Outsight Book Reader Diary

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

Review: The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received the 2nd edition of this book as a donation for my Little free library and am leaving this review voluntarily.

Ethnobotanists know that the more names a plant has, the greater its cultural importance.

Why then have we permitted the dominance of economic systems that commoditize everything? That create scarcity instead of abundance, that promote accumulation rather than sharing? We’ve surrendered our values to an economic system that actively harms what we love. Our metrics of economic value like GDP count only monetary value in the marketplace, of that which can be bought and sold. There is no room in these equations for the economic value of clean air and carbon sequestration and the ineffable riches of a forest filled with birdsong. Where is the value of a butterfly whose species has prospered for millennia and lives nowhere else on the planet? There is no formula complex enough to hold the birthplace of stories. It pains me to know that an old-growth forest is “worth” far more as lumber than as the lungs of the Earth. And yet I am harnessed to this economy, in ways large and small, yoked to pervasive extraction. I’m wondering how we fix that. And I’m not alone.

Indigenous Economics: Sustaining Peoples and Their Lands

Trosper tells the story of how making relationships led to the historic intertribal agreements with the U.S. government to protect the cultural landscape of the Bears Ears as the first tribally focused national monument. Five different tribes nurtured relationships with the federal government to forever protect an earthly gift to be held in common. This was a transformative step toward healing a long history of colonial taking. That hopeful model of Indigenous economics was abruptly curtailed when Donald Trump reversed the decision and instead conveyed rights to those sacred lands to a private uranium-mining company. It took an election to reverse it.

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Review: The Story of Tatiana

The Story of Tatiana by Jacques Baynac
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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Monday, January 27, 2025

Review: The Religion of American Greatness: What's Wrong with Christian Nationalism

The Religion of American Greatness: What's Wrong with Christian Nationalism by Paul D. Miller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It is a bit refreshing to listen in on this internal debate among modern Christians about the Trump & MAGA specifically and fascistic Christian nationalism generally. I mean that it is good to know, some Christian thinkers are disseminating second-thoughts on that whole trend. Millers sees nationalism as Conflating "nation" (which is ephemeral, cultural, ill-defined) with "state", which is formally and legally defined as well as enforced. Apparently a lot that resonates with me is here distilled from Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States. See a detailed review of that book here.

A summary of the arguments:

Whitehead and Perry found evidence of illiberal views associated with Christian nationalism in the polling data. They found that Christian nationalists are more likely to believe immigrants increase crime (they don’t) and undermine American culture. They tend to believe that it is important to have been born in the United States and to have American ancestry to be accounted fully American, rejecting naturalized citizens and recent immigrants as coequal citizens. They are the most likely to admit they would feel uncomfortable if their daughter married an African American, to believe that the police treat Blacks and Whites equally, and to blame police shootings of African Americans on the victim rather than the police. They are most likely to perceive Muslims and atheists as a threat. The strongest supporters of Christian nationalism support prayer in schools and the display of religious symbols in public life and believe that being a Christian is important to being truly American. None of these beliefs have any logical connection to Christianity or to Christian republicanism, and many of them are directly opposed to it.

... the movement has some troubling attitudes toward race and identity. ...Whitehead and Perry conclude the worst:
Christian nationalism gives divine sanction to ethnocentrism and nativism. Recall that prominent Ambassadors rationalized stronger borders on the grounds that God himself uses walls to protect and preserve his people . . . it is likely that biblical justifications are simply masking ethno-racial understandings of “us” and “them.” In effect, Christian nationalism lets them neutralize disputed assumptions about American identity and who belongs by cloaking their views in religious symbolism.

...Christian nationalism has provided the unifying myths, traditions, narratives, and value systems that have historically been deployed to preserve the interests of those who wish to halt or turn back changes occurring within American society...

Christian nationalism idealizes a mythic society in which real Americans—White, native- born, mostly Protestants—maintain control over access to society’s social, cultural, and political institutions, and “others” remain in their proper place. It therefore seeks strong boundaries to separate “us” from “them,” preserving privilege for its rightful recipients while equating racial and religious outsiders with criminality, violence, and inferiority.

...Christian nationalism is, therefore, ultimately about privilege. It co-opts Christian language and iconography in order to cloak particular political or social ends in moral and religious symbolism.

[I read the unabridged audiobook published by christianaudio.com narrated by [author:Mike Lenz|17900958].]

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Saturday, January 25, 2025

Review: Sharing Good Times

Sharing Good Times by Jimmy Carter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

candor on Sexism, racism

I was startled and angry, considering her dismissive response a personal insult. But having no alternative, I was forced to accept the result of this exchange, and during the following days I was able to consider our relationship more objectively. It was obvious that my wife also considered this a seminal change, and from then on we carved out an unprecedented concept of equality and mutual respect.

Our family teamwork in the campaign paid surprisingly rich dividends. By election day, we had shaken hands with several hundred thousand people, and I was elected governor. Since then, there has been no facet of our business, personal, or political lives that we haven't shared on a relatively equal basis. I have to admit, though, that on occasion, I long for the earlier days.

Late '50s jazz clubs

One of our most memorable visits was to New Orleans, where I remember that our total bankroll was six hundred dol- lars. We found inexpensive hotel accommodations and spent most of our nights in the Bourbon Street and Royal Street nightclubs that had the best jazz performers. In one of them, we formed a special friendship with Billy Eckstine, and we later invited him to visit us in the White House. We had coffee and sweet rolls in the French Market early every morning before

going to bed to sleep until early afternoon. During two of our days, we obtained permission from the New Orleans Symphony manager to sit in the theater during their practice sessions, and on the other days we went to horse races and toured the cemeteries, waterfront, and other tourist attractions. We decided that we would splurge one night and have supper at Antoine's Restaurant, where we enjoyed pompano cooked in a paper bag (seven dollars) with potato slices that swelled up like small balloons. We then went to dance in the Blue Room above the Fairmont Hotel, and subsequently we would call long-distance from Plains to make special requests for our favorite songs.

In 1958 we drove to Miami, where Louis Armstrong was performing in the Fontainebleau Hotel, and we remember our astonishment when the stage rose from below the dance floor with him and his orchestra playing their initial song. While on the beach the next day, we made a spontaneous decision to go to Cuba and were soon on the way. We stayed in Havana for two days, casually noticing that the palace of the dictator, Fulgencio Batista, was surrounded by soldiers and stacked sand- bags and that many people were talking about a revolutionary lawyer named Fidel Castro, who was hiding in the hills. Since we had hotel rooms for only the first night, we spent the next one carousing in Havana and then flew without sleep to Miami the following day and drove back home.

The next year we went to Baltimore, primarily to hear performances by Sarah Vaughan. One evening happened to be especially memorable because the nightclub's sound system failed, and the audience sat in almost absolute silence for two hours, except for sustained applause each time she finished a song.

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