Why should the pope get all the good motets?

Merry Christmas, all. I'm at home in Wisconsin, enjoying time with my parents, siblings, a few old friends, and two cats who spend the day alternately lying on whichever laps have the warmest laptop batteries and wrestling with each other. Plenty of food, coffee, and sleeping in.

Hey, what's with this crazy contemporary Christian music, anyway? Aaron D. Wolf is a bit late to the cheesy-Christian-music-bashing party, but I enjoyed this piece.

No room in the guest house

Ben Witherington is tired of the idea that Mary and Joseph stayed in a stable owned by a hotel. Interesting stuff.

Via CT.

The moral beauty of being not-WalMart

Target apparently sells t-shirts with slogans like "Support Organic Farmers" and "Think Global, Act Local." For $9. How do they make a profit on this? Well, it helps to produce them in Thailand, w/ cheap, conventionally grown cotton...

(This isn't going to turn into a how-does-globalization-affect-Thailand blog, I promise. I'll be back to the interminable horse race in no time. Maybe I'll even include a proper religion post from time to time, when I can peel my eyes away from Iowa and New Hampshire...)

Via Ethicurean.

We don't know why, it's just cheaper over there

The BBC seems a bit too eager here to report the line given to them by a U.K. seafood manufacturer--that shipping shrimp to Thailand and back to be shelled by hand somehow produces less carbon than the old method of shelling them by machine in Scotland. While the reporter does squeeze in a (not especially illuminating) quote from someone from Greenpeace, the overall credulous tone is disappointing.

Even worse, the piece completely ignores what should be a very obvious question: what does the fact that this company finds it more economical to send its shrimp on a 17,000-mile round trip than to keep it relatively local say about its labor practices over in Thailand?

Of course, then it'd be a story about human needs and the costs of globalization, instead of about The Environment. We all know the two areas of issues are at best unrelated, at worst in conflict w/ each other...

The "nay" vote tally is immaterial to a majority

Eriz Zorn gives a good explanation of the "present" votes Obama cast in the IL senate. It ran in the Tribune two weeks ago, but it's actually a reprint of a column he wrote back in early 2004, when Obama was vying for the nomination in the U.S. senate race--and the same attacks came up. From people who, like Sen. Clinton's people, are extremely unlikely to not understand the political tool of a "present" vote.

Christopher Hitchens is nastier than David Hume?

Daniel Koffler raises a good point about the new atheists--not only are their ideas in fact quite old, but their vitriol is as well.

To be safe, just say "Happy Roman-calendar New Year"

Note to conscientious goyim: Hanukkah is over. Has been for almost a week. So "Happy Hanukkah" makes about as much sense as "Happy Thanksgiving."

More at Utne.

A pre-Roe southern Democrat

Mark Stricherz makes an important point that has not yet gotten much play--Huckabee's as "scary" or "Christo-fascist" or "theocratic" or whatever as...what used to be pretty much standard for many Democrats.

Come, thou long-expected...

Anna Groff has a good piece in The Mennonite about a family in Chicago that has developed its own Advent and Christmas traditions--traditions that seriously reject the culture of consumption binging, rather than just cutting back a bit and/or feeling super BAD about it all.

Via Tim.

"If [Jesus] were here right now, I would drink his wine until I could no longer stand"

There's a great nonfiction piece in the Dec. issue of The Sun--one of my favorite magazines--about mother-son relationships, depression, Bible camp, and whiskey. If that description doesn't make you feel as though you've already read it, check out my longer post on it over at Utne.

(The article itself is not available online.)

Praise bands and short-term memory loss

Touchstone has an interesting piece about church music and the worship wars. Some familiar territory, but makes a useful comparison: worshiping exclusively in a make-it-new/relevant/edgy/whatever context is like waking up each day with no recollection of your own history. What space remains for the great cloud of witnesses?

Letter from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the primates

Man, I bet this guy hasn't had a good night of sleep in months.

Glory to WHOM?

CT has an excerpt of Gordon Giles' book. It's about one of my favorite Christmas hymns, "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing." Interesting notes on the development and theological history of the song.

Mike Huckabee, welcome to the op-ed page, which, unlike the internets, is not full of underinformed ranting

Judith Warner:

I’m thinking of the now entirely muted issue of whether the basic ethical foundations of Romney, Huckabee et al’s political views truly are “Christian” – in the good-neighborly sense of the word.

I am referring here to the sentiments that lie behind the candidates’ attitudes toward gays, which may have found their most honest and open expression in Huckabee’s recently resurrected 1992 suggestion that AIDS patients should be forcibly isolated. I am thinking too of Christian conservative opposition to progressive taxation, public spending for the needy and government “meddling” in such matters as anti-discrimination policies.

It's shocking--well, no, it's predictable, but still stupid--to see how the Huckabee thing plays out in the media: 1) he surges in the polls, 2) the MSM finally starts taking him seriously as a candidate (well after the voters do), 3) we get op-eds like this one.

Has Warner listened to Huckabee's speeches? Has she taken a look at his record as governor? She criticizes him on sexuality and gender stuff, which certainly is fair. But Christian neighborliness is muted in the campaign? Sure, unless you count the fact that Huckabee brings it up in almost every speech and backs it up w/ concrete examples of his own populist efforts and goals.

It's incredible that people still don't get that Huckabee's the genuine compassionate conservative article.

Please understand I'm not endorsing compassionate conservatism--I'm an Obama man, as you know if you've been here long. But geez, what a piece.

Good news from New Jersey

A victory today for death penalty opponents. Nice to see good news coming from a state assembly, what with the Congress letting us all down on the farm bill.

As I've mentioned before, the death penalty is one of the only issues on which I'm a bit of an absolutist. More on that another time.

Four votes short of modest subsidy reform

The Senate just voted on the Dorgan-Grassley farm bill amendment to reduce the cap on annual farm subsidies from $360,000 to $250,000 (for a married couple), and it got 56 yeas.

Fifty-six? Hey, that's a majority, isn't it? Too bad the amendment requires 60 votes for passage--part of the deal to get the bill through. Aren't you glad we put the environment-loving, poor-supporting Dems back in charge?

