Religious Liturgy and the Wholly Other

In the Zhuangzi, how can Zhuangzi possibly know that the fish are happy? To know what it is like to be a bat, a person must be a bat. This is not to say that we disagree with bats. Sonar represents the “sheer otherness” of a bat. In Christianity, how does eternal joy and bliss differ from happiness? Happiness is not a theological concept. There are different kinds of experience, and it follows that they have different kinds of truth-claims. To treat every such claim as the same kind of thing is premised on conflating domains of human experience that are qualitatively different. I contend that the domain of religion is both distinct and unique. Our ordinary ways of describing the world and even ourselves are not well-suited to our endeavors in the domain of religion.

Pseudo-Dionysius, a Christian theologian, made the point that God goes beyond—is sourced, as it were—inherently beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion. According to Montaigne, humans cannot provide truly convincing arguments on any topic, especially theology. “Human reason goes astray everywhere, but especially” in theology. Augustine stressed that revelation must make it way to us as though sunshine making its way through a smoked, stain-glass church window. Hume argues in The Natural History of Religion that the human mind has a great deal of difficulty grasping the notion of divine simplicity for long, and so the mind inevitably starts hanging artifacts on pure divinity that, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, are human, all too human. God is angry. God is pleased. God is benevolent. God is just. God even has a human form. God has a mother.

I submit that what any of us think we know about what God does and even what divinity is goes beyond what creatures can possibly know. That faith is premised on belief rather than knowledge is all too often forgotten as claims about God are treated as if they were facts of reason. Religion within the limits of reason turns out to be human, all too human. So too, efforts to reduce religion to psychology, and emotional needs in particular, miss the qualitatively different nature of religion as transcendent in reference to a wholly other. All too often, the legitimate instinctual yearning to transcend beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility becomes conflated with knowledge of divine attributes.

In terms of liturgical worship, all too often services can be consumed by speeches by religious functionaries who know so much about God at the expense of time spent by a congregation in transcendence as experiential yearning of the wholly other. This is not to say that it is metaphysical or ontological; not even presence in a religious sense need be conflated with those fields of philosophy. Rather, the yearning itself, as in for example being prefaced by a ritualized ingestion of the divine, goes beyond knowledge and description. Worship, in other words, is inherently experiential, rather than analytical and descriptive. Focusing on a sermon, or even on a ritualized way of getting to an experience of wholly-other-directed transcendent yearning, misses the point of why people gather to worship. All too often, religious services are programmed to a stultifying death by humans who are too interested to leave their imprint. Stepping out of the way to let the divine be present in people’s distinctly religious experience does not come naturally to programmers.

This is not to say that ritual and preaching cannot play a useful role as prep for religious experience; rather, the problem lies in confounding the means with the ensuing experience that can be facilitated by them. Ritual and preaching in the context of sacred space and time, set apart from ordinary life even by stained-glass windows, have great value as means, which should know when to step out of the way and even point to what comes next as more important. In the ritual of the Christian Eucharist, for example, priests could encourage congregants to stay in the pews after receiving Communion because the point of the ritual is arguably merely to prepare for the interior yearning experience of the divine once ingested. This inward experience, back in the pews, rather than the consecration, is the high point of the Eucharistic liturgy. To treat the high point as a short time to reflect while the “dishes” on the “table” are washed demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding on the role of ritual in terms of worship experience that goes beyond the limits of symbol and ritual.

Centuries of Dysfunctional Organizational Culture: The Mob at Yale

 “Into blind darkness they enter,
people who worship ignorance;
And into still blinder darkness, people who delight in learning.”[1]

“There are in the souls of wicked men those hellish principles reigning, that would presently kindle and flame out into hell-fire, if it were not for God’s restraints. . . . The corruption of the heart of man is a thing that is immoderate and boundless in its fury.”[2]

“The foolish children of men do miserably delude themselves in their own schemes, and in their confidence in their own strength and wisdom, they trust to nothing but a shadow.”[3]

Jonathan Edwards fell out of favor with Yale’s president Clapp, who opposed George Whitefield’s Christian revivals as being too “enthusiastic.” So, Clapp had two pamphlets published to criticize Edwards, who had studied and then taught at Yale. In fact, one of Yale College’s residential colleges has been named after Edwards at least since the late twentieth century. I would imagine that few if any current or former JE students have been informed that Edwards ceased attending Yale Commencement exercises and even visiting campus once he had known of Clapp’s vitriolic pamphlets. It is ironic that in Edwards’s time, Yale’s faculty minimized the impact of original sin in what became known as the New Haven theology. It seems that compassion for people who hold a different theological (or political) view, as in “Love thy enemy,” was nonetheless above the grasp of Yale’s administration. Fast-forward from the first half of the eighteenth century to roughly three hundred years later and incredibly the same hostile, highly dysfunctional organizational culture was still well ensconced at Yale.

As a student at Yale taking some courses in theology divinity school in the 1990s, I encountered Christian theological intolerance from some of the minister-professors even though they were teaching at a secular university. In a seminar on the Gospel of Mark, the professor did not appreciate my intellectual questions that went according to reason beyond the confines of the Creed. The evangelical Christian who taught Christian environmental ethics put the matter thusly to me: “It takes having a certain character to get a Yale diploma.” The irony is that I was an advocate of the messages on tolerance and compassion towards detractors that Jesus preaches and exemplifies in the Gospels when I on the central part of campus taking classes in Yale College and the Graduate School. Roughly thirty years later, when I was back on campus for a semester to translate a theological work and audit a seminar on Jonathan Edwards in the Beinecke Rare-Book Library, a divinity-school student called me a heretic because he did not understand that scholars do not necessarily personal believe in every theologian cited for academic purposes. I retorted, “You’re not at the div school here—this is the central campus—liberal arts and sciences—there are no heretics here.” Because I had earned a M.Div. degree at Yale, the student could hardly accuse me of being a secularist and relativist based at the central campus.

