"If Obama is a Reaganite, then I am a salamander"

E.J. Dionne on "why the Clintons' assault on Obama is so depressing."

Busy week

Lots of things to blog about this week--plenty of good MLK Day commentary. Lively Dem debate last night, in which Clinton expertly put Obama in the no-win situation of either fighting back and Not Being a Uniter or not fighting back and proving that She's the Real Fighter. Today is Tu B'Shvat, the Jewish new year of the trees.

But I won't be talking much about any of those things. It's crunch time for the pitching cycle at Utne, meaning I'll be spending most every spare moment reading magazines and photocopying the articles I like. Not so bad, actually. And I've got a couple freelance projects to work on, about which I won't complain.

Anyway, you won't see much of me till the second half of next week, though I might hit you with a quick link or two.

Christian Unity Week

It's Christian Unity Week this week. The 100th anniversary of the first time.

If you didn't know that, perhaps that's in part because some of the ecumenical movement's efforts have been successful enough that they no longer seem controversial or even particularly interesting. Peter Steinfels has an interesting take.

Aw shucksabee, guess I'll change my immigration stance again

Good news for folks who can't handle Huckabee's moderate streak--he's again moving right on immigration policy.

So he's shaping himself into more of a traditional conservative to try to win South Carolina and the nomination. But which Huckabee would govern were he to be president--the old compassionate conservative Huckabee or the new paleoconservative one?

Feingold on Edwards

My housemate Dan and I are both Obama supporters and political junkies. We've been talking about, among other things, the string of endorsements that Obama's been getting, and Dan wondered out loud last night whether Russ Feingold's would be forthcoming. I responded that, sadly, I wasn't sure it would be all that helpful.

Then, this morning, Dan sent me this article, an interview w/ Feingold by a small Wisconsin daily. Here's an excerpt:

The [presidential candidate] that is the most problematic is (John) Edwards, who voted for the Patriot Act, campaigns against it. Voted for No Child Left Behind, campaigns against it. Voted for the China trade deal, campaigns against it. Voted for the Iraq war … He uses my voting record exactly as his platform, even though he had the opposite voting record.

So...looks like he won't be backing Edwards. He goes on to say he's having a hard time deciding whether to support Obama or Clinton. Perhaps he has his reasons for staying out of the fray on that one, but I have a hard time believing that the only "nay" in the Senate on the original Patriot Act vote would support Clinton over Obama.

Well, it's about time!

Starbucks gotten too eco-responsible for you?

OR, do Starbucks' various attempts to greenwash their practices drive you mad?

Either way, good news: the chain will no longer be offering organic milk.

Now if they would just stop pretending to promote progressive labor policies in their shops and fair trade policies for their growers...

Hooray for green government!

The White House LOVES the environment!

Why else would they be so deliberate about recycling and reusing things? Things like...computer backup tapes of e-mail correspondence?

What if President Kucinich/Gravel/Paul tried to amend the Constitution with the anti-imperialism of the book of Revelation?

The other night, Mike Huckabee clarified his earlier comments about how the Constitution should be changed to conform to God's word--he was talking specifically abouht gay marriage and abortion, not anything else.

Hmm. Tim Grieve's take is right on.

This ought to be interesting

Ron Paul's at Bob Jones University today.

Just when you though you had a good grasp of American Protestantism...

CT reports that some Southern Baptist seminaries are pushing Calvinism.

Calvinism!!!

Episcopal conflict in Pittsburgh

To no one's surprise, it escalates.

In Congress alone

This isn't supposed to be a political blog. But I've been fairly obsessed with politics for the last few months, so it just kind of comes out that way. I haven't been too worried about it.

Until now. I was just working on a post for another blog, and I meant to type the phrase "second coming of Christ" but accidentally wrote "second coming of Congress." I didn't even notice I'd done it until the third or fourth time I read through the paragraph. Better tell the separation watchdogs to let the Fugitive Safe Surrender program be for a spell and come file lawsuits against MY HEAD.

What a very strange mistake to make. This is a cause for some concern.

How about me, Mike? Can I get in, too?

Huckabee, fielding questions about who gets to go to heaven:

"I'm going to stick to the things that make it critical for me to be president of the United States," Huckabee said Sunday. "I have deep convictions about who goes and who doesn't, but as far as who makes that decision, it isn't me, it's God. I'm going to leave that up to him."

Marty's unsatisfied with this response, and understandably so. It should be noted however, that while this may be the careful response of a slick politician, it isn't JUST that--it's also pretty good theology. Demurring on the state of others' souls and deferring to God's judgment is not a mere cop-out. In fact, I'd say it's a pretty critical corrective to some of the worst impulses of Christianity.

