Entries from April 2008 ↓

There are indeed pro-life Democrats, such as Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey and former Congressman from Indiana Timothy Roemer. They and other pro-life Democrats are coming out strong for Barack Obama, even though he has opposed every restriction on abortion, including the bill to ban partial birth abortion. But pro-life Democrats say that he at least supports abstinence education and admits that abortion poses a profound moral dilemma. They think the atmosphere of unity and transcending differences that Obama promises offer a chance to end the currrent deadlocks and to arrive at a consensus that will result in fewer abortions.

Read For Obama, Unexpected Support - washingtonpost.com. What do you think of such hopes?

I keep bragging about Patrick Henry College, where I teach and am provost, to the point of advertising. Please bear with me, but I wanted to make you aware of something some of you parents and your offspring might be interested in. Every summer we have what we call “Teen Camps,” in which young people from 14-18 come to campus for a week (or sometimes more) for fun, yet educational activities. It’s a good opportunity to make friends, expand horizons, develop a skill, pursue an interest, and sample Patrick Henry College. Here are the topics for this summer:

Strategic Intelligence, June 8-14, $625 [Also known as “Spy Camp”]
Music Camp, June 15-21, $625
College Prep, June 15-21, $525
Moot Court, June 22-28, $525
Drama Camp, June 22-28, $525
Debate, July 6-19, $1050
Roots of Leadership, July 6-12, $525
Worldviews in Literature, July 13-19, $525
Strategic Intelligence, July 20-26, $626

You can go here for more information.

The Pope’s here. Did you realize the Catholics too are torn in a worship war? You would think that a historical, hierarchical, traditional-to-a-fault church that dogmatically defines (again, to a fault) every detail of worship could avoid debates over “worship styles.” But no. In fact, as I know from experience, contemporary Catholic worship is even worse than contemporary Protestant worship, the songs even more banal and the music even more sappy. In further fact, at least one scholar (was it John Pless?) has traced the unravelling of traditional worship practices in all traditions, including those of Protestant evangelicals, and their replacement with contemporary modes to Roman Catholicism, specifically, to the worship “reforms” of Vatican II.

Anyway, here are some telliing lines from the article Between Medieval And Folk, Two Mass Audiences - washingtonpost.com:

Imagine a bizarro world where all the 25-year-olds want Mozart and all the 60-year-olds want adult-contemporary. The kids think the adults are too wild. The backlash against “Kumbaya Catholicism” has anyone under 40 allegedly clamoring for the Tridentine Mass in Latin, while the old folks are most sentimental about Casual Sunday (even more rockin’, the Saturday vigil Mass), and still cling to what’s evolved from the lite-rock guitar liturgies of the 1970s. The result, for most parishes, has been decades of Masses in which no one is entirely satisfied, and very few enjoy the music enough to sing along.

A marketing company has analyzed the different candidates’ appeal and related them to that of various products. This article describes the process for McCain. (The findings for the other candidates was given in a box in the Washington Post, but I couldn’t find it on the website.)

According to this marketing research, if John McCain were a product (I am granting how idiotic that is), he would be a Ford pickup; Wrangler jeans; and a Timex watch.

Hillary Clinton would be a Volvo station wagon; Microsoft software; and the New York Yankees.

Barack Obama would be a BMW Z4 convertible; Apple computer; and Chicago Cubs.

I have a Ford pickup and wear Wranglers, though my watch is not a Timex, though it’s fairly equivalent. So that would put me 2/3 for McCain, which is pretty close.

I am 0/3 for Clinton. That is a highly accurate summary of her appeal for me.

I compute with Apples, so that would make me 1/3 for Obama. As I have said, I have a certain fondness for Obama that I cannot fully account for, though I couldn’t vote for him, and I guess it has to do with some of that Macintosh mystique.

Does this branding account for your own political preference?

Europe’s right-wing scene–including its FAR right-wing scene–is undergoing some interesting changes and some new popularity. The anti-semite (that is, the anti-Jewish) parties are finding favor with Muslims! Other groups are building on the public’s unease with the Islamisation of their countries by appeals to traditional European culture. There are also some new anti-immigration, anti-Islamic parties grounded in libertarianism that are becoming more and more prominent. See this article, Islam and the Evolution of Europe’s Far Right.

