The news this week about the Earth’s future has been, for the most part, grim.

On Monday, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its first analysis of climate science in nearly a decade, declaring its findings a “code red for humanity.” The group, made up of hundreds of international scientists reviewing tens of thousands of published reports, found that this past decade was the hottest in 125,000 years. Glaciers are melting faster than at any time in the past 2,000 years, atmospheric levels of carbon are the highest in at least 2 million years, and the rate of ocean level rise has nearly doubled since 2006, the scientists wrote.

News organizations, which had been anticipating the dire forecast, echoed the U.N.’s alarm. “Nowhere to run,” declared The Associated Press. “A Hotter Future Is Certain,” said The New York Times. “No good news here,” wrote the Agence France-Presse.

But for those whose job it is to raise awareness about climate change, there was another crucial point in the IPCC report: There is still time to do something about climate change.

That’s a message scientists have been increasingly trying to communicate as the public discourse shifts from a debate over whether climate change is happening toward a conversation about what to do about it.

For years, explains Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and co-founder of the blog RealClimate, the main effort around climate change communication was to convince doubters that the Earth was, indeed, getting warmer. But over the past decade, as the real-time effects of climate change have become more apparent, the number of climate change deniers in the United States has decreased, and the number of individuals alarmed about climate change has skyrocketed. 

According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 72% of the U.S. population in 2020 believed that “global warming is happening,” and the “alarmed” segment of the population grew by more than 50% between 2015 and 2020, from 17% to 26%. 

“We spent a good 20 years trying to convince the inconvincible, trying to use science and reason,” Dr. Schmidt says. “It turns out that things happening to you or people you know is more convincing.”

Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters

People hold League of Conservation Voters signs during a news conference urging action on climate change outside the U.S. Capitol on July 28, 2021.

Finding the right balance in messaging

But this shift has left scientists with a new communications dilemma: how to convey the urgency of climate change without making the situation seem so terrible, or so hopeless, that people disconnect from the problem altogether.

“What we’re trying to avoid is this idea of petrification, where it seems too bad and impossible to overcome,” says Daniel Bresette, executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, a nonprofit education and policy group that works with lawmakers to create climate-smart policies. “There’s a lot we have the ability to do,” he says. “It’s a matter of focusing on the sort of things that we can do to make things better, and avoiding doing things that can make it worse.”

A report like the IPCC’s this week can create significant anxiety, points out Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist at the University of Maine who also hosts the “Warm Regards” podcast about climate change.

“Some recent work shows that some amount of alarm is good and necessary,” she says. “That’s what can get people off of the couch and doing the sorts of things that we need to be doing to make a difference here.”

But there is also a risk that with too much bad news, and not enough guidance about how to respond to it, individuals can begin to feel powerless. 

“That feeling of helplessness can cause people to shut down; it can cause people to disengage,” says Dr. Gill. “What we need is for people to feel some sense of agency so that they can still show up.”

The reaction to climate analyses like the IPCC’s report doesn’t have to be either complete despair or shrug-it-off dismissal, she says. 

“There’s a lot of space between total civilization collapse … and everything is hunky-dory,” Dr. Gill adds.

Yuri Gripas/Reuters/File

Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe speaks during a discussion on the importance of protecting the planet at the South by South Lawn event at the White House, Oct. 3, 2016. She is one of the co-founders of Science Moms, which works with mothers to advocate for climate action.

Focusing on solutions 

That in-between place is important, says Joellen Russell, a professor at the University of Arizona who studies the ocean’s role in climate and who recently co-founded an initiative called Science Moms to motivate other mothers to work for climate action.   

Parents recognize the changing weather, Dr. Russell says. They are, like her, worried about letting their kids go out to play in yet another record-breaking summer heat wave. Many are also increasingly distraught about the climate-altered future their children will inherit if the world does not make changes.

Science Moms, a collaboration of female climate scientists, works to “help them raise their voices and put their outrage where they can make a difference,” Dr. Russell says. 