Which is not to say that Huckabee would say exactly this in any other context, in front of a different group of people. He's made it clear that he's quite adept at tailoring his message, and more than willing to do so.

"All it would have taken was exactly what Obama did"

Ezra has an effective take-down of the Clinton campaign talking point that Obama did very little to oppose the Iraq war once in the Senate.

Still skeptical of Huckabee

In the media frenzy over Mike Huckabee's rise to the top tier of GOP candidates, it's been all but forgotten just how ambivalent the religious right establishment is about the guy. A couple good correctives: this Mark Levin post, in which fewer than half the members of the Arlington Group express support for Huckabee, and this piece from Columbus, Ohio's The Other Paper, which describes Huckabee's unpopularity among state party bosses.

In other Huckanews, the blithely policy-lightweight tone of his candidacy may be over, assuming he's a quick study: the campaign has hired Jim Pinkerton, a real big shot. Walter Shapiro has the essential facts.

Budgets are moral downloads

The Bush OMB is releasing its annual budget Feb. 5, and for the first time, it's going paperless.

Such a bold eco-move on the administration's part! Of course, this is what we've come to expect.

The inimitable Sen. Byrd: "Let us hope that they send us a budget that is worth the paper it would have been printed on."

I'm glad I'll be nowhere near the DC policy advocacy community when, on the annual morning on which folks are accustomed to going and picking up a copy of the budget, they instead have to cue up to try to load the 2,200-page doc from OMB's Web site.

Via Grist.

The holiness of water

The current issue of Ruminate--a terrific, newish faith-based lit magazine--includes a lovely little creative nonfiction piece about the concept of holy water in the context of a drought.

More at Utne.

Kirkpatrick on Huckabee

I think David Kirkpatrick is one of the smartest religion writers around, even though I think his "Seminal!" "Conversation-changing!" NYT magazine piece on the evangelical "crackup" was little more than the culmination of two years of dubious MSM trend pieces.

In today's Times, Kirkpatrick gives some good insight into Huckabee's success w/ young evangelicals, implicitly making the crucial point that, if there is a crackup among evangelicals, it's between leaders and people in the pews--it's about authority itself more than it's about evangelicals becoming more moderate or following new, younger leaders or whatever (even though the headline suggests the last).

"The sexes have always lived together, but the races have not."

Good op-ed today by Lorrie Moore, one of my favorite fiction writers. I disagree with her conclusions--that it's rather late in our history of gender relations to be super excited about the prospect of a female president for its own sake, and that electing Clinton would necessarily mean more of the mediocrity of the 90s. I actually think that electing a female president would be a huge accomplishment, very exciting in and of itself. But I believe the same thing about electing a black president, and I like Obama better on most of the issues AND think he has a far better chance of winning the general election. So, while I don't think the identity politics element of this race should be downplayed or disparaged, I'm grateful that, for me and my vote, the race and gender questions are mutually neutralized. Obviously, that's easy for me to say, as a member of neither group.

I tend to think that arguments that either racism or sexism is the bigger problem today and/or that one candidate or the other represents the bigger triumph over bigotry are fairly pointless--they're fundamentally arbitrary and impossible to prove. (Though when such an argument is made by a black woman, it does offer some valuable experiential insight.) But I'm interested in Moore's piece, as it makes such an argument in reverse--i.e., she's a white woman arguing that race matters more.

My interest in the piece is also writerly--check out this fantastic lede:

When most of us first laid eyes on Hillary Clinton, it was during “60 Minutes,” and she was sitting by her man saying she was not one of those women who would stand by him. Not long after that, she told us she didn’t make cookies. At that remark I thought I heard the cheering of nonbaking working women everywhere, but apparently I was wrong, and quickly we the people were favored with Mrs. Clinton’s own contrite cookie recipe, which I have not yet had time to try.

Hardly an unprecedented idea, but how often do you get to read prose like that in the opinion pages?

Church lawsuits aren't just for Anglicans

Though in this case, it's the conservative congregation, not the universalist, tradition-forsaking, gay-loving communist theologically diverse larger church body, that initiated the suit itself.

In Pittsburgh--incidentally, an even bigger center of ANGLICAN conservatism than west suburban Chicago or Northern Virginia--the local PCUSA presbytery's dispute with its largest church has just escalated to a legal fight.

Via RNS blog.

We misplace modifiers in our headlines, you decide

The liberal media is making incendiary claims about the president again.

UPDATE: They fixed it! I'll gladly take full credit for embarrassing Fox News.

Ah, the body of Christ

The property dispute between the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia and several churches that left the diocese is costing both sides a ton in legal costs. The diocese is selling off other property and borrowing from endowment funds to pay for it. The "Anglican District of Virginia"--which represents the churches that seceded--is raising money from members. Many of whom, you may recall, have pretty deep pockets.