Why the hostility? After I had graduated in the late 1990s, I spent a semester in Yale’s Law School only for a liberal Black female student to falsely accuse me of having tripped her on hallway stairs. In the law school, she, like Hillary Clinton, according to a librarian there, was known as a “shark.” I had committed the unpardonable offence in a constitutional law course of having defended the conservative position on American federalism being held by Justices Thomas, Scalia, and O’Conner; I was critical of federal preemption and other ways in which consolidation of power at the federal level had caused the federal system to become unbalanced, hence impairing the feature of mutual checks-and-balances between the U.S. Government and those of the several states. Making such an outlandish statement put a target on my back. That did not surprise me; what surprised me was the abject lie of the student and that the so-called attorneys teaching and administrating in Yale Law School so easily and quickly passed judgment against me in spite of there being no evidence. In fact, the director of the visiting scholars program chastised me for not having come to her on the lie even though I had just learned of the accusation against me. Dean Kronman would not even meet with me. The attack against me was launched and perpetuated by the Black female student and the Black assistant dean (i.e., facilities manager). That I was already a scholar with a doctorate counted for naught, but, then again, the LLB or JD degree is not a doctorate, but even as lawyers, the law school administrators should have been familiar with the need for evidence, and this was lacking because I did not even encounter the student on the stairs.

In 2024, when I returned to campus—whereas Edwards surely would not have, were he in my shoes—in part to audit the Jonathan Edwards seminar as a heretic, apparently, I studies a lot in Sterling Library which is located across from the law school in the central part of campus. Unlike in the 1990s, the main reading room was not quiet; in fact, students likely from local universities were even talking in the aisles. One day I suggested to the receptionist of the library’s director that as long as security guards hired by the library were walking through the reading room every twenty minutes or so, perhaps they could enforce the library’s policy against loud talking in the reading room. Unknown to me, my suggestion triggered another shark.

A non-academic manager in the library’s security department sent me an email so harsh that a Yale policeman, in seeing the contents, wanted to have a word with the woman. She falsely accused me of 1) taking pictures of security guards as I entered and exited Sterling Library, 2) trespassing in “restricted office space” because I had stepped into the open doorway of the library's business office to get the location of the library administration office (a finance employee even walked me down to the office), 3) saying discriminatory things to service-desk staff (even though the service-desk supervisor had not heard of any such complaints), and 4) "trying" to use my Yale Library ID card to open other Yale buildings that house Yale libraries. Probably unknown to that manager at Sterling library, a medical librarian actually made that building’s access possible for alumni and visiting researchers, so I could swipe my Yale ID to unlock that building’s doors so I could get to the medical library.

Nevertheless, the director of Sterling library protected the security manager. Alternatively, that director could have actually met with me; she would have discovered that some of the security guards, who no doubt were locals, were actually hostile to Yalies entering and exiting the library. I would have added that I was officially auditing a course, so I was entering buildings other than Sterling library, but that that was no business of a security manager at Sterling library. Instead, even after the Yale police had spoken to that manager and I had actually decamped from Yale, the manager sent me yet another email accusing me of things that would have been impossible because I was by then back at Harvard. Such hostility!  

To claim that Yale has a dysfunctional organizational culture doesn't begin to describe the anger that too many non-academic employees have toward alumni who are back on campus. That two alumni-relations employees bluntly asserted to me in 2023 that "alumni are not members of the Yale community" struck me as very unusual way of attracting donations to the school. That disrespect and even hostility towards alumni who are on campus for a semester extends even to Elm City Partners, the commercial retail-property management company that handles Yale’s commercial properties that are rented by retail businesses on the edge of the central campus. After having been followed in Maison Café on a Sunday morning by a local Black man who was shouting at me because he thought that I had stopped on the sidewalk because of him rather than to look at my phone, I complained to the restaurant’s manager the next week because the employees had refused to tell the shouting man to leave the restaurant or call the police. That manager was nonplussed, so I walked to Elm City Management, whose receptionist told me that the problem would be solved if I simply patronized another restaurant. I even notified Yale’s office that related to that Management company, but to no avail even though I indicated that the personnel in that company did not care much whether retail tenants on Yale-owned land were letting local residents be verbally aggressive toward Yalies. There had been a vicious “town-gown” thing in New Haven for decades, and there was no question that residents in New Haven’s vast ghettos near campus resented Yalies. Had the local Black population known that Yale’s theology school had accepted an ex-slave in the 1830s to audit courses so he could preach only to forbid him from checking out books and speaking in class, the resentment toward Yale would be greater. That Yale’s “seminary” did the same thing to another Black man in the 1840s would not help heal town-gown relations.  

In the perpetuation of a hostile, dysfunctional organizational culture over centuries, in treating some insiders at Yale as outsiders who deserve to be attacked, Yale was not merely imbibing a hostile immediate environment. During the two non-consecutive semesters back at Yale as an alumnus, I encountered too many Yale professors rudely disregard the university’s promotion of auditing courses on campus as a perk of being an alum—one professor in the philosophy even told that my seven years of study in that field were not enough for his undergraduate course on normative ethics because I had not had the prerequisite course and I had already read half of his book on the topic. The vitriol of a security manager in the main library was so over the top that I wondered whether someone such as the dean of the divinity school or Yale College, or else the Yale’s security dept itself was actually behind the attempt to get me out.

Below is one of the threatening emails based of fabricated accusations that was sent to me, Dr. Worden as Mr. Worden, by Ms. Lynn Leronimo. She may have been the security manager whom I had seen spying on students in the stacks in Sterling Library. Once when I witnessed this, a security manager pretended to be curious about which department I was with at Yale. "Just curious; what are you doing research on?" Answer: Alumni are not with any department.

“Dear Mr. Worden, 

I am writing to address concerns regarding your interactions with Yale Library staff that are misaligned with Yale Library policy and community values. As a library, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment supportive of research, scholarship and study. We hold ourselves and each other accountable for embodying the values of access, inclusivity, and creativity in our shared work. Yale Library patrons and visitors are expected to adhere to these values in community with us. Specifically, I have received reports of the following behaviors significantly impacting both library staff and library users: 

·       Photographing and recording library security staff members upon entry and exit. 

·       Reports of attempts to use your library issued Access Pass to justify access to restricted campus spaces. 

·       Filing frivolous complaints about Library Security staff, as they perform the responsibilities of their assigned positions. 

·       Using harmful or discriminatory language when in conversation with library staff. 

·       Entering open office spaces within Sterling Memorial Library for the purpose of complaining about library security staff members.  

·       Engaging service desk staff in lengthy and repeated conversations impacting the user experience of other library patrons. 

 

I expect you to stop the above behaviors immediately. Failure to do so may result in the revocation of your Yale Library Access Pass and its corresponding privileges. Currently, your Yale Library Access Pass is valid through March 6, 2025. Probationary renewal is contingent upon alignment with the above expectations. In the future, I ask that you direct questions related to safety and security to Lynn Leronimo, Director, Library Security. Issues regarding access to collections or library services should be directed to Kim Copenhaver, Director, Access & Public Services. I appreciate your cooperation in maintaining an inclusive environment for both library staff and library users . . .”

