garygunderson Blog

Bee sex in Texas

Humans get so many things wrong about honeybees. I’m sure they are a bit confused about us, too. But they must be especially mystified by the way we call the one who sows all the eggs in the hive a queen, which implies the off-putting and inefficient pomp of human royalty. Mother is closer, given her role in laying many thousands of eggs; but also wrong given her lack of maternal qualities. She lays eggs but has no role in raising them. And the first thing she does when she emerges with her impressive stinger is to kill her competitors. Not like my mother.

The one we call queen is more like a sower of seeds. She is not even a gardener that carefully plants a seedling, making sure the roots are nestled just right in the soil. Let’s call her Sower.

Honeybees have successfully flourished for 30 million years precisely because they have no royal qualities at all. We have no idea how 60,000 bees in the hive think collectively, but we know it’s not the queen. Every single worker bee—all girls—have the identical genetics of the Sower. The hive every egg “royal jelly” for three days before switching to the more mundane “bee bread.” But the hive feeds the Sower special food her whole life turning on the genes that make her much bigger and living 10 times as long and, of course, able to lay a thousand eggs a day. But she isn’t any smarter than the other bees. Her most consequential decision is which egg to lay in which cell and doesn’t really decide even that. She sticks her tentacles into the cell to see which one the architect bees intended (the 10% drone cells are slightly bigger).

Why is this important for humans? We have long fallen for the idea of the Elevated Decider who receives ridiculously disproportionate privileges in exchange for making big decisions. The honeybees make those decisions collectively without the process skewed by privilege. Flat democracy so perfect humans can’t even recognize it.

Now and then humans approach smart by accident, such as recently seen in Texas of all places.

Honeybees typically produce way more honey than they can possibly consume, leaving plenty for us. They can also produce more hives, which is why they are so adaptive, able to explode into almost any niche given the chance. The Texas department of agriculture triggered an explosion of bee hives by granting agricultural tax abatements to any “farm” over 5 acres with 5 or more hives. Texans are not known for environmentalism, but they known a lucrative write-off when they see it.

Honeybees are insects, as TC reminds me, with little emotional bandwidth. They don’t care about dubious Texan morality. Suddenly, there were bees everywhere! And the people dumping poisons suddenly were surrounded by tax-incented Texans. (Here’s the story.)

We are so used to complaining about environmental decline that we overlook the natural superpowers like the honeybees’. They can make a new Sower and thus entire new hive when they need or want to do so. Normally, this is when the old Sower starts to show signs of wearing out and getting erratic. The hive puts some promising eggs in larger cells and feeds those eggs nothing but special food. In about 16 days a Sower will emerge. (She isn’t nice: as I mentioned, her first act is to kill the other potential queens.) She’ll fly off to mate with six or ten drones and returns to lay eggs in the dark for a couple years.

Often in the Springtime the the hive will find itself thinking of reproduces itself. Honeybee sex involves the whole hive. The existing Sower is chased around the hive to lose weight so she can fly one last time. About half the bees in the hive pour into the air in a swirling ecstatic cloud bringing the old Sower with them. They pause in a tree branch to give the scouts a chance to find a new permanent location in the neighborhood. While they are pausing an opportunistic human can persuade them into a box they may find it acceptable.

Kelly Carpenter’s bait hive for Methodist bees. So far it has captured four swarms that have come from his church rafters.

Kelly Carpenter and I have captured three Methodist hives this way in the past couple weeks. Combined with some Texas-style splits, 5 hives are now 16. The process is risky and wild. They bet everything on expansive possibility which has worked for thousands of millennia.

Last year about half of all hives in the United States did not make it through the gauntlet of toxins, sprays, overcrowding and stupid human behavior that magnify the threats of mites and such. But it is important to note that most of the hives that failed were the ones kept by humans.

Many natural species are also capable of exuberant expansion once humans quit pumping poison into their neighborhood. Nature out-generates death every chance it finds. Humans can help the most by removing the financial incentives to poison. Just imagine if we gave tax rebates for planting butterfly and pollinator flowers. Do we really need Texans to show us?

Why five acres? Our townhouse community has one acre of sanitized fescue vacuumed in the fall. The city council could change the game for bees and bugs and songbirds with a 5% property tax rebate. Of course, we could just do it. We not legally bound to spray neurotoxins on ourselves.

Too small to matter? One of my favorite organizations is Homegrown National Parks. “Homegrown National Park® addresses the urgent biodiversity crisis with a simple, science-based solution to a global challenge. We are a grassroots call-to-action to regenerate biodiversity by planting and preserving native plants that support critical ecosystem services and removing invasive plants that do not. We are catalyzing action that will have meaningful, tangible, measurable, and immediate results. We can do this NOW, without waiting for legislation.”

We are not inherently smart as honeybees. We have to think hard and do things on purpose. Somebody had to notice that there is more private land currently planted in lawns than in all the national parks put together. And think about what that means.

We can just stop behind stupid. Start choosing abundance.

Nature just won’t quit trying. Here’s an eager dandelion emerging from our parking lot. Never quit trying….

Community Perspective on CalAIM

Life is generous, although most humans don’t notice.

*Sunrise in God’s Acre in Old Salem, March 31, 2024*

I offer evidence, if you failed to notice the azaleas, not to mention the rising sun. I’ll point to a full bloom of creative generosity where you might not expect it—in a complicated partnership between government, healthcare and hundreds of small community-based organizations in California.

This week Stakeholder Health released some careful research into a radical innovation in how the state of California is providing health care for the poor.

Here is the link to the webinar.

Here is a link to a two-page summary of the research.

Here is a link to the full report.

In most places government and healthcare are built proudly with nonchalant acceptance of the fact that the poor live demeaning lives and then die in humiliating pain. Sorry, there’s just not enough to go around, says the hard-hearted god of the castles. Even when the poor can slither through the doors into the emergency rooms, they have little access to 21st century preventive medicine. For decades it has been clear that most of the drivers of disease and suffering are not medical and need relatively inexpensive preventative care. Most conditions that look medical are best managed by something social, mental or spiritual before leaping to the expensive pill or carving up a body part.

This is technically called the social determinants of health (SDOH) which is unhelpful language because they go way beyond social work. Everything that happens in human life has biological-psychological-social-and Spirit drivers and implications. Duh. Humans are complex and wonderfully made (Psalm 89). Even straightforward medical problems—say a broken leg, which my kid is still recovering from— has a four-fold a healing path. It works the other way, too: childhood trauma shows up as wickedly complex biological issues decades later.