In our ongoing series on holidays and special days throughout the year, we had better not forget this one. Otherwise, we could land in the slammer. Taxes are due! Don’t forget to mail them in!

This is a day of lamentation, not only that we have to pay so much to our governments but that we may not approve of so much of that we pay for. Nevertheless, paying taxes is one of the few civil obligations particularly and specifically enjoined upon us by our Lord Jesus Christ Himself. That has to limit some of our anti-tax sentiments to some degree–perhaps we could focus on the good Romans 13 uses of government expenditures–though I’m sure the angst will remain.

So how should we mark and celebrate (probably the wrong word) the meaning of THIS day?

George F. Will gives useful background on the worldview that looms behind Barack Obama’s contention that Americans are religious, love guns, and want border control because they are economically oppressed. A sample:

The emblematic book of the new liberalism was “The Affluent Society” by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. He argued that the power of advertising to manipulate the bovine public is so powerful that the law of supply and demand has been vitiated. Manufacturers can manufacture in the American herd whatever demand the manufacturers want to supply. Because the manipulable masses are easily given a “false consciousness” (another category, like religion as the “opiate” of the suffering masses, that liberalism appropriated from Marxism), four things follow:

First, the consent of the governed, when their behavior is governed by their false consciousnesses, is unimportant. Second, the public requires the supervision of a progressive elite which, somehow emancipated from false consciousness, can engineer true consciousness. Third, because consciousness is a reflection of social conditions, true consciousness is engineered by progressive social reforms. Fourth, because people in the grip of false consciousness cannot be expected to demand or even consent to such reforms, those reforms usually must be imposed, for example, by judicial fiats.

According to Marxism and its neo-Marxist descendents (who apply what Marx said about ecoonomics to other kinds of oppression, such as by race, gender, and sexual orientation), “false consciousness” has to do with the oppressed being manipulated by those in power to co-operate in their own oppression. For example, in neo-Marxist literary criticism (still a big deal on non-Patrick Henry university campuses), Jane Austen is said to show “false consciousness” by having her female characters get married rather than empowering them to be feminists.

According to this article in a British newspaper, China already is the world’s dominant nation.

To show this is not just a Lutheran blog, I offer here Carl Trueman offering some semi-whimsical reflections about taking life as it comes, which he calls Zen Calvinism:

Like the Buddhist movement which shares the same name, Zen-Calvinism is a school of religious thought which allows its adherents to live at one with the world, untroubled in any ultimate sense by the slings and arrows which life throws their way. It is also counter-cultural and thus represents a deeply alternative lifestyle. Let me elaborate a little on this counter-cultural mentality.

At the heart of Zen-Calvinism is the belief that all human beings are morally flawed, unlike the worldviews projected by the celebrity-saturated commercial culture of the modern West. . . .Zen-Calvinists also accept that they are themselves no better than anyone else; and, understanding their own tendencies to treat everyone else in a less-than-perfect fashion, they will not be surprised when they are repaid in kind. Zen-Calvinists are at one with the depravity of the fallen universe; they expect to be treated as they know they have treated others.

The second major element of Zen-Calvinism is the mantras which we use to worship. Unlike those used to hide from reality, whether the latest Britney Spears ditty or some nostalgic song extolling the mythical virtues of yesteryear, the Zen-Calvinist mantra book is rooted in the 150 songs we find in the Bible’s book of Psalms. Here, both Zen master and novice find words to express their deepest longings, their profoundest fears, and their most passionate desires in words which, as inspired by God, have the divine imprimatur. . . .

The final element of Zen-Calvinism is perhaps the most important: the realization that all evil has been subverted for the greater good purposes of the God who loves his church. If the supreme crime of human history – the judicial murder of the very Son of God – can be used for the greatest good, then any other crime, sin or moral failing can also be frustrated and turned to good account. And that applies not just to the loutish and corrupt behaviour of others; it applies supremely to that of the Zen-Calvinist who reflects upon these things.

