God bless Barbara Ehrenreich

She's a fine writer who's devoted herself to writing about being poor in America. Astonishingly, this is a pretty rare thing.

Here she gets into something important, and overlooked: what does a recession, with its nouveau poor and its somewhat less rich, mean for people who were barely getting by--or weren't--in the first place?

Affording Harvard

This is a really cool idea.

Of course, a larger-scale solution might include reforming the federal student loan system itself, making schools get rid of legacy admissions, and promoting the Washington Monthly's college rankings over the U.S. News ones among the hiring classes. Just saying.

Ken Schenck on inerrancy

Ken Schenck has devoted a couple recent posts on his fine biblioblog to the different understandings of inerrancy that exist within Wesleyanism. (Obviously, we're in subtler territory here than with the "different understandings of faith that exist within evangelicalism!" topic recently so popular in the MSM.)

On the one hand, you have the Chicago Statement of the late 70s, which is formative for conservative reformed circles and the Evangelical Theological Society. On the other, Wesleyans--and others--have long affirmed inerrancy without endorsing or implying all the specifics the Chicago Statement gets into. In Schenck's second post, he gets into how specifically some of these details fall short in his view. It's good stuff. (The first [numbered] graf is from the statement itself; Schenck's comments follow.):

2. Scriptures are supreme. The authority of the Church is subordinate. Creeds, councils, declarations are of lesser authority.

Given the assumptions of the authors, I agree. I think the "Church" here is understood in a political sense--the political bodies of church history, not least the "Catholic church." I certainly do not think any political church holds such authority, and the creeds and councils are still political statements. In my opinion, however, when these authors say "Scriptures," they really mean the Bible read Christianly, the Bible read as Christian Scripture. They would disagree that they meant this, but in my opinion they cannot see their own glasses and how those glasses color their perspective.

From my point of view, these sorts of statements involve such subtle but significant misunderstandings of language that I almost don't know what to say. It poses as contradictory options things that, on deeper examination, I believe are virtually the same. I'll agree to it in the same way I agree when my son says something like, "So it's better to score a touchdown than strike out, right Dad?" What I'm thinking, though, is that he's a little confused.

In my opinion, so many of the meanings these signatories themselves found so authoritative in the text of Scripture were themselves products of their own Christian tradition. The signatories would deny that this is the case, but they do not properly see themselves, in my opinion.

The NIV is a wonderful example of the "say one thing, do another" dynamic I see necessary for this hermeneutic to sustain itself.

Say: We are listening to the Bible. Our interpretations come from the plain sense of the text. We are under the authority of the text and not letting the Church have a higher authority.

Do: Let's translate "form of God" as "very nature God" so the full divinity of Christ is not in question (Phil. 2:6)--is "shape" really the same as "very nature"?! Let's translate "firstborn of creation" with "firstborn over creation" (Col. 1:15) so there is no question of whether Jesus is created or not. Let's add a word out of nowhere to "did not give" so it reads "did not just give" (Jer. 7:22), even though there is no such word in the Hebrew--we don't want to leave any question about whether Leviticus was written at the time of the exodus. Let's add another word out of the blue so that "to the dead" reads "to those now dead" so there is no room for the dead being saved (1 Pet. 4:6)--Protestants don't believe such Catholic ideas. Again, let's add another word that isn't there in the original so that "is not concerned" reads "is not just concerned" so we give no room for allegorical interpretation in 1 Cor 9:9-10.

Most of these moves have no clear basis in the text and seems in each case to be motivated overwhelmingly to maintain the perspective of the neo-evangelical tradition, thus deconstructing the fundamental claims of this hermeneutic. When push comes to shove, those of the Chicago Statement approach consistently trump the most obvious meaning of the Bible with evangelical tradition, in my opinion.

The Church is something more profound and Spiritual than any of the specific creeds or councils... and the Church led by the Spirit is already assumed in much of what the crafters of this Statement call the "Scriptures."

I particularly like his example of the creation of the (CRC- and NAE-initiated, evangelical-usage-dominating) NIV. It's one thing for inerrantists to acknowledge the value of reading the Bible in original languages. It's quite another to confront the actual process of translation and its ideological undertones. Whether the NIV is a special case in this regard isn't the point, so much as the fact that we constantly read the Bible through particular lenses, even and especially when we deny--knowingly or otherwise--that we're doing so.

Via James McGrath.