The healthcare industry is not organized this way. Governmental programs usually take the head off the body and put it over in the mental health agency, then detach body parts in thousands of reimbursable codes. Everything outside one’s skin goes under a totally different set of social services agencies leaving a scrap for public health to inspect the food, chase rats and get ready for the next pandemic.

BUT now California launched the first really large-scale trial (CalAIM) using Medicaid to treat humans as they actually are—complex and wonderfully made and living in communities that are complex human systems that can care for each other. The technicians in government (usually called bureaucrats) leaned into all that complexity and got the federal government to grant a “waiver” to spend Medicaid money on a wide range of SDOH drivers. North Carolina had been lauded for talking about this. California has done it in a state five times larger following science to embrace 10 times the range of SDOH factors. Bold.

AND they are spending that money through the extraordinary array of community-based organizations. In reality, these groups have only had scraps of money from bake sales or philanthropic largess (social justice one chardonnay at a time, says Dr. Suzanne Henderson). CalAIM has put $4 billion in motion, which, even in California, is a lot of chardonnay.

AND the innovations continued by investing millions in helping community organizations strengthen their capacities to interface with governmental funding procedures. This would be impossible except for the last innovation—the government folks listen, adapt in real time and change their way of doing things, too. Note the research was paid for by CommonSpirit Health, one of the largest healthcare systems in the nation. It is rare for such systems to even be curious about the reality of community organizations, much less partner in learning. It is head-breakingly difficult to blend institutional cultures and ancient practices. Easier to shame, blame and whine. Not here.

The initiative has released creative energy and imagination through changing the work of many hundreds of organizations. Many of the groups were built from faith, which is supposed to believe in generosity and even resurrection, but settle for much less. The Stakeholder Health panel included Lutheran Services, which has been doing this kind of work for many decades, now accelerated with the partnerships. And it includes “Pneumacare” (spirit—get it?)—a collaborative that grew out of a ministerial association, now managing millions of dollars to provide care that that cares in partnership with CalAIM. And yes, the healing is for everybody of every kind of faith and no-faith, skin and language. It’s California.

You have to watch the video to hear the story of real resurrection going on and be amazed at the technical skill making it work. (Here’s the link.)

This is smart generosity, not dumb give away. It is obviously smarter to invest in what people actually need when they need it will prove less expensive than the obviously dumb current idea of waiting for their life to blow up so completely, that they then end up in an emergency room. This kind of work is hard with many technical challenges. You have to do the right things right. It breaks every day and is fixed in real time. The research reveals a bold effort still underway.

California chicken from a generous california hen.

The only unforgivable sin is to accuse God of creating a world broken from the beginning without enough for everyone. All the disciples of every religion can’t work around that because it assumes that inequity is inevitable; God’s fault, really. That sin is the root of every angry political movement. If they would open it, even You-Know-Who’s $60 Bible tells of a God who did a good job for everyone and expects us to do so, too. Turn on the lights to the most the most obvious thing in the world– there is enough for everyone. Everything works—politics, faith, family, health, food systems, housing, education—if you begin with that most obvious fact. Witness California.

Labyrinth

Lit by the light of the Milky Way, the four of us held hands to find our way through and around the labyrinth. The Ramadan moon has not yet risen, and the African air was dry enough for the light to mark the sandstones against the dark gravel. We moved in toward the center, then to the left, followed the long loop and around before heading back in and around again. The pilgrims included myself, Marcellino, a South African community activist and researcher, and TC, my Bride of many years, as well as Bastienne. She is a Greek scholar who said that we should have been dancing as the Greeks did. We did well enough. Once at the center, we paused to look up with wonder at the thousands of stars, knowing there are billions beyond our sight and depth far beyond our capacity to imagine, much less grasp. We moved back out, turning, turning, seeking, seeking. Finding our way.

Most find the labyrinth a place of personal spiritual way-finding. Who and where am I in life? Holding hands, if not quite dancing, this was not personal; it was a hint of a greater whole moving in a social labyrinth. For today it is the whole that is seems needing to find a way. More likely to see that way by starlight instead of the stultifying glow of our screens and their chattering distraction.

I have been coming to Africa for nearly forty years, always amazed by the gritty tenacious people who simply won’t give up despite ever new complexities layered on historical traumas. I’ve sat with Thomas Sankara, the iconic young leader of Burkina Faso still seen as a wayfinder by youth today because of his fierce integrity. He renamed his country “land of upright people” and then made it real. Through the blowing red dust, he told of their victorious “commando vaccination” in which they mobilized the whole society to vaccinate every child in the country (and the thousands that were brought across the border by their mothers). Killed cynically, probably by the French, his life still resonates decades later with youth desperate for heroes who might show a way in and out, back and round, maybe even forward.

This particular labyrinth was on the grounds of Goedgedacht, a bold experiment in rural development an hour and a half north of Cape Town. The name means “good thinking,” and it is a good place to see clearly how much good thinking we will all need to find our way. Here we see radically different lives in a spectrum of whites, blacks and browns speaking far more than the eleven official languages. The local poor were already poor enough without the arrival of immigrant workers from all over Africa now competing for the scarce and difficult jobs. And the local rich were rich enough without finding new ways too exaggerate their privileges. Goedgedacht grows olives from the tough dry soil to finance the rural development efforts in the villages. But it can’t qualify for the valuable “organic” label because of the pesticides that drift from the farm next door, which is literally covered in plastic to shelter their luxury crops from the blazing sun. Their neighbor’s private dam shining like a jewel out of place in that bright sun is filled from a pipe drawing water from a river 15 kilometers away. All this bizarreness is possible because of the specialty grapes and clementines grown to be shipped abroad. Nothing local about it. Maybe I’ve had one of those clementines in the US.

Only a four-dimensional labyrinth could map the difficulties of navigating such complexity. But that is what the South Africans are doing by light of the Southern Cross. Shock after shock (AIDS after Apartheid, ‘state capture’ after freedom, then COVID, then ….). Layers of ironic betrayals that would shatter the heart of any lesser people left Mandela, Tutu and millions that hoped with them in tears. But the people do not quit. They do not stop putting one foot in front of the next finding the way by not stopping.

We were at Goedgedacht to convene some of the Fellows of the Leading Causes of Life Initiative. I once thought those words were too happy and American to even speak here in such a mystifyingly difficult place. The Africans taught me that life is the only thing tough enough to work here. No simplistic professionalism, no shallow plans, brittle schemes or mere interventions. Only life can live here. Only it can find the way.

