infant into their family and create a life of love around the child.

Passion is a gift. We do not buy it or manufacture it or control it. Passion is “passive.” We get passion from other people. I would say we get it from God, through other people.

We choose to be respectful, vulnerable, and faithful in our involvement with others. We do not choose passion. Something or someone else gives it to us.

Because love requires passion, love, then, is a gift. 

 

[published in Muddy River News, 4/12/2026]

 

Vulnerability

           The third part of an operational definition of love is vulnerability. Vulnerability is when you do not have control.  

John Joe Lakers, who gave me many of these ideas, tells the story of a couple he had been helping to prepare for marriage.

Laura and Mark were meeting with JJ in his office. Mark had been set to graduate from QU in the spring, but Laura was going to have to return to QU for another year. Mark was in turmoil; he had not yet heard from the graduate schools to which he had applied, and he was afraid that Laura might fall in love with someone else during the year they planned to be apart. As the two of them talked with JJ about the future, Mark suddenly broke down and cried in Laura’s arms.

 

At that moment, Laura knew that she wanted to spend her life with him.

 

Later, Laura and Mark were re-living the event with JJ. As Laura described her experience,  tears of joy came to her eyes. His breaking down had showed her the depth of his love for her. Mark’s memory of the event was different. He said: “I never felt so unlovable in my life, and I was determined that it would never happen again.”

 

JJ’s comment: If both Laura and Mark had not been together physically at the moment when they recalled the experience of his breaking down, both of them could have gone through life without ever knowing how different their experience of the event was. Mark would never have known how wrong he was when he determined never to let something like that happen again.

 

Men are supposed to be in control, not to show vulnerability.

 

Our society fears vulnerability. We need security. But if we let security take over our ability to be vulnerable to the people we love, we imprison ourselves.

 

The First Letter of John says “Perfect love drives out fear.” To love is to go ahead even when you know you might get hurt. You ignore the fear when you decide to love.

 

Three of the four elements of an operational definition of love are respect, faithfulness, and vulnerability. Those three are under our control. The fourth one, passion or emotion, requires special treatment because passion or emotion is not under our control. We decide to be respectful, faithful, or vulnerable. The Marriage Encounter slogan was “Love is a decision, not a feeling.” We cannot decide to be emotional. We can control what we do when we experience emotions, but we cannot control the emotions themselves. They just happen.

 

published in Muddy River News, March 14, 2026

 

 

 

Mater et Magistra

 

Mater et magistra. “Mother and teacher.”

“Mater, si, magistra, non.” That is how William F. Buckley responded to Pope John XXIII’s 1961 encyclical, Mater et magistra: “Mother, yes; teacher, no.”

In 1961 Mr. Buckley’s clever response to the pope was heresy to most Catholics. That was because he, and most Catholics with him, had a too restrictive view of what a teacher is.

Jesus once said that he alone is the teacher, all the rest of us are learners. A good teacher learns from students—teaching is not a one-way street. That is the principle that Pope Francis tried to get us to accept in his effort to promote “synodality,” which is intended to help church teachers learn from the rest of the church. That was as true of the pope himself as it is of the rest of us.

At least since the 1940’s, when Pope Pius XII began to grapple with new questions arising from scientific knowledge of the human body, the official teaching agents of Catholicism, the “magisterium,” have seemed to feel responsible for issuing definitive statements about the morality of every new scientific advancement. What has happened is that Catholic moral teaching has become less and less persuasive to our fellow seekers of truth, inside and outside of the church boundaries. There is a host of questions where public moral sensitivity has moved away from what the magisterium says ought to be done. 

We believers need to enter into honest dialog with everyone else about such questions. We are all learners.

Twenty-five years ago a Catholic personal friend of mine, Mary Lyndon Shanley, published a book titled Making Babies, Making Families: What Matters Most in an Age of Reproductive Technologies, Surrogacy, Adoption, and Same-sex and Unwed Parents. I was impressed by her approach to the moral issues raised by the list of topics in the subtitle of her book. Our Catholic magisterium has a long list of official statements about all of these issues, but as far as I can tell, few people, and few Catholics, are guided by what the magisterium has said. That leaves faithful Catholics with the choice of being counter-cultural and obeying what the church officially says, or abandoning the official teaching and floating free in an atmosphere without moral guidance.