Still to come: a vote on an amendment from my new senator, Amy Klobuchar. (Note to DC readers: you should move here. We have senators.) Her amendment would block wealthy farmers from receiving subsidies. A no-brainer, right? Right...

Greenwire piece (sub required).

Can he amicably duckabee questions about these ones?

The NY Times has put up a long Huckabee feature from the upcoming Sunday mag.

It's a lively and engaging piece, though Zev Chafets, the writer, has a bit too much fun with the cute details related to the fact that the Huckabee campaign, despite its huge lead in Iowa and growth in national polling, is still running on a shoestring budget. (He carries his own dirty laundry to the counter at the Marriott! His 25-year-old daughter has an important-sounding title!)

More importantly, it includes a couple raging quotes:

I asked Huckabee, who describes himself as the only Republican candidate with a degree in theology, if he considered Mormonism a cult or a religion. ‘‘I think it’s a religion,’’ he said. ‘‘I really don’t know much about it.’’

I was about to jot down this piece of boilerplate when Huckabee surprised me with a question of his own: ‘‘Don’t Mormons,’’ he asked in an innocent voice, ‘‘believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?’’

And, on his lack of foreign policy expertise:

‘‘What you do,’’ he explained, ‘‘is surround yourself with the best possible advice.’’ The only name he mentioned was Representative Duncan Hunter of California. ‘‘Duncan is extraordinarily well qualified to be secretary of Defense,’’ he said.

Melissa Rogers (among others) has a long post about the first; Tim Grieve mentions the second in a post about Duncan Hunter and waterboarding.

Geez. The MSM's finally covering Huckabee in (relative) depth, and they won't stop soon. And his "aw, shucksabee" charm will only go so far, especially if he keeps saying crap like this.

Two funny bits of Romney-speech parody

In the LA Times, John Kenney's own speech on religion and politics.

In the Weekly Standard, Romney's notes on an early draft of his speech.

The emergent church has a (postmodern, candlelit) crush on Obama

Scot McKnight asked his readers to say whom, if anyone, they'd decided to vote for in the presidential primary. Today was Democrats; tomorrow will be Republicans... Who do you think dominated the comments today? I'll give you a hint: he's never been the first lady, and his father wasn't a poor millworker.

NYT: Blah, blah, locavores are elitists and wrong because farmers drive old pickup trucks

Haven't we seen this article too many times by now?

I've grown quite weary of the "righteousness equals SELF-righteousness" fallacy: simply doing something socially responsible doesn't automatically mean you're smug and judgmental about it. That really doesn't make any sense.

Also: "Transporting food by container ship or rail is relatively energy efficient. Shipping it by air or a 25-year-old pickup is not." Nice try--if only most of our industrial food was transported by ship or rail. In fact, it travels by truck--hundreds of miles in a great big, <10-mph 18-wheeler.

More importantly: The point of buying local produce is not to reduce the "food miles" or "carbon imprint" or whatever of an individual piece of produce so that you can sleep better at night knowing that, while the world's still going to hell, you did slightly less than someone else did to pack it into its hellbound handbasket. The point is to help build a movement--not only to contribute your small part but also to promote the greater efficiency, economies of scale, etc. that come w/ the movement's success.

And: the benefits of local food aren't just about reducing energy used to transport food. (Why are we incapable of talking about anything except energy use and global warming?) We know that largescale monocropping devastates the soil. We know that agribusiness devastates family farms and rural communities. We know that tomatoes and stone fruit shipped hundreds of miles are always going to be articifically ripened and relatively flavorless. Why is anyone feeling the need to crunch numbers to figure out whether local or industrial food is "greener"?

Sorry to rant. It's a really frustrating piece to see in the Times.

Philpott takes it down calmly, concisely, and effectively. I should take notes.

New Over the Rhine

My review for Sojourners.

For the first time, a second secession vote

The San Joaquin Episcopal diocese in California held a second vote to leave TEC. It passed by an overwhelming margin. Quote from the presiding bishop has the right combination of gracious tone and firmness of principle/intent:

"We deeply regret their unwillingness or inability to live within the historical Anglican understanding of comprehensiveness," [Katharine Jefferts Schori] said in a statement. "We wish them to know of our prayers for them and their journey. The Episcopal Church will continue in the Diocese of San Joaquin, albeit with new leadership."

Shooting last night at Denver YWAM

Two dead and two injured. AP story.

Christe eleison.

Romney fever!

I was thinking about writing a longer analysis of the Romney speech, but I think that ship has sailed--absolute saturation in the MSM opinion pages today. I won't even link--just open up any major paper. Dionne, Gerson, Krauthammer, unsigned pieces in the NYT and WSJ. Not to mention all the stuff that ran yesterday, before the speech itself.

I will say that I was surprised at how much of the speech did, in fact, make direct reference to the JFK speech. At other points, of course, Romney completely contradicted the sort of capital-S Separation doctrine that Kennedy articulated, and which has since become Democratic boilerplate. Plenty of having it both ways, to be sure.

But you don't need me to discuss that--you can read about it anywhere. And probably already have.

The real JFK speech

Sounds like we will NOT be hearing a "JFK speech" from Gov. Romney tomorrow. However, if you're interested in watching the genuine article--Kennedy in 1960 w/ the Greater Houston Ministerial Association--CSPAN has posted the video. Best of all, it includes the rather intense Q+A that followed the speech.

Via Melissa Rogers.

Baptists love rosary beads

Part 2 in our occasional "who the hell's handling photos over at ABC?" series: this story on Huckabee.

Part 1.

Wow

Fox bought Beliefnet.

Romney: I, Senator, am no Jack Kennedy

The governor said today that his upcoming Mormon Speech will NOT be in the mold of JFK's speech during the 1960 general election. No word as to whether he uttered the phrases "Massachusetts pluralist," "godless separationist," or "damn papist Irish."

The speech is going to be one hell of a balancing act. I think the only safe path is to jettison all nouns and verbs, leaving only vaguely pro-but-not-too-pro-religious feeling.

Posner on Huckabee

Writing in The American Prospect, Sarah Posner gets the Huckabee story right.