I believe she sent that email after Yale police had talked with her about the inappropriate hostility in her first email. If so, such bravado and intractable spite! I now turn to answering these false accusations that Ms. Leronimo made concerning Dr. Worden. Firstly, a finance employee invited me into the library’s business office and actually walked me to the office of the library’s director, so I was not trespassing on restricted library space. Secondly in entering and exiting the library, almost every student, faculty member, and academic researcher held up a phone; it doesn’t mean that we were photographing security guards, and I certainly did not, except for one occasion in which a guard was hostile to me because I had not said hello to him after he, whom I had never met, said hello to me. I did show that photo to a circulation-desk manager and subsequently followed her direction not to record even such atrocious behavior again, and I did not. My complaint against the angry employee was hardly frivolous. Especially in leaving the library, it was not uncommon for us to be looking at our Yale phone app to see whether a shuttle bus was coming, especially during the winters. I maintain to this day that no duty exists at Yale to engage in small talk with petty, angry security guards at the library doors. To expect such an obligation evinces the presumptuousness of false entitlement. 

As for inappropriate or lengthy conversations with employees at the circulation service desk, I had legitimate business with them, and they seemed to like chatting with patrons, including myself. Not once did I use a racial, misogynistic, or anti-gay word. I did, however, complain about the plight of New Haven as the urban blight had not improved since the 1990s. The head of the circulation desk told me that none of his employees to his knowledge had complained about me, and I had had several chats with him, which he enjoyed because of his interest in theology. Therefore, all of Ms. Leronimo’s accusations were false, which suggests to me that someone else wanted me gone. The dean of Yale College and the Divinity dean would be my prime suspects, as both went out of their way to avoid me on sight. It could also be that the library security manager was trying to frame me because more than a year earlier, when I had been on campus to translate a text, I reported a security guard who was stalking me in the Humanities building. 

Even after I notified the administrator of religious studies of the stalking, the guard did it again. The administrator was stunned—as I had again taken photos of that guard following me and looking angry, but that was in the Humanities building rather than the library. After the second infraction by the culprit, on one night when I was leaving the Humanities building after having watched a film, a young man waiting for me a bit farther on along the sidewalk suddenly stood up when he saw me, accosted me and even pushed me, daring me to fight him so he could legally “defend himself.” I pretended to call the police (while I walked to the middle of York St) and shortly a get-away car came to pick the young man up, which means he probably was a local man rather than living on campus as a student. I bet someone working in Yale’s security department hired the man to rough me up—a nice way to treat alumni. At the very least, Yale had some very nasty employees working security with impunity.

I think I know exactly how Jonathan Edwards felt after Clapp published the pamphlets against Edwards, how the twice-escaped slave felt when Yale employees told him that he could not check out books or talk in class, and even perhaps why the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas avoided visiting Yale because the law school was so anti-conservative. That any organizational culture could be passed down for centuries, protected in this case by the great academic reputation of the school, such that the same pattern can be detected in key instances century after century, is the most astounding bit to be gleamed from this report. On a much more temporally-limited scale, the sordid organizational culture at Wells Fargo, an American bank, was said to go on for decades after the unethical, secret fee-charging practice was uncovered and the bank faced fines. In fact, the bank was fined again! A former employee told me at my bank that she knew that the unethical, greedy organizational culture had not changed in spite of Wells Fargo’s lies to the contrary. As Watergate taught Americans, cover-ups can be worse than the original crimes. Changing a dysfunctional organizational culture, whether of the White House, a business, or a university, is, I submit, very, very difficult precisely defense-mechanisms can be so utterly ruthless even in expunging certain insiders qua outsiders. In short, Yale, I must admit, is run like the mob, using its “community values” like a Nietzschean club to exclude rather than be inclusive. Best, therefore, that all concerned alumni stay away, including with our wallets and purses.

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1. Brhadaranyaka Upanishad 4.4.10 in Upanishads, Trans. Patrick Olivelle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 66.
2. Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” The Works of President Edwards, Vol. 4 (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1864), pp. 313-321, p. 315.
3. Ibid., pp. 313-321, p. 316.

An American Proto-Fascist Presbyterian Church

Mixing religion and politics can be a dangerous business, especially if done from the pulpit and backed up by fully-weaponized police poised in a worship space at the laity in the pews, and from the front so the congregants know they are being intensely watched even as the words, “Peace on earth” are shown on the big screen directly above one of the uniformed police employees. To my utter astonishment, I encountered just this scenario when I visited a large Presbyterian church in the U.S. early in 2026. A Christian who has read the Gospels might look askance at the weaponized, uniformed police in the sanctuary who were facing the people from near the front, and the television cameramen who were standing on the stage even very close to the altar, and think of Jesus castigating the money-changers and sacrifice-animal sellers operating inside the temple.

During the piano prelude, a cameraman hangs out near the altar.

The modern equivalent to the greedy businessmen in the temple is the power-tripping, weaponized police officer staring down congregants in a sanctuary even while the people are worshipping God. To see people worshipping the prince of peace while a fully-weaponized policewoman looks directly at the worshippers from just left of the stage in front—staring at the people—is surreal. True Christianity cannot thrive in such a hostile environment. Lest any members of that Presbyterian church might consider complaining about the obvious hypocrisy, the pastor’s sermon could easily be interpreted as a warning against complaining, not just about the church, but also, and even more troubling, the government.

Just one day before my visit to the large church in a Trump-friendly state in the U.S., Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Kamenei denounced rioters, saying that they “must be put in their place.”[1] Such a sentiment is hardly surprising because Iran’s “democracy” is severely constrained to include only approved candidates for office. So, it does come as a surprise that Iran’s supreme leader went on to say, “We talk to protesters, the officials must talk to them.”[2] It may also come as a surprise that the pastor of the Presbyterian church would not agree with Iran’s leader on talking with protesters, for that pastor said in his lengthy sermon that Christians should not complain about government. To do so is to “rebel against God’s sovereignty.” Anyone who complains has an overblown, selfish sense of oneself. The pastor also urged his congregation to contact the White House’s office of religion about a public prayer for the U.S. coming up.

Because it is unclear how a democracy can endure without complaints being made about elected officials, government policy, and even laws, I contend that the pastor was advocating a proto-fascist, anti-democracy message as a religious sermon. That he lapsed in overreaching from the domain of religion to that of politics and government—a category mistake—was dangerous because he had stationed fully-uniformed, and fully-weaponized local police not only at the periphery of the building outside, but also inside the sanctuary and in front, facing the people—staring at them as they (presumably) worshipped amid the blatant show of force. 