Fun!

Fired up! Ready for you to drop the stupid, sexist Hillary's-a-crybaby-and/or-a-faker story already!

Seriously, Jesse Jackson Jr., you really shouldn't do that.

The other day, I was proud to be an Obama supporter when, after Clinton choked up a little--she didn't even shed any tears or cry out loud, for crying out loud!--my guy responded to a question about it from the juvenile gaggle of groupthinking gossip hounds Our Nation's finest political reporters with just the right combination of classy respect for his opponent and subtle disdain for the question--while the other guy expressed fear that Hillary might, if elected, get too emotional to think clearly while she's menstruating all over the missile launch buttons gave a careless and offensive response.

Today, Jackson, Obama's co-chair, outdid Edwards. While Jackson doesn't get into the crying-women-are-weak garbage, he does talk some pretty serious nonsense about how she should have cried about other sad things--POLICY-related sad things--instead of about "her appearance." And, asked if he's accusing her of faking the tears, he hedges, tries to have it both ways.

Now please don't accuse me of perpetuating a story that I think should be a non-story, because this blog doesn't have enough readers to have any kind of real effect...but, on the off chance that somebody from the Obama campaign stumbles onto this post by mistake: please don't let this happen again. It's offensive, and it won't work.

My friend Dave summed it up well in an e-mail:

Encouraging that someone in the Obama campaign is echoing talking points from William Kristol.

It's mean to accuse someone of crying on purpose. At least Edwards had the integrity to believe she was really crying, and the guts and backbone to just make fun of her for being a weak woman.

If it's less carbon, then it must be good!

A new greenwashing low:

A U.S. company is working with the Chinese government to give farmers carbon credits in exchange for growing the company's genetically modified rice. You know, because GM rice requires less nitrogen fertilizer, resulting in less greenhouse gas production.

It's not the "green" craze itself that's scary. It's the fact that it gives cover for crap like this--for framing genetically modified conventional agriculture as somehow environmentally friendly.

Geez.

Huck and the somewhere-else-state solution

Huckabee appears to be no friend of Palestine, to say the least.

See Matthew Duss' fairly devastating take.

Oh yes, the old "it's not a religion; it's a person"

This Andrew Greeley piece is sort of all over the place, but it raises a good point:

[Catholics have] been Christians since the beginning. The claim of the evangelicals to a monopoly on the term is little more than a century old. It excludes Mormons, secularists and Catholics. We don't like being excluded, and we might just begin to make trouble about it. We invented Christianity, guys, and your claim to sole rights is historical nonsense -- and bigotry, too.

Too bad he doesn't include the peace churches, the Orthodox church, and, for crying out loud, mainline Protestants in his list of those wronged by evangelicals who think "Christian" refers only to their particular brand of the faith. I'm not just being defensive here--I've found over the years that those evangelicals I know who tend toward this particularist stance are not anti-Catholic so much as they are anti- anyone who defines faith primarily in terms of church membership rather than evangelical tenets of faith.

Here's one I've heard a lot: "It's not that Catholics can't be real Christians; it's that being Catholic doesn't MAKE them Christian. Anyone who has a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, believes the Bible is true, and knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that only Christ's blood can save him/her from hell can be a Christian..."

A frustrating attitude, for sure. But it's not the SAME attitude that provoked convent burnings in the 19th century. Substitute "Lutheran" or even "Baptist" for "Catholic" and you'd get largely the same group of people to endorse the above statement--because it isn't about bigotry against a certain group, and it isn't even just about sectarian particularism. It's about a general disregard for the denominational structures that used to dominate U.S. religious identity.

(Also, on the Greeley piece: I'm not sure how he's using the word "secularists" in the quote above. People, including Christians, who support the separation of church and state? Okay, I'm one of those. Though if he intends it as a blanket label for non-theocratic Protestants--which, in caricature-your-enemies land might be seen as a synonym for "mainline"--then I take the rest of this post back and will instead write about how confusing and stupid it is to use the word that way.)

Noah Feldman on the LDS church's position in American culture and politics

Good in-depth piece from the NYT magazine.

Oh, is there a presidential race on the ballot, too? We were too worried about protecting life to notice...

Looks like Missouri--that electoral vote-rich swing state--may well have an abortion-restricting referendum on its ballot this fall.

Those crazy grassroots movements and their insistence on focusing only on issues!

In case you've forgotten--though if you're like me you never, ever will--President Bush may well have lost in 2004 were it not for the fact that Ohio (among other states) had a same-sex marriage ban on the ballot.

Fortunately, as we've all been told, the religious right is dead...