The same dilemma is at the root of serious political divisions in our country. Because our faith leaders have not engaged in serious dialog with others who do not share our beliefs, one whole segment of the Catholic population has voted for a political party that has abandoned programs designed to alleviate hunger and disease in poorer nations. The Democratic party has used the politics of U.S. Catholic leaders as a reason to banish anyone who considers abortion a moral evil from the party. We are in the middle of a religious war once again, forgetting the past two centuries of peace that arose from the First Amendment of our Constitution and that were re-affirmed by the Second Vatican Council in its decree “On the Dignity of the Human Person,” Dignitatis Humanae.

Catholic moral thinkers, including Thomas Aquinas, grappled with the wider culture surrounding the faith community. Thomas was condemned by the University of Paris because he used Aristotle, whose writings had been preserved from destruction by Muslim scholars.  Surely Pope Leo XIII had that in mind when he wrote in 1879 that Catholics should use Aquinas as a guide for their thinking.

Bigger than us

Bigger than us

 

“Bigger than us” I say.

As I reflect on the place religion might play in this messy world, where so many people do not seem to have any need to see and respond to God, I ask myself, what is the core of religious response?

My answer: a sense that there is something bigger than us.

Something, maybe someone, bigger than us. Not just bigger than me, bigger than all of us.

Who are us?

 Back in the ancient days of sociology, the 1950s, one of the more famous sociologists, Robert K. Merton, coined the term “reference group.” He suggested that we fashion in our minds a group of people with whom we identify. We may not belong to that group, and may have no physical connection with them, but they shape who we are.

One of my reference groups is the Roman Catholic church community. That community, in the very concrete form of St. James parish in Decatur, Illinois, saved my parents from the effects of what I believe were my two alcoholic grandfathers, one of whom committed suicide. My parents were lower class—neither went to high school. They were suddenly uprooted from their families in Springfield and sent to Decatur by the Bell Telephone Company. There the church community, and especially its leader, Fr. Francis Ostendorf, rescued them.

The Catholic community is world-wide. It inspired my brother to live for nine years as a missionary on the Brazilian Amazon, which led me to choose “Latin American social and economic development” as one of the two topics I studied intensively for my degree in sociology. My black seminary classmate, Fr. Bennet Spivey, who died two years after his ordination of Lou Gehrig’s disease, motivated me to identify with Black Catholics.

So for me, “us” is worldwide. And now that my church has expanded its sense of who can experience the voice of God, “us” for me is even wider than the Roman Catholic world.

So I say, when Jesus said “make disciples of all nations,” I say: the word “disciple” means “learner.” Jesus calls me to make learners of all nations, and then, maybe when some learners want to affiliate in a deeper way with my church, we can baptize them. Too often in history we baptized first and then made learners. Usually we never got around to the learning and let the baptism (or lack of it) become an excuse for exploitation. “If we baptize you, you can work for us without pay. If you refuse baptism, we kill you.”

 

The troubles of our time

Our greatest problem as we muddle our way through the environmental mess and the worldwide migrations our behavior is causing, is that too many of us are drifting in a world where there is nothing bigger than us. We are masters of our destiny, and our technology should be able to dig us out of whatever hole we dig ourselves into. Without anything bigger than us, self-interest tells us that restraints are not needed.

The regulators do not regulate because there is no sense that there is something bigger than themselves. Why be concerned about the feelings pf co-workers, or respectful of people who look different?

 

Love

My friends kid me about my fascination with definitions. But I insist that we need a working definition of love. Otherwise the word can mean anything, even murder. My working definition of love: respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement of people with each other. (And, if you are a believer, with God).

Why should I respect, be vulnerable to, and be faithful to someone if there is nothing bigger than us?

But there is something bigger than us. That something, who I believe is a someone, is God.

I believe that we should be respectful, vulnerable, and faithful in our dealings with one another because that is how God is involved with us.

God loves, which is the message that Jesus took from his Jewish background, especially the psalms, and lived out himself.

 

 

Faithfulness

 [published in Muddy Riverr News, February 16, 2026]

    The first part of an operational definition of love is respect. The second is faithfulness.

    Faithfulness means that involvement is open-ended—you don’t know how your relationship with another person will look in the future, and you don’t close it off right now.

    This makes human life delightful. Any time two human beings are open to each other, the relationship might continue on into the future. When we do something to other people that shuts down that possibility, our lives are impoverished.

