Entries from March 2008 ↓

Now Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons: The New Conseervative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots, takes up the cause of Issues, Etc.

It’s rather surprising to many of us how this seemingly internecine controversy within the LCMS has attracted such attention from outside our circles. But the “Issues” that come up with this case do indeed have wide currency. And that “Issues” is not only conservative, but “crunchily conservative” in Dreher’s sense is surely significant, and not just for Lutherans.

It isn’t just us old people who are defending “Issues,” but, judging from The Wittenberg Trail social networking site, it is young people who are some its biggest fans and who are lighting up the internet. Those who are savvy on the internet, unlike the officials who cancelled the show seemingly oblivious to internet downloads. Those who consider the interview show, which is at the same time both culturally plugged in and theologically in-your-face, to be not just edifying but also cool.

And you don’t have to make your own granola to see Dreher’s point, that a conservatism exists that is young and counter-cultural, with a great concern–given the current cultural inanities–of returning to “roots.” That would include the roots of the church, which is what “Issues” championed.

UPDATE: Michael Horton on White Horse Inn also weighs in. He interviews the author of that piece in the Wall Street Journal, M. Z. Hemingway. Go to Bring Back Issues to hear what she has to say.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Todd Wilken speaks.

when hope springs eternal in the human breast, as everyone’s team begins in first place. I stayed up late watching the Washington Nationals in their new stadium play the Atlanta Braves. It was a good game that the Nats won in the last inning when Ryan Zimmerman hit a walk off home run. My resolution this year is to try to follow and be for the Nationals, since I now live in the D.C. area and feel a community obligation to support the local team. I’ll still pull for the Milwaukee Brewers, but I will watch Nats games on TV, check their box scores every day, and go to some games if I can get tickets (which, I am told, may not be easy in this first year of a new stadium).

So the floor is now open for optimistic predictions. ESPN pundits were predicting that the Cubs would be in the World Series! Don’t I hear that every year?

I am glad to see that one of my alma maters, Kansas, is in the Final Four. You may notice that I say little about basketball in this blog. One reason is that whenever I watch basketball my team, no matter how highly favored, loses. I can tune in at half time with my team leading by 12 points, but in the final minutes that lead slips away and they lose at the buzzer. I just know from experience that if I had watched the Kansas game, this year’s team to come out of nowhere Davidson would have made that final 3-point shot and won the game. So I AM supporting my team by not watching it play. (I just hope writing about the Jayhawks on this blog will not have a similar effect.)

Yes, we decry the way Communist China (at least I’m not saying “Red China,” tODD) is oppressing the Tibetans, as well as Christians and just about everybody else. But that does not excuse the Tibetan Buddhists who murdered at least 19 innocent people just because they were Chinese. From Eyewitnesses Recount Terrifying Day in Tibet - washingtonpost.com:

It was a heady feeling, being part of a howling pack that had forced police to turn tail and run, some dropping their shields as they fled a barrage of rocks. Then the Tibetans in the crowd slowed and began turning back, grinning and patting one another on the back.

The ebullient mood did not last long. The pack broke into smaller groups, gathering rocks and pulling out knives, looking for the next target.

“There was no more crowd to be part of. It looked like they were turning on everybody,” said Kenwood, 19, describing the scene to reporters last week when he arrived in Kathmandu, Nepal, after 10 days in the Tibetan capital. “It wasn’t about Tibet freedom anymore.”

What he witnessed next was a violent rampage unlike any in decades in Lhasa, a city where Tibetan Buddhism’s most revered temples sit among office buildings and concrete markets built by Chinese bent on developing the remote Himalayan region. Hundreds of mostly young Tibetans broke up into roaming gangs and attacked Chinese passersby and vandalized shops, killing 19 people and injuring more than 600 over two days.

During the riots, looters set fire to a clothing store, burning to death five young employees who were huddled on the second floor. Most police officers kept their distance while the center of Lhasa descended into chaos.

