garygunderson.bsky.social
@garygunderson.bsky.social
Faith doesn’t have opinions about power; it is power. Faith has no fear of what simplistic violence can take away. Faith does not blink when God turns on the lights. Granted, faith can snooze through an approaching storm piddling and fiddling, doing not much until it hears the voices of its prophets
King Year
Buddhists walk for peace in my Carolina Winter while I, a Baptist/Quaker, walk their Monks’ Trail in Chiang Mai. Here in Thailand it is hard to see the mountains through the blizzard of campaign signs for their election February 8th. The campaign is skewed by live fire border conflict with Cambodia that makes this Buddhist nation think more about their military than their monks, but nothing remotely as brazen and raw as my own country. The people here will vote and the government will be who they choose. I am not sure that will happen for my people as the increasingly brazen, desperate man coming apart in real time on world screens simply can’t afford one.
garygunderson.net
January 21, 2026 at 8:45 AM
This is surely the worst Christmas since the slaughter of the innocents. Against this ugly tide we celebrated Christmas like Quakers against slavery, like honeybees against the elements.
Bee
Radical non-conformists built this first Friends meeting house in Skipton in 1689 when slavery was utterly normal. TC and I got back from England some weeks ago but writing is harder here. Especially as I agreed to teach an online asynchronous Divinity School class next semester. I didn’t quite grasp that  this requires all 14 weeks of the teaching in advance by video. Yikes. It’s on the Leading Causes of Life, and I’ve got lots of help. But rather pushed my blog writing to the side. ///// This is surely the worst Christmas since the slaughter of the innocents.
garygunderson.net
December 25, 2025 at 10:12 PM
We need role models not just ideas. Even better would be a role model with ideas. This is what I found in the London Quaker bookstore, where I stumbled across 87-year-old George Lakey, the author of Viking Economics.
Consequences
I have a friend whose life has led him to be one of the most powerful Republicans in the North Carolina state legislature, marked by his tenacious commitment to expand Medicaid. He is a grandfather, a religious man with a diligent spirit. I reached out to him a few days ago, knowing he would be voting in a razor-thin decision to gerrymander one more Congressional district to support the desperate effort to protect MAGA. North Carolina is 50/50 Democrat to Republican voters, but our state legislature is ridiculously gerrymandered into a Republican “supermajority”, dependent on his vote to make it 11-3 guaranteed GOP districts.
garygunderson.net
October 27, 2025 at 7:35 PM
Deep accountability begins by thinking clearly about complex human ecosystems in today's landscape. Healthcare is a good, if painful, place to start. There a new book about this.
Torrent
I was supposed to be in India two weeks ago to participate in the Christian Medical College of Vellore’s strategic conclave and to attend the astonishing Sikh Sathya Sai Grama in Bangalore. Instead my visa got caught in the US government’s sabotage of international relations. You can imagine how badly I felt to not be in these sacred places at this time so pregnant with possibility and, yes, danger. The Sikh based One World One Family Foundation supports the Sri Madhusudan Sai Global Humanitarian Mission that provides essential services in 5 world regions, to over 100 countries, and maintains 12…
garygunderson.net
October 2, 2025 at 9:35 AM
Ribblehead Lessons

The Ribblehead Rail Viaduct is a wonder, but like the US Constitution it did not anticipate all the challenges it would face. The founding brothers of the United States of America crafted an exquisitely complex array of checks and balances, anticipating craven behavior by…
Ribblehead Lessons
The Ribblehead Rail Viaduct is a wonder, but like the US Constitution it did not anticipate all the challenges it would face. The founding brothers of the United States of America crafted an exquisitely complex array of checks and balances, anticipating craven behavior by tyrants. Like the stone pillars of a high arch built to defy gravity, ice and wind by carefully balancing opposing forces, they expected an American King George rather like our current imitation. They worked fast as best they could in a hostile time, but could not think of everything; such as the weak behavior of Congress collapsing like bricks made of poor clay.
garygunderson.net
September 28, 2025 at 3:43 PM
Fear sees nothing beyond its own exaggerated weaknesses. Fear is anxious with no fine motor skills and none of the patience or diligence that the work of discovery demands.
The possibilities out of which the future emerges are unlocked by the unlimited creative imagination of spirited humans. Every
What to do?