    When Jesus said we should become like little children, he was talking about how a child who has experienced love by another person knows that it is fun to repeat that experience. We are created to enjoy being involved with one another.

    Faithfulness is most important in the kind of relationship that we call marriage. But faithfulness is not limited to that kind of relationship.

    Faithfulness can be a low key behavior based on the tiny delight that can come from just another person’s smile—the smile of someone we meet on the street. When we know that we could, even if the possibility is hugely remote, meet that person again and have the same delight, we behave accordingly.

    We know that many of our contacts with other people are not so delightful—we sin—all of us. We damage each other, sometimes deliberately. We do things or say things that can shut down a relationship, even with someone we have loved.

    It doesn’t take much familiarity with the online world to know that online can be a sewer of unfaithfulness. It seems to be easier to say things online that you could not say face to face, which means that we shouldn’t say it online either. Every person who reads what I write online could be a person I might come to enjoy talking with some time in the future. I have a friend I disagreed with very much, but we learned to listen to each other and we changed.

    I owe my ideas about respect and faithfulness to Fr. John Joe Lakers, my Franciscan colleague and friend, whose 1996 book, Christian Ethics: An Ethics of Intimacy, says that intimacy should be the basis of all our moral judgments. As I read the book, I got the idea that what he calls intimacy can be the basis of an operational definition of love. Respect and faithfulness are two of the four behaviors that make intimacy.

 

Disciplecy

    Democracy, autocracy, bureaucracy, meritocracy. All of these words end in the letters “c-r-a-c-y,” which are based on the Greek word “kratos,” which means “rule.” Democracy is rule by the people. Autocracy is rule by oneself (the person on top). Bureaucracy is rule by a committee. Meritocracy is rule by the deserving.

    The problem is the word “rule.” To rule means to tell other people what to do.  Democracy means that the people can tell you what to do. Eventually, in a democracy, what the people tell you to do can feel pretty much the same as what the monarch would tell you to do.

    Pardon my christianity, but Jesus said “You have only one teacher. All of you are learners.” The word “disciple” comes from the Latin word “to learn.” To learn is to change your mind. Jesus’s last words in the gospel of Matthew were “Go and make disciples of all nations.” He didn’t say “Go and rule all nations.”  He said, “Go and make learners of all nations.” Make learners of all people. Make all people open to changing their minds. Don’t rule them.

    So, I suggest the word “disciplecy,” pronounced di-si-ple-see. Take away the word “rule.” Disciplecy means learning how to live with other people. Learning how to live with other people means being ready to change your mind. The purpose of a disciplecy is not to tell people who should rule over them. It is to help people live together without killing each other.

The Roman Catholic Church

    I was born into a Roman Catholic family, so the story of the Roman Catholic Church has been a lifelong interest for me. Roman Catholic traditions have been too much shaped by Roman Empire traditions—canon law has the last word about everything. Popes down through the years have looked more like emperors than learners.

    The Catholic Church under the recently deceased Pope Francis engaged in a group process labeled “synodality.” The word “synod” is an ancient term for a gathering of church people to discuss things. The purpose of synodality is to get church people to learn from one another, starting with the pope. It is to get people to change their minds about what God wants, starting with the pope.

    The most recent synod was a three-year process beginning with getting people’s opinions on the grass-root level, letting the opinions migrate toward some kind of consensus, and ending with month-long meetings of representatives from all over the world. They met in a hall with round tables at which all the participants sat as equals, listening to each other, with electronic devices to deal with the variety of languages. Even Pope Francis sat at one of the round tables. They were there to learn from one another.

    When democracy really works, it is more like a disciplecy, people meeting to figure out how to live together in some kind of peace. They make rules, but the rules are hammered out by people changing their minds about what is a good way to get something done.  

    One problem we have is that our democratic gatherings tend to evolve into techniques for telling other people what they should do. They become “cratic,” focused on rule, rather than on how to live together. They get involved in collecting and distributing money taken from other people, which can be used to tell those people what to do. They become empires focused on amassing power rather than tools for living together.

    The same thing happens with our business organizations. In the capitalist dream, an entrepreneur comes up with a new way of doing something, struggles competitively with other people trying to do the same thing, and the result benefits everybody. In our world, the entrepreneur gets bought out by a bigger competitor, who gets bought out by a still bigger competitor, until we have a capitalist empire where the emperor tells everybody else what to do.

    Our country has become an empire ruled by emperors, both political and economic. Some emperors are not bad, like Caesar Augustus. Others, like Nero, are not so good.