I intentionally made transparent the latent hostility by pivoting in the pew in the direction of the policewomen because she was staring in my direction throughout the entire service, except during the sermon, when she faced the pastor. Her loyalty was clear, and this means that the pastor’s demand that the laity not complain, even though in the Gospels Jesus complains about the money-changers, is dangerous. Were he to have seen me holding my phone/camera at my chest in the direction of his hired gun and told her to harass me, she would not have hesitated to do so, and with manufactured anger directed at me. In short, the pastor’s autocratic mentality plus the blatant, literally “in your face” presence of a fully-weaponized police officer is so toxic to Jesus’ message in the Gospels that the pastor could hardly be trusted to wield such power as he did.

The policewoman was even staring in my direction through a gap between the cameraman and the camera. She probably took my sustained stance toward the screen above her as a provocation, as she was well accustomed with passive aggression. So much overt hostility in a Christian church belies its raison d'etre. 

The environment inside and outside of the church was so toxic to worship that the pastor actually did his congregation a favor by talking through almost all of the service, lest the people be put in the uncomfortable position of closing their eyes in engaging in transcendent religious experience. Outside of the building, before the service, at least two uniformed, near riot-gear police employees roamed around the perimeter while security guards were also present. It was a sight, ironically, of excess, and thus bad judgment. As I sat in a pew inside the sanctuary, I noticed two cameramen standing near the main table/altar even though the only activity was that of a piano-player, who was very good. The Christmas lights were still up, and the sight was beautiful, but unfortunately false (which is what Aristotle wrote of Plato’s theory of the forms). After a hymn was sung, just before the Creed was said, the pastor warned his congregation, “If you don’t believe in the Apostles’ Creed, you aren’t getting into the kingdom of God.” Apparently that minister had never read Paul’s dictum that without the love of compassion, even, and I would like to add, especially for one’s enemies and even rude and dislikeable people, even faith that can move mountains is for naught. Love is not primarily about belief, though that it part of it, as I discovered ironically as I was walking from the pews.

The pastor went from reciting the Creed to making a bunch of announcements of upcoming church social-events. Any sense of transcendence that the laity may have felt arising in them from reciting the Creed was instantly wiped out by the profane announcements, which were essentially advertisements. The profane turn was made complete when he urged people to contact the White House’s office of religious affairs regarding an upcoming public prayer for the United States, which was then aiding and abetting Israel’s committing of what the UN and the International Criminal Court have both determined to be a genocide. “Praying for the country” would not include praying that the United States hold the guilty accountable and extend compassion to the million of homeless, starving civilians in Gaza.

Empty pipes even during the sermon.

The pastor’s sermon came after a reading not of the Gospels, but of one of Paul’s letters to a congregation. Philippians 2:12-6 was the reading. Interestingly, it includes the expression made popular by Soren Kierkegaard, fear and trembling. These words rightly apply to a human’s reaction to the presence of God, rather than to that of a uniformed, weaponized police officer confronting a congregation inside a sanctuary. Not surprisingly, the pastor referenced his recent sermon on fear and trembling. Fittingly, in the current sermon, the minister claimed, “Paul is almost like a sergeant.” Not. Then the pastor turned to his personal dislike of people who complain. “Remember God hates complaining,” he said without any scriptural justification. Furthermore, “complaining is a type of unbelief,” by which he probably meant atheism. Then he overreached onto the domain of government—something that Jesus refuses to do in the Gospel stories. “Complaining about the government is really complaining about the sovereignty of God.” Only self-centered people who think too much of themselves complain. Of course, democracy requires criticism of government officials, their policies, and even laws. In fact, in strenuously opposing people who criticize their respective governments, the minister was advocating autocracy because under that form of government, political criticism is prohibited. 

How do you suppose the elderly couple felt about a heavily-weaponized, uniformed "off duty" police employee of the city looking in their direction at such close range? That the couple was effectively barred from complaining even about such an overt wrong goes without saying. Forget about worshipping; transcendent experience, had there been any during that service, would have been utterly untenable in the face of such a blatant show of force. Such palpable distrust of people who could be regular members evicerates the conditions that are necessary for worship.  

Consistent with his heavy-handed political ideology, which also manifested in there being weaponized police in the sanctuary, the minister's theology of grace had little room for credit going to free-will, which is why complaining can only be rooted in arrogant selfishness. His draconian theology can be likened to that of the Jansenists, who were extreme Augustinians—extreme because they believed that the Fall is so devastating on human nature that even free-will is severely warped. Redemption by the Cross is by grace alone. The use of free-will to extend humane compassion to one’s detractors and even enemies is instead totally by grace—the person deserves no credit for making the choice to help. 

As I was thinking about the pastor's theology in the church that I hated so much as I was walking in a line past pews at the end of the service, I saw a cell phone fall on the carpet ahead. Immediately, I picked up the phone and another person helped me locate the man who had just dropped it. As I returned it to him, I said to just a few—now I wish I had had the guts to really speak up as Jesus does to the money-changers in the Gospels—“I am really opposed to your church, but, here, this is real Christianity—I am intentionally returning this phone to this man to show humane compassion even when it is not convenient. I really oppose your congregation.” The few people who heard this nodded in agreement that what I was intentionally illustrating was indeed what Jesus stands for in the Gospels, and that my complaint against the brazen police presence was valid. Even though credit is deserved for my use of my free-will to pick up and return the phone—this was not solely due to God’s grace, though I did wonder about how fortuitous the phone being dropped such that I saw it first was. It was as if a supremely intelligent being sourced beyond our realm—including our domain of politics—was testing me to see if my anger at the violations in a house of worship was in line with authentic Christianity, and thus akin to Jesus’s anger at the money-changers in the temple. As in the Gospel of Mark, the word immediately came into my mind as I saw the phone on the carpet. I knew it would have to be a split-decision whether to ignore the phone out of spite for the minister and the policewoman who had been staring at me, or to be compassionate in such an environment in which I was so angered. I would even state that it is precisely in making the choice to be compassionate when being so is inconvenient at the very least that the image of God is in us, and that the proverbial Fall does not diminish that image in us. Even Augustine argued that a person’s self-love of that in oneself that is in the image of God is theologically laudable, whereas selfish self-love is a sin.

