Month: March 2026

Dawoodi Bohra masjid

Next to the northbound New Jersey Turnpike rest area in East Brunswick, there’s a Dawoodi Bohra masjid. Carol and I looked at it over the fence separating it from the rest area access road. It looked quite impressive. Behind the masjid is a parking lot, and on the far side we saw two men wearing the characteristic white clothing of the Dawoodi Bohra.

If you’ve never heard of them before, the website of the Dawoodi Bohra community in the United States says:

“Following Islamic principles, our faith is expressed through service and kindness to others. We believe in the value of society, equal education, women’s empowerment, interfaith engagement, physical health and wellbeing, and a responsibility to care for the environment.”

Carol and I both wanted to see the inside of the building. But we were on a tight schedule. Plus, given the increased security necessary for many religious communities these days, we thought unexpected visitors might not be welcome. So we admired the outside of the building from afar.

Al Masjid Al Zainee (Dawoodi Bohra), East Brunswick, New Jersey

Big tech landscape

A large bleak-looking warehouse
Crate and Barrel warehouse, Cranbury, New Jersey

On our way to a seminar in Maryland, we stopped at a rest area in New Jersey. Right behind the rest area was a bleak Crate and Barrel warehouse that extended more than a quarter of a mile in one direction; behind it was another bleak warehouse, an Amazon fulfillment center, again more than a quarter of a mile long.

We mostly think of big tech as software and computer companies. But huge fulfillment centers are also a part of the big tech landscape — all that merchandise we buy online goes through physical plants like these.

NAACP and No Kings Day

NAACP has issued a set of talking points for the No Kings Day protests set for March 28. To my way of thinking, the NACCP talking points sound better than the verbiage on the official No Kings website. One especially good NAACP talking point: “Today we march. Tomorrow we organize. In November, we vote.” In other words, protesting has to be followed by organizing.

Yeah I know, NAACP seems so old school, but they’ve been doing protests for decades, and they know what they’re talking about. For example, check out their tips for staying safe during protests. And if you’re an NAACP member, they’re offering a webinar next week; I’ve found their webinars inspiring and informative.

Update 3/25/26: Removed non-working link to the NAACP talking points. They set up the link so it can only be opened via an email from them. Yes I could have downloaded the PDF and reposted it here, but I respect their commitment to member security and privacy. Join NAACP to get the full list. In the mean time, here are a few more of their talking points (posted under fair use of copyright law, fewer than 500 words, less than half the document):

“— Today we march. Tomorrow we organize. In November, we vote.
— Register. Verify your registration. Volunteer with your local NAACP. Help your neighbor register. Then show up like your freedom depends on it—because it does.
— Every moment this nation has faced its darkest hours—Reconstruction, Jim Crow, World Wars, Civil Rights—it was We the People who rose. We are rising again….
— 250 years of survival, struggle, and triumph didn’t happen because we waited for permission. It happened because we showed up.
— Come November 2026, we will show the nation—and the world—once again: it has always been us. And it will always be us.
— No kings. No retreat. No surrender. WE. THE. PEOPLE.”

Jurgen Habermas

Jurgen Habermas died on Saturday, March 14. I encountered Habermas first through his book Legitimation Crisis (Beacon Press, 1973), required reading in an undergraduate class I took on the Frankfurt School of Marxism. I found his writing to be impenetrable; I’m not the only one, as the New York Times obituary of Habermas quotes one philosopher as saying that reading Habermas is like chewing on glass. Then later on, Habermas came to speak at the college I attended. He had a speech impediment and a thick German accent, and that coupled with his impenetrable writing style meant I understood not a word of what he said. I found this very frustrating, but also acknowledged to my self that much of the fault was mine — I wasn’t dogged enough to force myself to read Habermas in any depth.

Yet I read enough to realize he was brilliant, and that he represented the kind of society that I wanted to be a part of. He asserted the value of reason and rationality — this in the face of the widespread embrace of postmodernist baloney that swept through late twentieth century Western thinking. He continued to assert the value of truth and rationality through the early twenty-first century, in the face of cynicism from both right and left. The cynics were wrong. Society could be made better, Habermas said, and we could make it better by better in part by learning how to communicate with one another. And while it would be easy to criticize him for writing such dense impenetrable prose in his books, leading to a lack of communication, he also wrote for the popular press in Germany where he lived.

