Month: June 2005

Jennifer has a good post on poverty:

I’m not a humanist; I’m a Christian. I believe that poverty is caused by sin and that “our struggle is not against enemies of flesh and blood, but against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, agaisnt the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). I don’t have faith that if we try really, really hard, we can eliminate poverty and live in some utopia. I think we have to wait until the kingdom of God comes.

BUT, just because the poor will always be with us does NOT mean sit on our asses. When Jesus said that, don’t you think he was referring to this verse: “Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, “Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.” Deut. 15:11.

Of related interest, this article at Slate warns of “utopian overreach” on the part of Bono, Tony Blair, et al.

That’s the rub, though, isn’t it? How do you avoid utopian overreach without falling into complacency? The author of the Slate article says that the most effective programs tend “not to be government-to-government grant-making, but a new style of targeted, goal-driven, private philanthropy.”

And then of course there is the thorny issue of trade (free or “fair”, etc.). For instance, this article from today’s Inquirer suggests that cheap imports from the US have crippled Ghana’s poultry industry, costing jobs. The counterargument, of course, is that folks in Ghana are paying much lower prices for food than they would otherwise. All of this is complicated by the fact that U.S. agriculture is heavily subsidized by our government:

“Why are we suffering?” said Paul Akpabi, a rice farmer in Dawhenya who struggles to compete with 30-cent-per-pound rice imported from Asia and America. “Maybe the international lenders want us to be totally dependent upon them.” Ghanaians can pay more than $3 per pound for locally grown rice. (The average U.S. price last month for white, long-grain rice was 55.2 cents per pound.)

That certainly sounds bad from the farmer’s point of view, but on the other hand, the difference between 30-cent-a-pound rice and $3/lb. is probably not a small one to the average Ghanaian.

Sure wish I knew what the right answer was.

The President “is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation’s armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy.”

Click here to find out.

(via A Conservative Blog for Peace)

I came across this passage in Fr. Capon’s An Offering of Uncles (my copy is from the collection The Romance of the Word) and thought it was worth pondering:

In the interest of making a hasty accomodation between a stale biblical chronology and a half-baked theory of universal evolution, all kinds of things were said by all kinds of people. On the one hand, biblical obscurantists made a frantic attempt to salvage the chronology by sweeping scientific knowledge under the rug. On the other, modernist theologians retreated so hurriedly before the specter of evolutionary supersession that they abandoned wholesale the theology and horse sense of the Scriptures. The first have, mercifully, met the fate they deserved; but the second are still with us. They have such a fear of sounding like Genesis that they end up sounding like gibberish. They are so afraid of making Adam and Eve particular human beings that they forget that, if history is real, some particular people will have to turn out to have been Adam and Eve. In the day of judgment we may find out that they called each other Oscar and Enid and that they lived on a Norwegian fjord; but those will be only details. They themselves will have existed. And the essential historical fact about them will be not simply that our biological inheritance came from them but that all the threads of the web began with them. It is precisely the rest of history that you lose if you unload Adam and Eve.

[…]

Under the influence of what they conceived to be the demands of evolution, they took to expounding both the creation story and the narrative of the Fall as myths. And by myth they meant something quite specific: a fundamentally nonhistorical truth, presented under the guise of fictitious history. (There is, admittedly, a historical way of using myth–it can also mean an imaginative, but not unlikely, reconstruction of an event that really happened but went unrecorded at the time–but that is not what they had in mind.) The story in Genesis became, in their hands, only a diagram of the spiritual state of Everyman; they lived in mortal terror of ever allowing Adam to be anyone’s grandfather.

And yet, that is the critical point. Adam has got to be somebody’s grandfather–and Eve, somebody’s grandmother–or history is nonsense. The human race is precisely a web: times without number, good science has done nothing but confirm that. If I got my flat-footed walk or my love of caviare from my own grandfather, the case is closed. History is by that fact real; and all real things have beginnings. My grandfather himself had a grandfather. And if you rummage around long enough, somewhere in the web you are going to run into a fellow who had no human grandfather at all and who, therefore, is the real granddaddy of history. That gentleman is Adam. (pp. 85-87)

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. – I Peter 2:9-10

You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise. – Galatians 3:26-29

Both apostles share the same feast day, for these two were one; And even though they suffered on different days, they were as one. Peter went first, and Paul followed. And so we celebrate this day made holy for us by the apostles’ blood. Let us embrace what they believed, their life, their labors, their sufferings, their preaching, and their confession of faith. – St. Augustine

William Saletan draws an interesting parallel.

Looking at it again it seems to me that this post was somewhat unclear, or at least didn’t say quite what I wanted to say.

The point I was trying to make was that just because we can’t point to a place in the Bible where Jesus pronounces explicitly on issue x, it doesn’t follow that he has no opinion on x or that there’s no right answer (or that we have no way of knowing what the right answer is).

