Entries from May 2008 ↓

Barack Obama took North Carolina, and Hillary Clinton took Indiana. It looks like the Democratic nominee is going to be up to the superdelegates. And why not? That’s what they are there for.

The question they all must be asking is, who would be the strongest candidate against John McCain? Pretend that you are a superdelegate whose main interest is winning. Who do you think would be the most formidable candidate? (Both Republicans and Democrats can play this game.)

P.S.: Actually, Obama won enough delegates in Indiana to make him almost impossible to overtake. IF Hillary withdraws today (and I’ll be on a plane most of the day so unable to update), the question still remains. How formidable a candidate will Obama be against John McCain? Or, put another way, does McCain have a chance?

Burma cyclone death toll could hit 63,000 .

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Syesha is certainly the most improved of all the singers, developing from inauspicious beginnings into a fine singer and performer. The two Davids, though, are in a class by themselves. I have been favoring Cook, but I’m thinking Archuleta was even better last night.

What I want to comment on is Jason Castro. Look, you can’t be like Bob Marley just by having dreadlocks! You’ve got to have. . .well. . .soul. Not just external packaging. That would help also if you are going to sing a Bob Dylan song, that and remembering the words.

If Jason doesn’t get voted off tonight, whether because of some sympathy vote or because of the “vote the worst” crowd or because teeny-boppers think he is cute, I’m going to have to seriously re-evaluate my faith in democracy.

UPDATE: He DID get voted off. The world has been made safe for democracy. I will now eagerly await the people’s decision about the presidency.

It always saddens me to see old church buildings that have been turned into restaurants, bars, concert halls, museums, or condos. See The Cultural Conversion Of Cast-Off Churches.

On “Kitchen Nightmares,” Gordon Ramsey, that chef I have been hyping who slaps failing restaurants and cooks into shape, took on an eatery that had once been a church. He, at least, for all his bleeped-out language, was strangely respectful of the once-sacred space. He used the confessionals to make the errant cooks confess their sins against their vocations (Q: “What was the worst thing you’ve ever done in the kitchen?” A: “I dropped a piece of meat on the floor and just put it back on the plate.”) After he forced the owner to clean the filthy kitchen and buy some decent equipment, he brought in local clergymen to pray and to bless the kitchen.

To be sure, new church buildings are often designed to look like shopping malls, corporate offices, or convention centers. I see no problem with using them for the purposes that their appearance suggests anyway. (But is there a problem even there?) The old buildings getting abandoned tend to have the sacred built into them: they typically follow a cruciform floor plan (expressing that worshippers gather in the Cross), are adorned with built-in Christian symbols that cannot be removed (shapes evoking the Trinity, Crosses everywhere, lines sweeping upward to evoke a sense of transcendence), the tripartite structure of the Hebrew Temple (a gathering place for all; a holy place for worship; the holy-of-holies area that is the altar). So turning all of that–or ignoring all of that–to turn the building into a night club just seems, literally, a profanation.

Wouldn’t it better to just tear these buildings down than to turn what was once “sacred space” towards “profane” uses? Or is this a wrong distinction? Do these new uses for a church building instead bring the sacred into the secular, turn everything sacred, and demonstrate God’s reign over all of life?

According to the polity of the United Methodist Church, there is no separate denomination for each country, nor a hierarchical transnational organization. Rather, Methodist congregations from around the world are on an equal footing. Their representatives get together every four years for a General Conference to decide on policies for all Methodists. In the General Conference currently going on in Fort Worth, a coalition of AFRICAN Methodists with American conservatives is thwarting efforts from the normally-liberal Methodists to take their church even further to the left.

See Methodists Struggle To Reflect Diversity. Once again, the Africans are the ones upholding Christian orthodoxy against the churches that once sent them missionaries.

Also, what do you think of the Methodist polity? Could that be a model for an international synod of, say, Lutheran churches?

HT: Graham Walker

Gary MacDougal, who works with poor people to help them climb out of poverty, writes about just how harmful Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s message is, and not just because he hurts Barack Obama or even because he preaches racism. He and preachers like him proclaim the pervasive message that the poor people in their congregations have no hope, that they are doomed to be perpetual victims, and that their problems are always white people’s fault. This worldview, he says from experience, paralyzes people who need, instead, encouragement and prevents them from improving their lives.

Imagine getting up each morning to go to work in a society that doesn’t want you, doesn’t respect you and seeks to hold you back. Your spiritual leader has told you this, after all. With powerful rhetoric, Wright has asserted, for instance, that white America sees black women as useful only for their bodies. If this is the message you got from your mentor, would you expect that you could succeed? Would you try very hard, if at all?

