Entries from January 2008 ↓

As we await the state of the union address–which I suspect hardly anyone will watch–I’m struck by how EVERYONE, including conservatives, and including people who used to defend him, are piling on President Bush. Peggy Noonan, for instance, is saying that it wouldn’t be Huckabee or McCain whose nomination would destroy the Republican party, as Rush Limbaugh says; rather, President Bush has ALREADY destroyed it. Meanwhile, a liberal group is raising money to make sure that his approval ratings do not go up before he leaves office! Why spend money to trash someone who is already leaving office?Bill Kristol, though, defends the president and his reputation. What do you think?

In church yesterday the sermon was about the Kingdom of God as opposed to the Kingdom of Satan; that is, the reign of sin. Christ’s Kingdom breaks in as a subversive power, undermining that kingdom’s rule over our lives.

We speak of God’s two kingdoms, but this one of Satan’s gets less attention, but it too is real and a factor in how we live in the other two. I suppose Satan too has an earthly and a spiritual kingdom, with the usurper aping the rule of the true King.

In an interview with Christianity Today, Barack Obama answered this question:
“You’ve talked about your experience walking down the aisle at Trinity United Church of Christ, and kneeling beneath the cross, having your sins redeemed, and submitting to God’s will. Would you describe that as a conversion? Do you consider yourself born again?”

I am a Christian, and I am a devout Christian. I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe that that faith gives me a path to be cleansed of sin and have eternal life. But most importantly, I believe in the example that Jesus set by feeding the hungry and healing the sick and always prioritizing the least of these over the powerful. I didn’t ‘fall out in church’ as they say, but there was a very strong awakening in me of the importance of these issues in my life. I didn’t want to walk alone on this journey. Accepting Jesus Christ in my life has been a powerful guide for my conduct and my values and my ideals.

Great and widely-applicable story from Dawn Eden at National Review Online, from a discussion of Planned Parenthood and the left’s absolute hatred of abstinence education:

Some 1,700 years ago, a hermit living in the Egyptian desert predicted “a time is coming when people will go mad.”“And when they see someone who is not mad,” continued the man known today as St. Anthony the Great, “they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad, you are not like us.’”

What are some examples of this syndrome?

Well, getting $600 apiece has its charms. According to this report, a deal has been struck in Congress that will give each taxpayer $600, plus $300 per child. A family of four would thus get $1800. (Earlier versions would have given $800 to taxpayers, but this agreed-upon plan is a little less so as to give $300 to those who pay no taxes.) The checks will be cut between May and July. The cost will be some $150 billion, about the cost of an average year in Iraq. But it IS our money, after all, just given back. Yes, getting that check will be nice, but is it a good idea?

Finally an article that addresses what I had been wondering about. We know that the Social Security system will be in big trouble when we baby-boomers retire. But what will happen to the stock market once we all sell off our IRAs to fund our golden-year lifestyles? Won’t all those sell orders flood the market and drive the prices down, thus leaving us old-timers with less money after all, despite all that saving and investing? The linked article acknowledges the problem, but offers some hope.

William Kristol calls for an end to the “more-conservative-than-thou” discord in the Republican ranks and explains the difference between Ronald Reagan, who came to office as the leader of an ideological movement, and the normal state of politics, in which ideological movements use the candidates they have. Read Waiting for Reagan. Does he have a point?

Now that the New Age candidate, Dennis Kucinich, has dropped out of the race, that would be John Edwards. Charles Krauthammer writes about the man’s “breathtaking” posturing, grandiosely condemning the very things he voted for (the Iraq war, free trade with China, the new bankruptcy bill, the Patriot Act, No Child Left Behind, disposing nuclear waste in Nevada) during his short and indistinguished one term in the Senate. And how he is posing as the angry revolutionary who has been fighting for the proletariat all his life. Please.

Jason Braaten, at Concordia TheoBLOGical Seminary, links to a good Touchstone essay by Anthony Esolen, then draws some incisive conclusions of his own:

Talking about taste is not bad with regard to the arts in the church, unless you have none. And it is this that we as the church have been reticent to discuss-mainly due to the fact that we ourselves don’t actually have taste. We have knowledge of what we want people to think is good taste, but don’t actually have it. It isn’t a part of the fiber of our being. We are fakes. We are phonies. We have no taste-some to a lesser degree than others.

What strikes chords that resonate within me with this essay is Esolen’s ability to say just that. To evaluate tastes, you must have some taste. And what the church hasn’t done, nor is it quite prepared to do because we are in a very real sense victims and perpetrators of the enemy issues, is come out to say some tastes are better than others. We have not inculcated and nurtured people to identify with those tastes that are higher and better. And this is not just the case in church, but probably more so in the home. There is objectivity to beauty and taste, even though we have learned otherwise. And the saddest and most shameful thing about this is that we have chosen simply to maintain status quo and hand it on to subsequent generations.

To remind those of us who say we believe in “absolutes” against the postmodernists who deny there is any such thing, the three absolutes were and are Truth, Goodness, and BEAUTY. Christians are against relativism when it comes to truth and goodness but they tend to agree with the postmodernists that beauty is relative. This must be challenged. Once beauty goes, the other absolutes quickly become unravelled. (This is not, by the way, just the problem of churches; rather, it reflects the even bigger tastelessness of the culture as a whole, which Christians, while criticizing the culture on many points, emulate it on this one.)

Yes, beauty involves a subjective response and that “tastes” differ, but taste, like other human faculties, must be cultivated, educated, and disciplined. We need to learn how to take subjective pleasure in what is objectively GOOD.

By subdividing private property into miniscule shares, capitalism has allowed the masses to own the means of production in a way that socialism never could.

The stock market numbers give us the sum-total of millions of individual decisions, which form an aggregate that affects the whole economy. The stock market also lets us see the laws of price and demand and other economic forces working seemingly instantaneously.

Anyway, yesterday on Wall Street was something to behold: Following a world-wide collapse on the previous day, when the American markets were closed, stocks, as predicted, followed that trend, dropping 300 points. But then, people seeing that they could get blue-chip properties really cheap, started buying. And buoyed by an interest rate cut from Treasury, they kept buying. The market ended 300 points up. That would be 600 points from what it was in the middle of the day!

Robert D. Novak offers a window into the Republicans in Congress, who, in their desperation to get re-elected, feel they must funnel large amounts of taxpayer money to their districts in the form of unnecessary pork-barrel “earmarks.” This, again, is one reason why so many of them despise John McCain, who consistently opposes that kind of spending.

Novak says that an important thing to watch is whether the Republicans will give the seat on the House Appropriations Committee to Jeff Flake of Arizona, a stalwart pork fighter. If they do, that would signal a return to the old Republican ideal of fiscal conservatism. If they don’t, since the other candidates for that slot are pork-barrel spenders, that would signal a commitment to the status quo. Nevermind that the status quo is disillusioning America–and even rank and file Republicans–against the Grand Old Party.

But maybe Jeff Flake, Tom Coburn, and some of these other mostly-young crusaders might represent a new breed of Republicans that will rise from the rubble.

Not too long ago we discussed children’s Bible picture books. Well, the Islamic government of Malaysia is confiscating Christian books that picture Abraham, Moses, Jesus, or other Biblical figures who are recognized by Islam as prophets. Islam forbids visual representations of holy figures, so even non-Muslims must do the same.

And remember how some liberal Christians were saying that we should just use “Allah” for God, since the word is simply the Arabic word for the deity? Well, the Islamic government of Malaysia has also outlawed Christians or any other non-Muslims from using the term “Allah.” This, in effect, prevents Christians from saying the word “God” in the Arabic language.

Read this.