Pat Robertson leaves CBN

http://www.cbn.com/media/?s=/vod/Gordon_CEO_120307

And here I thought we were experiencing a resurgence of populism

Does anyone else think this sounds like it was written either ten years ago OR on opposite day?

Romney as JFK

Looks like Romney's going to give the religion speech.

I still think this is a bad idea, a lose/lose with the conservative evangelicals he so badly needs.

Marc Ambinder has a nice list of some additional pros and cons.

Henry Hyde is dead

He represented me (in a manner of speaking) for four years.

Sun-Times piece.

Prooftexting a chapter number

Of all the reasons I'm glad I moved to Saint Paul, MN, this has to be the most significant.

The dreaded wooden spoon

At my parents' house for Thanksgiving, I was making gravy and couldn't find a wooden spoon. A bit sheepishly, my mother admitted that she'd stopped buying them once my youngest sibling got too old for spankings. We used to have a simple system for eventually demoting the newer, food-worthy spoons to bottom-smacking detail (lest we wind up with some temper tantrum or sass in our stew). But it turns out the repurposing was itself the purpose, and there's no longer a single wooden spoon in the house.

(A friend with a similar upbringing once told me that he still cringes when his mother reaches toward him for a hug--even though they have a close and loving relationship and he doesn't think her punishment techniques were ever over the line--because she used to smack him in the face when he was mouthing off. Always sensitive to a serious moment, I pointed out that the wooden-spoon thing has kept me from eating any cooked food for the past 15-20 years.)

In high school speech class, my first assignment was to make a traditional argument for a position and subject of our choice. I chose corporal punishment, arguing that, while there's no evidence that it's the best or only good way to discipline children, used responsibly and lovingly it's one good one. I might still believe that--anecdotally, I know an awful lot of people who grew up like I did and are pretty well-adjusted, parent-loving adults.

On the other hand, my professional life has also exposed me to the research community's consensus that the effects of different kinds of spanking range not from good to bad but from bad to worse. And my theological development makes me a bit uncomfortable with the idea that you can use physical pain or violence to promote good character (though I have trouble describing the kind of careful, loving spanking that my parents used as "violence" with a straight face). And I know that many parents who ARE child abusers by anyone's standard got there via escalation of well-intentioned and considered corporal punishment.

Anyway, Massachusetts might be on the way to being the first state to ban spanking. If "blogging" was an acronym, the "b" would stand for "burying the lede is okay, especially if you don't have an editor."

Via World magazine.

Oh, it's the same God. Thanks, NYT!

After running this good piece in the city section, the Times apparently got some complaints about the headline. It responded by running a thoughtful pair of online-only commentaries by religion scholars from different perspectives; the ombudsman also devoted part of his column to it. The Times ran a simple correction, and it's a gem:

A headline last Sunday about a Muslim man and an Orthodox Jewish woman who are partners in two Dunkin’ Donuts stores described their religions incorrectly. The two faiths worship the same God — not different ones.

That's why we need a paper of record--to present two sides of an age-old and ultimately unresolvable debate not as point and counterpoint but as simple fact and simple correction.

(What's more, the headline said different RELIGIONS, not different GODS, and the correction says that "the two faiths worship the same God"... Separate from the question of whether Jehovah and Allah are one and the same, is the Times now in the business of defining the difference between a religion and a faith?) CORRECTION: I was mistakenly looking at the corrected headline, which changed "Gods" to "Religions." So disregard this paragraph.

(Tip via Get Religion.)

Bill Clinton as red-meat-to-the-base spouse?

The former president told Iowa voters yesterday that he "opposed the Iraq war from the beginning." Anne E. Kornblut pokes some holes in this claim, and Tim Grieve finishes the job effectively.

Both use the word "nuanced" to describe Clinton's past statements on the topic. While certainly they were that--basically everything the man says is--I don't like the value-laden word's implication that, say, statements made before the war began calling it a "dumb war" and predicting correctly some of the problems that would result are somehow less "nuanced." Consistency and strength of opinion are not the same as painting in broad strokes.

The blogging Jesuits

America has a new blog. Looks pretty good so far.

Songs of the Rich and Poor

So I finally posted a couple songs from the songs-about-money-and-class revue I did with a couple friends in DC last month. Check it out on my MySpace space. (It's still cool to have one of those, right?)

"For evangelicals, the cumulative effect of heavy coverage has been the impression that they’re shifting left. They are not."

See Columbia Journalism Review for an excellent takedown of the MSM frenzy over The New Evangelicals.

Give God __, and __ will bless you

The WSJ has an interesting longer reported piece about tithing.

I grew up in an evangelical context, in which tithing was taken literally. The "give God what's rightfully God's his, and he will bless you with even more" line was used liberally--an argument that's manipulative at the least and can easily lead to the nightmare of the prosperity gospel world (though, thankfully and to my home church's credit, this hasn't happened there).

The thing that makes me mad is when a church combines this sort of God-will-bless-you line w/ an insistence that God's blessing and care is purely a spiritual and/or miraculous thing, and not the role of the church itself (aka "Christ's feet and hands"). Individual congregations' handling of this seems to be all over the map.

"These days many evangelicals talk like premillennialists but act like postmillennialists"

Collin Hansen predicts a shift in evangelical eschatology.

"It was in fact the grinch himself who believed that Christmas came in a box"

Bill McKibben on Christmas gift giving.

"Well, Jesus didn't get it quite right."

Scripps Howard has a good piece by Terry Mattingly about the re-purposing of a Christian bumper sticker with an (originally) anti-consumption message.

(Thanks, Get Religion.)

McCain and evangelicals

World magazine--my favorite quite-conservative-but-generally-not-reactionary evangelical publication--has a cover story on John McCain's overtures to evangelical voters. It's essentially a news piece, w/o a lot of commentary, although the multiple "Some evangelicals think..."-type statements always ring oddly coming from such an ideologically movtivated pub.

Anyway, the fact that he's on the cover of this sort of magazine and in a neutral-to-positive piece inside is itself significant, given how coolly the religious right has received his candidacy (despite his tough-on-terror and anti-abortion bona fides).

