Repeat after me: Pesticides hurt people, especially poor people

Next time someone goes off about how the organic food people are oblivious to the realities of the lower classes, etc., you could do worse than to point them to this article on the human costs of conventional industrial agriculture:

TERESA AVIÑA won’t open the windows or door of her small apartment, despite a heat that plagues the soul. On the kitchen table, beside two jugs of bottled water, a small, green, electric fan pushes thick air around the room.

“What good is the wind?” she asks, glancing out the window at the breeze that flutters the trees in her front yard. “It’s all poison.”

Controversies large and small at Lambeth

Well, there's the gay thing. Or, if you prefer, the authority of scripture/doctrinal integrity/historic beliefs thing.

But there's also the Buddhist chant thing. Several bishops were outraged that the Bishop of Colombo gave a sermon that ended with the chant, even though the words he used were orthodox Christian by any standard. (Nobody tell them about the U2charist, okay?)

And let's not forget the thing where the bishops and their spouses marched in support of the Millennium Development Goals, but did so dressed to the nines--because immediately afterward they were to have tea w/ the queen. Nothing like making it easy for the press and the liberals-are-hypocrities-osphere to ignore the real story.

Meanwhile, the Common Cause Partnership--which represents the various conservative Anglican groups in North America that aren't part of TEC or ACC--is petitioning to become a province of GAFCON.

Since when do American civilians answer to a "commander in chief"?

Josh considers the militarization of the presidency.

Enjoy playing in the alley, Conor/Madison/Quinn. Wear your beach tag so people know you belong.

Next week, I'm spending a couple days on the Jersey Shore, in one of those towns where a bunch of people who drive everywhere they go in their regular lives pay a lot of money to spend a week or two in a dense, walkable town.

Matt Wanamaker contemplates this odd exemption to middle-to-upper-class NIMBYism on density. He also gives a good and thorough historical answer to a question I raise in the comments: Is it possible that people who otherwise despise multi-family housing, alleys, and other city-ish things are a little warmer to them in a place where they're unlikely to run into any of the kind of people they were wanting to avoid in the first place?

No room for theological skepticism in our wicked leads

Christian metal band Haste the Day has fired its guitarist--for becoming an atheist.

New study: Girls are just as good at math as boys are

From a new study by the National Science Foundation: Now that girls and boys take the same number of math classes, their standardized test scores are the same.

A great excuse to re-post this classic xkcd comic, titled "How it Works":

About that Brandenburg-trip thing

Ali raises a good point: For Obama, the equivalent to JFK's trip to Germany isn't going to Germany. It's going to Pakistan.

How is John Hagee like Moses?

Only Joe Lieberman could tell us.

"Kids! No church this weekend."

Drew on the persuasive power of license plates.

But I Thought the Religious Right Was Dead: Iowa edition

Sen. Grassley--Iowa's senior Republican elected official and recently an investigator of televangelists--will not be a delegate to the GOP convention.

Secrets

Doug Muder reflects on the religious themes that come up so often in Frank Warren's PostSecret project.

On a personal note, a few months ago I went to an art exhibit that featured something similar: Instead of secrets, visitors were invited to write down GOALS and drop them in a box; the artist later posted them. I submitted one--something serious and vulnerable--but I can't even remember what it was.

Indaba at Lambeth

So the bishops at the Lambeth Conference recently participated in Indaba meetings--a Zulu term for a meeting focused on hearing everyone out and talking about things rather than voting. Like most such things, sounds like a moving and frustrating experience. A couple posts: from the bishops of Missouri and Arkansas.

In other Lambeth news, Pope Benedict offers his prayers for the Anglican Communion.

David Neff on environmentalism and eschatology

The CT editor tackles some of the tensions with which the topic of evangelical theology's intersections with environmental ethics is fraught.

SBC: We need to sing more songs about going to heaven/burning in hell

I've done a lot of reading on people's (strong!) opinions about the relative merits of hymns and praise choruses, but this is an angle I hadn't quite seen before.

The Nation: America's little white daughters are sexually attracted to a black presidential candidate

The inaugural comment in The Nation's regular sex-and-politics feature is more than a little bizarre.

More Womenpriests ordinations

This time, in Boston.

Gift idea

For the guy who welcomed you into his home for six months, during which you both discussed much politics and put up much food, a t-shirt publicizing a new coalition:

More rapture profiteers

At last: A way to e-mail your Unsaved Friends post-that-great-gettin'-up-morning.

Via Gary.

Lambeth links

The Lambeth Conference has begun.

Dave Walker has a useful set of links to blogging bishops and other coverage. And here's a feed that aggregates most of the blogging bishops.

Why U.S. religious pluralism is way better than any European alternative: Mosques in Europe edition

USA Today:

• Supporters of the Swiss referendum collected enough signatures two weeks ago to call for a constitutional ban on minarets, the towers used to call worshipers to prayer. No date has been set for the vote.

