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©1991 Taskforce of United Methodists on Abortion and Sexuality, Inc.
Published by the Taskforce of United Methodists on Abortion and Sexuality, P.O. Box 306, Cottleville MO 63338
(636)294-2344 / email@example.com theological and moral reflection during a session of a United Methodist annual conference is about as rare as a March snow at Cape Hatteras. The word is rare, not impossible.During the l990 meeting of the North Carolina Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church, rarity (reflection, that is, and not snow) became reality. At the invitation of the Evangelical Fellowship of the N.C. Conference, Professor Stanley Hauerwas, who teaches theological ethics at Duke University Divinity School, lectured on abortion and the church. Hauerwas' lecture was delivered on the second night of conference, a tropical June 14th, in the Science Auditorium of Methodist College. Since Hauerwas' presentation was not a part of the "official" agenda of the conference, he did not begin speaking until the official program of the day had ended–at approximately 10:00 p.m. What follows is an edited text of the lecture that theologically and morally challenged a group of North Carolina Methodists to reconsider the problem of abortion from within the faith and life of the Church. It is hoped that this lecture will serve as a starting point for strengthening our churches' ministries with regard to abortion.Thanks is due Ms. Carole L. Stalnaker, the Secretary of St. Peter's United Methodist Church in Morehead City, North Carolina, for her faithful labor in transcribing the lecture. Thanks also to the Pastor of St. Peter's Church, The Reverend David A. Banks, who, as President of the Evangelical Fellowship, oversaw many of the logistics in setting up this important and unique event.
Reverend Paul T. Stallsworth, President Lent 1991
Taskforce of United Methodists on Abortion and Sexuality
You are blessed indeed to be here, listening to this, at this time of the night . . . Since you have had a long day at annual conference, I will try to be as brief as I can.
I'm going to start with a sermon. Every once in a while you get a wonderful gift. About a month ago a former student, who is now a Presbyterian minister, mailed to me a copy of a sermon on abortion. This evening I could not do better than read you this sermon and then give you an ethical commentary on it. [The author of the following sermon is The Reverend Terry Hamilton, formerly the Chaplain of Queens College, Charlotte, NC, and now of Kansas City, KS.]
The text for the sermon is Matthew 25:31-46. I will be reading from the Revised Standard Version. "When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will place the sheep at his right hand, but the goats at the left. Then the King will say to those at his right hand, 'Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.' Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?' And the King will answer them, 'Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.' Then he will say to those at his left hand, 'Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.' Then they also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see thee hungry or thirsty or n stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to thee?' Then he will answer them, 'Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.' And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.'"
"As a Christian and a woman, I find abortion a most difficult subject to address. Even so, I believe that it is essential that the church face the issue of abortion in a distinctly Christian manner. Because of that, I am hereby addressing not society in general, but those of us who call ourselves Christians. I also want to be clear that I am not addressing abortion as a legal issue. I believe the issue, for the church, must be framed not around the banners of 'pro-choice' or 'pro-life,' but around God's call to care for the least among us whom Jesus calls his sisters and brothers.
"So, in this sermon, I will make three points. The first point is that the Gospel favors women and children. The second point is that the customary framing of the abortion issue by both pro-choice and pro-life groups is unbiblical because it assumes that the woman is ultimately responsible for both herself and for any child she might carry. The third point is that a Christian response must reframe the issue to focus on responsibility rather than rights."
Gospel, Women, and Children
"Point number one: the Gospel favors women and children. The Gospel is feminist. In Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Jesus treats women as thinking people who are worthy of respect. This was not, of course, the usual attitude of that time. In addition, it is to the women among Jesus' followers, not to the men, that he entrusts the initial proclamation of his resurrection. It isn't only Jesus himself who sees the Gospel making all people equal, for Saint Paul wrote, 'There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus' (Galatians 3:28)."
"And yet, women have been oppressed through recorded history and continue to be oppressed today. So when Jesus says, 'as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me' (Matthew 25:40), I have to believe that Jesus includes women among 'the least of these.' Anything that helps women, therefore, helps Jesus. When Jesus says, 'as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me,' he is also talking about children, because children are literally 'the least of these.' Children lack the three things the world values most– power, wealth, and influence. If we concern ourselves with people who are powerless, then children should obviously be at the top of our list. The irony of the abortion debate, as it now stands in our church and society, is that it frames these two groups, women and children, as enemies of one another."
The Woman Alone
"This brings me to my second point: the issue as it is generally framed by both pro-choice and pro-life groups is unbiblical because it assumes that the woman is ultimately responsible both for herself and for any child she might carry. Why is it that women have abortions? Women I know, and those I know about, have had abortions for two basic reasons: the fear that they cannot handle the financial and physical demands of the child, and the fear that having the child will destroy relationships that are important to them."
"An example of the first fear, the inability to handle the child financially or physically, is the divorced mother of two children, the younger of whom has Down's syndrome. This woman recently discovered that she was pregnant. She believed abortion was wrong. However, the father of the child would not commit himself to help raise this child, and she was afraid she could not handle raising another child on her own."
"An example of the second fear, the fear of destroying relationships, is the woman who became pregnant and was told by her husband that he would leave her if she did not have an abortion. She did not want to lose her husband, so she had the abortion. Later, her husband left her anyway."
"In both of these cases, and in others I have known, the woman has had an abortion not because she was exercising her free choice but because she felt she had no choice. In each case the responsibility for caring for the child, had she had the child, would have rested squarely and solely on the woman."
Reframing With Responsibility
"Which brings me to my third point: the Christian response to abortion must reframe the issue to focus on responsibility rather than rights. The pro-choice/pro-life debate presently pits the right of the mother to choose against the right of the fetus to live. The Christian response, on the other hand, centers on the responsibility of the whole Christian community to care for 'the least of these.'"
"According to the Presbyterian Church's Book of Order, when a person is baptized, the congregation answers this question: 'Do you, the members of this congregation, in the name of the whole Church of Christ, undertake the responsibility for the continued Christian nurture of this person, promising to be an example of the new life in Christ and to pray for him or her in this new life?' We make this promise because we know that no adult belongs to himself or herself, and that no child belongs to his or her parents, but that every person is a child of God. Because of that, every young one is our child, the church's child to care for. This is not an option. It is a responsibility."
"Let me tell you two stories about what it is like when the church takes this responsibility seriously. The first is a story that Will Willimon, the Dean of Duke University Chapel, tells about a black church. In this church, when a teen-ager has a baby that she cannot care for, the church baptizes the baby and gives him/her to an older couple in the church that has the time and wisdom to raise the child. That way, says the pastor, the couple can raise the teen-age mother along with the baby. 'That,' the pastor says, 'is how we do it.'"
"The second story involves something that happened to Deborah Campbell. A member of her church, a divorced woman, became pregnant, and the father dropped out of the picture. The woman decided to keep the child. But as the pregnancy progressed and began to show, she became upset because she felt she could not go to church anymore. After all, here she was, a Sunday School teacher, unmarried and pregnant. So she called Deborah. Deborah told her to come to church and sit in the pew with the Campbell family, and, no matter how the church reacted, the family would support her. Well, the church rallied around when the woman's doctor told her at her six-month checkup that she owed him the remaining balance of fifteen hundred dollars by the next month; otherwise, he would not deliver the baby. The church held a baby shower and raised the money. When the time came for her to deliver, Deborah was her labor coach. When the woman's mother refused to come and help after the baby was born, the church brought food and helped clean her house while she recovered from the birth. Now the woman's little girl is the child of the parish."
"This is what the church looks like when it takes seriously its call to care for 'the least of these.' These two churches differ in certain ways: one is Methodist, the other Roman Catholic; one has a carefully planned strategy for supporting women and babies, the other simply reacted spontaneously to a particular woman and her baby. But in each case the church acted with creativity and compassion to live out the Gospel."
"In our scripture lesson today, Jesus gives a preview of the Last Judgment. 'Then the King will say to those at his right hand, "Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me." Then the righteous will answer him, "Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?" And the King will answer them, "Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to men (Matthew 25:34-40)."
"We cannot simply throw the issue of abortion in the faces of women and say, 'You decide and you bear the consequences of your decision.' As the church, our response to the abortion issue must be to shoulder the responsibility to care for women and children. We cannot do otherwise and still be the church. If we close our doors in the faces of women and children, then we close our doors in the face of Christ."
I wanted to read that sermon because I suspect that most of you ministers have not preached about abortion. You have not preached about abortion because you have not had the slightest idea about how to do it in a way that would not make everyone in your congregation mad. And the reason that you have not known how to preach a sermon on abortion is that you thought that you would have to take up the terms that are given by the wider society.