Mothers, she says, have regularly dug in and demanded social change where it was hard. Now, she says, it’s time for them to act with urgency and demand that everyone – individuals, policymakers, country representatives – moves faster.

This isn’t a pie-in-the-sky approach, she points out. There is evidence that both individual and group action can make an impact on climate change. The United States, she says, has reduced carbon emissions by 20% since 2007.

“There are all these amazing human beings, and companies, making wise decisions to save a buck and save the planet,” she says. “But we need to move faster.”

That is also a takeaway of the IPCC report. 

Actions today, scientists wrote, can mean the difference between the catastrophic effects of 4 degrees of global warming, such as dramatically increased flooding, deadly heat waves, and food shortages, and a still hot, but less devastating, temperature increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius, the target put forth in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

That’s not to say the situation isn’t alarming, says Dr. Schmidt from NASA. It is, and scientists need to convey that reality.  

But now it is also time to personalize the message.

“I give a lot of public talks, and literally the No. 1 question that I’m asked is, ‘What do I do and how do I do it?’” says Dr. Schmidt.

“I say that you, as an individual, wear many hats. You’re a consumer, you’re also a parent, you are a member of a faith community, you go on a march and you go to Congress and you make your voice heard; you talk about it with your friends and family,” he says. “You can influence decisions not just in your household but in your city and state and country; you can elevate your voice enough that you and the others you’ve influenced impact those big decisions that will really make a difference.”

Nathan Bilow/Courtesy of Karen Hoskin

Karen Hoskin, founder and owner of Montanya Distillers in Crested Butte, Colorado, had an especially difficult time hiring this year. She's dealt with worsening labor and housing shortages by spending an estimated $13,000 or more on securing places for her staff to live.

Queen-size bed. Television. Dresser, shelf, and bedside lamps. Karen Hoskin spent one May weekend in Crested Butte loading secondhand furniture into her Toyota pickup. Not for herself – for employees. 

This spring she offered an elaborate hiring incentive. The founder and owner of Montanya Distillers for 13 years says recruiting has never been this hard. “I would put the word out that we were hiring, and there was dead silence,” says Ms. Hoskin, who was so short-staffed on the Fourth of July that she bussed tables herself.

Potential hires couldn’t find – much less afford – a place to live. And since she couldn’t afford to lose them, Ms. Hoskin pivoted. “My job advertisements began to say, ‘Housing offered.’” 

It worked. Since spring she has hired 11 workers and helped six of them secure housing. Ms. Hoskin says she’s backed four leases, paid two security deposits, and covered some staff rent. Three employees live in her garage. Including the furniture, her housing efforts have cost her over $13,000, she estimates.

That help made all the difference for Sophie Bolles, who recently moved with her partner from Denver to Crested Butte to work as a business manager for Ms. Hoskin. Without her boss finding their lodging and paying a security deposit plus first month’s rent, she says, “we wouldn’t be able to work for her.”

Affordable-housing shortages in Colorado mountain towns have long complicated workers’ search for stability, but rising housing costs and pandemic-spurred “mountain migration” have cued a new level of desperation this year. It’s driving officials and employers like Ms. Hoskin to pursue emergency stopgaps as towns debate longer-term solutions.

To Breckenridge Mayor Eric Mamula, the most important part isn’t necessarily economic. 

“It is about living in a community where the people that work here, live here,” says Mr. Mamula, who owns a restaurant and rents to local workers. “A lot of us moved here because, when you go to a coffee shop in the morning, you know everybody.”

Pandemic exacerbates existing housing crunch

While a lack of affordable housing in ski towns dates back decades, so do solutions. It’s common for high-country resorts and other employers to subsidize worker housing as an incentive. 

The Aspen/Pitkin County Housing Authority emerged in the late 1970s to address labor shortages, a model that other Colorado counties have replicated. Considered the first mountain resort housing program in the country, it oversees more than 3,000 deed-restricted housing units – reserved for people employed in the county. But that’s not enough to meet demand, says deputy director Cindy Christensen. And while there are new housing developments on the horizon, that’s no help now.