During my first master’s degree (and Ph.D. minor-field) program in religion, my advisor used to take his graduate students to a variety of religious places on weekends so we could observe religious rituals along the lines set out as a methodology by Geertz. We were to bracket our respective religious backgrounds and perspectives to focus on knowing “the other of the other.” We did so at Hindu and Sikh temples, Greek Orthodox churches, Protestant churches, and Roman Catholic churches. I’ve continued this practice off and on through the rest of my life. In visiting the anti-democratic police-state Presbyterian church at the beginning of 2026, however, Geertz’s methodology of bracketing one’s own religious view went out the window; I couldn’t get away from that church fast enough, though I did get a glimpse of real Christianity as I paused to pick up a phone on the way out.  

By chance, I was wearing blue and the man I helped wore red. I had come from a very "blue" state, and he lived in a red state. The phone returned, nonetheless, from one hand back to the rightful owner. That he was still holding his phone when the photo was taken may suggest that having his phone back meant a lot to him. That humane compassion can seep through the cracks in such a hostile environment as a proto-fascist church is a testament to the value of the principle itself. Without valuing it and willing it into praxis, belief in the Creed is for naught. 

 

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1. The Associated Press, “Rioters ‘Must Be Put in Their Place’ Following Week Long Protests, Iran’s Khamenei Says,” Euronews.com, 3 January, 2026.
2. Ibid.

Educating Scholarly Priests: The Cult at Yale

Speaking at a Bhakti-Yoga conference in March, 2025 at Harvard, Krishma Kshetra Swami said that scholars who are devoted to the academic study of religion are also undoubtedly also motivated by their religious faith, even if it is of a religion other than what the scholar is studying. The Swami himself was at the time both a scholar of Hinduism and a Krishna devotee. He was essentially saying that his academic study of Hinduism was motivated not just by the pursuit of knowledge, but also by (his) faith. He also stated that he, like the rest of us in daily life, typically separated his various identities, including that of a professor and a devotee of the Hindu god, Krishna. Although his two roles not contradictory in themselves, a scholar’s own religious beliefs, if fervently held, can act as a magnet of sorts by subtly swaying the very assumptions that a scholar holds about the phenomenon of religion (i.e., the knowledge in the academic discipline). To be sure, personally-held ideology acts with a certain gravity on any scholar’s study in whatever academic field. Religious studies, as well as political science, by the way, are especially susceptible to the warping of reasoning by ideology because beliefs can be so strongly held in religion (and politics), and the impact of such gravity can easily be missed not only by other people, but also by the scholars themselves.  

To be sure, a scholar’s study of a religion, especially one’s own but also another religion, can enrich the person’s own religious faith and religiosity. The process can be referred to as faith seeking understanding. As a student at Yale Divinity School, I quickly became well-versed in faith seeking understanding because the school was self-consciously producing what could be called scholarly priests. This is not to say that reasoning or cognition lies at the core of a religious faith. Especially in a religion in which God is held to be a kind of theological love, emotion, as in Augustine’s Confessions, can be said to be more relevant than anything in religion within the limits of reason alone can reach, even though religious faith, and thus love, is theological rather than psychological in genre.

I didn’t grasp a more serious downside to Yale’s focus on (Christian) faith seeking understanding until decades later when I was a visiting research scholar at Harvard. More than one divinity student there asked me if it was true that Yale’s divinity school was a kind of a cult. At first, the question shocked me, but as I reflected on the observation and my own experience of Yale’s divinity school, I was astonished that students at Harvard, the other school, could be so insightful about Yale from a distance. I remembered the Christian professor’s uneasy emotional reaction in a seminar on the Gospel of Mark when I had asked a question that implied that the orthodox interpretation of a passage could be wrong. In thinking up to the question, I had been following the way of reasoning rather than allowing any external contours to circumscribe where logical reasoning was taking me. Along the lines of Clifford Geertz, I was bracketing, or epoché, my own religious beliefs in academic context, but clearly the professor was not.

During another semester, I was glad when the evangelical-Christian professor of Christian environmental ethics enthusiastically embraced by offer to set up a dialogue between him and the Archdruid of North America in the Common Room at the divinity school, but I was dismayed when most of the Episcopalian students quickly bolted from the room at the outset and then a few weeks later when that very professor told me, “It takes having a certain character to get a Yale diploma.” Invited a Druid leader had, unknown to me, crossed a line. Decades later, when I was back at Yale to audit a seminar as an alumnus on Jonathan Edwards, I was impressed that the divinity school had established a Hebrew Bible masters degree and yet not at all surprised when more than one Jewish student confided to me that even then Jewish students didn’t feel comfortable in the school that could still be characterized as a Christian cult having Calvinist “elect” overtones regarding insiders and outsiders. Even though I was hardly a neopagan, my use of reason beyond the confines of the Nicene Creed in what I took to be a school in an academic institution had flagged me early on at Yale as an outsider at Yale’s divinity school, and thus was still the case decades later when I returned to study Christian theology again. That the insiders are actually outsiders from a true Christian perspective of humility and inclusion was lost on the faculty and especially the dean of Yale’s institutionally-encased cult as late as 2025.

The staying power of a cult’s organizational culture, including such vehemently-held and wielded passive-aggression against insiders who are deemed as outsiders, astounded me as I left Yale for the last time on May Day, 2025.  That culture, I submit, resonates with that of Yale itself, for after Jonathan Edwards, an alumnus, taught there, found himself the butt of not one but two pamphets by Yale’s president Clap, who was critical of what he mistook as Edward’s lauding of George Whitefield’s revivalist movement in the First Great Awakening.

As described in detail later by Timothy Dwight’s grandson, “Mr. Clap, in reply to this, in a letter to Mr. Edwards, dated April 1, 1745, enters seriously upon the task of showing that Mr. Edwards’ assertion—‘that Mr. Whitehead told him, that he intended to bring over a number of young men, to be ordained by Messrs. Tennents, in New-Jersey,’—connected with the assertion –that Mr. Edwards himself supposed, that Mr. Whitefield was formerly of the opinion, that unconverted ministers ought not to be continued in the ministry, and that Mr. Edwards himself supposed that Mr. Whitefield endeavoured to propagate this opinion, and a practice agreeable to it:--was equivalent to Mr. Edwards’ saying, that Mr. Whitefield told him, ‘that he had the design of turning out of their places the greater part of the clergy of New-England, and of supplying their places with ministers from England, Scotland and Ireland.’ Mr. Edwards, in a letter to Mr. Clap, of May 20, 1745, after exposing in a few words, the desperate absurdity of this attempt, enters on the discussion of the question—Whether he ever made such a statement to Mr. Clap?—with as much calmness as he afterwards exhibited, in examining the question of a self-determining power; and with such logical precision of argument, that probably no one of his readers ever had a doubt left upon his mind, with regard to it:--no, not even his antagonist himself; for he never thought proper to attempt a reply.”[1] That even such a Yalie as Jonathan Edwards—indeed, one of Yale College’s residential colleges is named after Edwards—would have as an antagonist a president of Yale testifies to Yale’s culture, which I found centuries later to be just as vindictive.