Defining the most confusing word in the cultural-religious lexicon

Touchstone has an informative scholarly forum on evangelicalism--what it is, how it's changed, etc. They plan to do similar forums on the mainline, Catholic, and Orthodox churches in the next year.

Joel Stein on going out for Mexican food with Rep. Tancredo

Pretty funny stuff.

I do, however, take issue with Stein's suggestion that there is good Mexican food in Washington, DC. Or, if he's right, I'd really, really like to know where.

Buy Nothing Day

Also: Don't forget that today is Buy Nothing Day. Not even a hybrid car, super-greenwashed-whatever-kind-of-junk, or indulgences carbon offsets.

I'm never able to observe the day too strictly, as it's traditional in my family to go out for dinner the night after Thanksgiving. Maybe I'll observe it tomorrow, instead--I just learned that, outside the States, it's observed Saturday instead of Friday.

Hymns of harvest and gratitude

When I lived in Chicago, I had a church music position. We always did a Thanksgiving Eve service, which I've come to miss. It tended to function largely as a hymn sing, with a bunch of songs focused on gratitude.

It's a bit odd in our present-day culture that, in our Christian hymnody, the themes of gratitude and harvest tend to be weaved together. The sad truth is that this connection means a lot less to most people now than it did years ago. "Come You Thankful People, Come," "We Gather Together," "Great is Thy Faithfulness," "Praise and Thanskgiving"...to mitigate this oddness, I tended to choose also general-use hymns such as "Now Thank We All Our God" and "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing."

I can think of few things that would do more for our collective spirituality (not to mention our local economies and the natural world) than a general reconnection with ideas of gratitude and harvest and the relationship between the two. Personally, perhaps a more immediate goal will be to write some music for worship that somehow resonates with contemporary experiences of trying to treat food with more reverence, mindfulness, and gratitude.

Hope you're enjoying your food-coma Friday as much as I'm enjoying mine. Happy Thanksgiving.

Farm bill fails to get 60 votes

Meaning the Democrats can't cut off debate.

AP Story

Which makes a better lede? "Bishops address citizenship" or "Bishops: You might end up in hell"?

RNS piece on the Catholic Bishops' statement leads with the most incendiary part of the statement. So does Cathy Lynn Grossman in USA Today, though she also details the process that led to the relatively tame statement in question.

Some good responses from Melissa Rogers and Beth Dahlman.

"Pretty much everything is natural, including this sentence."

Good piece over at McSweeney's about Whole Foods and labeling.

More on the GOP candidates

Matt Taibbi has a lively but fairly stupid piece about Mike Huckabee. He thinks Huckabee's quite electable; his social conservatism and economic populism make him appealing in much the same way as the blue dog Democrats who got elected last year, an apt comparison to...a Republican primary situation... Anyway, for Taibbi, the downside of Huckabee is not electability or the difficulty in acquiring widespread conservative support. Instead, it's the fact that he's a conservative evangelical, and thus crazy.

Also, a very telling post over at World on the Web: Clint Rainey raises the much-rehearsed question as to "the merits of any GOP candidate [on abortion], since three of the top four have previously or still do support abortion." Three of the top four? Any outside observer would immediately ask, "well...what about the fourth?" To which there's no very satisfying answer: just "he once said some mean things about some really extreme, mean people who don't really represent most evangelicals anymore; and he backed a law that made it harder for interest groups--including but by no means limited to the anti-abortion lobby and its allies--to bully lawmakers with money."

The post ends with this: "The only candidate who’s been pro-life his entire 25 years in politics? John McCain." But just this--no explanation/exploration of why evangelicals refuse, based largely on flimsy grudges, to give Sen. McCain the time of day.

The historical fear of a "writers' soviet"

Sean Mitchell has a very interesting piece in the LAT about the history behind the very different ways writers are treated in Hollywood vs. the theater.

A nostalgic music post w/ nary a faith angle

When it comes to technology, I've always been a bit of a late adopter. (Did I mention that I recently started one of those crazy new BLOGS?) But as a music nut and stereotypically male obsessive list-maker, I was thrilled with the computer-based-music-collection thing and got in relatively (not extremely) early. It was just like always for people like me, except instead of a database file with a numerical code referenced to a CD on a huge shelf (yes, really), you could just CLICK ON THE SONG AND IT PLAYED. Incredible.

Anyway, whenever I take a road trip, I end up listening to CDs instead of mp3s. The byproduct of this is that I end up listening to older music, from back when I used to buy CDs--making a drive halfway across the country in a rented minivan full of everything I own to begin a new chapter of my life also function as a trip down memory lane. It's hard to drive safely through the tears...

Anyway, while I fear turning into the nostalgic-for-the-music-of-my-youth type that people pushing 30 tend to start turning into, I sure enjoyed the music during my move last week. A couple highlights:

Vigilantes of Love. Used to be one of my very favorite bands. Influenced my early songwriting, in which I tended to cram in an awful lot of dense ideas and hundreds of (often multisyllabic) words. I listened to their two least country/folk, most hard-rocking albums--the early, polished, hotshot-band Welcome to Struggleville and the middle-period, shoestring-budget-scrappy Slow, Dark Train. My two favorites--each is dark and brooding, each is clever, each features a reference to Salome's weight problem in the first track (!). I've since burned out on long-form confessional songwriting, but these albums still sound great.

U2. I've always been ambivalent to their wider catalog, but I love the 90s stuff, in which they're more playful and less anthemic, in terms of both production and lyrics (more silly wordplay, less political browbeating--have you heard that Bono's an activist, too?). Anyway, I rocked Achtung Baby and sang along w/ every word in order to stay awake from Chicago to Wisconsin.

The Innocence Mission. An enduring favorite, possibly my favorite band by now. But the older, more upbeat stuff still holds up well, too--sounds like the Sundays, but better.

Tom Waits. Hardly a timepiece and still my very favorite songwriter. Most Waits fans seem to fall into one of a few categories:

• "Closing Time is so tender and wonderful; why did he have to get so weird and start singing like Howlin' Wolf instead of Springsteen?"
• "Mule Variations is the best album of any kind in history."
  
