Month: July 2005

Doug Bandow reports on the messy aftermath of a war we launched against a country that didn’t threaten us, without UN approval, and at the behest of a president who acted unilaterally with few objections from a supine Congress that surrendered its constitutionally allotted war-making powers:

The Kosovo war is over, but the peaceful resolution has barely begun. In the West’s search for a solution, no one should unduly worry about respecting international juridical principles or seeking regional consensus. NATO abandoned any pretense of principle when it launched its unprovoked war against Serbia.

The allies should indicate that precedent is irrelevant. Every case, whether Kosovo or Bosnia or Croatia or Macedonia, is unique. International solutions will depend on particular circumstances and won’t be determined by any other settlement.

There are lessons to be learned. The U.S., with or without NATO, should say never again. Never again will Washington substitute ideological fantasies for practical realities when implementing its foreign policy. Never again will Washington intervene in a distant civil war of no geopolitical concern to America. Never again will America attack another nation that poses no threat to the U.S. The world is filled with tragedy, and the Balkans — let alone Iraq — demonstrates how difficult it is for outsiders to resolve ancient and intractable conflicts.

Much has been made of the fact that Supreme Court nominee John Roberts’ wife Jane has been affiliated with Feminists for Life. For some its a welcome (or unwelcome) confirmation of where Roberts himself may stand on the issue of abortion (side note: how good are a spouse’s political views or affiliations as a predictor of someone’s political views anyway? I know my wife and I have a considerable area of disagreement on politics!). For others it indicates that the Roberts may represent a kinder, gentler face of the pro-life movement.

Christianity Today has an article on how FFL fits in with the broader pro-life movement. Also see this discussion from Hugo.

Interesting LA Times article (via the wonderful Arts & Letters Daily) on the “death of cool.” Basically, people are sick of keeping up with the rat-race and one-upmanship involved in purusing every micro-trend that comes along in our increasingly splintered culture and are starting to pursue interests that they actually like and find personally fulfilling (gasp!).

No doubt this is much less of an issue in a place like Philly than in cultural meccas like LA and New York. The closest I ever came to living in a truly cool place was the San Francisco Bay area, but there are so many idiosyncratic weirdoes there that I think it was difficut for any one notion of “cool” to gain social hegemony (or, alternatively, I wasn’t hanging out with the right people).

Here are some interesting excerpts:

If hipness is losing its appeal, it may have to do with how difficult it is to stay ahead of the curve.

In a recent issue of his JC Report, a global fashion and lifestyle trend report, Jason Campbell prophesized “the downfall of the hipster.” Staying cool, says the fashion trend forecaster, “has become a bit of a joke at this point. It’s a rat race that’s really difficult to keep up with, and a lot of people are bowing out.”

A fashion-designer friend of Campbell’s recently confessed that he was so overwhelmed by the endless barrage of new designer denim brands that he vowed to wear only classic Levi’s 501s as a form of protest. “People aren’t feeling they need to run out and pick up the latest thing that whatever celebrity of the moment has,” Campbell says. “They’re returning to things that resonate with them and are part of their personal style.”

[…]

Unlike the beatnik ’50s, when discovering some gem of cultural arcana involved real detective work, today getting hip to the latest blog or indie rock band is as easy as logging on to the Internet. “We’re in a post-hip era, which means everybody’s hip,” says Leland. “I can’t tell you how many churches I’ve been in where the pastor has a goatee, tattoos and earrings.” [Zing! – ed.]

So if everybody’s hip, then let’s be unhip, and indeed, what a very hip idea. Some people are just fed up with the whole enterprise.

[…]

Twenty-six-year-old “office slave” and aspiring novelist Brian Bernbaum founded the blog hipstersareannoying.com, under the pseudonym Aimee Plumley, while living in Williamsburg. Based on the outcry against his mockery, “you would’ve thought there was a revolution going on,” he says.

Bernbaum was inspired by what he viewed as a pose adopted by hipsters to deliberately obfuscate human interaction. “I felt people wouldn’t level with you, that they were giving you their résumé of cool. You could never really get anything out of people that seemed like normal social interaction.” Conversations at clubs and parties became “a one-upmanship of pop culture encyclopedias.”