Marcellino, Sandy and Beulah helping each other find the way.

And how does it do so? By what light? We gathered around the hunch that it might be fueled by something more like joy, let us dare to say dance. The English word “joy” falls so short, but still comes closer to the way we move with just enough light to see to the next turn on the path. Never one by one; always in small groups who would be lost entirely if not held by slender and improbably threads of trust.

One of these improbabilities that lights up the sky is the Christian Institute of Southern Africa, which Goedgedacht has honored with a peace grove of 28 olive trees for the founding giants who suffered with some dying in the bitter decades of struggle against Apartheid. Built with what we now see as the sinews of life, it defied the massive structures of Apartheid. Nobody involved had any clear thought as to how it could be ended. They gathered and spoke such vivid truth that the government banned them all, preventing them from being together or even be quoted in public. Tiny, nimble and fragile looking, they nonetheless persisted, gathering support all across the globe, creating channels for funds to flow into the struggles for justice, dignity and integrity. They won their day in ways that inspire us to struggle with very different demons in ours.

We walk in their light today because they kept weaving thin webs across borders, time zones, political snares, theological lines and impossibilities of every kind. Like the Milky Way constellations, the dozens whose names we know reflect millions who we do not know who also risked everything for a future that drew them beyond the possible. Most in the movement did not get an olive tree memorial garden or even a footnote.

What do we do with this light? Their specific answer and ways of struggling are not ours. It is unlikely they were any smarter than us. Or that they would be any better than we at figuring out how to move through the current labyrinth of collapsing climate with political systems so easily gamed and tamed by the cynical powers.

We are here now, not them. And we are in our struggle, which is not exactly theirs. Their problem was nationalwith some hope to be found abroad. Ours is planetary with no help on the way at all except for the next generation. They are rising quickly, but time is short.

What can we learn except like them to act as best we can; to risk as wisely and boldly as they did with those they trusted with their lives and with the life of their hopes.

Neither they nor we could know if our very best would be enough or in time. Who can ever know that?

Hold hands with a few you trust and put one step in front. Turn, move, turn again and yet again, grateful for the light of billions of stars.

Bolt

Compared to Ukraine, Gaza or the wobbly democracy in the US, reading about my Chevy Bolt may not seem urgent. But stick with me; it might relieve some of your despair.

TC and I bought a basic 2020 Chevy Bolt the dealer was so eager to get it off the lot, they let us strip it of everything including the silly floor-mats. I mean basic; the cheapest EV one can buy. And still a terrific car comparable driving and space to my beloved Mini Cooper. It’s a small hatchback with the same 250-mile range as the base Tesla. I usually charge it at home with the stock cord and a $20 adapter from Amazon to plug it into the same 220v plug which powers my big wood turning lathe. It’s not elegant, but it works overnight. I plug it in a couple times a week as most of my life takes place within a couple dozen miles of home.

An electric car is only as clean as the electricity, which in Winston means coal from Duke Power. We once looked into installing solar panels but avoided the mud wrestle with the home-owners’ association by buying our power through Sol Systems (formerly Arcadia). They negotiate with Duke Power to buy wholesale electrons from solar and wind producers. It costs us a few dollars for the moral fig leaf, of claiming to be 100% solar. It’s a nice tingle.

We also have TC’s Prius for when we don’t have the patience on long trips or if we would have to cross West Virginia or Mississippi. The guzzle bunny, as I call it, gets 52 miles to the gallon which is a good tingle, too. I prefer the Bolt on the road as it is more quiet and comfortable.

Long distance driving in an EV in the Deep South requires patience and planning, neither of which I am known for. And a lot of apps, which I am known for. I am 70-ish, so I need to pee and stretch more often than I need to charge. The 240 miles range means a couple of added hours on a 400 mile day but the breaks mean we arrive a lot less frazzled. It’s a feature, not a flaw. That’s really true of nearly everything the climate crisis is forcing us to do from eating closer to the land, to E-bikes, to recycling to slowing everything down. Every single thing is quieter, calmer and better for us. Don’t the screamers make you miss the real plot–it’s better, if sometimes, like my Bolt, a bit awkward.

The complication is that a handful of Bolt batteries caught fire a few years ago, which forced GM to recall everyone’s car. GM came up with what they called a “final solution” (they need a new PR firm). They offered $1,400 to allow an electronic monitor on the car for 6,200 miles to detect the rare fatal signs. I took the money. The catch is that the process reduces range by 20% while monitoring which means in the Winter I have more like 180 than 240 miles. That’s a big difference.

That set up my 1,400 mile Deep South drive to Atlanta and Orlando and back as an adventure. I’ve driven to Atlanta innumerable times over the decades including 4 trips in the EV recently so I know where the good chargers are in Charlotte, Greenville and over the Georgia line. These are by Electrify America, which VW had to set up as penance for their environmental fraud. Good comes from bad sometimes, as there are now fast inexpensive chargers in Walmart parking lots along many highways. They barely need even 45 minutes to get from 20% to full and there’s always something to buy in a Walmart. The one in Greenville even has a Chick Filet across the parking lot. The destination Marriott in Decatur had a free charger in the basement, so I sleep well.

South of Atlanta was new EV territory. First stop was Buc-ee’s just south of Macon. The nice Mercedes charger outside almost made up for the bizarreness inside. As usual chargers are off on the edges of the lot as if we should be ashamed of ourselves, like smokers. This is especially ironic at Buc-ee’s with everyone smothered and covered by plastic crap and deadly food. So we left without a full charge, stopping in Tipton where a pokey charger at a hotel bumped us back up enough to get to the Walmart in Valdosta. TC needed some contact solution.

I don’t really know what to say about Buc-ee’s. Nice Charger. Great driving companion.

We were aiming for Palatka for the night which is about 200 miles from Valdosta—just out of range. The first time I’ve ever had to wait for a charger in three years was at a Shell station in Lake City: all three stations were occupied and the 4^th one broken, kinda off in the dark side of the lot. I had promised dinner, but there were only sad hot dogs on greasy steel metal rollers, so TC settled for a bag of pistachios. She graciously pointed out the gorgeous full moon rising over the vacant scrub behind the gas station. It is important to marry someone with a sense of humor, if one drives an EV.