    Democracy is not the best word for what we want, both in religion and in politics. We would do better to call it disciplecy.

 

 

Respect

    In sociology, which I used to teach, you need operational definitions. You need to be able to observe things, and even to put a number on what you are observing. If you want to study poverty, you have to have an operational definition of poverty, something you can measure.

    For years I looked for an operational definition of love. We really need that. How can men and women who call themselves followers of Jesus treat other men and women with disrespect and violence? They say, “Any talk about love is just romantic dreaming.”

    I finally found an operational definition of love. It has three or four terms, but I will just focus on one: respect. The first part of love is respect.

    Respect is observable. With a little work you could measure it.  

    Roy Webb, in his recently published book “How to Lead a School District through a Pandemic,” was describing how he did his job as superintendent of Quincy Public Schools. On page 140 he writes: “Respect is key. In the military we salute when we see others in the military out of respect. Respect is 360 degrees. You respect your boss, your peers, and your subordinates.”

    Dennis Williams, one of the founders of Bella Ease, used to tell young people not to use the N-word. When a white person uses the word addressing a black person, you have disrespect, and he did not want young people to use the word on anybody, white or black. Using it can make it easier to treat people with disrespect.  

    The F-word is a word of disrespect. The fact that it has become so common is a sign that we are getting used to treating each other disrespectfully.

    Without respect we cannot even begin to love.

    Every single human being, young, old, male, female, criminal or innocent, deserves respect, needs respect, because every single human being has dignity and needs love.

    Any form of violence is disrespectful. We cannot show love by intentionally hurting someone else. There are times when we have to cause pain—for example, when we have to struggle with someone dear to us over behavior that could destroy our relationship. But the pain is not the purpose. When you start out wanting to hurt, you diminish the dignity of the other person.

    We christians often hear the gospel admonition that we should love one another. We should love one another as Jesus loved us. Jesus never used violence against another person. Even when he was driving money changers out of the temple, he was not hitting the money changers.

    We can measure the extent to which we are a christian society by measuring the extent to which we treat every one of our neighbors with respect.

 [published in Muddy River News, January 18, 2026]

Influence versus Power

 [published in Muddy River News, December 15, 2025]

    There are two ways we can get other people to do what we want them to do. One way is to persuade them to do it. We call that “influence.” The other is to cause them pain if they do not do what we want. We call that “power.”

    Physical harm is an extreme kind of power. We allow police to carry guns. The gun is a symbol of power. If we do not do what police want us to do, they can hurt us. We do not want everybody threatening to hurt us, so the police are the only people we authorize to do it. It seems we can’t live together peacefully any other way. But we advise even the police to use power as little as possible. Some police live their whole lives as police without using their guns.

    Physical harm is not the only way for us to use power.  We can hurt with our words. Words can kill.

    We are moving away from power in many areas of our lives. We no longer allow teachers in our schools to punish students physically. We advise parents not to use physical punishments on their children. We think it is better to use influence rather than power to get children to do what we want. Why shouldn’t we treat adults the same way?

    I cannot recall one instance in the four gospels where Jesus deliberately caused or threatened pain to someone in order to get them to do something. Threatening or causing pain shows a lack of respect for the other person’s dignity. Jesus always showed respect, even to sinners.

    We say that Jesus is God. That means that God, just like Jesus, always shows respect, even to sinners. God does not use power, God does not punish. Jesus said “Let the weeds grow until the harvest.” That’s what we should do.

Counsellors and therapists are worth it

 

published in Muddy River News Oct. 14, 2025

One of my friends in the Franciscan Order recently celebrated 47 years of sobriety. It has been 47 years since he left a facility that helped religious and priests suffering from alcoholism to achieve sobriety.

Treatment like that was and still is expensive. It took my friend three months in that residential facility before its staff judged that it would be okay for him to return to a normal life. But the treatment was successful. The staff knew what it was doing.

There are many people who work in the mental health services who know what they are doing. Our problem is that we do not want to pay such people in proportion to the benefit that we receive from their services. When a recovering addict returns to society and is able to live as part of a family or church, and is working productively, we do not measure what we have all gained from their recovery.

We do not grumble about the cost of guns and fighter jets and submarines. In recent years we have spent hundreds of  billions of our hard-earned dollars to upgrade our nuclear capabilities, even though we know that if we were ever to use those capabilities, we would destroy the world for human habitation.   