Cagn Cochrane. What to do? Amid a paralyzing deluge of dismal surprises we ask simply; what to do? I was surprised to learn there is a whole violent alt-right movement to the far right of the young Turning Point man killed in Utah. He died doing a very American thing—speaking freely--although I disagree with his viewpoints. I’ve known young men like Kirk, so I wonder how he would have evolved as many like him do. I’m so sorry he fell to cowardly violence. We are well and truly off any map.
garygunderson.net
September 15, 2025 at 5:55 PM
You and I are made up of 30 trillion cells and about 38 trillion microbes. Most all of that colony works like a family. No small part of that is our immune system which recognizes the other viruses that like to eat us for lunch. When disingenuous blather breaks it down the virus notice the opening.
Postive virus
You and I are made up of 30 trillion cells and about 38 trillion microbes. Most all of that colony works like a family. No small part of that is our immune system which recognizes the other viruses that like to eat us for lunch. Those might snack on your daughter if they notice her parents did not get her vaccinated. Public health and faith are like the social immune system. When disingenuous blather breaks it down the virus notice the opening for every kind of infectious disease. The Navajo Nation was severely affected by COVID19.
garygunderson.net
September 7, 2025 at 6:24 PM
Nobody in public health has ever earned in two years what many hospital CEO’s make in a month. They don’t have jets, three homes or minions to write their speeches and books. They do science for the same reason poorly paid pastors do ministry-they love the people God loves.
Shame
Public health holds many inconvenient truths. Some demand highly technical digging to find the evidence buried in the behavior of living microbes. The vaccines built on that train of evidence interrupt that behavior in ways that are near miraculous, but with variations that infuriate those who want certainty and someone to blame. Bullets lace the CDC encouraged by the lies of our tragic disgrace of a secretary of health, appointed and tolerated by a tragic disgrace of a president. Most of what public health inconveniently knows is not as subtle as a vaccine, but self-evident.
garygunderson.net
August 28, 2025 at 11:40 AM
This thing I think of “my life” is entirely and only what passes through—"dissipative creatures,” said Capra. Ridiculous poofs perched on golden toilets, the nameless poor with metal buckets or me with my plastic cassette; all the same at the end (pun intended).
Sh-t
Sunday night on our canal narrowboat often involves sunsets and pub music. But Monday morning usually finds me trundling down the towpath a quarter mile to dump our 35 pounds of the week’s waste. The technology involves a plastic cassette and a special little building to which we have a key. Still, not much different from thousands of African townships in which this is done with open buckets. Likewise, we keep an eye on our fresh water that lasts about a week. But TC unlike African women, she does not have to walk miles with the water tank on her head.
garygunderson.net
July 30, 2025 at 12:07 PM
More lives have been saved by trash collection than all the pills and stainless steel combined. I find this comforting guidance as I wonder how to be relevant in our social political dumpster fire.
Collecting trash
Gawflat Meadow in Skipton, Yorkshire, retrieved from decades of trash. A good place for a prayer about trash collectors. More lives have been saved by trash collection than all the pills and stainless steel combined. I find this comforting guidance as I wonder how to be relevant in our social political dumpster fire. It has always been inconvenient to know that public scale contagion is unnecessary. And deeply annoying that this makes it immoral. Many deadly phenomena have patterns: vehicles injuries (hence seat belts and motorcycle helmets), the long gestation of cancer (hence smoking and environmental laws).
garygunderson.net
July 22, 2025 at 4:34 PM
During COVID-19 I wrote a book of prayers, Prayers for a Newer New Awakening inspired by people like us a hundred years ago. They, too, were struggling with a society gone mad. They prayed and found the spirit to ignite a whole new way forward. We should do that, too.
Praying
Sunset through the chapel of the women's chapel on Iona, Scotland. Women prayed here long before the Christians showed up in 563. Plague and contagion are a recurrent part of human life at every scale. During the last plague—COVID-19-- the humans were more or less on the same side. At least they were until some saw political profit to be made in disabling the social body so that we lost our mind. COVID-19 killed somewhere north of 6 million people and it’s not over: 1,001 died yesterday. It dropped me to my knees.
garygunderson.net
July 13, 2025 at 9:01 AM
I am new to cruel men laughing with alligator teeth, ablaze with disdain for the weak, all the time preening about their mean God.
Maybe the arc needs fire to bend.
Maybe without fire nothing changes.
Be the seed after fire. Cultivate your deep kindness, your most fierce love of the truth.
Seed after fire
Seeds fulfil their role when released by fire. And wise humans can help them. So we learned at the McElvoy Ranch in Montana. "The arc of history bends toward justice," promised Dr. King. I was saved for the church and America by exactly that promise. I had decided as a Vietnam era student at Wake Forest to turn from my military family, suburban Jesus and American war-making when chaplain Richard McBride stopped me. He noted that I was nearly ignorant of my faith tradition beyond the tiny suburban rivulet I had dabbled in till then.
garygunderson.net
July 8, 2025 at 8:49 PM
I have some thoughts about July 4th but will save mine for a couple of days. I can’t possibly do better than Dr. William Barber and Fannie Lou Hamer. TC and her twin sister Lisa were born in Sunflower County, Mississippi 500 feet from where Hamer is buried.