Although a staunch upholder of Enlightenment atheism, in his later years he came to understand the importance of religious institutions. In 2007, he participated in a public discussion with the Jesuit School for Philosophy, which resulted in the 2008 book Ein Bewußtsein von dem, was felt; translated into English in the 2010 book An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age (Polity Press). I read his essays in that book not lang after it came out, and I had forgotten how much his closing essay in that book has influenced me, until I picked it up again upon hearing of his death. He wrote:

“Secular morality is not inherently embedded in communal practices. Religious consciousness, by contrast, preserves an essential connection to the ongoing practice of life within a community, and in the case of the major world religions, to the observances of united global communities of all the faithful. The religious consciousness of the individual can derive stronger impulses towards action in solidarity, even from a purely moral point of view, from this universalistic communitarianism. Whether this is still the case today I leave to one side.”

This short excerpt helps define one of the reasons that make me think that religion is still relevant in today’s world: the need for communities that support solidarity in moral action — and further, to link to other similarly constituted communities to support worldwide moral action. It is fashionable in the West to disparage organized religion as outmoded and useless, but there is no other Western institution to fill this void. Part of today’s crisis of polarization and lack of communication can be traced to the decline of communities that support solidarity in moral action; and part of the challenge facing organized religion today is to recognize one or our primary purposes is to promote some kind of universalistic communitarianism.

These days, when I’m trying to explain to someone why they might want to be part of our congregation, I talk about the importance of being part of a values-based community that aims to influence the world locally, nationally, and globally. This turns out to be far more convincing than saying things like “you can believe whatever you want” (you can do that anywhere), “it’s a great place to raise kids” (only works if you have kids), or any of the other old bromides we used to repeat. Jurgen Habermas nailed it — we need for communities that support solidarity in moral action, and you need and want to be a part of that.

Hermes and the Woodman

Another in a series of stories for liberal religious kids. This story is one of Aesop’s Fables, ancient Greek tales dating from about 500 BCE. Aesop’s Fables typically get modernized, with morals that are borrowed either from Poor Richard’s Almanac, or from greeting cards or fortune cookies. Instead of completely modernizing this fable, I’ve tried to retain at least a little of the ancient Greek sensibility — so I left off the obvious moral, “Honesty is the best policy,” and instead used a more literal translation of the original moral. I also like the fact that this myth includes an actual Greek god.

A Woodman was chopping wood alongside a river, when his axe flew out of his hands and and was carried away by the swift current. The Woodman sat down on the riverbank and began to weep; for he earned his living with his axe, and what was he to do without it?

Hermes, the messenger of the gods, and himself the god of trade, merchants, roads, and many other things, saw the Woodman weeping, and took pity on him. The god’s winged sandals carried him to the riverbank, and he appeared before the Woodman. “Why are you crying, Woodman?” he said.

“I have dropped my axe in the river, and the swift current has carried it away,” said the Woodman.

Hermes went into the river, and emerged holding an axe made out of solid gold. “Is this your axe?” he asked. But the Woodman said it was not his. Hermes went into the river again, and this time brought up an axe made of solid silver. But again, the Woodman said it was not his.

Once more, Hermes went into the river, and this time brought up the Woodman’s axe. This time, the Woodman recognized his axe. Hermes rewarded the Woodman’s honesty by giving to him, not just his own axe, but the gold and silver axes, too.

When the Woodman told this story to his friends, one of them grew jealous. He decided to do the same thing as the Woodman. The jealous friend went to the riverbank, began chopping wood, and then let his axe fall into the river, where it was carried away by the swift current. He sat down and began weeping.

The god Hermes appeared and asked what had happened, and the man said that he had lost his axe in the river. Hermes went into the river and brought up an axe made of solid gold. Hermes asked if this was the axe he had lost. The man said happily, “Yes, this is it.” Hermes hated such shameless greed. The god kept both the golden axe, and also the axe the jealous man had dropped into the river.