• Italy's Interior Minister Roberto Maroni announced this month that he wants to close a Milan mosque because crowds attending Friday prayers spill onto the street and irritate neighbors. In April, the city of Bologna scrapped plans for a new mosque, saying Muslim leaders failed to meet certain requirements, including making public its source of funding.

• In Austria, the southern province of Carinthia passed a law in February that effectively bans the construction of mosques by requiring them to fit within the overall look and harmony of villages and towns.

• Far-right leaders from 15 European cities met in Antwerp, Belgium, in January and called for a ban on new mosques and a halt to "the Islamization" of European cities. The group said mosques act as catalysts for taking over neighborhoods and imposing Islamic ways of life on Europeans.

I'm feeling uncharacteristically patriotic today.

Sign of the Timeses (and the Posts and the Sentinels)

Veteran God-beat reporter Mark Pinsky has been laid off.

Sourcing your compost (or, God forbid, your garbage-disposal fodder)

If this card (from someecards) is to be believed, apparently while I've been sitting at home pitting the season's last tart cherries (while simultaneously watching baseball and looking for a job--both notoriously slow-paced activities) and then canning them in a light sugar syrup, some of you who "work at jobs" and "can't spend three hours in the kitchen on a Thursday afternoon" have been WASTING FOOD--a crime far more serious than buying produce at the grocery store or whatever.

Via Bonnie P., who adds that "you know something’s reached a tipping point when it gets its own hipster greeting card."

Sane words on Coverillustrationgate

Jeffrey Weiss says something that should be obvious but apparently isn't: All satire is offensive or transgressive in some way. That's part of what makes it satire.

"Man running through the grass outside, says he wants to take up serpents"

A crackdown on the snake handlers.

No word as to whether people will be arrested for deliberately drinking the deadly thing.

Why I miss Chicago

The people. The food. The weather. The Cubs. The (great) lake.

The coyotes.

In which my big-tent instincts evade me

Via Jeff, the church door prize from hell.

Pretty sure you don't hunt with these things. They're meant for shooting PEOPLE, something I think we can all agree the church shouldn't be promoting among its teenagers.

Tithing on staff time

I missed this before--an interesting idea from Tom Perrellio, the Democratic challenger in Virginia's 5th congressional district.



Via Mark.

"We understand that casual sex is dear to you, but staying alive is dear to us."

If you're interested in the tensions between Western ideas and the ways in which Westerners tend to actually treat non-Westerners, you could do worse than to follow the conflict in the Anglican Communion.

This piece from the co-chair of Uganda's anti-AIDS committee is instructive as well.

Cars have four wheels and an engine! It's a disgrace.

An analogy from Ezra on the fact that John McCain's made it clear not only that his "plan" to reform Social Security is a little light on details and heavy on nonsense but also that he doesn't (or didn't) even understand how the program works:

It's like if lots of people made fun of one guy's car because it was broken down, ugly, and lacked headlights. Then one of the dimmer members of the group, sensing an opportunity to jump in, piped up with, "yeah, four wheels and an engine? What's with that!? When you gonna do something about that!?" Everyone would sort of look at the guy for a moment while they registered that this person didn't understand how a car worked. Now imagine that this person was applying to run an auto shop. And people were taking his application seriously. That's sort of the situation we're in.

Community organizing vs. compassionate conservatism

Ira Chernus on why the Obama faith-based initiative plan is fundamentally different from the Bush one.

Wes Granberg-Michaelson q+a

Back when I was at Utne Reader, I interviewed Wes Granberg-Michaelson--general secretary of the Reformed Church in America and a leader in global and stateside ecumenical efforts--for the Web site. It's just been posted.

Remembering the lies in an age of moving on

With a successful book out about prosecuting the president for murder, it's remarkable that Vincent Bugliosi hasn't gotten more press. Leaving aside the actual merits of Bugliosi's main idea, this video's a good reminder of just how damning the facts (not conjecture) about the Iraq War buildup are to its architects:



Via Kathy G.

Repeat after me: The religious right was NOT born of moral outrage at Roe v. Wade

I'd forgotten about this gem of an anecdote from Randall Balmer until Digby quoted from it in a post about Obama's discussion of limits on late-term abortion w/ Relevant magazine.

In case you don't feel like reading the Balmer excerpt, here's the gist: It wasn't abortion. It was segregation.

Good thing she hasn't discovered Cornerstone Festival yet

It looks like Claudia Parsons has never heard of the evangelical movement, much less of its music festivals. Creation Fest is "an unusual place to get baptized," what with all the long hair and rock and roll? Unusual by whose standards, Episcopalians? Or this paragraph:

One in four Americans count themselves as evangelical Protestants, a growing movement with serious clout in a country where religion and politics often mix. Creation is officially non-denominational and it drew some Catholics, but the rhetoric of most speakers was that of "born again" Christians.