Here you see a young minister who knew how to cut through the kind of pro-choice and pro-life rhetoric that is given in the wider society. She preached a sermon on abortion that derives directly from the Gospel. Her sermon is a reminder about what the church is to be about when addressing this issue in a Christian way. That is the primary thing that I want to underline this evening: the church's refusal to use society's terms for the abortion debate, and the church's willingness to take on the abortion problem as church. This sermon suggests that abortion is not a question about the law, but about what kind of people we are to be as the church and as Christians.
Abortion forces the church to recognize the fallacy of a key presumption of many Christians in this society–namely, that what Christians believe about the moral life is what any right-thinking person, whether he or she is Christian or not, also believes. Again, that presumption is false. I want to underwrite what I call the Tonto Principle of Christian Ethics. The Tonto Principle is based on the Lone Ranger and Tonto finding themselves surrounded by 20,000 Sioux. The Lone Ranger turns to Tonto and says, "What do you think we ought to do, Tonto. Tonto replies, "What do you mean we, white man?" We Christians have thought that when we address the issue of abortion and when we say "we," we are talking about anybody who is a good, decent American. But that is not who "we" Christians are. If any issue is going to help us discover that, it is going to be the issue of abortion.
Beyond Rights
Christians in America are tempted to think of issues like abortion primarily in legal terms such as "rights." This is because the legal mode, as de Tocqueville pointed out long ago, provides the constituting morality in liberal societies. In other words, when you live in a liberal society like ours, the fundamental problem is how you can achieve cooperative agreements between individuals who share nothing in common other than their fear of death. In liberal society the law has the function of securing such agreements. That is the reason why lawyers are to America what priests were to the medieval world. The law is our way of negotiating safe agreements between autonomous individuals who have nothing else in common other than their fear of death and their mutual desire for protection.
Therefore, rights language is fundamental in our political and moral context. In America, we oftentimes pride ourselves, as Americans, on being a pragmatic people that is not ideological. But that is absolutely false. No country has ever been more theory dependent on a public philosophy than America.
Indeed I want to argue that America is the only country that has the misfortune of being founded on a philosophical mistake–namely, the notion of inalienable rights. We Christians do not believe that we have inalienable rights. That is the false presumption of Enlightenment individualism, and it opposes everything that Christians believe about what it means to be a creature. Notice that the issue is inalienable rights. Rights make a certain sense as correlative to duties and goods, but they are not inalienable. For example, when the lords protested against the king in the Magna Charta, they did so in the name of their duties to their underlings. Duties, not rights, were primary. The rights were simply ways of remembering what the duties were.
Christians, to be more specific, do not believe that we have a right to do with our bodies whatever we want. We do not believe that we have a right to our bodies because when we are baptized we become members of one another; then we can tell one another what it is that we should, and should not, do with our bodies. I had a colleague at the University of Notre Dame who taught Judaica. He was Jewish and always said that any religion that does not tell you what to do with your genitals and pots and pans cannot be interesting. That is exactly true. In the church we tell you what you can and cannot do with your genitals. They are not your own. They are not private. That means that you cannot commit adultery. If you do, you are no longer a member of "us." Of course pots and pans are equally important.
I was recently giving a talk at a very conservative university, Houston Baptist University. Since its business school has an ethics program, I called my talk, "Why Business Ethics Is a Bad Idea." When I had finished, one of the business-school people asked, "Well goodness, what then can we Christians do about business ethics?" I said, "A place to start would be the local church. It might be established that before anyone joins a Baptist church in Houston, he or she would have to declare in public his or her annual income." The only people whose incomes are known in The United Methodist Church today are ordained ministers. Why should we make the ministers' salaries public and not the laity's? Most people would rather tell you what they do in the bedroom than how much they make. With these things in mind, you can see how the church is being destroyed by the privatization of individual lives, by the American ethos. If you want to know who is destroying the babies of this country through abortion, look at privatization, which is learned in the economic arena.
Under the veil of American privatization, we are encouraging people to believe in the same way that Andrew Carnegie believed. He thought that he had a right to his steel mills. In the same sense, people think that they have a right to their bodies The body is then a piece of property in a capitalist sense. Unfortunately, that is antithetical to the way we Christians think that we have to share as members of the same body of Christ.
So, you cannot separate these issues. If you think that you can be very concerned about abortion and not concerned about the privatization of American life generally, you are making a mistake. So the problem is: how, as Christians, should we think about abortion without the rights rhetoric that we have been given–right to my body, right to life, pro-choice, pro-life, and so on? In this respect, we Christians must try to make the abortion issue our issue.
Calling a Spade
We must remember that the first question is not, "Is abortion right or wrong?," or, "Is this abortion right or wrong?" Rather, the first question is, "Why do Christians call abortion abortion?" And with the first question goes a second, "Why do Christians think that abortion is a morally problematic term?" To call abortion by that name is already a moral achievement. The reason why people are Pro-choice" rather than Pro-abortion" is that nobody really wants to be pro-abortion. The use of choice rather than abortion is an attempt at a linguistic transformation that tries to avoid the reality of abortion, because most people do not want to use that description. So, instead of abortion, another term is used, something like termination of pregnancy. Now, the church can live more easily in a world with "terminated pregnancies," because in that world the church no longer claims power, even linguistic power, over that medically described part of life; instead, doctors do.
One of the interesting cultural currents that is involved is the medicalization of abortion. It is one of the ways that the medical profession is continuing to secure power against the church. Ordained ministers can sense this when they are in hospital situations. In a hospital today, the minister feels less power than the doctor, right? My way of explaining this is that when someone goes to seminary today, he can say, "I'm not into Christology this year. I'm just into relating. After all, relating is what the ministry is really about, isn't it? Ministry is about helping people relate to one another, isn't it? So I want to take some more Clinical Pastoral Education courses." And the seminary says, "Go ahead and do it. Right, get your head straight, and so on." A kid can go to medical school and say, "I'm not into anatomy this year. I'm into relating. So I'd like to take a few more courses in psychology, because I need to know how to relate to people better." The medical school then says, "Who in the hell do you think you are, kid? We're not interested in your interests. You're going to take anatomy. If you don't like it, that's tough."
Now what that shows you is that people believe incompetent physicians can hurt them. Therefore, people expect medical schools to hold their students responsible for the kind of training that's necessary to be competent physicians. On the other hand, few people believe an incompetent minister can damage their salvation. This helps you see that what people want today is not salvation, but health. And that helps you see why the medical profession has, as a matter of fact, so much power over the church and her ministry. The medical establishment is the counter-salvation-promising group in our society today.
So, when you innocently say "termination of pregnancy," while it sounds like a neutral term, you are placing your thinking under the sway of the medical profession. In contrast to the medical profession, Christians maintain that the description "abortion" is more accurate and determinative than the description "termination of pregnancy." That is a most morally serious matter.
You must remember that, morally speaking, the first issue is never what we are to do, but what we should see. Here is the way it works: you can only act in the world that you can see, and you must be taught to see by learning to say. Again, you can only act in the world that you can see, and you must be taught to see by learning to say. Therefore, using the language of abortion is one way of training ourselves as Christians to see and to practice its opposite–hospitality, and particularly hospitality to children and the vulnerable. Therefore, abortion is a word that reminds us of how Christians are to speak about, to envision, and to live life–and that is to be a baptizing people which is ready to welcome new life into our communities.
In that sense "Abortion" is as much a moral description as "suicide." Exactly why does a community maintain a description like "suicide"? Because it reminds the community of its practice of enhancing life, even under duress. The language of suicide also works as a way to remind you that even when you are in pain, even when you are sick, you have an obligation to remain with the people of God, vulnerable and yet present.
When we joined The United Methodist Church, we promised to uphold it with "our prayers, our presence, our gifts, and our service." We often think that "our presence" is the easy one. In fact, it is the hardest one. I can illustrate this by speaking about the church I belonged to in South Bend, Indiana. It was a small group of people that originally was an E.U.B. (or Evangelical United Brethren) congregation. Every Sunday we had Eucharist, prayers from the congregation, and a noon meal for the neighborhood. When the usual congregation would pray, we would pray for the hungry in Ethiopia and for an end to the war in the Near East, and so on. Well, this bag lady started coming to church and she would pray things like, "Lord, I have a cold, and I would really like you to cure it." Or, I've just had a horrible week and I'm depressed. Lord, would you please raise my spirits You never hear prayers like that in most of our churches. Why? Because the last thing that Christians want to do is show one another that they are vulnerable. People go to church because they are strong. They want to reinforce the presumption that they are strong.