• "All of the albums are wonderful, even the loungey 70s stuff and especially the angular 80s stuff. Mule Variations is fine, but its partisans are lightweights and dabblers."

I've alternated between the second and third options over the years. But I'm also among a minority of folks who think that Alice and Blood Money--the two very different albums he released on the same day in 2002 and two of the last CDs I ever bought--are as good as anything he's ever done. One is gorgeous and lush; the other dark and sinister. Both channel his jazz interests into something not loungey but chamber-ish and his circus fascination into something quieter than the old carnival-barker stuff he used to do. Great arrangements and some really astonishing songs.

For the second leg of the trip--from SE Wisconsin to St. Paul--I didn't have a CD player. So I listened to a lot of Wisconsin Public Radio, with its endless local talk shows and their socially-conservative-economically-moderate callers in, and I welcomed the familiar accents. But I missed the rock.

"If I have to choose between having the leader or all their followers, I'll take their followers any day."

Michael Sherer has one of the better of the many Huckabee interviews of late.

Popcak on abortion

Gregory Popcak has a more-insightful-than-average defense of faith-based opposition to abortion, written in response to this Gary Wills book excerpt. Both pieces are pretty much intellectual abortion boilerplate; they don't break a lot of new ground but do provide a nice summary of some of the more thoughtful (i.e., less reactionary and screamy) arguments out there. (The two aren't neatly opposed, either: Popcak writes from a Catholic perspective, while Wills focuses his criticism on evangelicals, and they do have some points of agreement.)

Popcak situates the epistles historically to connect a couple passages to the common Roman practice of abortion. He also cites more explicit condemnation in not only the church fathers but also non-canonical early church writings. All of this is interesting but also begs the question why the New Testament doesn't include explicit condemnation of abortion. (This is, or should be, especially problematic in an evangelical context, which tends to deny the influence of the fathers and other non-scriptural sources--even as it endorses, say, trinitarian doctrine.) People often try to argue that Paul and others were addressing their own culture and not ours--tellingly, one of the only times you'll hear such talk from conservative evangelicals--but that dog won't hunt: abortion was as common in the wider culture then as it is now.

Anyway, Popcak offers a good summary of how anti-abortion Christians can do a lot better than "it's murder and God hates murder but liberals love it."

Gov. Ryan reports to prison

My former governor started serving his six-and-a-half-year sentence for racketeering and fraud yesterday.

It was exciting to be in Illinois while he--a Republican!--was creating what is now an increasingly popular model for aggressive gubernatorial action against the numerous problems of the death penalty. He had plans to try to take this work to the international level after leaving office, but instead some of the less-impressive parts of his tenure as governor caught up with him. Here's hoping he's got some energy left when he gets out.

Letter I'd like to send to Obama

Dear Sen. Obama,

I am extremely excited about your campaign. I lived in Chicago in 2004, and it was thrilling to for once watch the underdog, inspiring candidate actually rise to the top and win. It's incredible that the Democrats right now have the opportunity to nominate a single candidate who has arguably the best liberal bona fides of the frontrunners AND the best crossover appeal to Republicans--along with being a person of color. I strongly believe that you have the potential to bring the country together, not by merely endorsing centrist-consensus sort of stuff but by showing genuine respect to people who disagree with you while providing bold moral leadership at home and abroad.

I also understand that, however bold and pure some of your goals might be, you won't make it through a national election without the occasional strategic compromise. So, here is my promise: if you will unequivocably revoke this shameless pandering and nonsensical attack on Sen. Clinton's slightly-less-shameless triangulating by, say January 4, I might actually show up at the polls to vote for you.

Or maybe I'll calm down in a day or so. Not like energy policy matters that much these days.

Best,
Steve

I'm back in blog-action, with a long-winded post about evangelicals and politics to prove it

Long time, no blsee. In the last week, I've completed my move from Washington, DC to Saint Paul, MN, with time in between to spend a few day with my brothers in Wisconsin and to meet a beautiful new baby born to friends in Chicago.

Meanwhile, looks like the non-third-party-threatening religious right leaders disagree about which GOP frontrunner is least bad but, Rick Scarborough excepted, agree that a long-shot SOUTHERN BAPTIST PASTOR somehow Sucksabee.

"Long shot?" you may ask. "Huckabee's polling second in Iowa. Why aren't these guys supporting him?" In particular, you might question, as Gail Collins does, why Pat Robertson--who holds more-lunatic-than-Jerry-Falwell unusual views on, among other things, 9/11--is supporting Rudy Giuliani. Collins:

Now this is the part that I have never been able to get. When did government spending become part of the divine agenda? Is there something in the Bible about smiting down federal bureaucrats?

Oh, Gail. How quaint to assume that religious right heavyweights look primarily to the Bible for guidance! They don't NEED to read it; they've long since memorized the verses that matter.

The reason Mike may be out of Luckabee with God's Bullies has nothing to do with the Bible and everything to do with their unholy alliances with the neocon establishment, and, especially, the free-market and small-government fundamendalists. Huckabee may talk a pretty good tough-on-terror game, but I'm pretty sure he's never...happened to be the mayor of a city on the day it was attacked. But it's especially his populist streak that makes these guys keep their distance.

The WSJ and the Dallas Morning News each have fairly predictable gosh-this-means-there's-a-split-among-evangelicals pieces (I think these are written by computer software by now, like Bob Herbert's columns). But as Amy Sullivan and others have been saying for awhile, the evangelical split that will matter in the election is not between conservatives and moderates or even between hardliners and pragmatists. It's between the religious right big shots--the people who endorse and anti-endorse candidates but most (not all) of whom don't have and have never had formal, church-based authority--and the people in the pews.

Why should average evangelicals be beholden to the fiscal conservatives if they don't want to be? They know how to read their Bibles. In fact, they're the theological inheritors of the most reductive distilled version of the Reformation values of local autonomy and sola scriptura. If they disagree with those who claim to speak for them, most of them don't need to go through a long and painful process of re-aligning themselves with different leaders, perhaps thousands of miles away. All they have to do cancel their Focus on the Family subscription, stop responding to Family Research Council action alerts, and practice that great and terrible evangelical tradition of reading the Bible for themselves.