"A referendum on the Protestant political soul"

The always-insightful Diana Butler Bass frames the possibility of an Obama vs. Huckabee election in terms of two entrenched positions withing U.S. Protestantism.

Making executions better...

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments today about Kentucky's use of three-drug lethal injection. A good NY Times editorial manages to both address the issue at hand and make it clear that the larger point is that the death penalty, regardless of how it's administered, is always unconstitutional and immoral.

I often struggle with this myself--to even have a serious conversation about how much risk of pain or indignity or whatever is acceptable when KILLING SOMEONE IN A STATE-SANCTIONED SETTING strikes me as equivocal and disgusting. But I'm hopeful that cooler heads than mine on this particular issue will continue to achieve incremental reform on the way to eventually ending the barbaric practice altogether.

Just what we need--more Jesus in the English department

(Actually, I found my grad school experience to be fairly hostile toward religion, despite the fact that I went to a Jesuit school with a crucifix in every classroom.)

Terry Eagleton--the prominent literary scholar whose diverse career has been marked more by Marxist thought than by any other school or movement--has written a new introduction to the Gospels.

Why Obama?

Lots of people have asked me recently why I'm such a fan of Obama's. Along with my pride in having voted for him twice when I lived in Chicago, I usually name a few reasons:

• He offers a more sophisticated explanation of the appropriate place for faith in public life than any other candidate from either party.
• He believes in America as a force for good in the world but doesn't equate this w/ reckless, pointless war.
  
• As Andrew Sullivan and others have articulated, President Obama's name and face mean instantly better relations w/ many parts of the world.
  
• His intellectual style seems to place more value in seeing all sides of an issue fully than in being decisive and right all the time.
  
• Despite this, he offers bold progressive vision--the unity and consensus he seeks are not about centrist compromise. He's able to actually persuade people to support his ideas--to LEAD. And left-leaning Democrats don't have to choose between the "electable" candidate and the one who actually represents their views.
  

Since Iowa, some of the best analysis of Obama's candidacy has come from Ezra Klein--e.g., on Obama's current stump speech. Actually, all of Ezra's election coverage has been quite good.

This post from Daniel Koffler is also interesting.

Surprise, Dobson likes Huckabee after all!

James Dobson is claiming the Huckabee win in Iowa as evidence of the religious right's ongoing influence. I don't think he's exactly wrong about the basic point, but it's obnoxious to see him do this after his conspicuous unwillingness to give Huckabee the time of day up till now. He's just barely stopping short of actually taking credit for something he distinctly refused to do, now that it's gotten done w/o his help.

This guy gets more tiresome each year.

Polling and religion

Dan makes a good observation about exit poll data from Iowa--CNN and NBC each asked Republicans about evangelical affiliation but not Democrats.

Wasn't it just months ago that the MSM was hyping the Evangelicals Go Liberal! narrative every damn day? Pretty crazy that the What the Huck's Going to Happen Now? story could displace it so entirely.

This is gonna blow your mind

The National Council of Churches has a list of principles, a reference for voters.

Anthony Bradley--of such mainline-loving organizations as the Acton Institute and Covenant Theological Seminary--seems to think the list leaves something to be desired.

Coming soon: Southern Baptists disagree with the finer points of UCC Christology!

Dismissed as rector, effective Christmas day

Another casualty of the Anglican conflict.

Iowa

It seems redundant for little old me to chime in on the analysis, so let me just say this:

Obama!

Remember "macaca"?

Interesting thought experiment from Dan Schnur: what if Sen. Allen was running for president, as everyone assumed he would be until his reelection campaign went down in flames?

You have heard what others say. What do YOU say?

Which theologian represents you best?

I lined up best with Calvin, followed closely by Tillich and Moltmann. Nadia got Moltmann. Dad says he'll try to get Luther but expects he'll get Jonathan Edwards instead. Whatever that means.

Via Adam Copeland.

Yes, yes, Christ saved you--but WHEN?

When I was in high school, a good friend of mine spent many evenings in conversation with me before deciding to "get saved." (He was converting from not Islam or paganism or, worse yet, secular humanism--he was baptized Lutheran. That's a topic for another time.) When he told me about deciding to embrace the more personal faith of our evangelical church, he didn't say anything about a particular moment at which he prayed and accepted Jesus. This worried me, and I said so (and offended him).

It was only later that I learned that the idea that salvation is largely about a moment in time and the uttering of a few sentences is, in the larger world of Christendom, not a particularly popular or traditional one. (It was later still that a seminary professor articulated what I've come to believe is a common and serious evangelical heresy--embracing faith over works to the point that faith itself becomes a work.)

Erik Thoennes has far better evangelical cred than I do. In this great essay for CT, he offers some good correctives to common ideas about getting saved.

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.