“We’re usually 100% full,” she says, adding that 50 to 60 people recently expressed interest in one rental property.  

Rising home and rental prices collided with a pandemic influx of residents and visitors, resulting in the current urgency. Mountain migration aided by new remote-work capabilities is partly to blame, as incoming location-neutral workers occupy more inventory. That’s one finding of a report from the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments and Colorado Association of Ski Towns, which surveyed six mountain resort counties about the pandemic’s legacy. The report found that market rents in these areas increased by an “unprecedented” 20% to 40% in 2020. 

Maddie Davis, who lives with two roommates in a double-wide trailer, says she’ll likely have to move out of Steamboat Springs at the end of the year, even though it’s the friendliest place she’s ever lived. Ms. Davis says she recently learned her rent will increase from around $1,800 to $2,500 a month. She’s not willing to pay that, in part because it would make her goal of eventually buying her own home harder to attain.

“I was pretty devastated, because it’s impossible – nearly impossible – to find somewhere to live here,” says Ms. Davis, who works two restaurant jobs and teaches snowboarding in the winter.

Courtesy of Maddie Davis

Steamboat Springs, Colorado, resident Maddie Davis hikes near town with her dog Hank in July 2021. She says she recently learned that her rent will increase from around $1,800 to $2,500 a month, which is making her consider moving out of town.

Paradox of paradise

When it comes to solutions, several high-country housing experts agree it’s impossible to “build your way out.” Expense aside, these resort destinations are surrounded by national forests and rocky peaks.

“The very assets that everybody wants, all the mountains and the woods ... those are impediments, actually, to solutions. Because you can’t build a neighborhood on them,” says Melanie Rees, who’s worked as a housing consultant for three decades and helped produce the recent survey of pandemic impacts on ski towns. Commuting into mountain towns is undesirable for a variety of reasons, she adds, from cost to increased air pollution.

Some areas have embraced emergency actions. Summit County, which includes Breckenridge, proclaimed a workforce housing crisis in June, the same month Crested Butte declared an affordable-housing emergency. The town had one available rental apartment but over 110 job openings, says community development director Troy Russ.

The declaration allowed Crested Butte to expedite certain actions, like bypassing zoning requirements to allow the town to purchase a bed-and-breakfast meant to house up to seven local workers. Workers are also allowed to camp on private property through mid-October. 

“We’re in a very rare moment in time where we literally have nothing available, and we have a number of folks out here” looking for housing, says Mr. Russ. 

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

A storefront in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, displays one of several help-wanted signs seen on Lincoln Avenue on July 17, 2021. Resort towns are grappling with how affordable-housing shortages are limiting options for local workers.

The town is also developing roughly 90 units it hopes will be ready to rent or sell by 2023. The median income for a three-person household in Gunnison County is $71,200, while the average local housing price is around $1.3 million, according to Crested Butte real estate data. The town plans to price the new units between 40% and 200% of the area’s median income.

One strategy recommended by the report would be to increase the number of units with deed restrictions, which limit occupancy to local workers. In Crested Butte, around 25% of housing stock is currently deed-restricted, and around 10% in the Breckenridge area. Breckenridge housing program manager Laurie Best says the town is currently developing a new initiative that would identify additional inventory – even single rooms – available for workers to lease.

“We always say a resort community that doesn’t house its workforce isn’t a community. It’s just a resort,” she says.

Some communities are also pushing back on short-term rentals. On July 19 the Crested Butte Town Council voted for a 12-month moratorium on new licenses for non-primary-residence vacation rentals. Steamboat Springs City Council passed a 90-day pause on new applications for vacation home rentals in June, which it recently extended. Locals in at least two other mountain towns have circulated related petitions.

Supporters of the Steamboat Springs suspension see it as progress toward protecting more units for unhoused locals. Critics say unregulated rentals – the majority of short-term rental stock – deserve more scrutiny. The moratorium is “damaging to our tourism, and it’s damaging to our vacation rental businesses, but we are trying to work through this,” says Robin Craigen, CEO and co-founder of Moving Mountains, a luxury vacation rental management company.