Richard Land--of the SBC and thus an exception to the rule of non-church-based religious right leadership--understands this. The otherwise dull Morning News piece includes this great bit:

Mr. Land has not endorsed anyone.

"No one can deliver evangelical voters to the candidate but the candidate," he said. "They have a way of deciding for themselves."

I've long been skeptical of the evangelical-crackup narrative, as I don't feel we've seen much significant evidence of the reach of various moderating/broadening influences. But I'm more hopeful about this than I've been in the past. And, while this is about far more than electoral politics, I do think that some of the evidence will be in the future fortunes of the Huckabee campaign after losing some major endorsements (though, importantly, not all to the same rival). It's a blow that he didn't get Brownback's and Weyrich's endorsements--the value of Robertson's is at this point debatable, a subject I won't take up in this already-too-long post--but it's too soon to say that Huckabee's chances with evangelical voters are Hucked.

"We called him a pro-life, pro-gun liberal"

The Wash Times gets the second part of the Huckabee story right--it isn't just about the electability catch 22. The religious right establishment has long been in bed with the government-spending-is-by-definition-bad crowd--yes, of course this is ludicrous by any biblical or theological standard--and Huckabee's considerable populist streak makes him a tough sell.

This combination--setting aside his crazy national sales tax idea and his unwillingness to unequivocably condemn torture, among other things--also makes him a pretty compelling candidate for they younger, more moderate evangelical voters we keep hearing so much about. This is going to be real interesting...

I'm moving this week

Getting up early Wednesday to drive back midwest in a rental.

So, things will be pretty quiet here, at least until Thursday or so.

RIP Porter Wagoner

What a great singer. And what great suits.

Gorski on Focus

In general, Focus on the Family's notorious caution with the media + the MSM's generally reductive understanding of the religious right = precious little in the way of insightful pieces about James Dobson and his empire.

But an exception to the rule today--an AP story by Eric Gorski offers some real insight into the different things that Focus has been and will be in the future.

Two of my favorite things

1. McSweeney's lists

2. Good jokes about how ridiculous it is to suggest that equal civil marriage rights for gays and lesbians will somehow threaten hetero marriages

Thus, I especially enjoyed this.

You're using my work to support WHAT?

Interesting NYT piece--a scientist just retracted his 1955 paper after Googling himself and finding Creationist Web sites with some equivocations in the direction of the "theistic evolution" they used to mock intelligent design Web sites that misused it as support for their positions.

That's what I like about scientists--unlike us arts and humanities types, they're not willing to be well-known for just anything.

The newly ubiquitous Mike Huckabee

AP story and Gail Collins column chime in on the he's-going-to-be-a-contender/why-the-hell-isn't-he-a-contender story.

A side note on the Glover piece: someone at the AP copy desk must know that you don't strum a bass guitar--you pluck it. Or maybe Huckabee DOES strum--it is possible to do so, just not especially useful--and it's an example of his nonconformity or whatever...

Dumbledore or whatever

Disclaimer: I have never read any of the Harry Potter books, not because I think they're stupid, but because I'm not a fan of the genre. I have nothing against them, other than the fact that they're evidence of the incredibly lopsided book industry, in which 10 writers own castles and everyone else is grateful for the chance to hustle for gas money at near-empty chain-bookstore readings. But this sad situation is not Harry's fault per se.

Now: John Cloud has an entertaining and insightful piece about the Dumbledore-is-gay story. He raises good points from the perspective of the gay and lesbian community.

But my problem with this is philosophical--does she really think she can just say something's true about a character in a series of books that are already published? Twentieth-cenutry literary theory is famously obtuse, but the main takeaway, as any college English major knows, is that Rowling's perspective on the sexuality of a character--un-addressed in the book itself--is no more valid than yours or mine. (Okay, maybe more than mine, you no doubt have at least read the books.) Interpretive authority belongs to readers, communities, the text itself--not just or even especially the author.

Of course, as any Tolkien aficionado knows, immersing yourself in an invented world can make an author a bit murky as to the lines between fantasy and reality. No doubt Rowling considers the question in the context of actual speculation about a person she knows very well. This is one of the reasons I don't like fantasy literature--I'd always rather read an author who is just as committed to and immersed in her characters, but whose characters seem more immediately (NOT metaphorically) relevant to the real world than, say, a hobbit or a wizard or a benevolent and sacrificial lion.

But again, I can't judge HP, because I've never read it...

In which I write two consecutive EJ-admiring posts

Every now and then, we hear about something called the "Catholic vote." Today, it's from Seth Gitell. He makes the standard argument that Catholics are the ultimate swing vote, noting that a bare majority of them went for Gore in 2000, that Bush beat Kerry among Catholics 52 to 47 percent, and that 55 percent of Catholics voted for the Democrats in last year's midterms.

In other words, Catholics as a group voted much like the rest of the country. Catholics are assimilated into mainstream culture to the point that the idea of a Catholic vote doesn't mean much anymore. This is not to say that actual Catholic teaching has no radical, countercultural edge--this certainly is not true. But the culture war splits the Church just like it splits everyone else, and individual Catholics prioritize particular Church teachings differently. When all is said and done, in a general election, the Catholic vote is about as substantive a concept as "the tall vote" or "the squeaky-voiced vote."

See this great EJ article from last summer.

EJ on Romney

Good column from EJ Dionne today on the whole Romney's-a-Mormon-oh-what-will-this-mean question.

Dionne points out that the chorus of people urging Romney to give a "Kennedy speech" about his faith are exactly wrong, because the voters he's trying to woo--with a certain amount of success, if the FRC straw poll is to be trusted--do NOT want to hear about how his religion won't shape his policy. But they also want to be assured that his religion doesn't make him all weird. It's a dilemma.

Of course, it's worth remembering that Kennedy's speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association took place after the convention. Should Romney get the nomination, he may well need to do likewise--but not now.

Go to the land our God promised you, and get to work on that temple, so that it can be destroyed, and you can be destroyed, and I can go to heaven

On the weirdest-and-most-cynical-marriage-of-convenience front (i.e., Zionist Jews and end-times-obsessed evangelicals): an AP story about the IFCJ's work in bribing convincing Iranian Jews to move to Israel.