Happy Father's Day! See you at work tomorrow, unless you can afford unpaid paternity leave.

Something I'd like for Father's Day (along with a church service that doesn't observe Father's Day): paid paternity and maternity leave. Most industrialized countries have it; we don't. I wrote about this (and paid sick days) for Utne awhile back. This week, EPI's indispensable Snapshots series highlighted the issue:


I don't think I'll get either of my wishes this year. Maybe cause I'm not a father yet? I'll get moving on that--this is important stuff. The ability of parents to spend time caring for and bonding with newborns without losing their income or their job is a family value, if anything is--unless, that is, family values only matter for people who can afford to keep one parent at home full-time and/or take unpaid leave.

Calling the kettle hateful and ignorant

If you're going to not only totalize and personally smear Prop 8 supporters but even go so far as to write hateful letters about them to their own neighbors, you ought to at least get your facts straight:

Last November, Jay Pimentel began hearing that people in his neighborhood were receiving letters about him. Pimentel lives in Alameda, Calif., a small, liberal-leaning community hanging off Oakland into the San Francisco Bay. Pimentel, who is a Mormon, had supported Proposition 8, the ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage. And that made him a target. "Dear Neighbor," the letter began, "Our neighbors, Colleen and Jay Pimentel" — and it gave their address — "contributed $1,500.00 to the Yes on Proposition 8 campaign. NEIGHBORS SHOULD BE AWARE OF THEIR NEIGHBORS' CHOICES." The note accused the Pimentels of "obsessing about same-sex marriage." It listed a variety of local causes that recipients should support — "unlike the Pimentels."

Pimentel, a lawyer and a lay leader in the small Mormon congregation in Alameda, is markedly even-keeled. Yet the poison-pen note still steams him, even though in May the California Supreme Court validated Prop 8 as constitutional. He is bothered less by the revelation of his monetary contribution, which he stands by, than the fact that the letter's author didn't bother to find out that every other Saturday for 15 years, he or someone else from Alameda's 184-member Mormon ward has delivered a truckload of hot meals to the Midway Shelter for Abused and Homeless Women and Children — one of the organizations the Pimentels allegedly wouldn't support.

Read the whole article.

Nope, they're not going to tell us who they're talking to

This is disappointing. Where's that transparency you talked about, Obama?

For the last time: Fresh, local food isn't elitist; assuming that poor people don't want it is.

Until this weary critique goes away, we need good examples. Here's a great one.

Who's rationing, and what's being rationed?

Sens. McConnell and Kyl are cosponsoring a bill to prevent the federal government from rationing health care. Without such a measure, OMG IT COULD BE AS BAD AS CANADA!! (The press release even manages to work in a comparison to "socialized health-care systems.")

But why single out public insurance with your fear of rationing, when private insurers (actually, already) deny care to the people they cover all day long? Today's Leonhardt column details the various destructive ways care is being rationed now. ("The choice isn’t between rationing and not rationing. It’s between rationing well and rationing badly.") And Ezra points to the fact that the factor by which more Canadians than Americans have to wait for care is about the same as the factor by which more Americans than Canadians AVOID care because it's too expensive. He and others have pointed to this study before--it's from 2001--but this doesn't keep the rationing boogey man from remaining a political winner.

If the Republicans think not having to wait in line awhile for elective surgery is more important than ensuring that lower-income people can have surgery at all, they should say so. Of course, they won't--they'll just keep whining about how Americans want to make their own health decisions, with their doctors, instead of having some big government bureaucracy tell them what care they can and can't have access to. They won't mention that a big PRIVATE bureaucracy is already doing this, a lot.

Jonathan Cohn asked both senators this morning whether they'd like to outlaw rationing for private insurers, too. He hasn't gotten a reply yet.

Quick quiz: FotF succession edition

Question: Does this nugget from Focus on the Family's new CEO--

Daly says he is results-oriented, not an ideologue.

"When those who are right, left and center all say, 'Let's make abortion rare,' let's meet at that starting point," Daly said. "Let's shove off the rhetoric and get together on practical matters."

--prove any of the following?

• OMG, the religious right is dead!
• Most evangelicals are totally moderates!
• The religious right is very much alive, Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo just use their "hey, we should do something about all the poor people!" shtick to distract from the fact that they're totally part of it, and now they've got their man at Focus!

Or is it just that, along with (perhaps) not being a blowhard and a bully, Daly's a bit savvier than Dobson?