[…]

Bernbaum wonders if conservatism from the heartland may be infiltrating hipster-heavy metropolises, “making people seek out something more meaningful” in their lives.

In hipster and media-driven Los Angeles, it’s easy to forget that most Angelenos ages 25 to 40 don’t wear checkered Vans with distressed blazers or go to downtown gallery openings or Echo Park dive bars.

Craigslist.org, once an underground website for hipsters seeking jobs and apartments, now boasts an activities section packed with people seeking irony-free social connections in such humdrum activities as chess, badminton, lacrosse, foreign language study, outrigger canoeing and the Hermosa Beach Lawn Bowling Club.

Best get involved now, before they become hip.

• The New Atlantis has posted a new spate of articles. Of particular interest we have David B. Hart and Robert W. Jenson on John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body.”
• Alan Bock asks if we’re seeing a sea change of opinion on Iraq and the broader aims of U.S. foreign entanglements.
• John at Confessing Evangelical has been doing a great series of posts on Jacques Ellul’s views on Christianity and anarchism (you can read Ellul here and here).

One of the many evils war brings in its train, an evil we had thought long banished from our shores, is the scourge of prohibition. At least among our armed forces. This article by a civilian military employee is from the delightfully irreverent Modern Drunkard Magazine and discusses life on a dry (at least officially) military base in Iraq:

At work here are reasonable precautions – no one wants drunk teenagers manning .50-calibre machine guns – as well as unreasonable ones, such as the wickedly pious dry laws in Muslim host countries. But in practice the prohibition means exquisite torture for the fighting men and women who crave and deserve a stiff drink at day’s end. Making matters worse is the knowledge (repeated with envy as whispered lore among US troops) that in southern Iraq, British soldiers still get a modest ration of ale with their dinners, and the Italians near Nasiriyya can buy cases of beer from their PX. As for the Ukrainians and Poles manning bases south of Baghdad, suffice it to say that their cultures have blessed them with the ability to distill spirits out of the most meager of materials. Place those fine men in the desert with nothing but a palm tree, a folding shovel, and a thimble of sugar, and somehow they will be producing gallons per day of mid-grade vodka before the weekend is through.

What’s left for an American drunkard in Iraq to do? The answer, in short, is to arrange for smuggled liquor, then to pay extortionate prices once it arrives. For a 750ml bottle of Jack Daniel’s couriered in on a convoy, $50 is reasonable. The truckers who bring in the goods are frequently Turkish, and therefore teetotalling Muslims. But they see our desperation, and their pity transcends religion.

Occasionally we can make contact with Iraqi Christians living off the bases. The Christians, who make up a small fraction of Iraq’s population and tend to support the Coalition, swill whiskey as eagerly as any American, and they are proud to sell us hooch. The catch is that fundamentalist Muslim zealots have been firebombing their liquor stores in the cities. (For that reason I would like to imagine that with every defiant sip of Iraqi liquor I am striking a blow for freedom in this benighted country. But even I am not self-congratulatory enough to feel so ennobled by my own drinking.)

William Placher is a Presbyterian theologian in the “postliberal” (Hans Frei, George Lindbeck) tradition, but one who actually writes in a very clear and accessible style. A theologian writing for laymen rather than other academics! Imagine! (I’m looking at you, John Milbank.)

Anyway, I’ve gotten a lot out of Placher’s writing. His book The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong helped convince me that many modern criticisms of Christianity simply miss the target, and that reappropriating the tradition of theologians like Aquinas, Luther, and Calivn was a viable alternative to various modern reductionist theologies (e.g. process theology, Bultmannian existentialism).

Lately I’ve been re-reading parts of his great primer on Christology called Jesus the Savior: The Meaning of Jesus Christ for Christian Faith. He discusses the traditional topics of Christology but also shows how they have concrete implications for ethical and political issues.

Here’s a good example:

Our society, like many others, tends to tell lots of people that they are not very important. We celebrate “the rich and famous,” but few of us are famous, and a shrinking number of people holds a larger and larger percentage of the wealth. The power that emerges when a group of people follows Jesse Jackson in chanting, “I am somebody,” makes it vivid how people can begin to doubt that they are anybody, and how much pain that doubt can cause them.