The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod has finally released information about why its radio show “Issues, Etc.” was cancelled. According to the statement’, the church-owned radio station KFUO has been losing money on the show, and viewership numbers were not enough to justify the expense:

In fiscal year 2007-08, KFUO-AM’s operating deficit was $620,698.  Since 2001, the accumulated deficits at the station have been in excess of $3.5 million. . . .

Although some are under the impression that “Issues, Etc.” was profitable and self-supporting, the fact is the program lost approximately $250,000 in the last fiscal year.  While airing for only 18 percent of KFUO-AM’s programming week, “Issues” accounted for more than 40 percent of the station’s total deficit.  These figures are based on the audited financial statements of the LCMS. . . .

Some may also be under a misapprehension about the size of the “Issues” audience.  In 2005, station management decided it could no longer justify paying for expensive ratings reports in light of the predictably low and static nature of KFUO-AM’s audience numbers.  At the time, a blending of the spring 2004 and spring 2005 “books” showed an average listening audience during the “Issues” Monday-Friday timeslot of 1,650.  There is no indication these numbers have grown appreciably since. 

As for the audio streaming of “Issues, Etc.” via the Internet, the numbers are similarly low.  During the last full month (February 2008) for which we have reports, the average number of live, streaming listeners during the “Issues” Monday-Friday timeslot was 64. 

On Sunday nights, when the first hour of “Issues” was syndicated in a number of markets (an opportunity for which, during the past fiscal year, the LCMS actually paid $66,000 in broadcast fees), and where the second hour was available only on the Internet, the peak number of online listeners on the KFUO stream was 39. 

The figures–which are three years old–do not include, however, the main way people listen to radio on the internet: not streaming but downloading. In the last three-month quarter, the show was downloaded 480,000 times. (See this for the number-crunching and this for a comparison of “Issues” downloads compared to KFUO’s other shows to gauge its relative popularity.) Figuring the cost of the show as given in the LCMS statement, this calculation finds the cost comes to 13 cents per download, less than the cost of a printed flyer.

For more responses and information about the grass roots uprising over the “Issues,” go here.

Meanwhile, here is an attempt to privatize “Issues.”

Also, fans suffering “Issues” withdrawal should know about Radical Grace, a similar radio and downloadable program that is already privately operated but hits the same themes as “Issues.”

M. Z. Hemingway explains everything you need to know about the current controversy over the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod’s cancellation of “Issues, Etc.” in a story in no less than the Wall Street Journal. Her piece is entitled Radio Silence. After discussing the cancellation, including the synod’s latest explanation that the show lost too much money and had too few viewers, Hemingway puts the incident in a larger context and concludes:

The program was in all likelihood a pawn in a larger battle for the soul of the Missouri Synod. The church is divided between, on the one hand, traditional Lutherans known for their emphasis on sacraments, liturgical worship and the church’s historic confessions and, on the other, those who have embraced pop-culture Christianity and a market-driven approach to church growth. The divide is well known to all confessional Christian denominations struggling to retain their traditional identity. . . .

[The program’s] attacks against shallow church marketing included mention of some approaches embraced by the current leadership. It opposed, for instance, the emergent church — an attempt to accommodate postmodern culture by blending philosophies and practices from throughout the church’s history — and the Purpose Driven Church movement, which reorients the church’s message toward self-help and self-improvement.

John McCain’s daughter, Meghan, is blogging about the campaign on the internet. She’s funny, cool, and oblivious to the issues. FromFortunate Daughter - washingtonpost.com:

Who else could write about “town halling it” with such irrepressible sunniness? And who else cares that much about accessories? This is the campaign trail as it would look if it were covered in Us Weekly. On McCainBlogette.com, McCain, 23, takes a private tour of the White House with Laura Bush and reports that the place is “breathtaking” but could use some modern art. Perhaps a Warhol? she ventures.

She writes that her dad’s new campaign bus is totally “pimped out,” and she posts “10 Things You Don’t Know About My Mom,” revealing that Cindy McCain is a “huge” fan of the band Cream and that her favorite snacks are “Cheetos and salt and vinegar potato chips.”