We need to put our dollars where they will really do some good.  We need to use them to pay therapists and case workers and personal assistants. And not just people who help us with our aging bodies. We need to pay the people more who clean our houses or landscape our yards. The people who help us when we are ill or old contribute more to our well-being than material stuff that we buy. Too much stuff goes into storage before it goes to the landfill. We should forget stuff and think people. We need to put our money into helping each other live more fully and more abundantly.

 

 

Changing your mind

 

[published in Muddy River News on November 5, 2025.]

Learning means you change your mind.

Some people never learn. They keep making the same mistakes over and over. We say, “Will they never learn?”

Our two major political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, are dedicated to keeping us from changing our minds. Nothing the other side says is worth listening to. To a dedicated partisan, changing your mind shows weakness and lack of dedication to the cause.

Our social media are the perfect tools to keep us from changing our minds. The media reward eyeballs on the screen. They make their money by following the crowd.  

Face-to-face contact with other human beings is the best way to get us to change our minds. The most valuable thing that a school can do for students is to help the students get used to listening to living human beings who challenge what the students think.

My father quit school after seventh grade. He realized that he needed to learn things, so he took correspondence courses. After I started getting more education I had trouble talking with him. He seemed to think that if I said something he didn’t like, I was rejecting him. He never had teachers who could have given him the most important benefit of schooling: living teachers who can help you to welcome people who disagree with you.

Good coaches help players to change their minds. You think this is the way to do it, and the coach says, no, you are wrong. I still love you, but THIS is the way to do it.

We religious people experienced a movement in the last century called “ecumenism.” The movement was fueled by the idea that when Christian churches fight each other, they keep other people from accepting any church. The movement gave me a set of rules for talking with people who have different ideas about religion: 1) Keep quiet and listen while the other person states what he or she believes as clearly and forcefully as they can; 2) State your own ideas as clearly and forcefully as you can, and trust the other person to keep quiet and listen while you do that. 3) Let God determine what happens next.

When you let God determine what happens, you may have to change your mind. And we did. We Catholics learned from the Protestants that it is good to read the Bible. I think the Protestants may have learned a thing or two from us Catholics, but you will have to ask them.

The last thing Jesus said in the gospel of Matthew is “Go and make disciples of all nations.” A disciple is a learner. A learner is someone who changes his mind. To be a disciple in religion means to change your mind about what God is like and what God wants.

All of us who do religion are learners. So are all of us who do politics. We all have to get used to changing our minds, and the best way to do that is to communicate with people who don’t think like us. It’s uncomfortable, but didn’t Jesus say that the road to the kingdom is narrow?

My reaction to Bishop Paprocki's statement

Our bishop, Thomas John Paprocki, has publicly objected to the Chicago Archdiocese’s rewarding Senator Dick Durbin for his years of service in government because Senator Durbin has publicly advocated a “pro-choice” position regarding abortion.

Catholic belief that abortion is evil goes back centuries and continues today. Prolife defenders say that opposition to abortion is “natural law.” That means that everyone, regardless of religious belief, should be able to see the evil of the action. People who do not see it are unreasonable, and must be acting in bad faith.

There is a difference between believing that abortion is evil and believing that the government should make “procuring” an abortion a crime, punishable by law. Catholic canon law uses the unusual term “procure,” probably because the decision in favor of abortion is not exclusively the woman’s decision. Men can be equally guilty.

Canon law excommunicates anyone who procures an abortion. It does not excommunicate anyone who murders. People who oppose murder are considered reasonable. People who oppose making the government punish abortion are not unreasonable. I can only speculate that the reason for the special punishment must be that the lawyers believe that more stringent punishment will discourage it.

Something like eighty percent of the population, including eighty percent of Catholics, think that abortion should be legal under some circumstances. That is evidence that allowing abortion legally is not against natural law.

Believing that abortion must be punished by law is a denominational belief, and the Second Vatican Council said that Catholics should respect other people’s denominational beliefs and not require the government to impose those beliefs by law.

I respect Senator Durbin’s statement that he is personally opposed to abortion. That does not make him a hypocrite. As a professional politician, he must believe that making it punishable by law goes beyond what natural law requires and that as a Catholic he is not required to make it a crime.  