I remember some years ago visiting Washington, D.C., noticing how many people defined themselves by their connections. “I went to prep school with the vice president’s son.” “That cabinet secretary used to be my boss, and she still remembers me.” Hearing such comments in Washington, I noticed them particularly, but don’t we all say similar things? “I studied in graduate school with the famous professor.” “My office is right next to the boss’s.” “I used to play basketball with the famous star.” And yet these claims are trivial compared with the one available to us all: “I share the same humanity assumed by the Word of God.” If we really understand that, then all our doubts about our own worth, all our compulsive needs to prove the significance of our particular connections, ought to dissolve, and at the same time so should our sense of who the “important people” are. Compared with this qualification that everybody has, all our usual criteria of importance seem singularly unimportant.

In our society, it seems hard to grasp the importance of every human life. Pope John Paul II has denounced the “culture of death” which pervades the contemporary world. He condemns abortion, the death penalty, and war as among its manifestations. Yet a recent survey of the United States Congress (which includes many Catholics) could find only one member who opposed both abortion and capital punishment. Political values rather than religious ones usually shape our views: liberals favor abortion on demand, conservatives applaud executions, and very few consistently begin their thinking with the inestimable value of each human life. (pp. 50-51)

I think Placher’s writing is an excellent counterexample to the idea that theology is all about irrelevant obscure doctrines and takes away from living a life of discipleship.

When I was in college I reviewed John Shelby Spong’s Why Christianity Must Change or Die for our undergraduate philosophy journal. Though I didn’t consider myself a Christian (or even a theist) at the time, I was flabbergasted by Spong’s sloppy arguments which were full of straw-men, distortions, and ad hominem attacks. I knew that the targets of Spong’s diatribes bore little resemblence to the classic Christian tradition as found in the writings of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, or Wesley.

From Jonathan at the Ivy Bush I came across this exchange from a few years ago between Spong and Rowan Williams. Spong presents his “12 theses” for a “new reformation” (again with the grandiose aping of Luther!):

1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.

2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.

3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.

4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ’s divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.

5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.

6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.

7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.

8. The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.

9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.

10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.

11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.

12. All human beings bear God’s image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one’s being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.

Williams ably dismantles this incoherent mess, which interested parties can read for themselves. What strikes me here is the very same thing that struck me in reading his book – the arguing against positions no one holds, the positing of false dilemmas, the assertion without evidence or argument of propositions that are debatable at best if not outright false.

In other words, Spong continues to come across as every bit as dogmatic as the “fundamentalists” he scorns.

Here’s an interview with the author of Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries and Other Christians in Disguise (via A Conservative Blog for Peace).

Who are the avant-garde Orthodox?
These were orthodox Christian thinkers and artists who were not theologians and made important and somewhat revolutionary contributions to various secular disciplines. They’re interesting people because they’re both subversive of the existing modern order, but they are not subversive of the church or subversive of the faith.

They have a unique status as people who model for us how it is possible for believing Christians to enter into dialogue with the secular culture in a way that revolutionizes and transforms the secular culture and doesn’t just protest against it or isolate from it.

[…]

It’s ironic that while [Thomas] Merton had left the world for the monastery, through his letters, he was active politically. Many of these Christians have a different take on political action.

If you want to argue politics in the modern world you immediately find yourself hamstrung by definitions imposed on you by politicians who have laid out the rhetorical terrain. So the best way to deal with it is to refuse to play the game by the rules. These Christians offer an alternative vision that addresses political problems from a humble and inclusive Christian perspective that doesn’t argue about things so much as reveal things.

Let me give you an example of this. At the end of my book, I say these people don’t want to change the world. Changing the world is not their number one priority. Their number one priority is to love and serve the world in the light of Christian revelation. Now if that means that you have to stand up to an injustice, if that means you have to change the way the mass media is run, or change curriculums or something, that will mean that you will engage in dialogue with people, and you will witness, and you will listen. You don’t come in with this top down agenda and take everybody’s life apart so that you can put it back together again.