The most conservative Calvinists sing only Psalms in their worship. (Though they are actually metrical paraphrases: to Calvinists, I ask, why don’t you chant them, a musical form that allows you to sing non-metrical lines directly from the Bible? Surely you can’t think chanting the Psalms is too “Catholic” when it would allow you to be even more directly Biblical!) Anyway, I respect that practice, and it’s similar to our liturgical worship that consists nearly always of worshipping with texts from the Word of God.

Anyway, what do you think about this Zen-like serenity? What is distinctly Calvinist about this particular formulation? What is lacking (Christ’s Atonement? His presence? His Gospel? Suffering and the Cross?) and what difference would these make to the Christian’s serenity?

HT: Rob Spinney

An article in the Washington Post on the Pope’s visit to D.C. Tuesday includes a quotation that frames a larger issue perfectly. According to Michael Sean Winters, “The Latin American church still generates culture, unlike the American church. It generates art, myth, the things that help people sustain relationships.”

A Christianity that generates culture! That is what is so lacking in America today. It isn’t an issue of ruling the culture, or of exercising power over anyone. And I’m not saying at all that culture, as such, is in any way what the church’s mission should be. But a vital Christianity, one that shapes people’s thinking and living, has always had cultural side-effects.

Today in America, the church tends to be either reactionary (opposing certain elements of the culture) or conformist (aping whatever the culture does in a usually futile attempt to be culturally relevant). It is generally not, however, generating culture.

Christianity played a role in the development of Western civilization, from its art to its great ideas, that it simply doesn’t play anymore. The culture that Christians generated varied greatly over time and through history. To take examples from English literature, Christianity inspired writers as varied as Dante, Milton, the Metaphysical poets, Coleridge, Hopkins, and even the modernist T. S. Eliot. Christianity generated the invention of the university, universal literacy, the rule of law, non-classical drama, human rights, and on and on.

Perhaps Christians today, though, are laying the foundation for generating culture again. Many are building strong families, which are the basis of every culture. Many Christians are building an educational infrastructure that can bear important cultural fruit. We will know we are generating culture again when Christian artists do not just follow styles but invent new ones that even non-Christians follow; when Christians formulate ideas that shape our larger institutions; when Christianity has a fruitful presence in society once again.

On the other hand, it may indeed be that Christianity is entering a time of cultural marginalization or even persecution. Even in such a time of suffering and testing, Christianity must be vital enough to affect how its adherents think and live. The solution is never to conform to a hostile culture, which would mean the disappearance, or the swallowing up of the church, or its being changed to a mere cultural religion.

The Republicans have one hope in the next election: The Democrats’ Achilles heel. Namely, that liberals are SO condescending to typical, normal Americans. That does not wear well for typical, normal voters. Consider what Barack Obama says, as recorded here:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

So THAT’S why we small town yokels are religious. And THAT’S why we “cling to guns” and have problems with illegal immigration. Nothing about beliefs or principles. We are economically depressed and so are in need of Obama’s government programs. Then we wouldn’t have to be religious or like guns anymore.

Obama is saying now he didn’t mean to come across that way. But what is more worrisome is the glimpse of a worldview that the statement reveals. It reflects that old leftist ideology that Obama has up till now done such a good job of trying to transcend, the Marxist and neo-Marxist notion that accounts for beliefs, institutions, and habits of mind as nothing more than covers for economic oppression.

Athletes are getting stronger all the time, thanks to scientific conditioning, and records keep falling. But the velocity of a baseball thrown really, really hard has not changed all that much since Walter Johnson’s days. 100 m.p.h., and maybe as much as 3 m.p.h. more, is as fast as anyone can throw it.

According to this article, that is close to the human limit. Muscles can indeed get bigger and stronger, which is why athletes can run, swim, and jump better than ever before. But throwing a baseball has to do not only with muscles but with ligaments and tendons. Those do not get stronger as muscles do, no matter how many steroids you take. Powerful muscle exertion can snap, tear, and over stretch them like rubber bands. The article says that throwing a ball 110 m.p.h. would be about the very most a human arm could take.

Well, the official record is 103, so there is room for a new flamethrower to throw even harder, before he blows out his arm.