Regardless of the number of vacation rentals, housing consultant Ms. Rees would like to see locals band together to effect state-level changes that would allow for increased taxation of short- and mid-term rental properties. And additional funding will better equip communities in their pursuit of solutions, she says.

“We’ve rarely seen the demand for large, expensive homes get soft in these mountain towns. ... [Affordable housing has] got to be subsidized,” says Ms. Rees. 

Some support may be on the way. In addition to state funding, Colorado plans to direct $500 million of the incoming American Rescue Plan funding toward affordable-housing initiatives, according to Colorado's Department of Local Affairs. For some, setting that priority is progress in and of itself.

At least recognition of the housing crisis has become widespread, says Ms. Rees: “The part-time residents get it; the newcomers understand it’s a problem. ... I’m encouraged that that may also mean that support for solutions will be more widespread than in the past.”

Instead of waiters, America’s tables may need referees.

The restaurant – along with the airplane and grocery store – is becoming the site of angry confrontations between a patience-frayed public and overworked front-line workers, both looking for relief from the pandemic.

• When customers in a burrito joint in central Maine tried to rearrange some tables amid pandemic restrictions and then began to film an employee’s demand to put them back, expletives flew – and the customer was banned.

• In Ohio, a customer complained he couldn’t sit at the bar. When told it was to protect the safety of customers and staff, the man said, “Your safety? This isn’t about your safety at all. I’m sitting here.” The next day, the server quit the industry for good.

• When out-of-control customers made staff cry at a Cape Cod eatery this summer, the owners closed the restaurant for a day to give employees a mental health break.

Such conflicts are rooted, experts say, in a sense of consumer entitlement piqued by pandemic restrictions, and then riven by political discontent. 

Now, as labor shortages and supply chain hiccups only exacerbate shouting matches and even violence, the restaurant industry more broadly is reexamining core values around convenience, hospitality, wages – and even the humanity of the tipping class.

“The fundamental shift and reckoning of the hospitality industry is happening because the pandemic actually changed the perception of those jobs” to something more valued and necessary, says Patricia Campos-Medina, a labor expert at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “The consequences are right there in your neighborhood, your community, the people you see every day.” 

In some ways, the restaurant is providing an up-close lens on broader economic and social upheaval. The place where people seek solace and communion has increasingly become a flashpoint for pent-up frustrations. And as concern rises about the coronavirus delta variant – and businesses and cities pass more mandates, often policed by hourly workers – tensions are rising anew.

The end result? “The customer is always right” refrain has been replaced by a different chorus: “You can’t always get what you want.” 

Even though some 96,000 restaurants have closed due to the pandemic, a rebounding hospitality industry is still understaffed. More than 380,000 jobs were added between June and July – the most of any sector. Some of the personnel shortage may be related to expanded unemployment benefits. But more broadly, experts say, the labor mismatch is a signal of empowerment for a working class that hadn’t seen the federal minimum wage budge since the Great Recession. Now, fast-food chains are offering $15 or more an hour, and neighborhood restaurants are offering signing bonuses and other incentives.

A confluence of relief checks, boosted unemployment benefits, and new opportunities created a situation “similar to the start of World War II when enormous amounts of money poured into new industries and shut down other kinds of work, which is exactly what we have here: a historical opening” for employee empowerment, says Nelson Lichtenstein, director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

As Darron Cardosa, a New York waiter, puts it: “For years, customers have been telling us in the restaurant industry to go get a real job. Guess what? That is what has happened, and now they’re [mad] about it.” 

The blowback in customer service jobs has been at times severe. National park employees have seen a record number of threats from campground visitors this year. A spike in reports on the Aviation Safety Reporting System describe a chaotic workplace, with flight attendants increasingly on the receiving end of abusive tirades.

Last week, the Federal Aviation Administration urged a crackdown on to-go drinks from airport vendors, saying alcohol misuse has played a role in record amounts of airborne strife, the most since the FAA mandated such reporting in 1995.

And Mr. Cardosa’s Facebook page, which sees 1 million visitors a month, is overrun with tales of rude customers and waitstaff using their breaks to cry on the back stairs. 