People who equate procuring any abortion with killing a child late in pregnancy poison political discourse. Contentious issues should be approached with respect and sensitivity to others’ feelings. That is what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

 

Brother Joe Zimmerman, OFM

 

 

The prophet and the engineer

Engineers build things. Prophets take things already built and say what's wrong with those things.

 

But here's where they differ. Engineers know that things they build need upgrading, and so they suggest engineering changes. Prophets point out how the engineering is failing, but they don't suggest using engineering to correct the situation. They tell people how they should change their behavior in order to allow the engineering to work better.

 

Here's an example. Abortion.

 

Most people see abortion as unfortunate, if not downright evil. I shared this statement, verified by numerous surveys, with a Democratic activist, and she reacted with hostility.

 

Democrats come close to saying that abortion is something to be desired. They propose an engineering solution to the issue: set up the laws so that abortions can be procured as easily as possible, even to the point where the government should support getting them.

 

I think this strategy is too optimistic about engineering. If "most people" see abortion as unfortunate, if not downright evil, adopting a position where the politics actively support it is a gift to Republicans. It allows them to demonize Democrats as baby killers.

 

"Prolife" defenders make a similar mistake. They think that an engineering solution will make abortion less desirable. They make abortion illegal and make anyone involved in procuring an abortion guilty of crime. They are correct in believing that most people see abortion as unfortunate, and maybe downright evil, but they have not taken seriously the practical results of trying to criminalize it. Their position is a gift to Democrats. It allows Democrats to demonize them as heartless fanatics.

 

Prophecy

 

Prophets are outside the system, and that means prophets ignore the engineering.

 

We have become so conditioned to seek engineering solutions to everything that we have tied ourselves up in laws and lawsuits. We see a problem and immediately pass a law to fix it. If we have not yet passed such a law, we can enforce our own version of the law by suing someone. We are drowning in laws and lawsuits.

 

Parallels between Abortion and Slavery

 

Prolife theorists have argued that moral appeal had not been enough to overturn the racist effects of slavery on our culture--it took changing the laws, the structures.  They point to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision which outlawed segregated schools as an example.

 

But it has been seventy years since Brown, and racism persists. We did make advances in parts of our country--many more people of color are doing better today than they would have if Brown had never been issued. But we have re-segregated ourselves by housing preferences, and there are many areas where racist behaviors persist. 

 

When I first read the prolife argument, it sounded appealing, because I am a sociologist, and we look for systemic solutions to systemic problems. But I reflected that there are huge differences between abortion and slavery. Slavery was an institution that shaped half the country's laws and institutions, with immense economic consequences. Abortion has an economic component--prolife activists demonize abortion providers, but abortion provision is a negligible part of our economy.

 

There is a reason why we became so optimistic about legal engineering. We observed how defenders of slavery and its Jim Crow replacements used laws to achieve bad ends. The engineering of slavery was so successful that only reverse engineering could free us. 

 

That lesson ignored the power of prophecy. Without prophets like Dr. Martin Luther King, political opposition to the engineering of Jim Crow could not have dismantled the evil engineering. What we now call the "civil rights movement" was prophetic enough to change the engineering.

 

Prolife activists have hoped that engineering the Roe v. Wade decision would reduce the number of people seeking abortions, but that does not seem to be happening. We need prophets who can acknowledge the tragedy that abortion often creates but approach people facing the decision to abort with gospel compassion rather than with threats of violent repression. 

 

Another example: climate change

 

The world is facing an unprecedented challenge caused by engineering gone wild. Our engineering is upsetting the balances of nature to the point where natural disasters are becoming more and more disruptive to the rest of our engineered world. As hurricanes, floods, and fires become more destructive, insurance will become so expensive that most people will not be able to afford it. 

 

The Biden administration attempted engineering solutions to deal with the problem: subsidize wind and solar production. But artificial intelligence requires so much electrical power that its demands are swallowing all the advances we are making in wind and solar. New gas-powered sources of electric power are being constructed to meet the new demand.  Auto manufacturers tell us that bigger and heavier cars are the preference of car buyers these days. Heavier cars consume more energy. We want fast food, and so multinational corporations cut down rainforests to feed cattle to provide that fast food.

 

We need prophets who will have the courage to say to the public: We have to stop expecting our every wish to be fulfilled by engineering magic. To put it in more moralistic terms: if we let every entrepreneur convince people that they need more and more of whatever the entrepreneurs is offering, we will destroy our human environment.