One of the crucial issues here is how we learn to be a people dependent on one another. We must learn to confess that, as a hospitable people, we need one another because we are dependent on one another. The last thing that the church wants is a bunch of autonomous, free individuals. We want people who know how to express authentic need, because that creates community.
So, the language of abortion is a reminder about the kind of community that we need to be. Abortion language reminds the church to be ready to receive new life as church.
The Church as True Family
We, as church, are ready to be challenged by the other. This has to do with the fact that in the church, every adult, whether single or married, is called to be parent. All Christian adults have a parental responsibility because of baptism. Biology does not make parents in the church. Baptism does. Baptism makes all adult Christians parents and gives them the obligation to help introduce these children to the Gospel. Listen to the baptismal vows; in them the whole church promises to be parent. In this regard the church reinvents the family.
The assumption here is that the first enemy of the family is the church. When I taught a marriage course at Notre Dame, I used to read to my students a letter. It went something like this, "Our son had done well. He had gone to good schools, had gone through the military, had gotten out, had looked like he had a very promising career ahead. Unfortunately, he has joined some eastern religious sect. Now he does not want to have anything to do with us because we are people of 'the world.' He is never going to marry because now his true family is this funny group of people he associates with. We are heartsick. We don't know what to do about this." Then I would ask the class, "Who wrote this letter?" And the students would say, improbably some family whose kid became a Moonie or a Hare Krishna." In fact, this is the letter of a fourth century Roman senatorial family about their son's conversion to Christianity.
From the beginning we Christians have made singleness as valid a way of life as marriage. This is how. What it means to be the church is to be a group of people called out of the world, and back into the world, to embody the hope of the Kingdom of God. Children are not necessary for the growth of the Kingdom, because the church can call the stranger into her midst. That makes both singleness and marriage possible vocations. If everybody has to marry, then marriage is a terrible burden. But the church does not believe that everybody has to marry. Even so, those who do not marry are also parents within the church, because the church is now the true family. The church is a family into which children are brought and received. It is only within that context that it makes sense for the church to say, "We are always ready to receive children. We are always ready to receive children." The people of God know no enemy when it comes to children.
From the Pro-Life Side: When Life Begins
Against the background of the church as family, you can see that the Christian language of abortion challenges the modern tendency to isolate moral dilemmas into discrete units of behavior. If that tendency is followed, you get the questions, What is really wrong with abortion?," and "Isn't abortion a separate problem that can be settled on its own grounds? And then you get the termination-of-pregnancy language that wants to see abortion as solely a medical problem. At the same time, you get abortion framed in a legalistic way.
When many people start talking about abortion, what is the first thing they talk about? When life begins. And why do they get into the question of when life begins? Because they think that the abortion issue is determined primarily by the claims that life is sacred and that life is never to be taken. They assume that these claims let you know how it is that you ought to think about abortion.
Well, I want to know where Christians get the notion that life is sacred. That notion seems to have no reference at all to God. Any good secularist can think life is sacred. Of course what the secularist means by the word sacred is interesting, but the idea that Christians are about the maintenance of some principle separate from our understanding of God is just crazy. As a matter of fact, Christians do not believe that life is sacred. I often remind my right-to-life friends that Christians took their children with them to martyrdom rather than have them raised pagan. Christians believe there is much worth dying for. We do not believe that human life is an absolute good in and of itself. Of course our desire to protect human life is part of our seeing each human being as God's creature. But that does not mean that we believe that life is an overriding good.
To say that life is an overriding good is to underwrite the modern sentimentality that there is absolutely nothing in this world worth dying for. Christians know that Christianity is simply extended training in dying early. That is what we have always been about. Listen to the Gospel! I know that today we use the church primarily as a means of safety, but life in the church actually involves extended training in learning to die early.
When you frame the abortion issue in sacredness-of-life language, you get into intractable debates about when life begins. Notice that is an issue for legalists. By that I mean the fundamental question becomes, How do you avoid doing the wrong thing?
In contrast, the Christian approach is not one of deciding when has life begun, but hoping that it has. We hope that human life has begun! We are not the kind of people that ask, Does human life start at the blastocyst stage, or at implantation? Instead, we are the kind of people that hope life has started, because we are ready to believe the at this new life will enrich our community. We believe this not because we have sentimental views about children. Honestly, I cannot imagine anything worse than people saying that they have children because their hope for the future is in their children. You would never have children if you had them for that reason. We are able to have children because our hope is in God, who makes it possible to do the absurd thing of having children. In a world of such terrible injustice, in a world of such terrible misery, in a world that may well be about the killing of our children, having children is an extraordinary act of faith and hope. But as Christians we can have a hope in God that urges us to welcome children. When that happens, it is an extraordinary testimony of faith.
From the Pro-Choice Side: When Personhood Begins
On the pro-choice side you also get the abortion issue framed in a context that is outside of a communitarian structure. On the pro-choice side you get the question about when the fetus becomes a "person," because only persons supposedly have citizenship rights. That is the issue of Roe vs. Wade.
It is odd for Christians to take this approach since we believe that we are first of all citizens of a far different kingdom than something called the United States of America. If we end up identifying persons with the ability to reason–which, I think, finally renders all of our lives deeply problematic–then we cannot tell why it is that we ought to care for the profoundly retarded. One of the most chilling aspects of the current abortion debate in the wider society is the general acceptance, even among anti-abortion people, of the legitimacy of aborting severely defective children. Where do people get that idea? Where do people get the idea that severely defective children are somehow less than God's creation? People get that idea by privileging rationality. We privilege our ability to reason. I find that unbelievable.
We must remember that as Christians we do not believe in the inherent sacredness of life or in personhood. Instead we believe that there is much worth dying for. Christians do not believe that life is a right or that we have inherent dignity. Instead we believe that life is the gift of a gracious God. That is our primary Christian language regarding abortion: life is the gift of a gracious God. As part of the giftedness of life, we believe that we ought to live in a profound awe of the other's existence, knowing in the other we find God. So abortion is a description maintained by Christians to remind us of the kind of community we must be to sustain the practice of hospitality to life. That is related to everything else that we do and believe.
Slipping Down the Slope
There is the argument that if you let abortion start occurring for the late-developed fetus, sooner or later you cannot prohibit infanticide. Here you are entering the slippery slope argument. There is a prominent well-respected philosopher in this country named H. Tristam Englehart who wrote a book called Foundations of Bioethics. In the book Englehart argues that, as far as he can see, there is absolutely no reason at all that we should not kill children up to a year and a half old, since they are not yet persons. Foundations is a text widely used in our universities today by people having to deal with all kinds of bioethical problems.
I have no doubt that bioethical problems exist. After all, today you can run into all kinds of anomalies. For example, in hospitals, on one side of the hall, doctors and nurses are working very hard to save a five hundred-gram preemie while, on the other side of the hall, they are aborting a similar preemie. There are many of these anomalies. There is no question that they are happening. You can build up a collection of such horror stories. But listen, people can get used to horror. Also, opposition to the horrible should not be the final, decisive ground on which Christians stand while tackling these kinds of issues. Instead, the issue is how we as a Christian community can live in positive affirmation of the kind of hospitality that will be a witness to the society we live in. That will open up a discourse that otherwise would be impossible.
Now I know that you probably feel a bit frustrated by this theological approach to abortion–especially when you are trying to deal with concrete, pastoral problems, as well as the political problems that we confront in this society. In some ways what I am asking you to think about regarding abortion and the church is a little like what the Quakers had to go through regarding slavery. Some of the early abolitionists, as you know, were Quakers. Then somebody pointed out to them, there are a lot of slaveholding Friends." So the Quakers had to turn around and say, "Yes, that's right." Then they had to start trying to discipline their own ranks, and, as a result, they ended up creating a bunch of Anglicans in Philadelphia.
One of the reasons why the church's position about abortion has not been authentic is because the church has not lived and witnessed as a community in a way that challenges the fundamental secular presuppositions of both the pro-life side and the pro-choice side. We are going to have to become that kind of community if our witness is to have the kind of integrity that it must.
The Male Issue
When addressing abortion, one of the crucial questions that we must engage is the question of the relationship between men and women, and thus sexual ethics. One of the things that the church has tried to do–and this is typical of the liberal social order in which we live–is to isolate the issue of abortion from the issue of sexual ethics. You cannot do that.