Through my work with the Illinois governor’s task force on human services reform and its efforts to reduce welfare dependency, I have encountered misguided community “leaders” like Wright who tell their followers, for example, that the job market is stacked against them and that the jobs that are available aren’t good enough — that they are entitled to more. The underlying message: You can’t win because of who you are, regardless of what you do.

You have probably heard of that other example of monstrous evil, Aliza Shvarts, the Yale student who created a work of “art” that consisted of repeatedly conceiving via artificial insemination and repeatedly giving herself an abortion. Though some have said it was a hoax, Shvarts insists that she really did this to yourself and to her unborn children.

Washington Post editorial page journalist Charles Lane goes into what she meant with her work of “art” and what this, in turn, tells us about what she had been learning at Yale. From The Art of Folly at Yale:

Among her “conceptual goals,” she wrote in the Yale Daily News, was “to assert that often, normative understandings of biological function are a mythology imposed on form. It is this mythology that creates the sexist, racist, ableist, nationalist and homophobic perspective, distinguishing what body parts are ‘meant’ to do from their physical capability.” Shvarts wanted to show that “it is a myth that ovaries and a uterus are ‘meant’ to birth a child.”

Lane segues into a review of a book by a Yale professor who protests what his colleagues have done to the humanities:

Last year, Anthony T. Kronman, the former dean of Yale’s law school, published “Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.” This superb book traces the historical rise and fall of the humanities, which, Kronman writes, “are not merely in a crisis. They are in danger of becoming a laughingstock, both within the academy and outside it.”

In the past, Kronman argues, colleges and universities understood that undergraduates were hungry for answers to the Big Question: What is the meaning of life? And schools believed that not only religion but also higher education could help students find them. Humanities departments focused on great works of Western civilization, from Homer to Shakespeare. In short, Kronman writes, they gave their students a four-year seat in the unending “great conversation” of their civilization.

But between political correctness and the “publish or perish” ethic of the modern research university, the humanities have lost the desire and the capability to guide students’ spiritual quests. Instead, humanities professors stake their authority on an unrelenting critique not just of contemporary society but of meaning itself.

Once, humanities teachers cultivated perspective in their young charges; now, many of them instill grievance. The biological function of female reproductive organs can be portrayed as some kind of injustice. Or so Aliza Shvarts learned.

As I keep saying, where I am, at Patrick Henry College, we still cultivate the Humanities as this book says we should, as opposed to the inhumanities that dominate higher education elsewhere.

Who has seen Ben Stein’s satirical take on the Darwinist establishment, “Expelled”? I haven’t, and I’m not sure when I’ll get to. I see that even conservative blogs are just aghast at Ben Stein daring to defend Intelligent Design and to ridicule evolutionists. How well does he pull this off?

The colorfully eccentric conservative Boris Johnson beat out the incumbent Marxist “Red Ken” Livingstone as mayor of London, part of an overwhelming Tory victory over Labour (sic) in England’s off-year elections. According to this article, How Boris Johnson finally grew up to grasp his shot at redemption - Times Online , Mayor-elect Johnson’s lifelong ambition was to be elected President of the United States. He was born in New York, so he could actually qualify under the constitution as being “natural born.”

Unlike, maybe, John McCain!

The argument was inevitable: If Barack Obama is being held responsible for the views of his preacher, shouldn’t Republicans be held responsible for the views of all of those right wing white preachers who support them and who can sound (especially to secularists) just as whacky? See E. J. Dionne Jr. - Fair Play for False Prophets - washingtonpost.com. Is there a moral equivalence here? How would you answer this argument, or can it be answered?

Fed to Pursue Aggressive Checks on Credit Cards - washingtonpost.com:

The Federal Reserve and two other banking regulators are set to unveil today one of the most aggressive efforts in decades to crack down on the credit card industry, prohibiting practices such as arbitrarily raising interest rates on outstanding balances.

The proposed regulations, which could be finalized by year’s end, would label as “unfair or deceptive” practices that consumers have long complained about. That includes charging interest on debt that has been repaid and assessing late fees when consumers are not given a reasonable amount of time to make a payment. When different interest rates apply to different balances on one card, companies would be prohibited from applying a payment first to the balance with the lowest rate.

Before, all the Fed made the credit card companies do was to inform the consumer of such practices. Now, the Fed will forbid them.

Even if you bemoan government interference into businesses and the economy, isn’t this a good idea? Isn’t there a moral issue here that the state does have a Romans 13 right to restrict, namely that all-but-forgotten sin of usury?

Saturday is the Kentucky Derby. Here’s some background to the drama: Behind a Derby favorite, tragedy and redemption - USATODAY.com.

Horse racing is a sport that I know little about and so have never gotten into, though I’ve seen a few races and enjoyed them. I don’t think you HAVE to gamble.

Can any of you speak to this particular sport and sell it to the rest of us? Or is it nothing but gambling?