Mr. Cardosa says the number of complaints have gone through the roof in the past year, ranging from bad tipping to profanity-laced tirades. He says a big reason for people leaving the profession is how they are treated – instead of being appreciated for their hospitality, they have become targets, at least for some lashing out from a greater sense of injustice.

“Customers are going into restaurants looking for something to fail, and that’s not fair for the people busting their butts to give a good dining experience,” he says. “What I keep hearing is that people are losing their minds over the most tiny detail. ... It feels like we have forgotten how to navigate with other human beings.”

“I don’t deserve this”

Joshua Grubbs has noticed a similar phenomenon. The Bowling Green State University psychologist studies entitlement and its impact on society. 

“All of us feel like we have gone through something we don’t deserve: a multiyear period of injustice on a global scale,” says Professor Grubbs. “So people are likely to feel ‘I deserve some happiness, something good, I deserve to enjoy myself.’ Suffering promotes entitlement.” 

But even a small uptick in extreme behavior in public spaces has dramatic implications for everyone around them, he says. 

“That’s just the nature of extreme and dehumanizing behavior, and why that’s frowned on by society,” he adds. “It’s not amenable to having a functioning social world if everybody is being [a jerk] to each other all the time.” 

The situation could lead to deeper changes, says Professor Lichtenstein, co-editor of “Achieving Workers’ Rights in the Global Economy.” 

Among them: A rethinking of 24/7 convenience and a new focus on tipping reforms. Tipping especially plays to the moment, he says, given how the practice is a modern-day iteration of a servile relationship governed more by money than manners.

Restaurant owners have begun addressing those demands, in ways both large and small. For some, that means closing more days, offering paid time off, or just not opening after a busy day or week. A chef on Tybee Island regularly calls off midweek lunches if he senses his staff is getting too stressed. 

A sign on a pizza shop in Atlanta last week said simply, “We’re taking a few days off. We need a nap, y’all!”

“People have to practice patience”

David Basham says he has had about enough.

The Columbus, Ohio, native knows how to treat guests, because he’s a longtime hotel industry employee. But on vacation in early August here on the Georgia coast, he says he has issues with some of his fellow hospitality industry colleagues.

Long waits while tables sit empty. Annoyed glances from staff. A note of censure as they try to uphold public health mandates that Mr. Basham says he frankly finds unconscionable. He says he hasn’t made a scene, though he has come close. He admits that his political leanings infuse a larger frustration that disdainful waitstaff are a taste of what he believes “socialism” looks and feels like.

“What gets me is how so many servers are now, like, ‘Here is how it is going to be. And [too bad] if you don’t like it,’” he says.

But at Lisa’s Legit Burritos, managing owner Ehrin Sherman Simanski says the attitudes are simply the result of rising expectations running headlong into the limits of a laboring class under heavy social and economic strains.

“Frankly, the customer isn’t always right,” says Ms. Sherman Simanski. “I think a main reason why we haven’t struggled to find help is that I tell everybody the day they start: ‘I’ve got your back 100%, no matter what.’”

But as an owner, she says she also bears responsibility for how tensions are resolved, particularly in setting clear expectations for customers and staff.

“People have to learn to practice patience, including us,” she says. “Everybody is just so raw.” 

Indeed, such attitude shifts suggest that pandemic restaurants are becoming economic laboratories, where the ebbs and swells of labor will inform broader societal values.

“What’s interesting to me is there’s an opportunity here beyond wages and flexibility, which is to address: What is the value in being treated like a person?” says Ravi Dhar, director of the Center for Customer Insights at the Yale School of Management, in New Haven, Connecticut.

Dale Venturini and her staff at the Rhode Island Hospitality Association jumped into those issues this year after they began receiving calls from restaurateurs about a scourge of abusive behavior from customers.

Among their solutions: A “Please be kind” poster campaign that has caught on in restaurants around the state. To Ms. Venturini, it is a poignant reminder of a common desire by both staff and customers, heightened by the pandemic: to commune together, and leave elevated.