As this evening's sermon suggests, the legalization of abortion can be seen as the further abandonment of women by men. one of the cruelest things that has happened over the last few years is convincing women that Yes is as good as No. That gives great power to men, especially in societies (like ours) where men continue domination. Women's greatest power is the power of the No. This simply has to be understood. The church has to make it clear that we understand that sexual relations are relations of power. Unfortunately, one of the worst things that Christians have done is to underwrite romantic presuppositions about marriage. Even Christians now think that we ought to marry people simply because they are "in love." Wrong, wrong, wrong! What could being in love possibly mean? The romantic view underwrites the presumption that, because people are in love, it is therefore legitimate for them to have sexual intercourse, whether they are married or not. Contrary to this is the church's view of marriage. To the church, marriage is the public declaration that two people have pledged to live together faithfully for a lifetime.
One of the good things about the church's understanding of marriage is that it helps us to get a handle on making men take responsibility for their progeny. It is a great challenge for any society to get its men to take up this responsibility. As far as today's church is concerned, we must start condemning male promiscuity. The church will not have a valid voice on abortion until she attacks male promiscuity with the ferocity it deserves. And we have got to get over being afraid of appearing prudish. Male promiscuity is nothing but the exercise of reckless power. It is injustice. And by God we have to go after it. There is no compromise on this. Men must pay their dues. There is absolutely no backing off from that.
Christians must challenge the romanticization of sex in our society. It ends up with high school kids having sexual intercourse because they think they love one another. Often we must say that that is rape. Let us be clear about it. No fourteen-year-old, unattractive women–who is not part of the social clique of a high school, who is suddenly dated by some male, who falls all over herself with the need for approval, and who ends up in bed with him–can be said to have had anything other than rape happen to her. Let the church speak honestly about these matters and quit pussyfooting around. Until we speak clearly on male promiscuity, we will simply continue to make the problems of teen-age pregnancy and abortion female problems. Males have to be put in their place. There is no way we as a church can have an authentic voice without this clear witness.
The "Wanted Child" Syndrome
There is one other issue that I think is worth highlighting. It concerns how abortion in our society has dramatically affected the practice of having children. In discussions about abortion, one often hears that no "unwanted child" ought to be born. But I can think of no greater burden than having to be a wanted child.
When I taught the marriage course at Notre Dame, the parents of my students wanted me to teach their kids what the parents did not want them to do. The kids, on the other hand, approached the course from the perspective of whether or not they should feel guilty for what they had already done. Not wanting to privilege either approach, I started the course with the question, What reason would you give for you or someone else wanting to have a child?" And you would get answers like, "Well, children are fun." In that case I would ask them to think about their brothers and/or sisters. Another answer was, Children are a hedge against loneliness Then I recommended getting a dog. Also I would note that if they really wanted to feel lonely, they should think about someone they raised turning out to be a stranger. Another student reply was, Kids are a manifestation of our love." "Well," I responded, "what happens when your love changes and you are still stuck with them" I would get all kinds of answers like these from my students. But, in effect, these answers show that people today do not know why they are having children.
It happened three or four times that someone in the class, usually a young woman, would raise her hand and say, "I do not want to talk about this anymore." What this means is that they know that they are going to have children, and yet they do not have the slightest idea why. And they do not want it examined. You can talk in your classes about whether God exists all semester and no one cares, because it does not seem to make any difference. But having children makes a difference, and the students are frightened that they do not know about these matters.
Then they would come up with that one big answer that sounds good. They would say, "We want to have children in order to make the world a better place." And by that, they think that they ought to have a perfect child. And then you get into the notion that you can have a child only if you have everything set–that is, if you are in a good "relationship," if you have your finances in good shape, the house, and so on. As a result, of course, we absolutely destroy our children, so to speak, because we do not know how to appreciate their differences.
Now who knows what we could possibly want when we "want a child"? The idea of want in that context is about as silly as the idea that we can marry the right person. That just does not happen. Wanting a child is particularly troubling as it finally results in a deep distrust of mentally and physically handicapped children. The crucial question for us as Christians is what kind of people we need to be to be capable of welcoming children into this world, some of whom may be born disabled and even die.
Too often we assume compassion means preventing suffering and think that we ought to prevent suffering even if it means eliminating the sufferer. In the abortion debate, the church's fundamental challenge is to challenge this ethics of compassion. There is no more fundamental issue than that. People who defend abortion defend it in the name of compassion. "We do not want any unwanted children born into the world," they say. But Christians are people who believe that any compassion that is not formed by the truthful worship of the true God cannot help but be accursed. That is the fundamental challenge that Christians must make to this world. It is not going to be easy.
Now I will take your questions.
[Because of technical problems, the original wording of the questions is not here employed. However, an attempt has been made to convey the essence of each question.]
QUESTION #1: What about abortion in American society at large? That is, in your opinion, what would be the best abortion law for our society?
HAUERWAS: The church is not nearly at the point where she can concern herself with what kind of abortion law we should have in the United States or even in the state of North Carolina. Instead, we should start thinking about what it means for Christians to be the kind of community that can make a witness to the wider society about these matters.
Once I was giving a lecture on medical ethics at the University of Chicago Medical School. The week before the lecture the school's students and faculty had been discussing abortion. They had decided that, if a women asked them to perform an abortion, they would do it because a doctor ought to do whatever a patient asks. So I said, "Let's not talk about abortion. Let's talk about suicide. Imagine that you are a doctor in the Emergency Room (E.R.) at Cook County Hospital, here on the edge of Lake Michigan. It's winter; the patient they have pulled out of the lake is cold; and he is brought to the E.R. He has a note attached to his clothing. It says, "I've been studying the literature of suicide for the past thirty years. I now agree completely with Seneca on these matters. After careful consideration, I've decided to end my life. If I am rescued prior to my complete death, please do not resuscitate."
I said, What would you do?"
"We'd try to save him, of course," they answered.
So I followed, "On what grounds? If you are going to do whatever the consumer asks you to do, you have no reason at all to save him."
So they countered, "It's our job as doctors to save life."
And I said, "Even if that is the case, why do you have the right to impose your role, your specific duties, on this man?"
After quite a bit of argument, they decided that the way to solve this problem would be to save this man the first time he comes into the E.R. The second time they would let him die.
My sense of the matter is that secular society, which assumes that you have a right to your body, has absolutely no basis for suicide prevention centers. In other words, the wider secular society has no public moral discourse about these matters.
In this kind of a setting, Christians witness to wider society first of all not by lobbying for a law against abortion, but by welcoming the children that the wider society does not want. Part of that witness might be to say to our pro-choice friends, "You are absolutely right. I don't think that any poor woman ought to be forced to have a child that she cannot afford. So let's work hard for an adequate child allowance in this country." That may not be entirely satisfactory, but that is one approach.
QUESTION #2: Should the church be creating more abortion-prevention ministries, such as homes for children?
HAUERWAS: I think that would be fine.
I have a lot of respect for the people in Operation Rescue. However, intervention in an abortion-clinic context is so humanly painful that I'm not sure what kind of witness Christians make there. But if we go to a rescue, one of the things that I think that we ought to be ready to say to a woman considering an abortion is, "Will you come home and live with me until you have your child? And, if you want me to raise the child, I will." I think that that kind of witness would make a very powerful statement. The homes are good, but also I think that Christians should be the kind of people who can open our homes to a another and her child. A lot of single people are ready to do that.
QUESTION #3: How should the church assist a woman who was raped and is pregnant? Where is justice, in a Niebuhrian sense, for her?
HAUERWAS: First of all, I am not a Niebuhrian. One of the problems with Niebuhr's account of sin is that it gets you into a lesser-of-two-evils argument. Because I am a pacifist, I do not want to entertain lesser-of-two-evil arguments. As you know, Christians are not about compromise. We are about being faithful.
Second, I do know some women who have been raped and who have had their children and become remarkable mothers. I am profoundly humbled by their witness.
Now, stop and think. Why is it that our church has not had much of a witness about abortion, suicide, or other such matters? Let's face it, moral discourse in most of our churches is but a pale reflection of what you find in Time magazine. For example, when the United Methodist bishops drafted their peace pastoral, they said that most Methodist people have been pacifists or just-war people. Well that was, quite frankly, not true. I sat in on a continuing-education session at Duke right after the peace pastoral came out. I asked how many of the ministers present had heard of just war prior to the pastoral. Two-thirds of the approximately one hundred ministers indicated that they had never even heard of just war. The United Methodist Church has not had disciplined discourse about any of these matters.