Blame the social gospel first

Alan Wolfe has an interesting, if somewhat predictable, essay in the NYT Book Review on the new 100th-anniversary edition of Walter Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis.

The FRC values voters thing

So the much-discussed Washington Briefing straw poll went to Mitt Romney, who inched out Mike Huckabee. But it turns out Huckabee won by a landslide among in-person voters, with Romney doing better with online voters. Via Faith in Public Life, People For the American Way has an informative post about the numbers controversy.

At any rate, I've seen a couple of stories talk about Huckabee as a member of the "top tier." Even this PFAW post suggests as much. That's clearly the main take-away.

Corrupt governance or greedy development--in Chicago, you don't have to choose!

Andrew has a good observation about Chicago alderman-turned-realtor Ted Matlak:

It’s...like being a forest ranger and allowing your friends to cut down all the trees in the forest and plant lemon trees instead, then after you get fired from being a ranger taking the lemons off the new trees and making lemonade.

"If people are dumb enough to pay that much then hallelujah"

That's Rep. Collin Peterson (DFL-MN), chair of the House agricultural committee, on the absurdity of the local and organic food movements. The context is the congressman arguing that organic produce and livestock farmers don't NEED federal assistance--they're obviously doing just fine--so why not give it all to the commodity farmers?

The Democrats--we're supposed to be excited that they're in charge now, remember?--have made it clear they lack the ability/will to bring meaningful reform to our food system, and the consequences for public health, local economies, and the environment will be severe. Five more years till the next farm bill...

Brownback is out

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071018/ap_po/brownback_1

Wonder if he'll endorse Huckabee?

"'We don't because they do' theology"

Jason Byassee have a lively write-up of a recent ACT3 event.

This seems to me like the best kind of ecumenical dialogue--a low-key and friendly environment in which to talk frankly about differences (as opposed to a formal, institutional environment in which to release bland press releases about similarities).

Steven Malanga on "the religious left"

Predictably, Malanga's WSJ commentary is quite critical and only passingly accurate or insightful. Less predictable--or at least, harder to take seriously--is his commitment to the odd idea that liberal religious activism is overwhelmingly about wealth redistribution in general and support for organized labor in particular. The result is one of those WSJ pieces that's full of names and facts but little overarching truthfulness--a red scare posing as a history lesson.

Still, I like one small thing about this--he correctly identifies the Protestant mainline as a driving force behind most left-leaning Christian political activity. Current "progressive" Christian movements are not driven primarily by evangelical ideological realignment, no matter how much those of us who come from that world and yearn to see the religious right's hegemonic grip released may wish that this were true (and no matter how many MSM stories report this as realized fact rather than as the germ of possibility).

So thanks, Malanga, for giving the NCC and the seven sisters (along with the Catholic bishops) the credit they deserve. If only you'd said more (actually, anything at all) about the historic black church, Latino pentecostals, or the peace church tradition...of course, these are pretty far down my list of complaints about the piece.

Obama's rural plan

It looks pretty good. Some nice realism about corn ethanol, and I particularly like the relatively strong language about tightening regulation and pollution loopholes for corporate hog farms.

Speaking of which, take a look at this letter. It's pretty heartbreaking.

"Bumper magnets. Because stickers are tough to get off, and we may change our mind about never forgetting."

Bill Maher is on today. Hyperbolic and prickly as usual, but right on.

"An apostate religion"

James Carroll on the idea of a "Christian nation." He overreaches a bit, but his overall point is right on:

What's bad for the state can be worse for the church. Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and all religious minorities are assaulted by even implicit claims of a "Christian nation," but so are Christians. A government that blesses itself in the name of Jesus Christ, while waging war and advancing empire, must first demolish the meaning of who that man was - three centuries before Constantine.

Obama on faith and the environment

This is not Obama the bold groundbreaker but rather Obama the joiner, making for particularly predictable rhetoric. Still, when you're right you're right.

The Catch 22 of electability

This Politico piece sums up Mike Huckabee's campaign woes effectively.

After all the trash they've talked, if the religious right leaders end up falling in line behind one of the GOP frontrunners--as opposed to supporting Huckabee or Brownback or actually following through on their threats to bolt the party--then they will fully deserve the party disregard that will no doubt follow.

Things I missed while I was away

In case you missed them, too:

The culture-war-victory-so-watered-down-it-seems-pretty-silly award goes to the Illinois legislature.

Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary is now offering homemaking classes. "'My created purpose as a woman is to be a helper,' [student Emily] Felts said firmly. 'This is a college education that I can use.'" Kyrie eleison.

Unlike some folks, I'm fairly enthusiastic about much of what Christianity Today has to offer. But their short-form Web-only content has this annoying tendency to take a mocking tone as it describes (with varying fairness) the views of more liberal people of faith. Case in point: this little gem on Out in Scripture. "The approach has a certain appeal to those who respect Scripture but don't understand it." While I have mixed feelings about Human Rights Campaign, evangelicals need to acknowledge that this sort of smugness does precious little to help a situation in which large numbers of Christians are deeply suspicious of and hostile toward each other.

New study: outlawing abortion doesn't make it any less common. This should draw anti-abortion folks into consensus-driven movements to reduce the need for abortion w/o criminalization, right? Wrong.

Very interesting debate over at Cato Unbound called Politics and Religion, Home and Abroad. Features Mark Lilla, Philip Jenkins, and others.

This is unprecedented: a letter about peace from a whole bunch of Muslim leaders to a whole bunch of Christian leaders.

At Grist: a conversation between two of the most eloquent sustainable food writers I know of.

Third Way report and a long weekend

Some friends and I are off to the Blue Ridge Mountains for a three-day weekend. I'm never goin' to see you any more, more, more...until Sunday or Monday, when I return to the internets.

I'm taking the new Third Way report with me. Expect I'll write about it a bit when I return.

Freedom isn't even CHEAP

Good story from The Onion about the rising price of freedom.