An EV journey makes one think about places along the way such as Palatka. We had watched a great PBS story about William Bartrum, who visited here in 1774 writing his amazing “Travels.” A Quaker botanist, ethnographer and poet, his book about the St. John’s river, plants, animals and people mesmerized all of Europe—and justified our slight detour. We stayed in the Great Gables Inn, which, once the finest house in all of Florida, run by Tate and Jennifer, who were even better than their house.

Great Gables Inn, Palatka, Florida. The town was nearly chosen as the Capital and the house looks like it.

Alas, Palatka has only one ancient charger on the side of the Nissan dealer a bit out of town. Every Nissan dealer in America has a free charger dating from when they introduced the first Leaf. They also have a nice bathroom and impressive array of drink and candy machines including more pistachios. But we found seafood later at Corky Bell’s across the river, damn near worth the whole drive down.

We could easily have made it to Orlando with 250 mile range, but with 180 we swung by the Walmart on I-95 at Daytona where we found a surprising selection of wines and tennis balls. Then a short bounce down I-4 for a delightful couple of hours with Bill Davenhall (formerly of ESRI) and finally to the hotel in plenty of time. As in Decatur, they have a free charger with plugs for both Tesla and normal people.

EV driving clarifies that moving a noisy machine really fast down the road is no big accomplishment. Nothing like seeing a Manatee which drew us to Blue Springs State Park a few miles out of our way heading back north. Hundreds of Manatee spend their winters in the warm pristine gushing spring. The Springs once became so dirty that the winter count got down to 20 of the magical creatures. Government and citizens made a million right decisions over a couple of decades so; there were 124 the day we visited. We talked for hundreds of miles of their wonder.

Manatee were created by a kind-hearted God on a good day. And the water would occupy Monet for years.

Up through Jacksonville and across the Georgia line. Zapped up again near Charleston and over to Columbia with 80 miles still in the battery. We slept in a hotel near….an Electrify America (TC sleeping while I charged up). A final bounce up to Charlotte for our last 20 minute charge got us home for lunch.

I mentioned the apps, which is how one navigates the chargers. Electrify America guides you to theirs, my first choice. Chargeaway and PlugShare show details about nearly every socket in the nation. Tesla has a great onboard app, which everyone is copying. Google shows charger details on their web-based maps, but weirdly, not on the phone. In short, finding the chargers is the emerging art. There aren’t enough and they aren’t all compatible, yet. But it’s all coming along.

What could be more complex than changing the whole energy system in the largest economy on the planet? It demands a million right things big and small done right over a couple of decades. Some of the choices are not great and will need to be improved. But it is is happening, even in the Deep South which weirdly treats sunlight as if it a liberal conspiracy.

Elon made his expensive cars fart (as he did the internet). Nameless GM engineers simply made them go. He did make 10,000 good chargers, which will soon be open to everyone, making it even easier to drive in the quiet elegance of an EV, albeit a Chevy which normal people can afford.

I’m almost done with the 6,200 battery monitoring. I can hardly wait to drive to St. Louis in April with all our mileage back. We’ll drive past Buc-ee’s this time. Maybe we’ll see another full moon, if nothing as astonishing as a Manatee.

Have you ever really looked up to the sky through Spanish Moss moving in the wind? *Palatkak Florida.*

Just Peace, please

Weapons on their way to another failed peace. Wow, indeed. says the Memphis billboard.

These are tender days for those who wish to be peacemakers amid the savagery in Ukraine, Palestine, Israel and dozens of African countries too accustomed to being forgotten. Who can speak of peace with any credibility without empathizing with the rage and bitterness? But how to empathize without enabling? Is there nothing in play but raw violence ending only with extermination?

I was raised in a military family and predictably entered ROTC at Wake Forest. But then I woke up (I’ll claim it!) and began the process of applying to be a conscientious objector, thinking of Canada if my application was denied by the draft board, as it likely would have been given my family. I pulled #348 in the draft lottery which made the question entirely theoretical, never applied and don’t know to this day what I would have actually done. One never does until one is in the actual moment of decision.

Years later I found myself at the Thomas Merton’s Abbey of Gethsemane in bourbon country south of Louisville for a meeting to develop a protocol of just peacemaking to balance the many centuries old protocol about just war. The more appropriate ambassador types at The Carter Center sent me because it sounded more like religion than serious statecraft. I found a spot in the back row until I was informed, I was supposed to be one of the experts to provide some basic principles to guide the discussion. Yikes. (The story of that otherwise dignified event is here.)

The group had giants in the field, so despite me, they identified 10 basic practices to judge whether a government, religious group or non-governmental organization can claim they have exhausted the peacemaking. Only then—after all the peacemaking–is just war theory relevant at all. War can only be considered ethical after the peacemaking.

Despite about sixteen centuries of weirdly meticulous ethics debate about its principles, Just War theory is almost always an ineffectual footnote applied after all the blood and tears has soaked into the soil. How do we know when peacemaking is enough?

This week the International Court said that the state of Israel had plausibly failed to conduct a just war so egregiously that genocide may be underway. Generations of Israelis will have to explain that to their children, a desecration of the memory of the lives so horribly lost on October 7^th. Their failure is not my point here. I have a lot to live with, too.

I am am pretty sure the court would find those of us claiming to be peacemakers negligent, too. We are guilty of malpractice, lazy practice and no practice at all as the engines of war were tuned and the lies so necessary for hatred were refined and repeated. We have known better for at least 30 years, from the beginning of Just Peacemaking theory at Merton’s abbey. More than that as he wrote 14 years earlier:

“Finally, we must be reminded of the way we are ourselves tend to operate, the significance of the secret forces that rise up within us and dictate fatal decisions. We must learn to distinguish the free voice of conscience from the irrational compulsions of prejudice and hate. We must be reminded of objective moral standards, and of the wisdom, which goes into every judgment, every choice, every political act that deserves to be called civilized. We cannot think this way, unless we shake off our passive ear responsibility, renounce our fatalistic submission to economic and social forces, and give up the unquestioning belief in machines and processes which characterizes the mass mind. History is ours to make. Above all we must try to recover our freedom, or moral autonomy, or capacity, to control the forces to make for life and death in our society.” (Thomas merton, The Non-violent Altnerative (New York: Farrar, Strais and Giroux, 1980) 78-79.)

The group at his Abbey came up with these guidelines which have become official policy of numerous religious bodies. An academic industry has risen up around them. You can get a PhD in them. But as a generation we have failed to do them with anything like the scale or energy of those seeking death. As Dr. Fred Smith says, we have allowed evil to out-organize us. Guilty.