Does our church have disciplined discourse–even about marriage? No. We let our children grow up believing that what Christians believe about marriage is the same thing that the wider society believes: that is, if you are in love with someone, you probably ought to get married. It is a crazy idea. Being in love has nothing whatsoever to do with their vocation as Christians.
Ministers, when was the last time you refused to marry a couple because they were new to the congregation? People should be married within our congregations if and only if they have lived in those congregations for at least a year. After all, they are making serious promises.
Ministers, when was the last time you preached a sermon on abortion? When was the last time you preached a sermon on war? When was the last time you preached a sermon on the kind of care we ought to give to the ill? When was the last time you preached a sermon about death and dying? When was the last time you preached a sermon on the political responsibilities of Christians? The problem is that we feel at a loss about how to make these kinds of matters part of the whole church. So, in effect, our preaching betrays the church. I do not mean to put all the blame on preaching, but ministers do have a bully pulpit that almost no one else in this society has–except for television. It's not much, but it's something. At least preachers can enliven a discourse that is not alive anywhere else, and people are hungering to be led by people of courage.
One of the deepest problems about these kinds of issues is that we fear our own congregations. But as this evenings sermon makes clear, this kind of sermon can be preached. And people will respond to it. And it will enhance a discourse that will make possible practices that otherwise would not be there.
This brings me to comment on how we conduct our annual conferences. I think that the lack of discussion of serious theological and moral matters at annual conferences is an outrage. It is an outrage! This is the one place where the Methodist ministry comes together every year and yet very little serious theological and moral challenge takes place here; it is an outrage. Annual conference today is like any other gathering of people in a business organization. Of course we have Bible study and all of that, but it is pietistic. It's pietism. It's all individualism. It's about how I can find my soul's relationship with God. But God isn't just interested in our little souls. God has bigger fish to fry. If all we are interested in is our little souls, we shortchange the extraordinary adventure that the Gospel calls us to be part of.
I know that some of you wonder what this means for supporting a constitutional amendment on abortion. More important than that is what Christians owe our fellow participants–I do not want to use the word citizens because I do not believe we are citizens–in this funny social order that would encourage, as much as possible, the glory of what it means to protect and receive children. But how you go about doing that is not going to be easy.


text:
SALT LAKE CITY— A Utah beauty pageant winner charged last week with tossing homemade "bottle bombs" from a vehicle said she is relinquishing her crown.
Kendra McKenzie Gill, 18, called the Aug. 2 incident a "stupid mistake" and said she wanted to turn over her Miss Riverton title before pageant officials stripped her of it.
"I just thought that it would be best for the city of Riverton and all the people affected by our decision and my choice, to just step down and resign from my position and let someone else take it from here," Gill said in an interview aired Tuesday on KSL-TV (http://bit.ly/16PCCsI ).
Gill and three friends — John Patrick Reagh, Shanna Marie Smith and Bryce Christopher Stone, all 18 — were charged Friday with four felony counts of possession of an explosive device. They're accused of driving around town and throwing plastic bottles filled with toilet bowl cleaner and shrapnel at people and property.
Nobody was injured, and Gill told KSL they never threw the bottles directly at people.
"We didn't think about what we were doing at the time," Gill said. "We didn't know that it would get to this point. We meant for it to be a practical joke and never had any intentions to harm anyone at all."
Gill topped a slate of nine beauty contestants in June in the Salt Lake City suburb, showing off years of piano training with a Scott Joplin number and taking home a $2,000 scholarship.
Contestants in the pageant — which is a preliminary of the Miss Utah and Miss America competitions — are required to sign a contract certifying they have not been convicted of a crime and don't have criminal charges pending against them. Pageant officials can revoke a title if a contestant is criminally charged during her reign.
Gill's lawyer, Wally Bugden, described the four teens as honour students who were playing a prank and didn't intend harm. Gill is getting a harder time because of her title, he said.
"Kendra is a lovely person who became Miss Riverton, and now it's being almost held against her that she held that title, and that she did something that was foolish," Bugden said.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Liberal cabinet minister Catherine McKenna says Canada still has credibility on the world stage as a climate change champion despite the controversy over Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau's past dressing in blackface.
McKenna, the environment minister, tried to push the fractious federal election campaign onto more familiar territory for her and her embattled party on Saturday, framing the fight against climate change as the core issue facing voters.
Trudeau had to contend with global mockery on Friday, including from late-night American comedians as images of the three times he chose to put on black- or brownface as part of costume events continued to flash around the world. U.S. President Donald Trump said he was surprised by the images of Trudeau.
McKenna promised to advocate for a ban on single-use plastics from federal government buildings, museums and parks at an event on the shores of the Ottawa River just west of Parliament Hill. The pledge was part of her local campaign as the MP for Ottawa Centre, and was not a plank in her party's federal platform.
McKenna deflected a question about whether the controversy had undermined Canada's efforts to lead globally on climate change.
"The measure of a person and of a party should be based on what you have done," she said, citing Canada's international actions to tackle climate change and "provide a leadership role at the table" as well as "action to combat racism or our announcement yesterday that we would eliminate assault weapons."
She added that "this election could not be more important," noting that issues like climate change are at stake.
"We have (a) Conservative Party and Conservative politicians who do not believe in action on climate change," McKenna said.
Trudeau wasn't campaigning Saturday and neither was Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer. Both were taking a break from the road, as is common on Saturdays during federal elections, after keeping up full-tilt schedules since the federal election call on Sept. 11.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh campaigned in Toronto, reiterating his commitment to help self-employed workers who are feeling left behind economically.
Singh was campaigning with Andrew Cash, a former NDP MP who's trying to take back his Davenport seat from the Liberals. They held a discussion on precarious work at a neighbourhood coffee shop.
Green Leader Elizabeth May is in Winnipeg, where she's to make an announcement in the morning and campaign with Manitoba Green candidates at The Forks later.
People's Party Leader Maxime Bernier is in northern Ontario for a plowing match and a rally in North Bay.
The Canadian Press


text:
Here is the Iran you don't see in the news bulletins: it's the Iran that loves rock, heavy metal and rap.
Iran is a nation where most forms of pop music have been strictly banned by the government, but that doesn't stop people from playing the music they love in secret. They play anywhere: from cellars to cow sheds and construction sites.
Negar and Ashkan are part of Teheran's vibrant and varied underground music scene. Just released from prison and fed up with being hindered from expressing themselves, the two young musicians try to get documents to leave the country for Europe. They have been able to arrange a gig in London, and are searching for like-minded musicians to join them when they meet Nader, a fast-talking black-market businessman who offers to help them. While Negar and Ashkan arrange for a last concert for friends and family in Teheran, Nader is trying to get them the much-needed passports and visas in time.
Friday, September 8
7pm Bar
8pm Movie Screening
10 pm Music and Fingerfood


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Monday, January 30, 2006
Mondays with Maida - Cinnamon Almond Cookies
Page 106 in the old book / page 145 in the new book
These are another of my old favorites from this book. It's possible they were the first cookies I made from the book, but I can't remember for sure. They are rich, buttery cookies with a generous dose of cinnamon, topped with sliced almonds and finshed with a lemon glaze.
I purchased the pan I use for these cookies (a 10 by 15 jelly roll pan) years ago, specifically for the purpose of making these cookies. At that time the only properly sized pan I could find was one of those Cushionaire pans which has two metal layers with a space in between. I think the idea behind the design is that your cookies won't burn on the bottom. Bad idea. Your cookies won't burn, but they won't cook properly either.
This is a long-winded way of telling you that I suspect I've been undercooking these cookies for years. Maida describes the cookies as crisp, but only the edge pieces are crisp when I make them. Not that I'm complaining... I love these cookies regardless of the texture.
I hadn't noticed before that the recipe actually calls for sliced blanched almonds - something I had never seen before, but which I just came across in Whole Foods today. I think I'll stick with the regular sliced almonds, though. I prefer the way they look, and almond skins are loaded with good-for-you flavanoids.
Here's the panel...
Suzanne: "I liked the cinnamon almond bar because it had a crunchy cookie base and a crunchy almond topping. There was a definite lemon taste to the cookie. Rating - 4.5"
Denny: "I think they are fairly crunchy but a tad non-descript. I'd give them a 2.5 as fairly average. Rating - 2.5"
Laura: "Crunchy and yummy. Rating - 4.0"
Phil: "Elegant almond coated squares with just the right combination of sweet, buttery and curious (cinnamon & lemon). Seemed out of place for office fare but sure helped endure the email/to do list onslaught. Rating - 4.5"
Overall rating by the panel - 3.9
Next week - Georgia Pecan Bars
Nutrition Facts
9 comments:
Those look absolutely delicious!