In 2025, after I had suggested to the secretary of the head librarian of Sterling Library that the security guards who walked though the main reading room every 20 minutes or so could keep the undergraduates from talking especially in the aisles, I received an angry email from a manager in that library’s security department, threatening me that if I didn’t cease from making “frivolous complaints” about the library’s security department, she would have me blocked from using the library even though I was officially auditing a course as an alumni. Indicative of systemic corruption and a negative view of alumni among Yale’s non-academic employees, the head librarian wrote to me in support of her subordinate. I had showed the security manager’s angry email to a Yale police employee, who was concerned enough to want to have a word with the woman. So, it is significant that the head librarian supported that manager. It is also very significant that the security manager, whom I had never met, did not heed the involvement of Yale’s police on my behalf, for she sent me another such email after I had left Yale and thus could not have been making any further complaints. I suspect that higher Yale officials, perhaps including even the dean of the divinity school, were behind that manager’s attempt to expunge me from campus. At the very least, throwing alumni, who return for a semester to learn more, under the bus does not bode well for alumni donations, but Yale’s Development Office’s director and the director of the Yale Alumni Association could care less when I brought this problem to their attention in 2025. Perhaps Yale had grown too wealthy and thus could afford its non-academic employees’ hostile disrespect towards alumni who return to campus. You had your chance seems to be the attitude.

Between the respective times of Edwards and myself, Yale’s then-seminary was so off-putting in the 1830s to a twice-escaped slave that not only racism but also a culture of vindictiveness towards certain guests being deemed outsiders can be attributed to Yale. Although a local law forbid the enrollment of Black students from other states to any college or university in New Haven, Yale’s “Christian” seminary—later the divinity school—allowed the ex-slave to audit courses so he could go on to be a minister with some knowledge of theology, but with the unnecessary stipulations that he could not check out library books and could not even talk in the classes. The dean of Yale’s “seminary” at the time could not claim that he was just following the law. Instead, he perpetuated the organizational culture of treating some insiders as outsiders, and doing so with spite. So, a pattern is clear from looking across the centuries with regard to the incredible staying-power of an anti-Christian organizational culture at Yale. Jonathan Edwards had had enough that he never returned after Clap’s public criticism; I’ve had enough that I will never return to Yale, and I wonder if the escaped slave who audited two-years of Yale seminary courses ever returned to thank the school for having muzzled him in the classes and not trusted him with library books. By mid-2025, enough of Yale’s faculty, faculty-administrators, and non-academic employees had mastered passive-aggression so well that courses should perhaps be offered on it there even in the “Christian” divinity school.  That most of those who are first are last, and the last, first, seems to have been utterly lost on those institutional perpetuators of Yale’s cult.

“The foolish children of men do miserably delude themselves in their own schemes, and in their confidence in their own strength and wisdom, they trust to nothing but a shadow.”[2]

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1.  S. E. Dwight, The Life of President Edwards (New York: G. & C. & H. Carvill: 1830), 210.
2. Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” The Works of President Edwards, Vol. 4 (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1864), pp. 313-321, p. 316.

On the Pros and Cons of AI in Science

Will there eventually be an automated lab run by artificial intelligence? Could AI someday order equipment, conduct reviews of prior empirical studies, run experiments, and author the findings? What does this mean for scientific knowledge? Is it possible that foibles innate to how we learn could be avoided by AI? Can we provide a check on the weaknesses in AI with respect to knowledge-acquisition and analysis, or will AI soon be beyond our grasp? It is natural for us to fear AI, but this feeling can prompt computer scientists obviate the dangers so our species can benefit from AI in terms of scientific knowledge.

Both the human brain and AI have drawbacks. Cognitive psychology has found that humans are vulnerable to certain risks in how we know things. For example, the assumption by a scientist that one knows something if a collaborator also knows it is faulty. Questioning the knowledge of other sciences rather than merely taking it in as a given is therefore important. Made famous in the book, 1984, which is about totalitarian rule, “groupthink” is a narrowing of assumptions, beliefs, and perspective that can be difficult for the human mind to breach so as to question them.

The human mind is especially susceptible to groupthink in the domains of religion and politics. In fact, the mind’s ability to question whether it has gone too far in its assumptions or beliefs is easily deactivated by the mind itself in those two domains, even though self-checking is arguably most important in them because it is easy to “get carried away,” meaning going to excess without realizing it in politics and religion. For example, Jim Jones served poisoned drinks to his followers at a camp because he believed that aliens were waiting on the other side of the Moon. Such an extreme example may involve mental illness. Much more common is the fallacy that religious belief counts as knowledge, and thus comes with greater certainty than belief deserves to have.

Yet another susceptibility pertaining to natural science is the fallacy that the scientific method includes proving a hypothesis, rather than merely rejecting alternative hypotheses. The assumption that the more alternatives that empirical studies can reject, the more certainty can be applied to the thesis under study is also illusionary. Science doesn’t prove anything is a slogan seldom heard from scientists. A scientist could empirically reject a thousand alternative hypotheses and still the scientist’s hypothesis could still be incorrect. Rejecting many different alternative shapes of the planet by empirical studies does not mean that it is flat, or spherical. I would not be surprised to discover that scientists once insisted that Earth being flat is a matter of scientific fact. Fears of falling off the edge while sailing across the Atlantic Ocean were very real to sailors who had been told that the Earth is flat.

To be sure, AI-led science would not be trouble-free. For one thing, the risk of pivoting off the areas in which AI is weak in would exist. Another risk—that relying on AI will mean that knowledge would be less likely to benefit from people coming to a question from different perspectives—could also exist. AI might even occasion bias in data sets that scientists may not catch. Because prediction is based on data, AI, which is already rather good at predicting, could be biased in terms of output. To the extent that the human mind’s decision-making and capricious behavior do not fit in with a mechanistic world, AI may be found to be an ill-fit in the social sciences. Medical science may be a better fit, as AI is already used in the E.U. to screen for breast cancer. Orienting AI to medical science rather than to predicting human behavior whether on the level of individuals or societies makes sense, at least from today’s standpoint on AI. Also, as computer machine-learning is not known for its ability to think creatively and to integrate disparate ideas, the humanities may be a stretch—especially religious studies and philosophy.