This fable shows that the divine is in agreement with people who are just, and the divine is opposed to people who are unjust.

Sources: V. S. Vernon Jones, Aesop’s Fables: A New Translation (1912); Laura Gibbs, Aesop’s Fables: A New Translation, Oxford University Press (2002); and a machine translation of the ancient Greek text from the Chambry edition (no. 253).

Numskull and the Rabbit

Another in a series of stories for liberal religious kids. This one is from the Panchatantra, an ancient Sanskrit text that contains many well-known folk tales.

In the forest lived an arrogant lion whose name was Numskull. He only needed one animal a day for his food, but he enjoyed killing for the fun of it. So he would kill any animal he saw, whether or not he was hungry, just because he enjoyed it.

At last, all the other animals of the forest — deer, boars, buffaloes, wild oxen, rabbits, and more — agreed to go to the lion together, to try to stop this slaughter. When they approached Numskull, they got down on their knees to bow to him. Speaking with the utmost humility, they said, “O King of all the animals, we beg you to end this endless slaughter of other animals. For as our sacred book tells us:

“When a fool does evil in this life
For the sake of bliss,
They shall have a thousand future lives
Pass in wretchedness.

“We beg you to think of what will happen to you in your next reincarnation, if you continue to slaughter us willy-nilly. We humbly ask that you simply stay at home, and we will send one animal each day to serve as your meal. This way, you will never be hungry, and for our part we will not have to worry about our families. And you can perform the duties of a king without risking punishment in your future lives. For as the proverb says:

“When a king tastes power like a potion,
Sipping bit by bit,
He will not overload his life,
He’ll fully relish it.”

Numskull listened to the animals, and replied, “You have convinced me. But be warned! If you do not send me an animal to eat every single day, I swear that I will come and kill all of you.”

Relieved, the animals promised to live by this agreement. From then on, the animals were able to roam about the forest without fear. But each day, they had tosent one of their number to serve as Numskull’s midday meal. Each day, it was the turn of a different kind of animal, whether deer or gazelle or boar, to send forth one animal of their species.

Rabbit-day came around, and the rabbits decided on one of their number to send to the lion. As the other animals sent her off to die, this rabbit thought to herself, “Somehow, it must be possible to kill this horrible lion. For it is said:

“In all things wisdom surely can prevail,
In nothing can determination fail,
There is nothing flattery cannot subdue,
Nothing enterprise cannot win through.”

And having repeated this little poem, the rabbit thought to herself, “Perhaps I can even kill a lion.”

She went along slowly, thinking of ways to defeat the lion. She was several hours late when at last she came to the home of the lion. Because she was so late, the lion had become very hungry, and was thinking to himself, “I cannot stand waiting so long! First thing in the morning, I shall go out and start slaughtering all the animals.”

While the lion was thinking these thoughts, the rabbit came up and bowed low. The sight of this small little rabbit, barely a single bite, enraged the lion. “You worthless animal!” he roared. “Not only are you late, but you are too small to make a full meal. I shall kill you first, and then I shall kill all the other animals besides.”

The little rabbit bowed low again, and humbly said, “O great lion, the fault is not mine, nor does it belong to the other animals. If you will listen, you will hear the real cause.”

The lion replied, “Tell me quickly, before I eat you up.”

“O great lion,” said the rabbit, “today it was the rabbits’ turn to supply an animal for your meal. When they saw how small we rabbits are, they sent six of us together so you would have enough to eat.

“Yet as we walked to your home, another lion leaped out of a huge hole in the ground, saying, ‘And where do you think you are going? You had better pray to your favorite god before I eat you up.’ I spoke for the other five rabbits, saying, ‘We are travelling to become the dinner of the great lion Numskull, according to our agreement with him.’ To which this great lion said in return, ‘Well, this whole forest belongs to me, which means that the animals can only make an agreement with me. This Numskull is merely a small-time thief. Go call him and bring him here at once. Whichever one of us is stronger shall be the king of the forest, and shall eat all you six rabbits, and whatever other animals he pleases.’

“So said this great lion,” concluded the little rabbit, “and this is why I am late. As for the rest of it, your majesty shall be the judge.”