Sprouts find their way through the bullet holes in an old refrigerator in North Georgia.

You can’t say you have sought peace until we:

1. Support nonviolent direct action.
2. Take independent initiatives to reduce threat.
3. Use cooperative conflict resolution.
4. Acknowledge responsibility for conflict and injustice and seek repentance and forgiveness.
5. Advance democracy, human rights, and religious liberty.
6. Foster just and sustainable economic development.
7. Work with emerging cooperative forces in the international system.
8. Strengthen the United Nations and international efforts for cooperation and human rights.
9. Reduce offensive weapons and weapons trade.
10. Encourage grassroots peacemaking groups and voluntary associations.

From Just Peacemaking, edited by Glen Stassen (Pilgrim Press, 1998)

No American voter can be proud, measured by these standards.

But it is not only up to the leaders of statecraft to do peace. The politicians and their technicians are trapped unless we the people lead in making peace possible. A brilliant interview of Mahmood Mandani in The Nation provocatively argues that the state itself is built to exclude and that genocide is just an extension of its logic.

Dr. Mandani is not a cynical man, but inconveniently clear-eyed for those of us who think the instruments of state will just do the right thing. We citizens must not give up on the means of peacemaking, including the structures of government. He and Merton warn us that the seeds of the next war are already germinating in us, the people.

We must hurry to do justice and mercy now. Who will build back the ruined hospitals, public health and social services of Gaza? Why would we imagine that it is anyone else’s job than those of us who dare to think we are peacemakers?

How Long?

Dr King has been dead longer than he was alive. And his dream seems as wobbly as the 94 years old he would have been this year. This is what happens to dreams too tethered to specific humans as we tend to age quicker than grand hopes can be fulfilled. King got the idea of “beloved community” from Josiah Royce, who would have been 169 this year. Amos, the prophet who imagined the waters of justice rolling down would be 2,788. Born 11 miles south of Jerusalem, I doubt he’d be feeling fulfilled if he’s watching from wherever.

Closer to home in little Winston Salem there is energy stirring to come together in a different way, one organized around the “vital conditions” linked to the Leading Causes of Life. Deeply informed and illuminated by the strategic fervor for equity, the vital conditions look at the community of people and organizations who hope with the tenacity of King and Amos for justice to roll at least a bit. Monte Roulier, the bard of Community Initiatives, was here just a month ago to talk about how we might do the plumbing for those rolling waters and not just chase whatever bothers us the most at the moment (homelessness, no–addiction, no-reading levels, no-toxic waste, no-poverty, no-whatever). Precisely because we have so many non-profits within 10 miles of city hall, each of which is organized around solving something ugly, it is very hard to work together long enough to see any change. Most of the organizations have some staff and a Board and donors whose attention span competes with all the other organizations’ needs.

Our fears compete while our common hopes are starved. While tribes can be built on fear, community is built on hope and possibility.

It is odd to look at civic body experiencing the Iowa caucuses next to the day honoring Dr. King, while the journalists run out of adjectives for the suffering in Gaza, Ukraine and among those struggling north to the US border. All this while a man who once held our highest office does all he can to shred the social and legal threads that hold us together. He has a tribe built on the fear of of community. It’s not the only such tribe around the world.

Anyone who is not depressed and anxious is simply not paying attention.

TC urged me to read Johann Hari’s book, Lost Connections, an exploration of the roots of our pandemic of depression and anxiety. He unpacks how our therapists and physicians are treating our depression and anxiety with a staggering amount of pharmaceuticals rolling down like a mighty river in our veins. His simple point is that the epidemic of depression can’t be fixed by pharma because the problem is not in our heads; it’s in the space between us, the one now filled with vitriol driving us farther apart at the very moment we need each other most.

“You aren’t a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met. You need to have a community. You need to have meaningful values, not the junk values you’ve been pumped full of all your life, telling you happiness comes through money and buying objects. You need to have meaningful work. You need the natural world. You need to feel you are respected. You need a secure future. You need connections to all these things.” (p318)

And of course, when he says “you,” he means me, you, himself and every single one of those we think we should fear or want to hurt. When depressed and anxious we lose the capacity to trust ourselves or anyone around us. The pills only dull the pain; they can’t resolve the disconnection.

We are deeply ill as a body politic, circling in our fears from the very people we need the most. Who do we need most? People who are annoyingly different, inconveniently complex, who don’t echo what we want to hear. Sort of like you’d find sitting down the row from you in church or standing next to you in line to vote.

Johann Hari is clear that this circling inward is serves the interests of the professionals plundering our souls by misdiagnosing our suffering . The pills for depression and anxiety are not medically effective except in rare circumstances. They create collateral damage at the individual level in such predictable things as weight gain. The pills and pill hucksters gain from our loss of energy, clarity and self efficacy. Every syllable is an accurate description of the venal way politicians exploit our fears.

No wonder people would vote for a transparent fraud. No wonder so few weep over Gaza and Nova Rave. No wonder people find the institutions of faith so hollow.

Hari suggests 7 anti-depressants—reconnections. None of these are in our heads or even our Spirit. Rather, the solutions are near at hand. He means literally at the fingertips where we touch other humans and focus on their joy or possibilities instead doing another lap inside ourselves.

Ask ourselves who is trying to make me and you more afraid. Walk away from them. Certainly, do not vote or give money to anyone who would gain from your fear.

Ask instead who might need some hope. Go toward them and show up in a real way. You should not go alone. Our culture, even hollowed out and brittle, still has an almost bizarre range of voluntary associations that will be happy to see you and give you a task that fits your hand.

Many such organizations were created in the aftermath of Dr King’s murder those many decades ago. They are what Jimmy Carter once called the mundane revolution, as practical as a bag of food, as basic electricity not being turned off, as modern as vaccine.

Hari’s hope is realistic and well-founded because it is not normal for humans to be so disconnected, medicated and fearful. Rather, we should expect to see a great turning toward the life of the whole people. It would be normal to experience an epidemic of connections of meaning, trust and respect.

A 94-year old King would remind us that he never promised that he would get there with us, and we might not either. Walking in hand is the way.

Iris Dement sings it:

Power, greed, and profit
Will never feed the soul
These three shovels have dug us
A deep dark hole
Compassion, understanding
And living one for all
And all for one is what it’s gonna take
To break this fall

How long? How long?

