All posts by Rob York

Rob York works for a think tank in Honolulu and still prefers communication by Post-it Notes.
Introvert, by Massimo Stefanoni, via Flickr
Honolulu
Commentary

The Unbearable Lightness of Being at Home

When the lockdowns first began, I thought the introvert in me would thrive. Instead, I learned that, however bothersome, social interaction helps keep my personal demons at bay.


I hate meetings. Yes, everyone says that, but I am on the extreme end of the relevant bell curve here: I am introverted to such a degree that some people have confessed that they were unsure I had the ability to speak until months after we met. Therefore, in late March 2020, when stay-at-home orders began to go into force, schools began closing, and my workplace switched to telecommuting, my reaction was more sanguine than most. After all, introverts draw strength from within! Forced social interaction is what tires us most! With fewer meetings scheduled, surely my unpublished novel, a new personal best for pushups, and that foreign language I’d been meaning to learn would all be within my grasp.

Or so I thought.

There was one thing I had not factored into my calculations: depression. While these spells have been with me for much of my life, they increased in frequency after the pandemic began. After just a few weeks of staying at home, I began to notice that I was having more extreme reactions to even mild criticisms from my wife, from my colleagues, even from strangers on the internet. With fewer social interactions to distract me, I heard “I think you misunderstood the nature of this assignment,” “You didn’t use enough soap when you washed the dishes,” and “You might want to rethink your evaluation of this polling data” and understood “Your failure to accomplish small tasks means you are a failure in life and that you should stare at the ceiling.”

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Rob York works for a think tank in Honolulu and still prefers communication by Post-it Notes.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Seoul
News

Born This Way

In South Korea, where a Christian minority dominates the country’s culture and politics, fundamentalists are fighting a culture war against their list of abominations: homosexuality, evolution, even Lady Gaga. But one church in Seoul is fighting back, working from within the faith to make it more tolerant — one gay Christian at a time.


The Reverend Daniel Payne, left, at this year’s Korea Queer Culture Festival in Seoul. Payne, who is gay, delivers Sunday night sermons on tolerance and social justice from his church’s house of worship — a Seoul bar. Photo by Rob York

At first glance, the scene seems all too familiar. On the fringe of a gay pride festival, a local church has set up shop. A pastor preaches about homosexuality while his followers hand out Bible passages to passersby.

But look closer. The church is not protesting. The pastor is preaching a sermon of affirmation and acceptance. He is openly gay.

Much like in America, conservative Christianity dominates South Korea’s culture and politics, and there is no shortage of fundamentalist believers who call gay culture an abomination. But as the gay-rights movement has gained traction here in recent years, some liberal Christian congregations have started welcoming members of all sexual orientations, allowing gay Christians — that unlikely but real constituency — to work from within to make their faith more tolerant. One of these churches is the Open Doors Community Church, an activist Christian congregation in Seoul whose members are mostly gay.

Continue reading Born This Way →

Rob York works for a think tank in Honolulu and still prefers communication by Post-it Notes.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Seoul
Reviews

Losing Zion

Conservative inflexibility and liberal apathy have endangered the dream of a democratic, secure Jewish state, a prominent American Zionist argues in a new book. But for all his ideas to salvage the two-state solution, Peter Beinart seems really to be documenting its demise.



What do Palestinian activists and a Jewish Zionist in Manhattan have in common? The opposition of Israeli hard-line conservatives, as it turns out. Peter Beinart, a former editor of The New Republic who now teaches at the City University of New York, argues that the future of Israel is in grave danger — not from the enemies that have long surrounded it, but from its growing extremism internally and the growing apathy of liberal American Jews toward Israel.

In his new book, The Crisis of Zionism, Beinart makes the case that the dream of a democratic Israel is dying, undermined by West Bank settlements and the marginalization of Palestinians. Within the United States, Israel’s longtime ally, Zionist organizations reflexively support Israel’s policies, while liberal Jews have a fading interest in Israeli issues. In both countries, there has been no significant opposition from liberal Zionists to the bellicose policies that endanger Israel’s founding principles of democracy.

Beinart fears the end of the two-state solution that would grant Palestinians and Jews their own nations, believing that the two groups could not live together harmoniously in one state after decades of acrimony. Breaking with many of his fellow Zionists, however, he identifies Jewish settlements in the proposed Palestinian nation as the greatest threat to this goal. “There are, to be sure, many Palestinians who don’t want two states and seek Israel’s destruction,” he writes. “But the best way to ensure their triumph is to keep eating away at the land on which a Palestinian state may be born.”

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Rob York works for a think tank in Honolulu and still prefers communication by Post-it Notes.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also: