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.