Monsanto's unbiased thoughts on Monsanto

So I'm looking forward to seeing the movie Food, Inc., which opens in Chicago this Friday.

Big ag's naturally less excited about the film, a sort of feature-length primer on all things food movement. Monsanto has a blog, called Monsanto According to Monsanto. Why? Hey, they're glad you asked:

The title Monsanto According to Monsanto is a spoof of The World According to Monsanto, a horribly biased documentary which portrays Monsanto in a very negative light. Aside from the shoddy journalism, we at Monsanto found it incredibly arrogant that the filmmaker would present her own twisted view of Monsanto as the company’s view of the world.

Unfortunately there’s no shortage of people, particularly on the internet, who have taken it upon themselves to speak about Monsanto – what the company is, what it does, and why. Many of these folks have their own agendas. If anyone should speak to Monsanto’s vision of the world, it’s those of us who come to work here every day and collectively make this company what it is. This is the main reason for this blog.

"Particularly on the internet"! Nothing like using a blog to imply that teh internets aren't credible. But more importantly: WTF? Seems to me that what's really arrogant is talking down to us internets readers to the point of suggesting that we might actually believe that "those of us who come to work here every day and collectively make this company what it is"--i.e., staffers paid to write spin pieces--are "folks" with less of an agenda than a documentary filmmaker has.

At any rate, via Ethicurean, intrepid citizen blogger Monsanto According to Monsanto is shocked--shocked!--that Food, Inc.'s Robert Kenner would criticize Monsanto for prohibiting its seed buyers from saving seeds. Mr. Kenner! Don't you care about intellectual property, sir? If not, I guess you won't mind if people bootleg your nice little movie, will you?

Hmm. The fact that Monsanto's seeds are corporate intellectual property, and not, say, something occurring in nature, is of course a big part of the problem. That aside, an "ooh! I think I see a hypocrite!" gotcha like this is a silly distraction. The problem with Monsanto et al is that they're destroying our health, our planet, and peoples' livelihoods. One way they do this is by forcing farmers to buy new seeds every year. Kenner can't credibly criticize this without immediately putting his film in the public domain? That's absurd, a comparison that depends on very narrow terms of conversation.

Big ag's mounting a major defensive, and it's going to take a lot of work to keep them from defining the debate. Bonnie does a good job in the comments here--take a look at the back and forth she gets into w/ a Monsanto employee. (You can tell he's one of the cool kids and not some corporate goon because he has a South Park avatar!)

DC's homeless homeless advocate

Via Ann Fontaine, a great All Things Considered story about a homeless advocate who is himself homeless.

This is the most interesting and moving thing I've seen about homelessness since this guy's art (via Jeff Severns Guntzel).

"We'll ask the lord to forgive us for all our sins / And we’ll look at the latest in gold-plated firing pins"

I posted briefly earlier this week on a Louisville pastor's "open carry celebration" at his church.

Now Gary Stern's covered the story--and added a nicely illustrative (if unsubtly ironic) concert video by the Beat Farmers. Here's "Gun Sale at the Church":

Who's to blame and who's responsible for fixing it

Wednesday's David Leonhardt column is terrific for its clarity and fairness. His two "basic truths" about the deficit:

The first is that President Obama's agenda, ambitious as it may be, is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits, despite what many of his Republican critics are saying. The second is that Mr. Obama does not have a realistic plan for eliminating the deficit, despite what his advisers have suggested.

Here he goes through the methodology. And here's a pie chart by Matt Yglesias:

The silence from the ticking-time-bomb crowd

Though I appreciate Frank Schaeffer's boldness and credibility, I generally agree with Nat that his "You know who was a real asshole? My dad and his stupid evangelical friends. Come read my latest HuffPost rant about it!" routine is wearing thin. (This post had its excesses but was powerful and much-needed; this one's mostly just over the top.)

So I could take or leave this Rachel Maddow interview with Schaeffer. But the clip's worth watching for Maddow's intro, when she briefly raises the question of whether Scott Roeder, who has volunteered that he has information about future violent attacks against abortion providers, is pretty much a textbook example of who, if anyone, should be tortured by the authorities. (Leaving aside the definition of "terrorist," it's certainly worth noting that Roeder, unlike most of the people at Gitmo, is clearly guilty.) Here's Maddow:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

She's not the only one to bring this up. Zachary Roth asked Dick Cheney, John Cornyn, Charles Krauthammer, and Rich Lowry whether they'd support using enhanced interrogation techniques on Roeder. Three days later, he's still waiting for a reply.