“One thing you don’t want to take away from us as an industry is our main job: to build community,” says Ms. Venturini, the association’s president and CEO.

To Mr. Cardosa, the New York waiter, the job is personal: “To know I was a part of something, that I was able to make that day even a little bit better for [somebody], it gives you a sense of accomplishment that translates into the rest of your life, and to how we treat people.”

Author, educator, and broadcaster Alvin Hall is not easily pigeonholed. His work ranges from the arts to personal finance. Asked how he maintains such a broad range of endeavors, he describes a state of mind: “A friend of mine said to me recently, ‘You know your greatest skill set is that you’re essentially fearless. You don’t fear failure.’”  

“I’ve long held the belief that you learn as much about yourself from failing as you do from succeeding and sometimes you learn more,” Mr. Hall continues. “Failure gives you an opportunity to look inside, to gain wisdom and then move forward, but without being held hostage to that failure.”

Along with an occasional failure have come many successes. Mr. Hall recently won the inaugural Ambie Award for the best history podcast of 2021 from the Podcast Academy for “Driving the Green Book.” Published by Macmillan, the 10-part series chronicles the 2,000-mile drive he and social justice trainer Janée Woods Weber took from Detroit to New Orleans in 2019. Using “The Green Book” as their guide, they retraced the often-perilous trip African Americans endured when traveling in the South during the Jim Crow and segregation eras. From 1936 to 1967, entrepreneur Victor Hugo Green published “The Green Book,” with listings for motels, gas stations, restaurants, and other services that provided safe havens for Black motorists.  

Monitor columnist Jacqueline Adams spoke with Mr. Hall. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Q. How was “The Green Book” useful to Black travelers, and what do you want listeners to take away from your podcast? 

People think of it as a traditional travel guide, but it was also a psychological tool, because you knew that when you got to this location, you could breathe; you could relax, away from the terrors associated with being on the roads of America during segregation.  

I want people to hear the stories of the people featured in the podcast and think about the time they lived through that is not talked about in any open way. And then I want them to look within their own families and start to ask questions: What did you do during this period? 

Recently I was at a cocktail party and a white lady said to me, “When I was growing up, I never thought about these problems in the lives of African Americans. I just assumed they were living exactly the same way I was. I never thought that when they went out into the world, it was a different experience.” 

The fact that my podcast opened her eyes to that reality – that’s what I’m looking for. I want everybody to take part of this home with them and explore how this exists in their own lives. 

Macmillan Podcasts

The balcony where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. In 1982 a nonprofit saved the site from foreclosure for use as America's first civil rights museum. This was one of the stops on Mr. Hall's 2,000-mile journey.

Q. What struck you most during the 2,000-mile drive from Detroit to New Orleans? 

How much African American parents tried to protect their children from the reality of racism, until they couldn’t. Doing subtle, protective waltzes as they walked down a street, parents would distract their children. “Oh, look at that church steeple” or “look at how beautiful those clothes look in that shop window.” Then the parents would place themselves between the child and an oncoming white person, so that the child wouldn’t accidentally provoke the white person in some way. Those are the stories that stayed with me.  

The second part of that is the collateral damage of racism, when a young child sees their parents demeaned by an authority figure, a policeman, or just a random white person. What does that do to that child? What does it make them think about the meanness of authority? How do they perceive their parents after that?  

Q. Why were these trips back to the South so important, so worth the risks that you’re describing? 

Not everybody migrated north. My relatives, for example, did not migrate north because we had land and we could always feed ourselves. 

I think part of the reason for “Driving the Green Book” was that we wanted to show that Black people during this period were entrepreneurs within the Black community. Women especially owned restaurants and beauty salons.  

The Black main streets – Walnut Street in Louisville, Kentucky; Jefferson Street in Nashville, Tennessee; Farish Street in Jackson, Mississippi; Davis Avenue in Mobile, Alabama – were places of Black businesses and Black pride, where people went to have a good time. There was joy there and people wanted to be there. 