The flip side, though, is that the further we get from broad principles into specifics, the harder it is to claim the authority of the Lord for our particular position. Jesus told us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, but he didn’t tell us exactly the best way to go about doing it. When we try and put that command into practice we always rely on our own imperfect knowledge and intentions.

This is somewhat surprising:

Puppies and kittens likely are not the first things that come to mind when many think of Sen. Rick Santorum (news, bio, voting record) — the conservative No. 3 Senate Republican known for his tough stance against abortion and gay marriage.

But Santorum, R-Pa., has won high praise from the Humane Society of the United States for pushing legislation aimed at ending breeding facilities known as puppy mills.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals also finds him a friend. “He’s a man with a heart, and he doesn’t think it’s any more acceptable to treat animals cruelly than humans,” said Mary Beth Sweetland, director of research and investigations for the Norfolk, Va.-based PETA.

Santorum, chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, said those who think of animal rights as a liberal cause should not be surprised to find him in this camp. A father of six who has a 2-year-old German Shepherd named Schatzie, he said having pets makes for a healthier home.

“To me, it’s part of a society that’s caring, sensitive to life,” Santorum said in a recent interview. “Obviously, the life of animals is fundamentally different than the life of a human being. But to me, we have a responsibility to God’s creatures to treat them humanely, and the government’s laws should reflect that.”

Good on ya, Senator.

I seem to have noticed an increase in the frequency of folks on all sides of the political spectrum invoking the “argument from silence” with respect to Jesus’ stance on their pet political issues.

On the left you might hear someone say “Jesus never said anything about homosexuality or abortion.”

On the right someone might mention that “Jesus never said anything about the environment or the government giving money to the poor.”

I find this to be a pretty unhelpful approach insofar as it implies we can only make judgments about things that Jesus specifically pronounced on. Especially when you consider that there are relatively few positions that Jesus took which have automatic and immediate applications to our present situation. Paying the temple tax is hardly a pressing issue for most of us.

And even in those cases where Jesus seems to come down on one side of an issue that does have present relevance, there is little agreement in the church how exactly it should be interpreted and guide our actions. Take divorce – Jesus comes down pretty hard on it. And yet pretty much every church (with the exception of the Roman Catholic) allows for divorce in some circumstances (and, frankly, most Protestant churches seem to have made peace with the idea of divorce for pretty much any reason at all).

Part of this is no doubt motivated by pastoral concerns, part of it sheer capitulation to the zeitgeist, and part of it due to legitimate differences of opinion about what Jesus intended to teach. There are conflicting accounts after all (and I’m leaving aside for the moment the question of whether what’s recorded in the Gospel accounts accurately reflects the “historical” Jesus).

My point is that you’re going to have to struggle pretty hard to get a litany of pronouncements from Jesus on the hot button issues of our day. And maybe the quest to do so (besides being an attempt to score cheap partisan points) is a way of avoiding our own responsibility for making ethical choices in a complex world.

This is not to embrace relativism or deny that there is a distinctively Christian ethic. But I do think it’s helpful to be reminded that outside of certain core principles there is a lot of room for disagreement among sincere and reasonable people about how to interpret and apply those principles. And remembering this might help us avoid both facile arguments from silence and hubristic identification of our political positions with the cause of God himself.

This is a fascinating article about how Tom Cruise’s recent public antics (jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch, scolding Matt Lauer, etc.) may be attributable to his having reached (or being about to reach) the upper echelons of the Scientology hierarchy.

A current Scientologist who has reached the level OT-V, and who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that considering the amount of time Cruise has been in the church, an OT-VII status seems probable. And Stephen Kent, a professor of sociology at the University of Alberta who has published articles on Scientology and Hollywood, also said that Cruise’s behavior strongly suggests OT-VII.

Cruise is acting as though he “feels he’s more in control over his environment and can convince more people to look into the organization,” Kent said. “In the high OT levels one supposedly gains the skills to master one’s universe. One is removing countless entities that have been holding people back. Cruise feels that he has freed himself from thousands of errant thetans, and he seems to be in a kind of euphoria he hasn’t experienced before.”

J. Gordon Melton, the author of “The Church of Scientology” and director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion in Santa Barbara, Calif., confirmed the details of the OT teachings. “It’s basically a variation of the Gnostic myth about souls falling into matter and the encumbrances that come with that,” Melton said. “In the OTs, you’re finding out that you’re a thetan, that you’ve come into bodies before. Part of what you’re trying to learn is exteriorization — how to get out of your body. You also learn that you carry a lot of encumbrances from past lives.”

You’re probably familiar with Rick Steves the friendly low-key host of the PBS European travel show appropriately titled “Rick Steves’ Europe.” We now learn (via Lutheran Chik) that Mr. Steves is a Lutheran and has even developed a series of travel videos for the ELCA called “Faithful Travel”! As the wife pointed out, he seems like a Lutheran.