I love Maida ... thanks for sharing those lovely cookies!
- January 31, 2006 1:14 AM
- Reid said...
Hi Cathy,
These cookies look great. I love cinnamon and almonds. Looks like the panel enjoyed them as well.
- January 31, 2006 8:02 AM
- Banlieue Blog said...
I bought one of those cushionaire pans for cakes, I really don't like it either. It sounded like a good idea, but it doesn't bake worth a darn.
The cookies look great!
- January 31, 2006 11:14 AM
- Nic said...
I found Phil's comment to be interesting, as I never really thought that cookies could be out of place in the office, though any cookie that could possibly be described as elegant could qualify.
- January 31, 2006 11:44 PM
- Cathy said...
Hi Ivonne - thank you!
Hi Reid - they are, they are! You should try them - they have so much butter and cinnamon I was thinking when I was eating one that was still warm that they taste sort of cinnamon toast (with lemon glaze of course!)
Hi Melissa - I was afraid I'd have people piping up to say how much they love those pans - glad I'm not alone!
Hi Nic - I'll have to ask him what he was saying. I think it was just a clever/nice way of saying the cookies were better than average, or as he said earlier in the comment, "elegant". I could be wrong though!
- February 01, 2006 11:17 PM
- Meena said...
OOhhh...this looks good! first time here and I love it! Will keep coming back often!
- February 02, 2006 4:58 PM
- Cathy said...
Hi Meena - welcome and thank you!
- February 02, 2006 7:40 PM
I always serve these at an afternoon tea party. They are easy to make and quite swank. The perfect accompaniment to a cup of tea or coffee for that matter.
Pie Susan
- March 09, 2006 10:13 PM
I love cushionaire pans!!!
- June 14, 2006 11:20 PM


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The question took me by surprise. I was sitting in a noisy Boston café with two biochemists who were having a straight-faced conversation about putting together a budget to create synthetic life-forms. Next to me was Jack Szostak of Harvard Medical School, and across the table was Steven Benner, who had flown up from the University of Florida to pay Szostak a visit. The conversation was thrumming along, touching on the efficiencies of chemical reactions and the like, when Benner abruptly turned to me and asked, "How much do you think it would cost to create a self-replicating organism capable of Darwinian evolution?"
The question was not "Will we ever create life?" but simply how much money creating life would cost. "Twenty million dollars," I said, choosing the number completely at random.
Benner nodded. "That's what Jack says."
Szostak, whose large glasses and round face make him look like an affable owl, had been letting Benner do most of the talking. Now he smiled, nodded with a slow blink, and said, "Sounds right."
Sounds right? As we strolled back to Szostak's lab, past the long lines of idling ambulettes parked by the Massachusetts General Hospital emergency room, I did some calculations in my head. Sequencing the human genome cost roughly $500 million, and essentially all that scientists had to show for the money was a long string of letters that make up human DNA. By contrast, for less money than a middling movie makes in a weekend, Szostak hopes to transform chemicals into a single-celled organism that will grow, divide, and evolve—and soon. "I think it's conceivable it could be done in as little as three years," he said. "The number of steps that might be real potential roadblocks has declined almost to zero."
What's more, Szostak's goal is not just to create life from scratch. His ultimate objective is bigger: Find out how life began on Earth. The fossil record and modern genetic analysis suggest that humans and all other living species are descended from bacteria-like microbes that first appeared about 4 billion years ago. But bacteria, appearances notwithstanding, are very complex. They can be packed with thousands of genes, along with proteins and other molecules, working together in an intricate struggle to stay alive. Most scientists agree that such DNA-based life probably emerged from a much simpler life-form that no longer exists on Earth. Szostak wants to figure out what that first life-form was by building it (or something close to it) in his lab.
Szostak, 51, embarked on this quest to re-create the ancestor of us all because he was bored with yeast. After years of studying yeast genes in search of insights into how human DNA works, he was looking for a challenge. He found it two decades ago after a spectacular discovery upended conventional wisdom about ribonucleic acid, or RNA, one of the fundamental building blocks of life.
Biochemists once viewed RNA as a lowly cellular messenger. Genes, made of double-stranded DNA, contain information for making proteins. This genetic code is embodied in long strings of chemical compounds called nucleotides and is copied onto RNA molecules, which then get shipped to ribosomes, biochemical factories where protein molecules are manufactured. Once completed, proteins curl up into complex shapes that let them do the actual work of life. Some proteins give an organism's body its structure, whether in the cell's internal skeleton or in a strand of hair. Other proteins, known as enzymes, can grab other proteins, cut them apart, or weld them to other proteins. DNA depends on enzymes to make new copies of its code as well as to translate it into RNA.
In the early 1980s Tom Cech, then a young biologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, uncovered evidence that RNA does more than simply relay messages from DNA to proteins. In an experiment that earned him a Nobel Prize, he found that a single-celled creature named Tetrahymena possessed some RNA molecules that could act like simple enzymes. These molecules, which came to be known as ribozymes, twisted into a complicated snarl that allowed them to hack themselves apart. In other words, RNA could carry information like DNA and carry out biochemistry the way proteins do.
The discovery of ribozymes not only changed our understanding of how life works today, but it also offered insights into the origin of life itself. Scientists believe that life on Earth emerged from carbon compounds and other simple chemicals. But it has long been a mystery how those raw materials were transformed into DNA. After all, DNA can't survive without proteins. So the question has been: What came before DNA?
RNA could be the answer. Watching ribozymes at work revealed how primordial RNA could store genetic information and act like an enyzme. In theory, simple RNA-based life-forms could have spread and evolved for millions of years. Perhaps they eventually evolved the ability to assemble proteins as well as build DNA molecules. Because DNA and proteins did their jobs better than RNA, maybe they eventually took over these tasks.
Szostak saw in this theory a calling. "I thought, I can figure out something different to do, where we could contribute something," he says. In a world before DNA, RNA molecules would have had to be a lot more accomplished than the Tetrahymena ribozyme. Most important of all, RNA would have to function as an enzyme (known as a replicase) that could replicate other RNA molecules. So Szostak began to tinker with RNA molecules from Tetrahymena and other organisms to see if he could make one.
In 1991 he and graduate students Jennifer Doudna and Rachel Green succeeded in making a crude prototype. They created a molecule that could grab shorter chunks of RNA and make copies of them. It was a remarkable achievement, but Szostak knew it was only a small step toward something that could accurately be called alive.
Enzymes in living cells can make duplicate RNA sequences one nucleotide at a time. Szostak's ribozyme could only piece together chains of RNA, each of which was several nucleotides long. And his new molecule was grievously sloppy, making regular copying errors. In a single generation, it could turn a life-sustaining genetic code into sheer gibberish. To create a better molecule, Szostak decided to turn to the father of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, for inspiration: "We realized that if we were really going to have a chance to have an RNA replicase, we were going to have to evolve it."
For many years biologists have been able to witness evolutionary change in the laboratory by studying organisms such as fruit flies or bacteria. Using that research as a guide, Szostak and his students began building a system to allow RNA molecules to evolve as well. Evolution produces new adaptations through cycles of mutation and natural selection. Szostak started an evolutionary cycle by randomly stringing together nucleotides to create trillions of RNA molecules. Then he and his students gave the molecules a very basic task to perform: latching onto another molecule. Typically, only a few of these first-generation RNAs could do the job—and needed a long time to fumble around until they could grab the molecule. Szostak's team extracted the winners and made trillions of new copies, allowing some random mutations to creep in along the way. Then they set the new generation on the same task and picked out the ones that did the job fastest.
In each experiment, Szostak and his students repeated the process dozens of times. In the end they were left with RNAs that were exquisitely well adapted to the job at hand. Szostak named these evolved RNAs aptamers, which means "parts that fit."And fit they did. Aptamers turned out to be capable of performing an extraordinary range of tasks. Some aptamers can bind to a specific virus, and others can grab certain kinds of cells or attach themselves to vitamins.
Aptamers were just the beginning. Unlike aptamers, which are capable only of sticking to something else, ribozymes can change the structure of other molecules. So Szostak then adapted the same process to evolving specialized ribozymes. Some can cut DNA apart, and others can put it back together. But of all the ribozymes that now exist, the ones that fascinate Szostak most are the ones that can do what his handmade RNAs couldn't do: make new RNA.
