King Holiday Essay —  2025 January 16
     Download a PDF of Vern's 2-page summary of the genius of the spiritual approach of Martin Luther King Jr by clicking this link.
     You can also read the Letter from a Birmingham Jail here.
     Bill Tammeus writes about King's visits to Kansas City here.
     Vern writes:

To be a good citizen, it is necessary to be warmhearted, but it is also necessary to master the disciplines, methods and techniques required to live well together: how to listen well, how to ask for and offer forgiveness, how not to misunderstand one another, how to converse in a way that reduces inequalities of respect. In a society with so much loneliness and distrust, we are failing at these social and moral disciplines.
     Similarly, to create social change, it is necessary to have good intentions, but it is also necessary to master the disciplines and techniques of effective social action. The people in the civil rights organizations in the 1950s and ’60s spent a lot of time rigorously thinking about which methods would work and which would backfire. Thurman’s emphasis on methodological rigor and technique influenced King’s brilliant and often counterintuitive principles of nonviolent resistance:

     1. It is not a method for cowards. It is active nonviolent resistance to evil.
     2. It seeks not to defeat or humiliate the opponent but to win his friendship and understanding in order to move toward a beloved community.
     3. The attack is directed against the forces of evil rather than against the people who happen to be doing the evil.
     4. One must have a willingness to accept suffering without retaliation, to accept blows from an opponent without striking back. Unearned suffering is redemptive.
     5. It avoids not only external physical violence but also internal violence of the spirit. It is a refusal to hate.
     6. Nonviolent resistance is based on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice. It has a deep faith in the future.

There are obviously times when this nonviolent strategy is inappropriate — in a state of anarchy or war, when the very existence of your people is under threat. But these techniques did work in Birmingham, Selma, Chicago and beyond. Most important, they altered people’s souls, fortifying the state of consciousness of the disinherited, undermining the state of consciousness of the dominators and elevating the consciousness of those who looked on in awe and admiration.
     These thoughtful techniques are a long way from the tit-for-tat crudities that now often pass for public discourse, the tantrums of the merchants of rage, the 57 percent of Republicans and the 41 percent of Democrats who regard people in the other party as their enemies.
     As many have noted, we’re not going to solve our problems at the same level of consciousness on which we created them. If the national consciousness, the state of our national soul, is to repair, it will be because people begin to think as deeply as Thurman did and begin to be intolerant of the immoralities of their own side.

● In the Primal faiths we find ecological awe: nature is respected more than controlled; nature is a process which includes us, not a product external to us to be used or disposed of. Our proper attitude toward nature is wonder, not consumption. Our lives depend on nature.

● In Asian religions the awe of personhood is clear when our actions proceed spontaneously and responsibly from duty and compassion, without ultimate attachment to their results.

● In Monotheistic traditions, the awesome work of God is manifest in history’s flow toward justice when peoples are governed less by profit and more by the covenant of service. Our lives depend on community.

Vern Barnet founded the Council in 1989 as a program of CRES and is Council Convener Emeritus. The Council newsletter has published his brief notes about three milestones in the early history of the Council.

 
The Council's ancestry, in brief: the 1893 Chicago Parliament of World Religions; the interfaith gathering in Assisi, Italy, convened by Pope John Paul II, the first such gathering in North America since the 1893 Parliament, the "North American Assisi" held in Wichita, KS (Vern was on the planning committee), and with some from the Kansas City area and others who had been drawn into interfaith relations through CRES, the hosting organization, the members of 12 different faith traditions began their work to honor and learn from one another and encourage the community to celebrate the rich diversity available in the Kansas City area.

#NYTimes1988

SEVEN DAYS 

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The themes help us focus on kindness in seven different ways, on seven different days.
LOVE DISCOVER OTHERS CONNECT YOU GO ONWARD

The SevenDays website gives you
the SevenDays story (with the horrific past
on April 14, 2014), the present, and the future,

the SevenDays events this year, how to get involved, resources, and an opportunity to shop and various sponsorship opportunities.