 

The Christian tradition of "mortification" could moderate these trends. Mortification means that you give up something you would like because you hope for a greater good. You could say, "I really would like my fast-food lunch, but for the sake of the greater good I will prepare my lunch at home and use an old-fashioned lunch bucket." Only prophets can motivate that kind of behavior.

 

 

 

 

facial recognition

 What are the facial recognition

       coordinates
       of the face of God?

I’m a Christian
       I hope
       maybe those coordinates
       are of the face of Jesus

       too bad they’re not around
              or aren’t they?

maybe they’re the coordinates
       of someone
       who looks at me
       with love

or maybe
       they’re the coordinates
       of my face
       when I look at someone else
       with love

does facial recognition technology
       work
       over the phone?

STEM needs HALM

    Okay, HALM is not a word. But the words Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics have nothing to do with the word “stem.” I can’t find a word to express what I want to say, so I invent a word: HALM.

    HALM—History, Art, Literature, Music.

    STEM is the fad of the day. STEM is not bad. Science has done wonderful things for us. But STEM is only half of what it takes to live in fully human ways.

    And there is a down side to STEM: it tempts us to think we can control the world.

    There is an old saying: science helps us understand; understanding helps us control.  

    Control can ruin us. The biblical story of the tower of Babel expresses an important human tendency. We can get so enthused about our power to control that we think we are gods, and we replace the real God.

    Science has given us nuclear weapons, which science is warning us are only a few seconds away from destroying all human life. Science and technology and engineering and mathematics are giving us climate change, which is destroying much of the beauty and diversity of life that has surrounded us since evolution produced us.

    We are not in control. The wisdom of many human traditions teach that lesson. The word “Islam” means “submission,” and there are almost as many Muslims in the world as there are Christians. Hubris is the vice of our age. Hubris is STEM gone wild.

    That is why we need to complement STEM with History, Art, Literature, and Music: HALM. Those activities can awaken us to the beauty and value of humility. HALM teaches us that God is important, that we can live fully even with our limitations, that we can be vulnerable to one another, and vulnerability is part of love. HALM reminds us of how our best efforts can go wrong, and how we can recover from wrong.

    STEM tempts us to control. We need HALM to help us be full human beings, enriched by the things we create, not enslaved by them.

 

[published in Muddy River News, August 15, 2025]

A Joe Messina poem from last April

Several of us meet in what we call “Writers’ Circle.” It consists of Terry Riddell, his wife Deborah, Paula Peter, Mary Ann Klein, and myself. Occasionally Mary Ann’s husband, Joe Messina, joins us. Terry, Mary Ann, and Joe have all been full-time English faculty at Quincy University. I am a sociological deviant.

Last March I wrote a poem titled “Ferris Wheel.” It is printed in this blog on March 31. On April 10 Joe Messina offered a poem with my name in the title. I suggested putting it on my blog. Joe just gave me (on August 13) the okay to do that.

Here is Joe’s poem:

 

80^th birthday: In imitation of Joe Z’s minimalism

 

first a baby cries
then it eats

it doesn’t ask
What does this breast want from me?

Before I was
there were two habits,
breathing and eating.

One day, I felt something for the people who fed me.

they didn’t scare me
they didn’t enrage me any more

what was it?

later someone told me about love
what’s that?

If I don’t know what love is
does  that keep me from loving?

Socrates says we don’t know what friendship is
but that doesn’t keep us from being friends.

A pilgrim poet, whose name I forget
cried How far is it to God?

No answer

He didn’t know what else to do
so he kept on going.

Speaking of going
I have to go to the bathroom
Then I’ll get back to it.

To what?

At 80 I can’t tell my living
from my dying.

What’s happening to me?
You’re dying.
Oh.
Well, let’s not make a fuss about it.

I came noisily
but I can go quietly

The air is sweet today
and ice cream is always good

Though I don’t know what good is.

Showing Up

Recently I was at a graduation party for a young woman who had just completed high school. An estimated 60 or 70 people, young and old, showed up for the party.

The party was open-invitation—no reservation required. All you had to do was show up and stay as long as you wanted. You could eat but you didn’t have to.

That event was giving glory to the young woman being honored.

Glory is when people show up to let you know that you mean something to them.

Showing up at worship services gives glory to God.

Church attendance in almost all denominations is way down. In the Springfield, Illinois Catholic diocese, a tabulation made each October of Mass attendance in all diocesan parishes combined shows that in 2023 attendance was half of what it was in 2000.