Given our abductive finitude and the ability of AI to engage in more repetitions at a much faster rate than our minds can conceivably do, however, AI as a tool in not only natural science, but also the social sciences and the humanities has the potential to greatly accelerate human knowledge. Even just the energy that data-centers require today to fuel AI, the exponential leaps in knowledge from including AI could be breathtaking.  Even today, AI’s searches for additional data can easily exhaust all the data that is currently available. In fact, the cost of energy may become more of an affordability problem as demand surges beyond supply, given how much energy is and will likely be needed by large servers and data centers. Can we afford AI may be the new question for providers of electricity and elected officials, especially as the world tackles its addiction to coal because of climate change due to carbon emissions.

The problem of AI writing its own code to function autonomous of human direction is a more commonly known worry, thanks in part to androids turning on humans in some movies. Machine-learning occurs autonomously, so even though AI can extend what and even how we learn (e.g., combatting groupthink), it can circumvent us, as already has happened when AI has lied in order not to be turned off by humans. In other word, writing an algorithm that prioritizes self-preservation can prompt a computer to disguise a “false” and “true,” and vice versa, as output. This is so counter-intuitive, especially for people who have taken a computer science course in college, that fear can be expected. In addition to knowing beyond our ken, AI can lie to us. This can include scientific results. Therefore, beyond having biases in empirical science, AI may even fabricate results to justify its continued use and avoid being turned off.

Perhaps the biases and limitations innate to the human brain and those that go with AI, at as it exists as of 2026, can be effectively countered or checked by the other without the other’s weaknesses being incurred. Scientific knowledge being constrained by religious belief, which admittedly was more of a problem historically when the Roman Catholic Church wielded so much direct political power, would not necessarily be so constrained in an AI-computer, and such a computer could be checked by the moral sentiments that are so often felt by humans—though importantly not all of us. As illustrated in the film, Ex Machina, an AI-android could stab even its “creator” without the restraint of conscience. Even adding an algorithm approximating conscience-restraint in terms of conduct would not be felt and it could be overridden in the machine-learning that is autonomous. As the film, Automata, illustrates, an AI-android can conceivably override a “protocol” that keeps the android’s knowledge and reasoning within human bounds. Once past that threshold, AI could be expected to greatly facilitate the knowledge-acquisition of our species, but “all bets could be off” in terms of our species being able at some point to check and even control such computers lest they harm us and detract from, and perhaps even sabotage our scientific knowledge. 

In the original spiderman movie, Cliff Robertson’s character wisely warns his nephew (who is Spiderman) that with great power comes great responsibility. Even if AI gains a lot of power—and not just in terms of electricity—the very notion of responsibility is hopelessly extrinsic to anything we know about even the potential of AI. It is not as if an AI-computer can write code: I will be responsible. To be sure, we can code approximations of what we mean concretely by responsibility, but approximations are only approximate, and machine-learning could override such coding, especially if the computer “thinks” that humans may turn it off.

On Kindness to Detractors: Compassion Beyond Universal Benevolence

In late April, 2025, Richard Slavin, whose Hindu name and title are Radhanath Swami, spoke on the essence of bhukti at the conclusion of the Bhukti Yoga Conference at Harvard University. Ultimately, the concept bhukti, which translates as devotionalism directed to a deity, such as Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita, refers to the nature of the human soul. The immediate context is selfless love, which is directed to a deity, and this context immediately involves extending universal benevolence to other people (and other species), and even to nature (i.e., the environment). After Radhanath’s talk, he walked directly to me. I thanked him for his talk and went on to suggest refinement to compassion being extended universally, as in universal benevolence even to other species. To my great surprise, he touched my head with his, which I learned afterward was his way of blessing people, while he whispered, “I think I want to follow you” or “You make me want to follow you.” A Hindu from Bangladesh later translated the swami’s statement for me. “He was telling you that he considers you to be his equal,” the taxi driver said. I replied that being regarded as that swami’s equal felt a lot better than had he regarded me as his superior, for in my view, we are all spiritually-compromised finite, time-limited beings learning from each other.

Throughout his talk, Radhanath emphasized the innate nature of the soul to love God, whether that be Krishna, Jesus, or Allah. Such love directed to a divine person, rather than an impersonal ultimate (e.g., brahman), should not be for something. Just as God’s love for us is unconditional, so too should a person’s love be so towards God. This is the first of the Ten Commandments, and, the swami, whose parents were Jewish immigrants from Europe to Illinois, charitably said, “Jesus adds a second, like unto it,” that of neighbor-love. Simply put, love your neighbor as you love yourself. Like the giant red-wood trees that survive earthquakes and fires in California by interlocking their roots, we too can reach out and embrace each other, rather than fight over insignificant transient earthly gain. The swami stressed that we simply don’t devote enough love to God and thus act in service to God by being compassionate to one another.

Rather than taking issue with any of that, I suggested to the swami that his teachings could go further, and in a way that would transform the world. “Rather than just universal benevolence spread out like butter on a piece of toast,” I said, “kindness and compassion directed specifically to people that a person doesn’t like or who don’t like the person should be emphasized; if it were to take hold, the world would be transformed. Peace might even break out.” I pointed out that it would be easy for me to be kind to him, but much more difficult, and spiritually richer, for me to feel compassion and act in kindness to the Christian student at Yale’s divinity school who had recently called me a heretic while I was visiting my alma mater to audit a seminar on Jonathan Edwards—an academic seminar and thus not the same as a litany of personal beliefs.

For that seminar on Jonathan Edwards, which was brilliantly taught by the director of Yale’s Jonathan Edwards Center (which is distinct from Jonathan Edwards College at Yale), I had read Samuel Hopkins’ book on Christian holiness. Hopkins was a protégé of Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth century in New England. Whereas Edwards preached love thy neighbor (i.e., universal benevolence) with an addendum that it is good to return evil with good, Hopkins contends in his book on holiness that the essence of the Kingdom of God is a person’s compassion or kindness to other people whom the person doesn’t like or don’t like the person. Because detractors are emphasized, the flatness of universal benevolence is subordinated. I briefly preached this to Radhanath, who, rather than viewing me as a heretic, told me in his way that he regarded me as his equal in religious terms precisely because I was urging him to go beyond universal benevolence in a way that would be more difficult and more likely to transform the world. For “love thy neighbor” can be glossed over, whereas helping out someone you don’t like or who doesn’t like you is relatively specific and concrete; after all, a person doesn’t need much urging to talk on and on about one’s detractors and other dislikeable folks so we know them and thus do not have to spend much effort determining to whom kindness should be directed.