[Kentucky writer and farmer] Wendell Berry’s method is to ask how this reform is going to affect my community and enter into dialogue with the people for whom these political reforms are going to change. The guy I think who was really on to this is Dostoyevsky. I guess you could call him a sentimental naturalist in his first book, Poor Folk. And then he was sent to the camps and he had his eye opened to the true nature of human beings. He came back and said until we deal with the irrational in man and healing one’s suspicions of another, you could have the greatest political ideology and people would subvert it out of sheer spite. Somehow, trust has to be regained between people before you can talk about politics. And that’s why ideological posturing, even if you’re right, is counterproductive.

Sounds like an interesting book. Other figures discussed include Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jacques Ellul, Jack Kerouac, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and E.F. Schumacher.

Via Thunderstruck, an article about hip young Christians:

They pile onto couches in a Longview living room to watch a DVD about sex, bearing the signs of hip young adulthood — flip flops, muscle Ts, alt-country cowboy hats, tattoos, piercings, moussed ‘dos.Leafing through their Bibles, they listen to a DVD-recorded pastor discuss the Song of Solomon’s lessons on sex, love and marriage.These young Christians say you shouldn’t judge them by their looks.

To today’s generation, stereotypes about earnest tucked-in Christians simply don’t apply. You don’t have to give up rocking, surfing and styling to worship God.

“The younger generation sees that it’s OK to be young and crazy and be cool at church,” said Longview’s Nick Boaglio, 27, who has scripture inked into his left arm.

In other words, Christians can be insufferable hipsters too! (Okay, cheap shot)

The next paragraph is (unintentionally, I assume) hilarious:

Though the federal government does not track religious data, there are some indications that young, hip Christians’ numbers are multiplying.

You mean the feds don’t track the number of latte-drinking, emo-listening, kitschy t-shirt wearing twenty- and thirty-somethings who’ve accepted Jesus as their personal savior? Someone get the census bureau on the case!

Some of that growth may be due to a nationwide effort by churches to keep young people engaged, said Rev. Mark Schmutz, 43, of Northlake Baptist Church in Longview. When Schmutz was in his 20s, he said, his deep love of the local church seemed anything but cool to his peers.

“I was one of those ‘weird’ church members,” Schmutz said with a laugh.

“A lot of young people would wander from the church,” he said. “But things are changing, there is now a place for people in their 20s.”

Churches make room with “come as you are” dress codes that leave behind the formality many older churchgoers remember from their youth. Some also add 21st Century music, doing away completely with traditional hymns that the pop star generation may not connect with.

At Evangel Christian Fellowship in Longview, thumping base and jangling electric guitars pump rock music into a cafe-style front room before Sunday services begin. Twenty-somethings and 30-somethings line up to buy espresso. Many men are in baseball caps, many women wear this summer’s trendy skirts, and at least a third of the congregation are in blue jeans.

There’s no need for Sunday best here.

“If you wear a hat in church, does that mean you’re not saved?” laughs Nick Boaglio’s wife, Jill, who remembers a ban on hats at her childhood church.

Now that’s just stupid. A grown man wearing a baseball cap in church needs slapped. And that line about “If you wear a hat in church, does that mean you’re not saved?” How about “All things are lawful, but not all things are helpful”? It’s one thing to recognize that tastes in fashion or music change; it’s quite another to banish reverence from church altogether.

When I read these kinds of stories it only makes me think that I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near such a place when I was 20 years old. Once I finally got around to reacquainting myself with Christianity after a long period of indifference mixed with hostility, I think I wanted to find something that didn’t just replicate or mimic the surrounding culture. If hanging out at church is no different from hanging out at Starbucks, what’s the point? The coffee and music at Starbucks are probably better.

Also, one wonders where all the older folks are at these rock ‘n’ roll churches. Or is the church going to start promoting the generational segregation that’s taken over the rest of our society?

Maybe this is just sour grapes because I was never one of the cool kids…

I’m curious what translation of the Bible folks use most frequently and/or find the most helpful. I still read the beaten up copy of the Revised Standard Version with the red faux leather cover I got when I “graduated” from Sunday school at Hillside Presbyterian in 1984. It may be time for an upgrade, so I’m curious what version others use or would recommend.