Those anything-goes Episcopalians!

It looks as though Kevin Thew Forrester, the controversial and liberal bishop-elect of the Northern Michigan diocese of TEC, doesn't have the votes for consecration.

"But wait," you say. "I thought the Episcopal church leadership was just a bastion of unmoored heterodoxy, that virtually all the people who actually believe anything left already and live in the Rwandan town of Wheaton or the Nigerian town of Fairfax."

Well, not quite. Surprise!

CT ran a pretty good news story by Frank Lockwood, though they also couldn't resist headlining it "Too Unorthodox Even for the Episcopal Church?" That's right: the headline perpetuates the very stereotype that the story itself resists.

E.E. Evans has a good take.

Draft from HELP

Sen. Kennedy and the HELP Committee Democrats have released draft health care legislation (pdfs).

Jonathan Cohn has a quick take.

The phrase "open carry celebration" doesn't belong in the same sentence as the word "church"

And that's granting that the words "open carry celebration" belong together in the first place, which requires all the see-both-sides energy I can muster today. Beyond that, words fail me.

They don't, however, fail Nat.

Civil marriage and the church

I've long been interested in Rebecca Voelkel's point (pdf) that the way to win hearts and minds on the same-sex (civil) marriage question is to include religious people in the effort. (She said this to me in an interview a couple years ago.) Gene Robinson agrees.

It's a provocative observation, among other reasons because it troubles the basic assumption shared by many, including me--namely, that the reason the same-sex marriage conversation is so difficult in this country, or at least one of the main ones, is that marriage is apparently immune to the separation of church and state in an unparalleled way.

Still, I'm with Mark on this one: it seems pretty clear that the key to winning civil marriage equality for same-sex couples is not to undo church people's objections so much as to take seriously the ones that deserve to be taken seriously: the ones about religious freedom.

Or rather, SOME of the ones about religious freedom. Others are basically crap. See this great Century article by Thomas Berg for more on that distinction, and on how to craft better policy that protects EVERYBODY's rights.

Obama in Cairo

Mark Juergensmeyer gets it right: It's amazing, and sobering, that all Obama has to do to make a deep impression in Cairo is speak respectfully and graciously to his audience. To which I'll add only that the contrast is not just with BO's immediate predecessor but with most of presidential history. Obama's disappointed me in any number of ways, both during and before his presidency, but he's doing a fine job in communicating to the rest of the world that America does, in fact, care that they exist, and not just for the exciting business opportunities.

And in the Times: a great example of what a large, internationally situated news company can do that you or I or our three-person-start-up-on-a-shoestring-budget simply can't (notice I didn't say that PAPER is a necessary part of the equation): a short article that gives us feedback to the speech from all over the region. 1400 words from 11+ journalists makes for an incredibly informative five minutes of your time.

Some Tiller links

Per usual, William Saletan asks the hard questions: if abortion is murder, why is killing one of the country's handful of providers of late-term abortion not a perfectly reasonable act? His good point: few anti-abortion folks actually behave as though abortion were equivalent to murder, whatever their rhetoric.

What he skips, however, is the fact that most in the anti-abortion movement have deep respect for the rule of law, and many--particularly of the Catholic persuasion--are also invested in nonviolent means of social change. The condemnation Tiller's murder has received from the mainstream anti-abortion folks reflects political damage control, of course, but it also has the advantage of representing the actual opinions of the vast majority of people who oppose abortion. And opposing both abortion and vigilantism is hardly an inconsistent position.

Meanwhile, Van Helsing calls the murder a "big propaganda coup for the left," without providing any links as evidence. (And then this nugget: "From the point of view of our progressive ruling class, only innocent life is expendable." Interesting phrase, "innocent life." In fact, the same qualifier appears in the boilerplate language from some of the anti-abortion groups. Wonder why.)

Which is not to say that some responses from the left haven't been over the top, totalizing of abortion opponents, etc. Here's a good example. But I've been relieved to see how good of a job most of the left-leaning folks I read have done at maintaining that this is about violent, lawless extremism, and not about the anti-abortion movement itself. And the Planned Parenthood statement is exactly what it should be, given who they are--it's entirely about the man who was murdered and the work he did, which they of course support, and not about what this event says about their political opponents.

Finally, what would the aftermath of an event like this be without a strongly worded piece by Frank Schaeffer?