Though I'm pretty sure my friends Jim and John and I scooped them on this (anonymously) back when we were interns at Sojourners.

Black clergy meeting on HIV/AIDS

This is exciting, especially to those of use who live in DC, where the infection rates are startlingly high.

Safer than walking

Alan Durning has a great overview of the facts on the relative safety of cycling.

For me, it's slightly less safe than it used to be, as someone ripped off my headlight and my rearview mirror, and I haven't replaced them. But I still have the bike--my fourth (each of the first three was stolen).

This might be the worst thing I've ever heard

ICE wants to sedate an Albanian man before deporting him--to keep him from freaking out about the fact that he's likely to be assassinated (for being a good citizen!) shortly after getting off the plane.

Were someone to smear me for "blaming America first" or whatever, I'd have trouble mustering the enthusiasm to defend my patriotism right now.

Obama the postmillennialist

"I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on earth."

Challenging the Speaker's prayer life

This is pretty raging. I know it's no secret that we bleeding hearts hate Fox News, but come on.

Via War Room, a transcript excerpt from Chris Wallace talking to Rep. Pelosi:

Wallace: You said the other day that you were praying for President Bush . . .

Pelosi: Yes.

Wallace: ... to change his mind about vetoing SCHIP. Do you pray for our soldiers to win in Iraq?

Pelosi: Of course I do.

Wallace: To win?

Pelosi: Of course I do. Of course. What a question.

First of all, I pray for President Bush all the time, and I prayed especially hard that he would sign the children's health bill because it's so important to America's children.

Wallace: When you pray for President Bush, what do you pray for?

Pelosi: I pray that -- well, at the same as I pray for him, I pray for America's children and that there can be some compatibility in their thinking. But I pray for his health, his well being. I pray that he makes the right decisions for the American people. But when I . . .

Wallace: Do you ever pray for him to change his policies?

Pelosi: All the time. But let me draw a line. When I was growing up in politics, we were always told that we shouldn't pray for a political outcome, that we just pray that God's will would be done.

We pray for the children. We pray for poor people. And we pray for people who need help. And we always, always, always pray for our men and women in uniform who make our freedom to pray possible.

Pelosi handles herself quite well, I'd say.

It's ethanol-pander time!

David Roberts has an entertaining rant about Fred Thompson's particularly dubious argument in favor of corn ethanol subsidies.

Remember that episode of The West Wing where Santos lets Josh convince him to pander to the Iowa ethanol people and Vinick says what he really thinks and then the two campaigns happen to meet in a hotel restaurant or whatever and chat w/ each other and Santos is ashamed that he wasn't as bold and honest and full-of-integrity as Vinick and everyone watching says "Alan Alda's so great--remember M*A*S*H, the show not the movie?--and this show really treats conservatives with respect, even though it's fairly liberal" and the ratings briefly started to recover before continuing to plummet as they had been for two or three seasons?

That was a good one.

The old "take my millions of constituents and go home" trick

As John Potter pointed out in the comments, my previous post had a confusing title. No, I can't imagine Huckabee would bolt from the GOP to run on a third-party ticket. I can't even imagine Dobson et al. following through on their threat at all--that's obviously not the point. But watching/hearing various religious right folks shill for this thing in the last couple days, it seems pretty clear that Huckabee's the guy they heart, and there's a lot of time left for him to emerge as a more "serious" candidate.

On the other hand, this Globe story about the Romney campaign's reaction to all this is interesting. Romney's the only one of the top four whom Dobson hasn't basically denounced. At any rate, I'd be willing to bet this whole incident is going to lead to significant gains in the polls and fundraising for Huckabee, Romney, or both.

I wonder if Romney (a documented flip-flopper!) would have an (even) harder time in the general than (the extremely likable) Huckabee would. But the education the country would get in the realities of mainstream LDS folks would be a positive thing regardless.

A theoretical third-party candidate--let's call him "Hike Muckabee"

Via Faith in Public Life:

New Rasmussen poll confirms the continuing strength of the anti-abortion movement within the GOP.

It's been awhile since I've ranted here about the "Evangelicals are Going Progressive!" narrative and the difference between values and priorities. But I've just done so in a comment over at Melissa Rogers' (terrific) blog.

This week...

...is shaping up to be a relatively blquiet one from blme. Lots going on, not the least of which is watching the Cubs play the late playoff games last night and tonight (starting at 10 p.m. out here, my prime blogging time). Also preparing to play a show this Saturday, my first in some time.

But I'll at least put up a couple more links and short posts. Just so you don't run out of things to read on the Webnet....

On the paganized sabbath

CT has an interesting excerpt from Craig Harline's new book Sunday: A History of the First Day From Babylonia to the Superbowl.

I've always been particularly fascinated by the Sunday/Saturday thing, as my family's heritage is in the small Seventh Day Baptist denomination.

What death penalty cases?

Fred Thompson is again astonishingly oblivious.

"They did not get our permission before they arrived"

In this AP story from last week, Archbishop-elect Kwashi gets a bit more explicit about the postcolonial tension with which the Anglican conflict is packed.

Behind the newer, friendlier nuclear power

Peter Montague, guest-posting at Gristmill, makes a particularly compelling case against nuclear energy.

See also Jim Rice's recent cover piece for Sojourners.

Threatening the GOP

The religious right heavyweights are upping the anti-Giuliani talk.

Perhaps this will hurt Giuliani's campaign, though if issues of "electability" or whatever were going to stop him from leading in the polls, you'd think the campaign would have imploded, you know, as soon as the controversial, prickly, generally unsavory candidate declared.

At any rate, I'm more interested in the Democratic takeaway--will they get the message that winning actual conservative religious votes is not as simple as establishing themselves as no more hostile to religion than this cycle's crop of Republican front-runners?

I'm also interested in Gov. Huckabee's response, should he choose to do so at all. I tend to react to him the same way many evangelicals do to Sen. Obama--I may disagree him on many of the issues, but I appreciate his attitude and his ability. But this could be a tricky spot for him--if forced to distance himself from either the party establishment or the religious right, each of which he needs and will continue to need in his career, which will he choose? He's not much of a question avoider or triangulator, so could be interesting...