Fannie Lou 4th
I have some thoughts about July 4th but will save mine for a couple of days. I can’t possibly do better than Dr. William Barber and Fannie Lou Hamer. TC and her twin sister Lisa were born in Sunflower County, Mississippi 500 feet from where Hamer is buried, delivered by the same doctor who identified Emmet Till after his heinous murder. White liberals (like me) should hold silence on this day and listen—then follow—the courageous prophets such as Dr. Barber who know what to do. The following was his post today:
garygunderson.net
July 4, 2025 at 12:10 PM
There really was nothing to say, so I walked over to be silent with the champions of sacred silence, the Quakers. These radical non-conformists built this very first meeting house where we met this morning in 1689. That’s a lot of stupid wars ago.
What could go wrong?
These radical non-conformist Quakers built this very first meeting house where we met this morning in 1689. That’s a lot of stupid wars ago. Two hundred Quakers are buried in these stunning gardens, their lives continuing to nurture the lives and hopes of us now. So, what could go wrong? A 79 year old man surrounded by people who cannot possibly stop him just busted a bunker of an 86 year old man surrounded by advisors with the identical intellectual and spiritual bandwidth. Of course the world is better if Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons.
garygunderson.net
June 23, 2025 at 12:38 PM
Maybe you’re thinking that the tanks, drones and bunker-busters have a point. If something needs crushing, there are tools at hand that crush. And their promise seems so oddly clean; “once and for all.” Bust the bunker and be done. It never works, Not once. Ever.
Democracy is a meadow
Democracy is like a meadow, dependent on grown-ups acting wisely over time, which creates space for radical abundance. Gawflat Meadow, Skipton, North Yorkshire. Maybe you’re thinking that the tanks, drones and bunker-busters have a point. If something needs crushing, there are tools at hand that crush. And their promise seems so oddly clean; “once and for all.” Bust the bunker and be done. Why bother with the dubious prospect of persuading people to think differently, be they Iranians, MAGA, or my deep blue peeps. But it never works. Ever. Not once.
garygunderson.net
June 18, 2025 at 2:04 PM
We grow ever closer to each other, which makes some afraid and thus easy for those who twist power to inflate those fears. LA shows us one structure of power in a last desperate ill-considered rush to hold on to its privileges, debasing all and everyone to the very last Marine.
Live, the People
Belle Vue Cotton Mill used to dominate for miles with thread wove of slave-raised cotton. All gone, but the building is good for techies now. Our boat way down in the lower left corner on the canal that used to bring the cotton. We live only if we are connected. The FaithHealth networks in Winston Salem were so woven into the neighborhoods that somebody on the team knew every single homeless person by name. And where the Mayor ate lunch (West End Cafe). Thin filaments of trust, subtle as the forest mycelia, threaded every neighborhood including even into the Sherriff’s Office and, yes, ICE.
garygunderson.net
June 10, 2025 at 10:16 PM
Springsteen points toward new power beyond the old whales. We are not we left to scrape and struggle for scraps of the old? Both Boss and Jesus laughed at those who thought that God had already spent all the creative energies there were in the world.
Boss power
The many paths of the Mississippi North of Memphis. Drawn by Kathryn Gunderson for the Cover of Religion and the Health of the Public (Cohrane and me, Palgrave). How does power work in a time of no boundaries, rules, or words that mean anything? Robert Reich, who is normally pretty smart, said the other day that power is a zero-sum struggle; that is, if someone has more, the other has less. There is a limited amount of power; the only issue is who has it. This is a mistake as it turns our attention to…
garygunderson.net
May 29, 2025 at 10:52 AM
My colleague of Wake Div and Iona Sally Morris wrote this new hymn: "Diverse and Equal and Included by God, we rise to righteous calls each time we topple walls. To live your Gospel, help us, O God."
Dei, Image of God
Sunrise between Iceland and Greenland. Every morning for a hundred days the Trinity went silent as the breaking edge of the early sun sped past Iceland, Greenland and then onto American soil. Spirit sighed as Son complained, “I saved their ungrateful asses for this kind of behavior?” Godhead was silent as godheads tend to be, but noted that maybe they should have gone with the dolphins as the lead species. "These humans don’t deserve to walk by forests and rivers, much less have dominion." The Three/One gave up and stepped back to let the foolish species simply erase itself.
garygunderson.net
May 1, 2025 at 12:09 AM