Numskull grew angry at this. “Show me where this thief of a lion is, and be quick about it. He shall feel my anger.”

“Yes, your majesty,” said the rabbit. “Yet you should know this other lion lives in a fortress with stone walls, where it is difficult to attack him.”

“Little rabbit, show me this thief,” said Numskull. “I will kill him even though he hides within a fortress.”

“Very well,” said the little rabbit. She led Numskull to a place where there was a well. “You see, your majesty, as soon as he saw you, that thief of a lion crawled into his hole. Come, I will show you to him.”

“Hurry,” said Numskull, “for I grow more and more angry.”

The rabbit had Numskull look down into the well. The lion saw his own reflection in the water deep down in the well. He gave a great roar. Out from the well came an echo, sounding twice as loud. Upon seeing another lion and hearing it roar, Numskull hurled himself down the well to fight his rival, and drowned to death.

The little rabbit brought the good news to the other animals. They showered compliments on her, and they all lived in the forest happily and peacefully ever after. From this comes a proverb:

Wisdom by itself is power, but not where
Power and folly together make a pair.
The rabbit played upon the lion’s pride,
Outsmarting him, and so the lion died.

Source: Arthur W. Ryder, The Panchatantra of Vishnu Sharma: English Translation (Univ. of Chicago, 1925), p. 81-88.

The Blue Jackal

Another in a series of stories for liberal religious kids. This one is from the Panchatantra, an ancient Sanskrit text that contains many well-known folk tales.

Once upon a time there lived a jackal named Fierce-Howl. This jackal lived in a cave not far from a city. Now this jackal felt throat pinched with hunger, and one night he went hunting in the city. But the dogs that lived there snapped at him with sharp teeth, and terrified him with their barking. He ran this way and that in order to escape, and blundered through the door of a house where there lived a man who made his living dying cloth. A huge vat of indigo dye was just inside the door, and in his haste the jackal tripped and fell into it.

By the time the jackal had managed to crawl out of the vat, all the dogs had gone. So he slunk back into the forest. Once he was in the forest, some of the other animals who lived there stared at with astonishment at this strange blue-colored beast. They cried out, “What is this creature whose coat is richly colored with the remarkable color?”

Then they fled in terror, and quickly spread the news through the forest: “Some strange beast has come into our forest! No one knows from whence he came, or what he might be like.” And the animals began to say to each other, “We must flee from the forest!” for they knew the old animal proverb: “When you do not know who someone is, it is wise not to trust them.”

Fierce-Howl saw how frightened they all were, and had an idea. He called out to the animals, “Why do you flee in terror from me? The god Indra saw that the animals of the forest have no king, and he has appointed me as your king. My name is Fierce-Howl. You may rest in safety in my strong paws.”

When they heard this speech, the lions, tigers, leopards, monkeys, rabbits, gazelles, jackals, and all the other animals bowed humbly to Fierce-Howl, saying, “Your Majesty, please tell us what our duties are.”

Fierce-Howl made appointed the lion to be prime minister, the tiger to be lord of the king’s bedchamber, the leopard to be the keeper of the king’s food and drink, the elephant to be the royal doorkeeper, and the monkey he appointed the bearer of the royal parasol, to keep the hot sun off the king’s head. But fearing the other jackals might recognize who he really was, he cuffed them and drove them away.

And so the jackal lived in royal state. The lions and tigers killed food animals for this king, and laid them before him. And King Fierce-Howl divided the food animals, and distributed them among his subjects according to their need and their service to the king, just as all kings do.

One day when King Fierce-Howl was sitting in his royal court, he heard a pack of jackals begin to howl. This brought back old memories of the days before he became king. A tear came to his eyes, and without thinking he stood up and began to howl back. The lions and tigers, upon hearing this, realized that their king was nothing but a jackal. The jackal saw that he had made a horrible mistake, and stood there ashamed and downcast.

Lions and tigers do not care for jackals, since jackals may try to steal their food. The lions and tigers looked at each other and said, “We have been deceived by a jackal. He deserves to die.” And that was the end of the jackal.

Source: Arthur W. Ryder, The Panchatantra of Vishnu Sharma: English Translation (Univ. of Chicago, 1925), pp. 122-124.