The best thing out there, says Szostak, is a molecule that had its origins in his laboratory. In 1993 David Bartel, then a graduate student with Szostak, produced a ribozyme that could join another piece of RNA to itself. In subsequent work at the Whitehead Institute and MIT, Bartel modified this type of ribozyme through tinkering and evolution. By 2001 he and his coworkers had something much closer to a full-blown replicase. The ribozyme could grab an RNA molecule that would act as a template. It would then use the template as a guide for adding nucleotides one at a time onto an RNA fragment. In total, the ribozyme could add on 14 nucleotides, with an accuracy of roughly 97 percent.
Today both Bartel and Szostak keep students and postdocs busy in their labs evolving improved ribozymes that can build longer copies. "What you really want is something that can go to 100 or 200 nucleotides and go completely every time," says Szostak. That's a big jump from what's available today and perhaps the biggest one still left before anyone can claim to synthesize life. But it's not much bigger than what has already been accomplished. "It's getting really close," says Szostak. "We don't have to worry about whether it's possible. We know it exists. Now we ask how we can tweak it to make it better or simpler."
Szostak's work with synthetic aptamers and ribozymes has convinced him that RNA could have once dominated the world. Meanwhile, other researchers have found evidence supporting the hypothesis in living cells. It turns out that RNA is far more versatile than scientists once thought. Last March, for example, biochemist Ronald Breaker at Yale University and his colleagues discovered that some RNAs self-destruct before they can be copied into a protein if they grab onto a certain molecule. Other RNAs, he found, work the other way: Only if they grab a certain molecule can they act as a template for a protein. These "riboswitches," as Breaker calls them, are apparently essential to the workings of the cell. "The roles of RNA in the cell have expanded beyond what anyone imagined," says Szostak. "Who knows what else is lurking in there?"
The best proof that life got its start as an RNA-based organism would be to create one. But for all the advances to date, there's still plenty of work left to do before such a creature comes to life. A handful of ribozymes in a beaker—no matter how accomplished they may be—simply doesn't make the cut. It's as if Szostak wanted to prove that a car can exist; at this point, he's got brake pads, a steering wheel, and a lot of other parts strewn across a yard. Now he's got to get the pieces to work together.
The simplest way is to put the pieces in a container. All organisms alive today keep their DNA, RNA, and proteins together inside cell membranes. These oily bubbles prevent big molecules from getting out while letting smaller food molecules in. Today's membranes are complex constructions, built by a carefully choreographed crew of enzymes. Their surfaces are studded with sophisticated channels that carefully regulate what goes in and out of the cell. And as the cell grows, the enzymes expand the membrane as well; when the cell divides, enzymes push apart the membrane and its contents into two new cells.
All this takes lots of genetic guidance. A simple organism with only a sliver of RNA couldn't possibly build such a complicated container for itself. So four years ago, Szostak decided to expand his research on the RNA world: He set out to find a simple way to enclose his ribozymes.
Do Other Corners of the Universe Harbor Life Without DNA?
The hunt for extraterrestrial life is heating up. In a decade, NASA hopes to launch a network of space-based telescopes that will be able to pinpoint Earth-like planets in other solar systems and see whether life has altered their atmosphere in the same way it has here on Earth—flooding it with oxygen, for example. Closer to home, scientists are designing devices that could be deployed on Mars or Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, to detect microbial organisms. But it's possible that even if extraterrestrial life exists, none of these searches will find it. That's because everyone is trying to look for life in space that is like life on Earth. If life did emerge independently on some other planet or moon, it might be radically different, down to its very molecular basis.
All living organisms on Earth use DNA, but there may be other molecules that can do the job as well. For several years now, scientists have been learning how to attach the four nucleotides of our genetic alphabet to new backbones. Two kinds of artificial molecules—known as PNA and TNA—have proven particularly promising. Astrobiologists are paying a lot of attention to Harvard biochemist Jack Szostak's efforts to produce a self-replicating RNA molecule. If Szostak and his colleagues succeed, they will have created the first self-sustaining life that does not depend on DNA. Of course, RNA is not profoundly different from DNA (it's a single-stranded variation). But a self-replicating RNA molecule would open the door to new ways of thinking about life elsewhere in the universe.
Two new members of his lab, Martin Hanczyc and Shelley Fujikawa, were willing to take on the challenge. They began by experimenting with fatty acids. These molecules, which make up the bulk of cell membranes, were likely to have been floating in the prebiological oceans of Earth. A number of nonbiological reactions can give rise to fatty acids; they've even been found in meteorites. Fatty acids also have the fortunate habit of being naturally attracted to one another, forming sheets that eventually curl in on themselves and create bubbles.
Hanczyc and Fujikawa began studying the bubbles, known as vesicles, to see if they could grow and divide like cell membranes without the help of a lot of cellular machinery. In the 1990s Italian chemist Pier Luigi Luisi figured out how to make vesicles grow by adding loose fatty acids to their solution; gradually, some of the molecules slipped into the vesicles and expanded them. Hanczyc and Fujikawa spent three years perfecting the process to make it more efficient. "Right now, 90 percent of the material we add gets incorporated into the vesicles we already have," says Hanczyc.
Once Szostak's team proved that vesicles can grow, the challenge was getting them to divide. The researchers discovered a simple solution. They poured a solution of vesicles into a syringe and then squeezed it through high-tech polycarbonate filters. As the vesicles were forced through the 100-nanometer-wide pores, many of them were stretched out and pinched off to form into smaller vesicles, thanks to the natural attraction of fatty acids to each other.
Without any help from enzymes, vesicles could grow and divide and grow again. And they did so under laboratory conditions that more or less mimicked some of the conditions on early Earth. Instead of squeezing through polycarbonate filters, for example, primordial vesicle-laden water might have squeezed through the pores of rocks around hydrothermal vents.
One afternoon in the summer of 2002, Szostak was sitting in his office when Hanczyc and Fujikawa walked in with a vial of murky liquid. His students had added a kind of clay known as montmorillonite to their solution of fatty acids. Somehow the clay sped up the rate of vesicle formation 100-fold. "We spent years working on getting the growth and division stuff to work. That was a pain," says Hanczyc. "But the clay worked the first time."
Clay had already proved to be potentially important in the origin of life. In the 1990s biochemist James Ferris of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute showed that montmorillonite can help create RNA. When he poured nucleotides onto the surface of the clay, the montmorillonite grabbed the compounds, and neighboring nucleotides fused together. Over time, as many as 50 nucleotides joined together spontaneously into a single RNA molecule. The RNA world might have been born in clay, Ferris argued, perhaps the clay that coated the ocean floor around hydrothermal vents.
"The thing that's interesting is that there's this one mineral that can get RNA precursors to assemble into RNA and membrane precursors to assemble into membranes," says Szostak. "I think that's really remarkable."
As Hanczyc and Fujikawa analyzed their new vesicles, they made an even more remarkable discovery. Some of the grains of montmorillonite actually wound up inside the vesicles. Their next step was obvious. "It was very straightforward," says Hanczyc. "You just mix the RNA with clay, and mix it with the fatty acids, and voilà, you have RNA on the clay particles inside the vesicles."
Here was one possible way in which the pieces of the RNA world might have come together in cells that could grow and divide. The researchers haven't actually created synthetic life, but they may be within striking distance. "We have a pretty clear picture of what we have to do, and none of those steps look impossible," says Szostak.
Szostak's first step is to get a more sophisticated RNA molecule into the vesicles. He and his team hope to prove that a ribozyme can carry out real biochemistry inside a vesicle—even if that biochemistry consists of just cutting another RNA molecule in two. If they can pass this benchmark, their success will raise the odds that they'll be able to make a replicase work inside the vesicles. "Once we have a real replicating RNA system and a real replicating vesicle system, we can put them together and really watch this system start to evolve," Szostak predicts. "If the adaptive process is fast enough, it will be really fun to see how this system starts to become more complex."
Watching the evolution of RNA-based organisms could tell scientists how life got its start on Earth. At the same time, it could alter the way scientists look for life on other planets and moons. The current strategy of astrobiologists is to look for signs of DNA-based life. That's logical because DNA-based life is the only sort we know actually exists and the only sort scientists can study. But just because DNA-based life is the only sort on Earth today doesn't mean it's the only kind in the universe. Creating RNA-based life would show that alternatives are possible. "Once there's one example of a lab system that's evolving by itself, then the challenge is to build systems that can evolve under different conditions," says Szostak. "Could we design cells that grow in environments without water?" Beyond Earth, liquid water seems to be rare. The most common liquid in the solar system is high-pressure liquid hydrogen in the giant gaseous planets Jupiter and Saturn. Could life exist there as well?