 

CRES is glad to have been involved from the very first year with an interfaith panel, and admires the folks and the organization involved for turning tragedy into continuing community benefit by advancing understanding and relationships.

#250502

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#250515

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      #Aporia

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From Aporia to Praise: TO BE SCHEDULED (postponed from 2020 May 25) A very, very late observance of the 50th anniversary of Vern Barnet's ordination Aporia: "impasse, puzzlement, doubt."

 

      Vern offers his conclusions from over 50 years of experience and study: in a troubled world, what paths lie forward? and how can one dare offer praise for the intertwined mix of the horror and the beauty of existence?

* Doing theology is less like mathematics and more like expounding why you love someone.
* My passion for "world religions" in the context of the crises of secularism.
* The mystic's vision (amor fati--love of fate) and the public expression in worship.

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#250629

Visit Sacred Citizenship for a 2-page PDF version of our June, 2001 Many Paths essay with themes of loyalty, freedom, greatness. Does this essay still work after September that year, and as we are continuing to come to a fuller appreciation of our history, from before 1619 to the present disfunction of much of government, local, state, federal -- as well as international agreements?

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Oration Delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester, NY by Frederick Douglass July 5th, 1852 Rochester: Lee, Mann & Co., 1852 [Frederick Douglass, 1817/1818--1895] "The 4th of July Address, delivered [on the 5th] in Corinthian Hall, by Frederick Douglass, is published on good paper, and makes a neat pamphlet of forty pages. The 'Address' may be had at this office, price ten cents, a single copy, or six dollars per hundred."   {Visit oration for the text.}

     As an Appreciative Inquiry Coach, David has assisted individuals and groups in a variety of settings. These included the Department of Health and Human Services, Emergency Medicine, Head Start, and Community Action Agencies. He has provided training in Team Building and Appreciative Supervision in 39 states and Europe.

While the 9/11 attacks opened new gates of hell, the way our government has responded has brought us inside hell's domain. The smoke from that day, the acrid fumes, amplified into war, brings us purblind to the charred and hobbled Body Politic. How do we understand what has happened? How do we move forward? And what of other international conflicts, especially the war of Russia against Ukraine?

One way of understanding what happened, and is still happening, is by looking at the metaphors we use to explain things and which shape our responses.

1. Before 9/11, terrorism had been dealt with as a CRIME, internationally and at home. The violation of life and property in an otherwise orderly society makes the terrorist an especially despised outlaw. We employ a legal system to assure justice by punishing the criminal and removing the criminal from society. International courts have done the same.

2. But since September 11 we have used a WAR metaphor. Of course the metaphor is hardly new. We love war. We have fought the war against poverty and the war against drugs, though it is hard for us to admit defeat, even though Vietnam and Afghanistan are history now. We still fight the war against cancer, against crime, against . . . you name it.

But a war against terrorism was new. The metaphor had power because we struggled not just against isolated attack but against an organized force seeking not just advantage through harm of a target but rather destruction of a government or civilization. Though we ourselves use violence, we assumed our own righteousness would bring us victory over evil.

Both of the metaphors of crime and war too easily commend themselves because they are simple, and rest on the assumption that we are wholly good — and our opponents are completely evil.

3. A third metaphor might come closer to the complexity of the situation: DISEASE. Here the metaphor suggests not separate, competing powers but of all humanity as a sick body, within the organs of communities, cities, and nations, afflicted in various ways, degrading or sustaining each other in different degrees, infected with individuals and groups poisoned (using Buddhist language) with greed, fear, and ignorance. Now, with COVID, we are learning that, as Martin Luther King said, “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Is the disease metaphor give us any insights into the war of Russia against Ukraine? I think this metaphor gives us an essential insight into debilitated world governance, enfeebled by the failure to place armaments under international control requiring some body (a strengthened United Nations) to manage conflict between states when states cannot resolve problems peacefully. One way of looking at this situation, using the disease metaphor, is the war as an auto-immune disease of the world body; Russia, which benefits from a peaceful world order, attacks that very order, and the body must address this illness by sending resources to return to homeostasis. Just as chemotherapy, surgery, radiation, and other cures, can destroy healthy cells, so the body's response to Russian aggression requires the short-term sacrifice of some otherwise healthy parts for long-term health. Whether the expansion of NATO will inspire a true government of all nations is very unclear, and whether the many increasingly complex forces of civilization lead to planetary senescence and death, or to universal peace