The narrative created by the white world – that we were predominantly living in poverty and not being very productive – was never the full story. It was the story they needed in order to maintain [a sense of] white supremacy. Meanwhile, many of the people in these Black communities were truly visionary, intelligent, ambitious, and they had a lot of mother wit – that brilliantly intuitive, highly practical common sense, combined with ambition, that made them achieve. 

“I do whatever interests me”

Q. I’ve recently learned a phrase that’s called “a portfolio life” or a “portfolio career.” Does that describe your experience? 

Yes. I work in the arts. I work in personal finance. I write books and articles. I do podcasts. I do TV shows. I do radio shows. I do whatever interests me. 

I think that’s the result of my liberal arts education at Bowdoin College. I learned to think in different ways in different classes. That flexibility, that intellectual elasticity is the reason I can do this.

Q. Tell me about curating the “Subliminal Horizons” art exhibition at Alexander Gray Associates in New York City and Germantown, New York. 

Many people thought I had already done this because I’ve been involved in the art world as a collector and sometimes a writer since 1982, but no one had ever asked me to curate a show. It was real simple. Alexander Gray and I made a list of 20 artists who live and work in the Hudson Valley. I did studio visits with some of them to select the works. In other cases, we did everything via email. I think, in the end, we had 70 works. 

Looking forward

Q. Have you seen any progress toward racial justice, and are you hopeful? 

What I see happening with voting rights in state after state – you can’t help but think about the old adage “three steps forward, two steps back.” But it feels like two steps forward, five steps back. I am reassured to see that more people are becoming proactive.    

I was raised, as you know, on a subsistence piece of land in Florida. We planted every year: collard greens, okra, corn, tomatoes, pole beans, green beans. You can’t be a farmer on a small piece of land and plant every year and not be hopeful because that’s going to be your food for the next year. [Hope is] built into the process.   

I also invest the money that I earn in securities. Investing is hopeful too.   

I am hopeful that Americans will want to extend the rights that the Constitution guarantees to all Americans. 

But at the same time I’m realistic. You can’t control the weather when you plant. You can’t control the stock market. You can’t control how voters and people will react in the privacy of their own families and homes. 

But I would like to believe that people will be thoughtful, empathetic, and generous enough to want the common good for all Americans. So, I’m hoping.

Broadleaf Books

The New Journalism movement of the 1960s and ’70s – in which writers like Joan Didion and Truman Capote blended subjective views with fictional techniques – “had a secularism problem,” argue Costica Bradatan and Ed Simon in the introduction of “The God Beat: What Journalism Says about Faith and Why It Matters.” New Journalism, they contend, “often ignored the questions of meaning and transcendence that lay at the center of the human experience.” 

That changed after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to Bradatan and Simon, who edited this vibrant collection of 26 essays. Writers were reminded that religion and spirituality – however defined or undefined – were “still very much pertinent in the modern world.” And this book proves there’s great promise in a still emerging genre. The writing here is crisp and vivid and unafraid.

In the essay “On the Threshing Floor,” Daniel José Camacho discusses his struggle to decipher his own identity. While he is suspicious of ancestry tests, he also admits that he’s curious, and that he has looked at his brother’s DNA results. By a relatively small margin, Spanish heritage dominates, but there’s also a significant amount of Native American and African roots there too. The author doesn’t want to erase those origins in a “melting pot of whiteness.” He shares with readers the cause of his unease: The DNA test can’t tell him how to relate to all this information. 

Instead, the author looks to the Bible to find a road map for his search for identity. He interprets Jesus’ baptism by John as “the moment that [Jesus’] identity was made absolutely clear.” Camacho adds that a sense of self-knowledge is a prerequisite for engaging in a life of service, saying that such a path “requires a type of baptism.” He points out that before Jesus “engages in any activism, God calls him ‘beloved.’” This naming isn’t what God needs to hear – “it’s what we need to hear.”

No matter where one falls on the spiritual spectrum, Camacho’s piece, originally published in Sojourners, is a wake-up call to ponder an inward life, and to be alert to the counterfeits that stand in the way.