Why that is happening is surely a complex question, but maybe one of the reasons why people are not showing up for church services is that they have forgotten that the most important thing about church services is to give glory to God.

We live in a consumer culture. We approach things with the attitude, “what am I getting out of this?” Maybe we approach church with the same attitude: what am I getting out of attending a church service?

Clergy, we who have accepted the role of leading worship services, can be rightly focused on providing people with something that is at least minimally rewarding. We can forget that all of us, clergy and laity, are in church because we want to give glory to God. We show up because showing up is meaningful even when a particular service is not especially rewarding. We attend the party because we want to honor someone. Some of our parties are more successful than other ones, because some of us are better at putting on parties than others. But we show up for the guest of honor, not because the food is good.

 Showing up puts us into physical contact with other people. We humans need that, just as much as we need oxygen. No wonder so many people these days are tempted to give up on life. We have been taught that we don’t need other people—we center our lives on consuming. We go it alone, all by ourselves. Trying to live that way can be deadly. 

I live with several other men in what we call a “Franciscan friary.” We show up for each other each day, both in prayer and at meals.

Believe me, at my age this kind of showing up really keeps me alive.

 

Brother Joe Zimmerman, OFM

[published in Muddy River News, June 9, 2025]

Life on Mars

             Love, I have been saying for thirty years, is respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement.

Involvement. Relationship with something or someone outside yourself.

Question: can we humans love totally online, totally without physical contact with other human beings?

Can we be involved with other people respectfully online, vulnerably online, faithfully online?

Elon Musk is said to be determined to prove that human beings can live on Mars. Maybe he thinks that life on earth is doomed, and that Mars is the only place where humanity could survive. But human life there would be so impoverished as to be not life at all.

We live on a big beautiful planet (or, in the universe as we know it, a tiny beautiful planet). We are surrounded, even inside our bodies, with other life forms. We live in a world of plants, and other animals.

Students on my campus here at Quincy University are now allowed to have pet animals in their rooms on campus. Our recently retired State’s Attorney here in Quincy kept a well-trained dog in his office, because he found that the presence of the dog could help calm people for whom contact with the law was terribly stressful.  

Being outside in nature has always been central to my experience of life.

Mars would have none of that. Everything would have to be hermetically sealed against the outside environment, because the human body could not survive otherwise on the surface of a planet so far from the sun.

Is life online a foretaste of life on Mars?

It may not be as bad as that.

People used to write letters. Relationships could flourish with that greatly impoverished form of involvement. But letters weren’t good enough. We want physical presence, physical involvement, if we are to have life and have it more abundantly.

That is a phrase used by Jesus, “have life and have it more abundantly.” When we live a life of physical involvement that is respectful, vulnerable, and faithful, we do live abundantly.

Maybe that is what “eternal life” is.

I fall asleep several times a day (feature of my age, I guess). I imagine that death is just another form of falling asleep. Each time I fall asleep, I may not ever awake again. I am at peace with that. I have had life, and abundant life, most days of my life.

Each time I wake up, I face the possibility of experiencing love once again, and that is life for me. I have been given the gift—and it is a gift—of experiencing what it is to be involved, even in tiny moments, with other people, and even with the plants and animals of my world, respectfully, vulnerably, and faithfully.

The community of Roman Catholics I live in tells me that God has “eternal life” in store for me. My reason for accepting that belief is that a God who has given me so much life right here on this earth is not likely to stop just because my body gives out.

I face the fact that there are a lot of people for whom life has not been as abundant as the life I have experienced. All I can say is that I am not God, and God will have to take care of that. The story of Jesus tells me that God can create abundance in tiny moments of time, even in the experience of death.

Back to the basic question: will online involvement replace face-to-face involvement in our human experience? No, I say, online is much too impoverished. Compared to involvement with flesh and blood human beings, life online, I speculate, is little better than life on Mars.

Respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement with other people, in person, with all the power of our five senses in play, is a form of more abundant life.

I think people will come to see that.

They say that the Roman Empire fell partly because the Romans were drinking too much out of earthenware lined with lead, and the lead poisoned their brains. I sometimes wonder if our “civilization” will disappear because online devices can be as poisonous as lead.

The Roman Empire fell, but humanity went on. Maybe humanity went on because those people who believed that faithful, respectful, vulnerable involvement was more important than circuses and wine had an evolutionary advantage.