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.