Emma Green’s affecting piece in The Atlantic, “Will Anyone Remember Eleven Dead Jews?” follows the 180-degree turn that archivist Eric Lidji’s life took following the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in October 2018. 

While socializing at his local synagogue, he heard about the massacre at the nearby Tree of Life synagogue; 11 Jewish worshippers had been killed. 

Previously “an ardent psalmist of Pittsburgh’s quirky charms,” as Green describes him, Lidji’s job until then had consisted of collecting posters of local Yiddish theater productions. But within hours, the Jewish tradition of laying artwork and stones on graves began on the sidewalks outside the synagogue where the shooting took place. The outpouring of emotion touched Lidji, and he knew what he had to do. These artifacts needed to be preserved.

Lidji and others formed a task force and began attending vigils, funerals, and religious events across and beyond the community. The goal was to chronicle the grief and confusion around the massacre – obtaining signs in solidarity and protest, sticky notes, digital reflections, and donations of whatever might appear “at the bottom of a purse or in a pocket emptied for laundry.” 

Lidji’s work – as well as his own faith in Judaism, renewed that October – continue on. When living memory is gone, the archive will keep the tragedy, and the hatred that caused it, from being reduced to a headline.

“In Praise of Gods That Don’t Exist,” originally published in Aeon, relates journalist and atheist Nat Case’s personal account of joining a Quaker community. The “confirmed skeptic” writes that doing so helped him “ask Whatever-There-Is a question” – and sometimes he received answers. 

History professor Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s “Zen and the Art of a Higher Education” from the Los Angeles Review of Books revisits the 1974 classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” giving a robust argument for its place in today’s university classroom. 

Oxford professor of Indian history Faisal Devji unflinchingly objects to the oversimplification of religious harmony in “Against Muslim Unity” from Aeon.

Maybe in the end it’s Briallen Hopper’s “Learning to Write About Religion” from the Revealer that crystallizes the motivation for the assembly of all these works. Hopper says the best advice she ever got was from a graduate school professor: “write out of a sense of unease.”

Though one or two of the essays feels out of sync with either religion or spirituality, that’s a small quibble. “The God Beat” is a book to be reckoned with. It asks the reader to take it all in – whatever touches on both the holy and the unholy. It’s an invitation to listen, not to judge. And these days, that feels like a skill to be practiced.

Reuters

The European Union and Polish flags flutter in Mazeikiai, Lithuania.

Last June, the decadeslong project to bind European countries under democratic principles seemed to be fraying. Britain had left the European Union. A poll found most Europeans believe the EU to be “broken.” And the union’s new president, Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša, warned against the EU imposing “imaginary” values.

On Aug. 7, however, the EU’s core values were shown not to be so imaginary – but in fact, to be universal. Poland’s de facto leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, backed down in a tense clash with the EU over his attempt to purge the country’s Supreme Court. He promised to change Poland’s system of disciplining judges in a way that the courts would be independent of the executive branch.

For the EU, the standoff with Warsaw that began in 2017 was a challenge to its very identity. With no military power to enforce its decisions and no ability to kick out errant member states, the EU has long relied on democratic rule of law for its authority. At the center of such principles is the ideal of impartial judges, free of political influence. Mr. Kaczyński also seemed to accept that EU courts have primacy over the law of member states, a point Poland accepted when it joined the union in 2004.

Polish leaders have relented in large part because the EU’s administrative arm, the European Commission, has lately tried to act tougher against states that violate EU principles. This year, it threatened to withhold funds from Poland, wielding a financial stick for the first time. Meanwhile, the EU’s top court demanded that Poland suspend its attempt to put political pressure on judges.

Polish voters may also be shifting their support away from the ruling coalition, which includes Mr. Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party. The main opposition party, Civic Platform, headed by former European Council President Donald Tusk, has gained in popularity.

The EU has long found its unity in free trade between member states. But trade relies on fair courts that can act independently and uphold equality before the law. In democracies – even the nation states bound together in the EU – such liberal values remain a stronger unifier. There’s nothing imaginary about that.