He said “Till justice rolls down like water
‘Till justice rolls down like water
‘Till justice rolls down like water
And righteousness flows like a mighty stream”

(You can listen to How Long: https://irisdementofficial.bandcamp.com/track/how-long)

Yes

Friday night Shabatt in the middle of a burned out, now recovering, forest. Yes.

Nobody has a right to hope these days. Anyone with basic arithmetic can read the data trends to see the fire coming for everyone and all we love. I’m not arguing that our losses are any more precious than those of the times of the Black Death, just to pick one horror. But ours is a a distinctively precarious time because of the multiple overlapping and accelerating crises.

In this context I’d like to offer up Camp Towanga, which is 160 acres of hope with a Jewish accent surrounded by hundreds of thousands of burned forest left black and ruined by the Rim Fire of 2013. This is the dark side of John Muir territory, bordering the cathedrals of Yosemite and also the place that broke his heart. This was his great lost cause, the Hetch Hetchy valley, now a flooded cathedral filled with the water that provides the pure water our daughters and grandsons enjoy in the Bay Area. Hope in these mountains is always within site of something lost. A good place for religious camps.

Fresh lunch, served with a generous helping of words crafted across the millennia. Yum.

I was attending a Jewish camp a couple days after Christmas to fill in for our daughter whose broken leg kept her away. So it was her husband Nathan, me and the grandsons, all experiencing the camp in very different ways that stirred up deep and very different feelings

At this camp you don’t have to precede every hopeful song by the sort of apology that is common among religious social justice environmentalists like me who feel obliged to list all the reasons we should not be hopeful (note the first paragraph!). Nope, they go right to the bold brave joy. Nothing is more important than to sing the songs, ancient ones, and those by the Indigo Girls, Bill Withers, John Prine, then grab the kids and dance as have hundreds of generations in the dark times.

Hope is one flavor of faith, as basic and urgent as breath itself. In most religions, breath and Spirit are the same word and claimed the same way—by breathing in and out, in rhythm, song and trusted language that others have taught us for times just as these. Tawango has the DNA of an American religious camp, so it has the dumb songs and silly counsellor inside jokes. Many of the same songs I led at Camp Manidokan a half century ago, albeit with much less skill than Devon and Aaron.

And to sharpen the main point, they hold up hope in an eternal loving Presence of justice, mercy, peace and kindness that was not left to the side, just because of all the California scientists in the room. No. Out rolled the exuberant Shabbat songs. Saturday morning we stood as the Torah stood and those of us new to the experience were invited to stand near, in my case, with grandsons, as the exquisite words were spoken.

We sang, most with more practiced nuance than the Baptist mumbling along with the children: “It is up to us to hallow creation, to respond to Life with the fullness of our lives. It is up to us to meet the world, to embrace the whole even as we wrestle with its parts. Therefore we bow in awe and thanksgiving before the One who is holy.

This is not how most of us normally go about our days in the city, which is why places like Tawonga are as essential as the lungs in our social body. Anyone who hopes against all the grim fires burning our social watersheds to dust must find the places where you can remember what lasts, what is worthy of trust.

This camp borders Yosemite National Park, where I have hiked and savored. Cathedral rock is well named. But it is not enough to go to alone. It is crucial to go and be among others who share the doubt, as well as the hopeful practice that can seem so merely symbolic to hear, taste, and touch, with unalloyed joy, the flow of Spirit. I’m pretty sure this grandfather was the oldest present, but I felt as did the youngest kid as I tasted the challah. It tasted good and new and real. It was.

Those who delight in our fear want us to to argue, as if the opposite of fear is built of rationally vetted facts. These days they prefer we argue over the existence of facts and never even get to the construction.

The opposite of fear is joy, resonating among a group of people built and tuned like a good guitar amplifies a single string. Because hope is a social quality, it often finds voice and thus draws much on the arts and artists who are not drawing so much on the well of their own solitary muse, as consciously weaving from the choir that crosses generations—including the very youngest and most novel. This is, of course, not just for camp. Nearly every one of the gatherings of We In the World, led by Dr. Somava Saha does this. She knows to do this because she experienced it in her Bahá’í experience.

And back we go to work of healing the world. How? By grabbing the near edge of some great problem and acting at some cost to ourselves (Colin Morris). Or, better, grab the near edge of some tendril of life trying to find its way. Listen carefully to the scientists when you turn to the labor, so it will not be in vain. “Measure your steps,” says the great spiritual, which I always took as a nod to good data and careful logic. Don’t squander precious joy on ill-considered and inadequate action. Do the right thing…..right.

We must put out the fires we can, preserving the lives we can while not assuming it is all up to us alone. The Rim Fire burned thousands of acres of habitat of highly endangered owls which many assumed would be lost. Somewhat surprised, the Spring that followed the great burning witnessed nearly 100% of the nesting sites occupied across the range. Apparently the owls had seen it before and knew what to do. The species we think fragile are built for travail and fire. Maybe even us.

*Cathedral Rock, Yosemite National Park.*

Consider a gift of hope for those who give us hope by sending home money to the camp of your tradition which has helped make you who you are today.

That Jesus

We pause on a day almost certainly not his birthday to consider a strange carpenter-teacher who lived two millennia ago. He was always inconveniently good news. Long before germ theory, telescopes or electricity, Jesus lived a short life before dying as a political criminal. We know about his life through scraps of stories and vignettes no longer alive to us except through translations of translations. The stories of the birth that “magnify my soul” are all radical signals of protest and defiance against the oppressive cabal of religion and empire.

Said to be the oldest baptismal pool. Naples, Italy.

Jesus was not a member of any Christian group and would probably not recognize most of the religion that claims him. Paul, whose writings shaped much of that religion, villainized and persecuted Jesus’ earliest followers before converting, never met him. Although a student of the Jewish texts, Jesus was not a writer. No home, much less an office. No wife, apparently, or kids. We don’t know his sexuality. He apparently had a brother.

He healed people seven days a week with no business model. The only times he showed up at worship, he got thrown out. He never voted or sought political power. But he was regarded by Empire and its religious toadies as a threat to order. He had no school, but did accumulate disciples. Before his movement backslid into bishops, those following him were said to follow his “Way.”

That’s the clue. I want to move through life in that “Way” and with those on that Way.

He prayed some, mostly by himself, apparently to strengthen his capacity to stay on the Way.

He said that Way was narrow and difficult, which some think means we should go single file through life. I think it means we are to walk like the Reindeer we associate with Santa, but who are also symbols of radical resilience. The early Mediterranean Christians thought of Jesus as the Lamb of God, stressing the sacrificial metaphor. They didn’t know anything about Caribou and how the herd saves each other.