This would be right at home in a news story from back when I was a toddler. In reality, Reuters published it earlier today.

What's Stranger Than... (Lambeth Edition)

What's stranger than a blogging bishop?

A bishop who both blogs and VLOGS a gathering to which he was conspicuously not invited.

It's happening

Religious right leaders are getting behind McCain. And they're plotting strategy for convincing younger, more moderate evangelicals that they and their candidate do indeed "care about"--a phrase I love for its electoral meaninglessness, whether it's wielded by Eagle Forum, Faith in Public Life, or the New York Times--economic justice and the environment.

Happy 4th

A strange holiday for those of us who are uncomfortable expressing patriotism in its standard militaristic mode, and for those of us people of faith who insist that our allegiance to God and to country are two different things and that our allegiance to God comes first. But I've learned to like the holiday and to spend part of it thinking about the many parts of American identity and culture for which I'm indeed grateful, about the responsibilities of privilege, about the importance of the loyal opposition.

David Gushee has some good, measured thoughts about July 4 celebrations and church+state.

Jeff Pasley has some July 4 toasts from the early days of the republic, when political statements were not always coded as anti-patriotic. My favorite: "The Congress: May that representative body be purged of aristocrats."

And Meghan has a recipe for charcoal-grilled pizza, which Nadia and I are going to start working on as soon as I hit "post."

One more angel in Episcopal-blog heaven

Father Jake throws in the laptop.

The new Christian apologists

If it's a movement, it needs a slogan. I'll start a brainstorm:

• Apologetics: Because faith is all about incontrovertible proof
  
• Apologetics: My God is real because I'm smarter than you are
• Christianity: Only stupid people are skeptical of it
  
• Faith: The substance of things proven, the evidence of things painfully obvious

More shocking torture news almost no one will notice

Next time someone explains that they support the Bush administration's torture choose-your-euphemism policy because it might save a lot of lives by preventing a "ticking time bomb" or whatever, remind them of this:

• At Gitmo, military personnel learned interrogation techniques in a class based entirely on a chart describing "coercive management techniques."
• The chart was copied verbatim from a 1957 study of how the Chinese interrogated our guys during Korea.
• Many of the confessions the Communists--remember, we don't like them--got from the Americans were false. In fact, getting false confessions was PRETTY MUCH THE POINT.

What?! Are you kidding me?

Okay, back to the real news: I heard somebody said something not-controversial!

Oh, the homosexuality of life!

What happens when anti-gay organizations insist on using the word "homosexual" instead of "gay"?

Sometimes, this.

Take a deep breath and watch this

TPM.tv offers a lowlight reel of the Gen. Clark non-gaffe coverage:



This is absolutely infuriating. (I just watched it and started yelling at the screen. My friend Reuben, looking on, seemed concerned about me.)

In short, the difference between the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth thing and these comments from Gen. Clark are as follows:

• The Swift Boat guys disparaged Sen. Kerry's war-hero status, unequivocally and openly. Gen. Clark acknowledged McCain's service but questioned the assumption that it's equivalent to being prepared to be president.
• The SBV4T talking points consisted of carefully constructed half-truths, personal attacks, and spin. Gen. Clark, speaking off the cuff, said something that was at worst carelessly worded, because it's OBVIOUSLY TRUE: Getting shot down while serving your country might make you a hero, but it has nothing to do with your ability to govern.
  

Mark Silk on the Obama faith-based plan

A helpful summary from what's become one of my favorite blogs.

Why the Christian left is hostile to the Christian right

Barack Obama is not an evangelical.

Barack Obama is not a conservative reader of scripture.

Barack Obama certainly is not a student of theology.

But this? Come on.

Via Faith in Public Life.

Then STEVE AND HIS BROTHERS slew Hamor, Schechem, and the whole city

Dave on those personalized Bibles you can order that insert your own name in the text in place of the "you" or "they" to whom God's promises are addressed:

That way, you can understand that God is making promises directly to you, without the confusing suggestion that God's promises might extend to all people.

A priest, fine. But a BISHOP?

This stuff drives me crazy: Conservative clergy from the Church of England are taking a stand against female bishops.

It's fun to see people tie themselves into knots trying to explain why female BISHOPS are an even bigger problem that female priests. It would be intellectually consistent, if completely and utterly wrong, to oppose BOTH. But it's pretty silly to live (no doubt grudgingly) with the fact that your church ordains women, only to make a whole new stink when it starts to take the logical next step of consecrating them, too.

Obama and the "****ing faith-based thing"

Obama's making a religion speech today. The AP says he's going to announce plans to expand the faith-based initiatives program AND allow hiring and firing that considers religious orientation.

*Headline quote is from Karl Rove...