Snowmelt

The temperature has been above freezing most of the week. This afternoon, it got up to about 38 degrees F. (3 C.) with light rain and drizzle. I wanted to see how much the snow was melting in the woods, so I went for a walk. I did see some places that were now bare of snow, mostly on south-facing slopes or where the high winds of the blizzard hadn’t allowed much snow to accumulate.

Woodlands with snow covering most of the groun.

Most of the ground remains covered by snow, though. There are still places with a foot of snow or more. Crossing one field, I had especially tough going. Sometimes I’d sink up halfway up to my knees. In one of the deepest snowdrifts I stopped and stuck my hand down to see how deep the snow was. I didn’t manage to reach the ground, but I’d guess there was still a foot and a half of snow.

My legs in the snow, with the snow halfway up to my knees.

In many places, meltwater ran underneath the snow. Some of the trails had turned into shallow streams. My wet boots grew heavy from the weight of the water. I walked to a place where skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) usually grows, but I couldn’t get close enough to see if any had emerged from the snow due to a foot of water flooding the area.

At last I made it back to the car. What should have been an hour long walk took two hours. My boots were soaked, my raincoat and hat were dripping with rain. I only wish I could have stayed out longer.

The Old Man at the Frontier Loses His Horse

Another in a series of stories for liberal religious kids. Dr. Kate Sullivan, the DRE with whom I work, told another version of this story in the Sunday service two days ago. She based her version on the famous Alan Watts retelling of the story. Today, we tracked down the origins of this story. It comes from the Huainanzi, a Chinese philosophical text from the 2nd century CE. I did some more research on my own, found three or four different translations, and decided to do my own retelling of the story, that hews more closely to the Chinese original.

Many years ago, there was a man who was a Daoist, and he and his father understood how good fortune and bad fortune can turn one into the other. This man lived near the border of China, close to where the land of the barbarians began.

One day, his horse got loose and ran away into the land of the barbarians. The man’s neighbors came to tell him how sorry they were that he had lost such a fine horse. They all knew how expensive it would be to get a new horse. But the man’s father said, “How do we know this is bad? Perhaps it is a blessing.”

Some months later, the man’s horse returned from the barbarian lands to his household. Following close behind the man’s horse came another horse. Horses from the barbarian lands were known as being especially fine animals. The man’s neighbors came to tell him how pleased they were for him. But his father said, “How do we know this is good? Perhaps it will bring misfortune.”

Those two horses had babies, and soon the man owned many fine horses. The man’s son loved to ride all these wonderful horses. Alas, one day the son fell off the horse he was riding and broke his thighbone. The man’s neighbors came to tell him how sorry they were that his son was so badly injured that he would walk with a limp the rest of his life. But the man’s father said, “How do we know this is bad? Perhaps it is a blessing.”

The next year, a large army of the barbarian Hu people invaded China from across the border. Every man who was strong and able-bodied took their bows and went to fight. The fighting was so fierce that nine out of every ten young men from the border lands died in battle. But because the man’s son was lame, he could not go off with the army. He and his father and gradfather managed to protect each other, and so they survived the war.

And so you can see:

Good fortune becomes bad fortune,
Bad fortune becomes good fortune;
Their transformations never end,
So deep we cannot understand.

(And from this story comes the Chinese proverb, or chengyu: “When the old man lost his horse, how could you know that it was not good luck.”)

Sources: Huainanzi, ch. 18:7. Based on several translations: (1) Lin Yutang, The Importance of Understanding: Translations from the Chinese (Cleveland/New York: World Publishing, 1963), p. 385; Yutang’s loose translation is somewhat similar to the more famous version told by Alan Watts, but Yutang keeps closer to the original Chinese; (2) The Huainanzi, trans. John S. Major, Sarah A Queen, Andrew Seth Meyer, and Harold D. Roth (Columbia Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 728-729; a scholarly translation; (3) The Chinese Text Project version of the Huainanzi; this is a scholarly website with bilingual text, Chinese and English https://ctext.org/huainanzi/ren-xian-xun#n3395. Story revised 6 March 2026 with simpler language.