Caribou–they who move through impossibly difficult circumstances following many paths that weave together and then apart and together again. I have walked their narrow, braided paths on the tundra shelves flanking the frozen Alaska rivers beneath the Brooks Range. They are called Caribou in Alaska but have the same Way that they have followed for thousands of years, moving as a company of thousands, trusting each other to find the paths across and through to where the Spirit of life draws them.

The mesh of trails suggests a social complexity beyond our simplistic theory of networks.4 This helps me imagine the adaptive possibilities as Spirit sets us free while remaining social, safe while remaining kind.

I, too, pay attention to my trusted ones on the Way: Chris and Bobby, Enrique and Maria, TC, Jim, Tom, Fred, Jeremy, Jerry, Dora, Ron and a cloud of witnesses on the move. We trust each other to stay on the journey and in sight, sometimes protecting, sometimes finding safety. The world is a dangerous place. Safety only in motion, together, on the Way.

I wonder what Jesus would say about all this. I suspect he’d wonder about all the churches from which I was not thrown out. And all the clutter I’ve accumulated beyond his one cloak and borrowed mule. My offices. All the stuff I did not give away. All the healing kindnesses left for other obligations.

I hope for grace.

And pray for a Spirit to move me onto one of those narrow paths closer to the edge of the herd as we move together over tough land for another season of life.

//// adapted from my book, “For God and the People: Prayers for a Newer New Awakening.”

*Sunset from Monkey Valley, South Africa*

Honeybee Collaboration

I once got up in a frigid December night to put a blanket on the honeybee hive on our deck. I do not know how to “keep” them or assure their thriving. But I sit with the bees and notice they find their way improvising amid circumstances no one bee or any one hive has encountered. I wonder what we could learn.

Worst bee picture ever. But they are alive where I thought them all dead after the frost! A great picture!

Late in the summer a hive that I thought robust was overcome by wax worms. You may have read about them because of their recently discovered capacity to digest plastic. They prefer eating wax and also spin a sticky web of yucky gloop inside the hive that the bees can’t overcome. The bees in this hive gave up, took their queen and fled about 100 feet across the circle underneath an empty hive box—a desperate tactic. I jiggered a way to get them inside a box but thought they were too few with too little time to build up for winter. I was not surprised that after the first frosty night, I saw no activity. And then I was surprised again when they mocked my despair this week coming and going with elan. I wrapped them in insulating foil to celebrate.

I wrapped the other six hives, too, after our state bee magazine reminded me that bees are supposed to be inside a tree surrounded by 3-5 inches of trunk, not our flimsy ¾” pine boxes. Anything we can do to keep the bees from expending energy is good the winter. I put a “sugar board” for nutrition and then added a “quilt box” on top filled with cedar shavings for warmth and to absorb moisture. I’ll do a final treatment for mites this week, blowing in oxalic acid to beat down the mites.

This hive is ready for the sugar board for winter nutrition and quilt of cedar shavings for insulation and to absorb moisture

The only thing I don’t try is to coordinate anything. Nobody has ever tamed honeybees, though we humans subject them to bizarre circumstances to which they adapt as best they can. No bee coordinates anything, either. How bees think is as much a mystery as the how a three pound squishy mass in our skull “thinks.” Thirty million years with no boss, much less royalty. No executive committee. No “table” around which important bees gather to decide the future. And they don’t get tripped up by “perfect;” taking what is real and finding the way.

Many important humans are currently making such abysmal choices that the whole species seems locked in a doom loop. Artificial fears blind us to our real peril. It was hard for the “last chance” climate conference in Qatar to remember to even pretend to try. The honeybees don’t care, except that the horrible decisions include releasing plumes of toxic chemicals that make it hard for them to fly straight. It’s a small planet.

As the global people were squandering their opportunity in Qatar, some key people in our little city met to think differently about how our civic hive might work better. We brought in Monte Roulier of Community Initiatives, one of our Stakeholder Health friends who, with ReThink Health and We In the World, have brought the Vital Conditions framework alive all across the nation, even into the dysfunctional thicket of Washington. Honeybees have the Vital Conditions in their DNA; every single bee and every single hive knows what to aim for, not just what to fear. Fears fragment our focus, while vitality integrates. If every human—like every bee—had roughly the same idea of vitality and life, we would need far less complicated coordination. We would count on everyone buzzing to a roughly similar tune.

Even a small town of 250,000 humans is an ensemble of many hives, neighborhoods and overlapping zones of power and ways of being. Nobody can possibly coordinate such a complexity even when so much depends on working together. We burn energy and time trying to create a table with clear agenda, shared data, distinct roles of authority. But the more power is concentrated, the more energy emerges to resist. We, like bees, work better knowing the other hives have a similar idea of what to hope for. Honeybee organization spends little friction on forced coordination; entirely focused on adapting to the actual circumstances. Multiple generative nodes are way smarter than any table of self-chosen geniuses trying for a singularity.

Better to gather with curiosity about each other’s hopes for vitality, hopes for life. Food helps with coffee in the morning and wine later in the evening. Like hearts learning to beat together, common life will emerge.

At The Carter Center’s Interfaith Health Program we traveled widely to help complex communities find their way to implement the gifts of science for health. We spoke of a “limited domain collaboration” as a way of creating multiple nodes of aspiration without leaders quarrelling. I was not yet informed by honeybees, so I didn’t realize they figured this out 30 million years ago. It’s Honeybee Collaboration; giving credit where it is due.

Humans have less baked into our DNA than honeybees. This makes us more adaptable but also easier to miss the point, chase our fears and waste time on needless friction. Every honeybee is imprinted with the ideal dimensions and qualities of the cavity in which to build a good hive. Maybe the Leading Causes of Life which underlay the Vital Conditions are like that. They see the interplay of five facets—Connection, Coherence, Agency, Intergenerativity and Hope as a pattern out of which life emerges over and over again. Jim Cochrane points out that the Causes of Life are actively dangerous if captured by any one tribe, nation or committee. If informed by the creative imagination for the whole and animated by the energy we call Spirit, they find the way toward life even when all seems lost. But that is a lot less exact than the bees, with their DNA imprint of the dimensions for the ideal hive cavity (22 quarts, dry, with a 1 ½” hole).