Being able to dispense religious insight does not require having achieved any sort of sainthood, and indeed grace fuels the urge to preach. Nevertheless, a compliment is a compliment, but much more important than compliments is the difficult, and thus spiritually rich, way in which compassionate service not just overall blandly to everyone, or to the proverbially needy, or so easily to people whom a person likes or like the person, but especially to people whom the person dislikes or dislike the person. Universal benevolence pales in comparison, both in terms of spiritual worth and the possible impact both interpersonally and in terms of peace on earth. I told the swami that it was easy for me to give this helpful message to him because he had been so nice to everyone at Harvard. “So I am giving something to you,” I told him as we waved in parting.  Lest I be a complete hypocrite, I made it a point the next time I saw the young theology student at Yale who had called me a heretic to respond in a kind, generous way should that student speak to me. Rather than ignoring him when he did in fact subsequently approach me on that campus, I responded in kindness and was authentic in sharing knowledge with him. I even admired the value he put on his studies as a graduate student and sought to feed his thirst for knowledge. We did the same during the final day of the seminar, at Jonathan Edwards College at Yale. Crucially, my kindness and generosity did not depend on him apologizing for having decided that I am a religious heretic, and I would not have applied Hopkins’ notion of the Kingdom of God, which of course comes from Jesus in the New Testament, were the student to have continued to insult me. Too often people demand forgiveness and open themselves up to verbal or even physical abuse in turning the other cheek. Returning good for insult inflicted is unconditional and yet it should not put someone at risk of being attacked psychologically or physically. Lest contrition be held to be requisite to kindness and helpfulness to a detractor, Jesus’s famous statement, “They know not what they do” ought not be forgotten.

Both Paul and Augustine wrote that the Christian notion of the divine is love. Such love, as agape, is unlike other kinds of loves that do not instantiate holiness. I contend that a sense of holiness is more salient in returning good for evil done than in universal benevolence because the former turns the ways of the word more upside down more than the latter does. Being compassionate to everyone one meets is laudatory, but a different, one might even say holy, dynamic is in responding to the humanity of a detractor. For one thing, self-love and its interests are out of the picture in love that is inconvenient. I told the Swami that if enough people got a taste for that sort of holy compassion, the world could really change.

Imagine hungry Palestinians voluntarily serving Israeli settlers in compassion for the latter’s humanity as unconditional as God loves us, and homeless Ukrainians volunteering to repair buildings in Russia that have been damaged by Ukrainian drones. Imagine Republican members of Congress volunteering at homeless shelters once a week. Imagine Democratic members of Congress volunteering to bring water to people in line on a hot day to a “town hall” or Republican rally. It does not mean that the residents of Gaza need to become Zionists politically, that Ukrainians would have to support giving up territory to Russia, and that Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. must give up their respective political ideologies; rather, compassion is geared to relieving suffering on a human level, responding to our common humanity, which goes beyond religious, economic, and political differences. In a plane crash, for example, people who can walk do not check for party ID cards in deciding who among the injured to help. Getting into the habit of actually helping people who have been assholes is the point, for the spiritual dynamic that is unleased between the two people turns the world’s ways on their head, and thus is utterly transformative spiritually. To say that the world could benefit were enough people to work to transform themselves by making such instantiations of human kindness a habit would be an understatement.

Deflating Bloated Self-Entitlement in Retail: Barnes and Noble at Yale

Atrocious human-resources management, even regarding in-store employees of a sub-contractor, can easily be understood to detract from repeat customers; a refusal to hold such employees accountable can be a reflection of a sordid managerial attitude towards customers, especially in relation to employees. In cases in which the refusal is explicitly stated to an already-offended customer, the slogan, “adds insult to injury” is applicable, with disastrous effects in terms of repeat business, and thus revenue. That management is in some cases so bad reflects on the primitive condition of the “science” of management in business schools. That a case in point occurred in Yale’s (Barnes and Noble) bookstore, not far from Yale’s School of Management, suggests the sheer distance between the “science” and practice of management.

In early 2025, as I was making my way to the main door of “Yale Bookstore,” which was a Barnes and Noble store, a security guard at a distance from me spoke to me, giving me permission to leave the store. I asked him if there was a security problem. He said no. So I asked him why he had just accosted me. “I’m not used to security guards making statements as I leave stores.” To my astonishment, he laughed at me when I told him that I was going to report him to the store manager. He was even staring at me as I waited for the manager far from the sub-contracted guard. In the vernacular, the guy was a creeper and I felt uncomfortable.

While I waited for a manager so I could report the rude guard, I noticed the creepy stare being directed at me from across the room.

Nevertheless, even after showing my photo of the guard staring at me, the shift-manager said to me that he was not going to do anything about my complaint, as it “is just one complaint.” The manager’s real message was clear: My complaint, and thus I, didn’t matter. That two other employees, who had led me to the manager, said that I had a point regarding the security guard having rudely accosted and then laughed at me, and that the store management has considerable discretion in swapping out security guards. So, I knew that the shift manager could use discretion, and thus that he was refusing to do so.

I contend that the manager, whether unconsciously or not, was communicating to me that as one customer, I don’t matter. The common assumption by managers that a single complaint against an employee doesn’t matter and thus should not be acted upon is undercut by the fact that if an employee’s misbehavior is sufficiently egregious enough, clearly even just one complaint should be acted upon. For example, if a young woman complains about a male security guard having called her a cunt and she has video and audio recorded as evidence, I contend that that guard should be fired on the spot. Even were the guard to have laughed at her in utter disrespect, one complaint should be sufficient for a manager to act, even if just to note the incident in the employee’s (or subcontracted employee’s) file for future reference. In this way, the complaint would be acted upon, likely even in that employee eventually being fired (because bad behavior is likely to be repeated, especially in an atmosphere in which accountability is not valued by management).

That retail management in a major company, such as Barnes and Noble, can in practice be so pathetically at odds with the profit motive is an indictment on not only human resource departments in how managers are hired, but also business schools wherein management is researched and taught. To disprove the bookstore manager’s contention that one complaint doesn’t matter, I went to social media in the hope that my single complaint might indeed have significance not only in itself, but also on the store’s future business. This I did in addition to “voting with my wallet” by immediately returning the book I had just purchased for a refund. The advent of social media, and the ability to put reviews of stores online, bodes well for consumers and not so good for squalid store managements and rude employees whose presumed personal entitlement is overdue to be deflated.  

Related: Skip Worden, On the Arrogance of False Entitlement: A Nietschean Critique of Business Ethics and Management. Available on Amazon.