As Szostak and other scientists move closer to making new life, they inspire a lot of hand-wringing. Ethicists, philosophers, and theologians have weighed in. Environmentalists have warned of a Pandora's box waiting to be opened. When asked about these issues, Szostak—understated as always—blinks his eyes slowly and gives a slight shrug. "This thing will basically have no biochemistry," he says. "It won't be able to live outside the lab."
Nonetheless, Szostak suggests that the discoveries made by his research team could someday become a source of new kinds of biotechnology. There are already some companies dedicated to bringing ribozymes from the laboratory to the commercial world, with potential applications as sensitive sensors of biowarfare germs or as medical diagnostic tests. Other ribozymes have shown promise in fighting cancer, heart disease, and HIV. RNA organisms could evolve new ribozymes as well and also produce them in bulk as they multiplied. "Here we have a simple replicating nanosystem," says Szostak. "Why not direct it to do useful things?"
That prospect lends a profound irony to Szostak's quest. In trying to re-create the oldest life on Earth, he may end up spawning something entirely new. "There will probably be things to do with this system that we can't even think of yet," he says.


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Rooting Out Redundancy in Neo4j
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So, for the last 2 months we've been working diligently, trying to create the 1.5 release of Neo4j. While on the surface it may look like little has changed, under the hood a huge amount of work has gone into a far more stable and usable HA implementation and rewriting the property storage layer to use far less disk space while maintaining all its features and providing a speed boost at the same time. In this post I will deal exclusively with the latter.
Departing from the old model: A new way to store things
So far, the properties were stored on disk in a doubly linked list, where each of its nodes contained some necessary administrative/structural overhead and the actual property data. More specifically, the layout was:
byte 0 : 4 high bits of previous pointer, inUse flag byte 1 : unused< byte 2 : 4 high bits of next pointer bytes 3-4 : property type bytes 5-8 : property index bytes 9-12 : previous pointer 32 low bits bytes 13-16 : next pointer 32 low bits bytes 17-24 : property data
The last 8 bytes where the value stored, enough to accommodate all primitive values, a short string or a pointer to the dynamic store, where a dynamic record chain would store a long string, an array of primitives or String[].
There is some waste here, in part because the full 8 bytes are used in the (rare) cases of storing doubles and longs or for short strings but mostly because this pointers are repeated for each property, making the impact of the structural overhead felt. On the flip side, the Short String optimization was a great success, proving the value in inlining more property types. So we decided to highlight the good parts and lowlight the bad, ending up with a PropertyRecord structure that is no longer equivalent to one property but acts as a container for a variable number of variable length properties. The current layout is:
byte 0 : 4 high bits of previous, 4 high bits of next pointers bytes 1-4 : previous property record bytes 5-8 : next property record bytes 9-40 : payload
Yes, that is correct, no inUse flag, explained by the payload structure.
First, let's call the 4 8-byte-blocks in payload just blocks, to have a simple name for them. Each of these blocks is used in various ways, depending on the property data type. Starting off, every property needs to have the property index and the property type. These are common and always present, with the property index taking up the first 3 bytes of the block and the type taking up the 4 high bits of the 4th byte. Now, after that comes the property value. If it is a primitive that fits in 4 bytes, then the 4 low bits of the 4th byte are skipped and the remaining 4 bytes of the block are used to store the value and we are done. When storing a pointer into the DynamicStore for non-short strings and for arrays, the 36 bits required find home to the second half of the 4th byte and the low order 4 bytes. This means that each PropertyRecord can store up to 4 such properties - a huge saving in space.
For longs and doubles which require 8 bytes, the 4 1/2 trailing bytes are skipped and instead the next block is used as a whole to store the value. This leads to some waste but it is still more efficient than the previous method and it is a relatively rare use case.
What remains is ShortStrings and the brand new ShortArray. Since we saved all that space and I/O calls with ShortString, why not expand on the idea? We now have LongerShortString, which is like ShortString but on crack. It operates on the same principle - it scans a string, sees if it falls within an encoding, encodes it and stores a header with the length and the encoding table id and then the actual data, encoded in longs that take up blocks right after the property info. If it doesn't fit in the max of 3 1/2 blocks of a property record, it is instead encoded as UTF8 and stored in the DynamicStringStore. A similar idea is applied to arrays. When passed a primitive array we first determine the minimum number of bits required to store its values, effectively shaving off all the leftmost zeros we can while keeping all array members the same size. This means that if we are asked to store new int[] {1,2,3,4,5}, the entries will take up not 32 but 3 bits each. boolean[] for example costs 1 bit per entry. Obviously, mixing in even a single negative value gives immediately a maximum number of bits per entry. So, to store an array we first determine this number and then the header becomes:
4 bits, an enum value identifying the primitive type
6 bits, the length of the array
6 bits, the number of bits per item
and then follow the "bit shaved" array entries. The same algo is used for dynamic arrays as well, but the length is actualy stored in the length field of the dynamic record (as usual), not the ShortArray header and we just keep how many bits of the last byte are used. That, along with the bits per entry number are enough to reconstruct the value. Of course, in this case as well, if the array does not fit in the PropertyRecord even after this "compression", it is stored in the DynamicArrayStore as usual, though now in its bit-shaved form as byte[], meaning less DynamicRecords are used so less waste. This comes at the price of reconstructing the array when reading it in, but the reduced I/O more than makes up for it. A more exact description of the new ShortString, including all the ShortString classes and size limits, as well as the new ShortArray, is available in the manual.
What about the mystery of the missing inUse flag? Well, that is a combination of 2 things. One is that the blocks are marked individually as in use or not, since the API allows for a property to be deleted, and now a property is no longer a record but a collection of blocks. So we folded that into the property type, with 0 signifying not in use. The second is that the blocks are written out defragmented on disk, meaning that if from 3 properties in a record we delete the middle one (set its type to deleted), then only the remaining two will be written. This leads to a simple method of marking "no more properties in this record" by writing a 0 for the 4th byte of the first not-used block (the implementation just writes a whole long). A corollary of this is that a property record that has the 4th byte of the first block 0 is actually not used.
Code walkthrough
I was going to outline the changes/additions at a source code level here, but this post is getting too long. Besides, from the above the code becomes straightforward to follow. If you have any questions, suggestions or would like to small talk about the implementation, drop by our mailing list.
Just a tweaking note here - the logic of when and how allocation of blocks happens and the defragmentation strategy is held in WriteTransaction. Go ahead and experiment with what best suites your use case - feedback on these code paths will be greeted with much rejoice!
Out with the old, in with the new: Migrating the store
Unlike the 4+ billion changes for extended address space changes a while ago, this store upgrade cannot happen in place over an old database. We need to do a true migration, meaning recreating the store from scratch and replacing your existing data files with the new ones. This process is extremely safe: It never writes in your existing data files, it is crash resistant (so if it fails mid-way nothing bad happens) and keeps a backup of your data (under upgrade-backup/ in the database directory). However, better safe than sorry, so it is considered good practice to keep an independent backup of your data.
The store migration process is relatively straightforward - it goes over the node and relationship stores, copying them over as they are and, for each primitive, it reads in the property chains, transforms them in the new format and stores them. That has the side benefit of compacting the property store, skipping over deleted entries, so you should notice a significant reduction in disk usage if you happen to delete lots of properties and not restart often.
All the migration code is bundled in the kernel source in package org.neo4j.kernel.impl.storemigration and can be run both as a standalone tool and as part of normal startup - so no matter if you use the server scripts or just the kernel library, just set the config option "allow_store_upgrade"="true" and you are set to go.
Onwards and upwards
There are more stuff in this release that can fit in a blog post. Long discussions in the community have ended up providing inspiration for substantial changes which not only provide robustness in the current offering but pave the way for more exciting features to come. So, maybe "Boden Bord" is not filled to the brim with obvious new features, but rest assured, we are in for a wild next year.
Thank you for making Neo4j what it is.
Published at DZone with permission of Chris Gioran. See the original article here.
Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.


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I have several years of Airliners magazines in excellent condition. As I recall,they date from approximately 1970 to 1985. As some of you have said,I looked forward to each issue in the mailbox when I first subscribed. However,I lost interest in the magazine when they changed their content.
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