The preexisting paradigms for a candidate’s daughter have been either (a) fluent on the issues and surrogating for the candidate, like Chelsea Clinton and Cate Edwards, or (b) staying as far as possible from public life and shuttering out the press, like the Bush twins during their dad’s first run. Meghan McCain is upending both. She is a pop culture junkie sufficiently well versed in reality TV to know that her personal revelations need not make her vulnerable. Instead, they permit her to write her own script.

Politics is filled with “fake people,” as McCain sees it. She’s dedicated to revealing life behind the scenes, with a fizzy authenticity so infectious you almost forget what an ugly place the campaign trail can be. Politics seems fun!

Read the linked article and sample her blog. Do you find Meghan McCain refreshing and charming, or annoyingly shallow? (Or is this another false dichotomy?)

Appended to that Jonah article we blogged about yesterday was another tidbit from Ronald F. Marshall explaining why Islam denies that Jesus was crucified:

According to the Koran, Jesus was not crucified on the cross. Some have it that he never was nailed to the cross but a look-alike was nailed there in his place, perhaps Thomas or Judas; others that he was nailed to the cross but was taken down and later resuscitated in the tomb.

On this view, the sign of Jonah (Matt. 12:39; Luke 11:29) says that Jesus will not die because Jonah did not die in the belly of the whale, and that alone is the true but forgotten point of comparison between Jesus and Jonah. This argument is made by Ahmed Deedat in Was Jesus Crucified?, published by the Library of Islam.

Islam denies the Atonement for two reasons. First, “the Christian concept of salvation presupposes the existence of an a-priori state of sinfulness, which is justified in Christianity by the doctrine of ‘original sin,’ but is not justified in Islam, which does not subscribe to this doctrine,” as one highly esteemed Koranic scholar, Muhammad Asad, put it.
Second, Islam denies vicarious suffering. The Koran teaches that we have to bear the burden for our sins all by ourselves. So the teaching that Jesus bore our sins in his body on the cross (1 Peter 2:24) is a corruption of the original revelation, the original coming in the Koran, where we are told that God gave to Jesus the way of good works. By following them we have peace with God.

The Koran describes salvation as repenting of sin and obeying God just as Jonah did. Jesus’ life reinforces this way. This is all that is left for Jesus to do if original sin and vicarious suffering are denied, as they are in Islam (and much of liberal Christianity). The sign of Jonah is the way of good works.

Sounds like the beliefs of some people who think they are Christians! No wonder so many of them think Islam and Christianity are basically the same. Rather than OPPOSITES.

Hillary Clinton’s sniper tale is a good example of the postmodernist mindset at work: She constructed a narrative to advance her power agenda. This is legitimate, according to postmodernists, since the objectivity of truth is an illusion and, as her campaign aide put it, everyone’s perceptions are different.

My question to you is, what are some other outbreaks of the postmodernist mentality during this presidential campaign? You can draw from Mrs. Clinton, but also Barack Obama, John McCain, and any of the losing candidates from either party. (I’m thinking of doing an article on the subject, so I’m asking you to help me out.)

The California appeals court that outlawed homeschooling has decided to vacate the ruling. That doesn’t mean overturning it. Rather it means the court will reconsider the case. See here for details.

In case you missed it, Tickletext, in his comment on Grunewald’s Easter painting, posted this poem by John Updike, who is one of our most distinguished and critically acclaimed contemporary authors and a Christian (brought up Lutheran, now an Episcopalian), and yet hardly any Christians read him because his novels have so much sex in them! But treasure this:

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

John Updike, “Seven Stanzas at Easter”

A Touchstone article criticizes children’s Bible story books that take out the scariness that is in the Bible, looking particularly at the treatments of Jonah and the whale. The author, Ronald F. Marshall, argues that the scary parts are necessary for the child to realize the Gospel in those stories. See Eaten Alive.