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Added after watching the 2023  Political Conventions:
     I was bothered by the use of "fight" and I think a metaphor of healing would have been far better: a fight suggests two combatants contesting over a prize, the old GOP-DEM political exercise. But "healing" the political situation implies we are sick; it frames the nature of the problem not in terms of "winning" but in terms of a restoration of well-being.
Vern

#250911 

#250921

 #ThgvgSunday

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TO BE UPDATED
2026 November   Sunday 4-6 pm
INTERFAITH THANKSGIVING GATHERING
“Promoting Interfaith Peace, Renewal and Regrowth”  
The 2026 announcement pending
  

The 2024 recipient of the
Vern Barnet Interfaith Service Award
is Teresa Albright, Pastoral Associate
at Visitation Parish, a Catholic Community.

This year's gathering is planned and hosted by
the Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council,
the Heartland Alliance of Divine Love,
and the Kansas City Pipe Circle.

For over 25 years Teresa's academic and personal focus has been religious literacy, interfaith dialogue, and peacemaking. She has served on nearly a dozen interfaith commissions, and is a vowed Lay Associate of the Congregation of Notre Dame de Sion. Since July, 2019, she has been the KCSJ Diocesan Ecumenical Officer and Chair of the Ecumenical/Interreligious Commission, advancing the work of the past ecumenical officers, now-Abbot Primate Gregory Polan and Father Paul Turner, while incorporating her own interests and experiences. She has a Master of Arts degree in Comparative Theology. She was at Westminster College to work on the Central Missouri Interfaith Initiative, and later for the Diocese of Jefferson City as a curriculum writer in the Office of Religious Education. She applies her training and leadership skills to facilitate unity and friendship among Catholics, non-Catholic Christians, Jewish, Hindu, Muslims, Buddhist, and Tribal faith-filled peoples. Read more about this year's honoree's work in Houston and elsewhere here.

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An annual Interfaith Thanksgiving Sunday observance was sponsored by CRES
for 25 years, 1985-2009. The KC Interfaith Council was a program of CRES,
1989-2004. We are grateful to the current sponsors for perpetuating
a recognition of the place of gratitude in every faith.
   

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WEDDINGS of all kinds click for information We can provide a customized ceremony. We regularly work with the great folks at Pilgrim Chapel and are happy to serve at any venue.  THANKS to Robert and Shye Reynolds, a CRES fund to assist couples with fees for weddings  has been established, to celebrate their marriage June 19, 2002, on the occasion of their thirteenth anniverary.

FORTHCOMING BOOKS  see also our publications page in progress: KC Star, Many Paths columns and fresh essays: The Three Families of Faith and the Three Crises of Secularism      Many have asked for a compilation of columns Vern wrote for the KC Star, 1994-2012,  and the essays fatured in Many Paths. Here are tentative chapter headings for the selections:       ? The Three Families of Faith ? Faith and the Arts  ? Science and Religion  ? Teachers of the Spirit ? Ritual and Worship ? Religion and Public Policy ? Specific Faiths (Buddhism, Islam, etc) ? Comparative topics (reincarnation, gods, water, prophets, etc) ? How the column began and ended

OTHER  PROGRAMS and SERVICES If you would like to engage Vern  or another member  of the CRES staff for a speech, consultation, a wedding, a baptism, or other work with your organization  or personally,  please visit  www.cres.org/work/services.htmor email vern@cres.org