The wisdom tradition of Islam, the Jews and later, Christians, thought the honeybees were the species closest to the qualities of God with the sole exception of humans. We emerged millions of years later, so we may be an experiment by God to see if a species without the imprinted DNA can be agents of life for everybody on the little planet. It’s a perilous risk, working barely, if at all.

But that may be the Christmas miracle. Kate Hauk reminded me of the poem by John Roedel:

Me: Hey God

God: Hello there, my love.

Me: It’s over

God: That’s not true. You won.

Me: How can you tell?

God: Because you’re still here.

Me: Barely.

God: Barely is all it takes. Barely is amazing. Barely is a miracle.

The bees longest day is Friday. Six weeks later, still amid the frost, the queen will lay the eggs that will become the bees who will leap into the Spring sky to greet the early blooming maple and redbud. Miracle.

A bit ridiculous with foam insulation around perfectly dignified honeybees. It beats getting up in the the night with a blanket.

Relevant Science, Mature Faith

If we ask the wrong question, our answer won’t matter. Many ask the wrong question about how to resolve the conflict between religion and science. The useful question is more nuanced: how do we embody our most mature faith and the most relevant science to inform the health of whole people? Good question. But you have to see somebody do it to understand the answer.

*John Hatch, Jeremy Moseley and Teresa Cutts asking the right questions.*

Last week about 200 people asking that question gathered in Rocky Mount, North Carolina for the Eighth Annual John W. Hatch FaithHealth Lecture. And to celebrate Dr. Hatch’s 95^th birthday. Not many black men live to be 95, so we should have a party for every one that does and think about how they did so. John began by picking his parents and grandparents wisely. They were fierce for him, believed that he should be a professor (his grandmother even considered his goal of Governor). Just as important, was inculcating him from his earliest age that his life intelligence, energy, courage and heart belong to the people God so loves—all of them. Good pick, John.

Two weeks ago THE American Public Health Association Caucus on Faith and the Public Health honored Dr. John Hatch as the first recipient of the Flame Award, given for a lifetime of keeping the flame of justice, mercy and healing alive in a hard-hearted world. We did that in Atlanta by Zoom, but Barbara Baylor, the chair of the caucus and a student of Dr. Hatch, came to Rocky Mount to give him the award in person.

The interwoven fields of public health and faith have been embodied in many significant lives in the past several hundred years as public health science has emerged.

For example, in 1737, James McCune Smith became the first African American to earn a medical degree, awarded by the University of Glasgow in Scotland. The local schools didn’t admit him, so his church connections found the way. A gifted orator and writer and social entrepreneur, he was also a mathematician. He used his statical analysis to take down Senator John C. Calhoun who was citing the US census to show that poor health of slaves reflected their inferior stock and poor behavior. Dr. Smith’s widely published scientific article showed that comparative data on free slaves and poor whites to had identical outcomes.

A binary star as our North Star—mature faith, relevant science, John Hatch embodies the most relevant science of all, the one that sets people and communities free by undergirding their own power. I’m sure he learned this science from his family example. But as I thought of him, I picked up my precious copy of “Closing the Gap” published in 1987 by Oxford Press. This CDC Conference was the idea of Jimmy Carter and Bill Foege who convened the hundreds of scientists to figure out how many years of premature death could be prevented based on what we already know. There is a lot of confusion about what we already know. Said Carter in the introduction: “This is particularly true for an issue as complex as health. Too often, Americans are confronted by messages about health that leave us with little or no hope…. Frequently, there is no mention of what I as an individual, or what we as a society, can do to arrest this relentless onslaught on our health.” The answer is about what John’s grandmother would have said:
“Approximately two-thirds of all reported deaths can be delayed, which means that 1.2 million lives and 8.4 million years of life can be preserved each year.” That next three decades dramatically increased our preventive knowledge as well as some relatively minor increases in curative science.

But science without hands, feet and heart doesn’t move from the lab to the streets. That takes mature faith, the kind that lets the science flow through generous lives to where it is needed most. Like that of John Hatch.

Shortly after their landmark report on Closing the Gap, Bill and Jimmy convened another meeting of several hundred diverse faith leaders to see if they could grasp the urgent moral moment posed by the prevention science. They also created the Interfaith Health Program with major funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as well as some from Templeton Foundation. And they hired me. I quickly learned about John Hatch, who knew every bit of this science and carried it with his body into the toughest places that needed it the very most. This included Mississippi, where he and Jack Geiger created the first (or arguably second) community health center that is still more radical than most of the 3,000 that followed. And he came to the University of North Carolina and continued his landmark work with the 1,600 churches of General Baptist State Convention.

When I say “embody” science and faith, what kind of body do I mean? Whose bodies are best suited—let us say designed by God—to be the ideal carriers of this science that could prevent two-thirds of all unnecessary and thus, scandalous, death. Who did God put in the world for that purpose, to save, dare I say, it? Well, your body and mine, of course, just as well as John’s. Why can’t you and I be as brave, smart and fierce?

*Dr. Goldie Byrd of the Maya Angelou Center for Health Equity and Dr. Hatch of the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health*

But I think there is an even better body designed for this mature faith and relevant science. That is the social body of the church, synagogue, masjid, temple or wherever people gather to be made whole and sent out again. That’s the body that formed John. And that is the body designed to carry the science the world needs. We were, of course meeting in just one such body, the Impact Center and Tabernacle, embodying the saving science and faith in a tough town in a tough part of a tough state.

The science that saves us—at least 2/3rds of us—is for the world God so loves. It is hard to monetize and turned into money by healthcare organizations, even those trying to use value-based contracts to do so. It won’t put hundreds of billions in the basement or pay big bucks to interventional physicians or those who organize the organizations who so successfully monetize other branches of science. The science that fits mature faith perfectly is that of mercy-making, justice-doing and love that teaches people and communities that God has made a world in which 2/3rds of their suffering is within their control. This science is considered the lowest in the academic hierarchy with a tiny fraction of NIH funding. But it is the highest of all sciences because it liberates, releases and sends out the whole body of faith.

That science is relevant once it finds the right body to carry it to the streets.

The John W. Hatch FaithHealth Lecture is coordinated by Anita Holmes with support from the FaithHealth Division of Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist. Cosponsors include the Wake Forest University School of Divinity, the General Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, Maya Angelou Center for Health Equity, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Gillings School of Global Public Health, Caucus on Public Health and the Faith Community of the American Public Health Association, Community-Campus Partnerships for Health and the National Association of Community Health Associations.

More information at FaithHealth.org or StakeholderHealth.org