Month: July 2005

• An interview with Kenyan economist James Shikwati who says “If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid.” (via Siris)
• Differing reflections on the London terrorist attacks from Timothy Burke and Caleb McDaniel (via Cliopatria). UPDATE: More thoughtful stuff from Prof. Burke here.
• Jonathan at The Ivy Bush has Stanley Hauerwas’ take.
• Methodist readers (and others) may be interested to learn that Bishop (and former Duke preacher and sometime Hauerwas collaborator) Will Willimon has a blog!
• Is Hume the greatest philosopher ever? Julian Baggini makes the case (via Arts & Letters Daily).

Long-time readers (both of you) may know of my checkered voting history – I voted for Bush in 2000, but, mostly because of disgruntlement with the Iraq war I voted for David Cobb of the Green Party in 2004. Which has led me to wonder, is there any Republican I could vote for now?
Well, 2008 is a long way away, but I like what I’m hearing from Chuck Hagel:

You’re one of a growing number of Republicans who have lately accused President Bush of botching the war in Iraq.

If someone says I am a disloyal Republican because I am not supporting my party, let them say it. War is bigger than politics.

[…]

How would you compare the situation in Iraq with the one in Vietnam?

Congress was absent during the Vietnam War, and they didn’t ask the tough questions, and consequently we lost 58,000 Americans and lost a war and humiliated this nation. It took a generation to get over it. As long as I am here as a U.S. senator, I am going to do whatever I can to make sure that isn’t going to happen.

[…]

On the other hand, with our deficit now exceeding $400 billion, aren’t we sort of out of money?

In terms of the deficit, we have blown the top right off. We’re a bunch of Democrats.

I’ve never heard anyone call President Bush a Democrat.

That’s my point. We’re less honest about it. We built the biggest government history has ever seen under a Republican government. The Democrats are better because they are honest about it. They don’t pretend. I admire that. They’ll say: ”We want more money. We need more money.”

Where do you think the Republican Party needs to go?

I’d take it back to the party of Eisenhower, Goldwater and Reagan. It was a pretty simple party in those days. It was all about limited government, fiscal responsibility, strong national defense and pro-trade foreign policy.

Will that be your message in your 2008 presidential campaign?

Well, first of all, I haven’t said I am running.

You are rumored to be a candidate.

As John McCain has said to me, Anyone who is not in detox is rumored to be a candidate.

[…]

Actually, I think it’s warped to talk about 2008 so much. Pundits care too much about betting on the next winner, and then they lose interest once the contest is over.

That’s because there’s a dynamic to politics that has lately been overtaken by show business. Politics is show business. It’s just show business for the ugly. It’s Hollywood without all the beautiful people.

More from Hagel here.

James Skillen of the Center for Public Justice reviews three recent books on Christian political responsibility (via Byzantine Calvinist). He helpfully distinguishes someone like Jim Wallis as a “civil-religionist of the left” from the more counter-cultural stance of someone like Stanley Hauerwas.

Skillen criticizes Wallis for essentially cherry-picking quotes from the OT prophets as though they were direct policy prescriptions for today. Rather, Skillen argues, Christians need to pay attention to the whole Bible and the normative guidelines that arise from it in order to apply them to contemporary situations.

Wallis has no hesitation about deriving public policy ideas from eschatological prophesies and does so as easily as the pro-Israel lobby of Evangelicals draws its policy ideas from other prophetic passages. Does either side do justice, however, to the prophets or to the formation of sound public policy?

Skillen concludes that there’s still a lot of work for Christians to do:

We exhibit little public unity even in our understanding of how the prophetic messages relate to God’s covenant with Israel and to the Messiah of Israel, Jesus Christ. Beyond that, we exhibit little consensus around even the most basic of political philosophies. We should not be surprised, consequently, to find that we have difficulty achieving a consensus on particular public policy issues and on the responsibility government bears for any number of needs and problems people face. There is much in these books that provides food for thought and motivation for taking civic life more seriously. What is needed beyond that, however, are real organizational efforts that can bring Christians together in political service.

Skillen here puts his finger on something that’s been bugging me for a while. The whole debate over “values” that we’ve seen in the wake of last year’s election has all too often remained on the level of superficial platitudes. Take, for instance, the argument about poverty. Wallis’ oft-repeated point that there are more verses about poverty in the Bible than virtually any other “social problem” may be true, but it doesn’t really get us very far since it’s something practically no one denies! Thoughtful conservatives don’t think that society has no responsibilities to the poor – they think that the policies they favor are better for the poor than those offered by liberals.

That, it seems to me, is where there is need for fruitful debate. The question is not whether God wants the poor to be helped (everyone concedes that!); the question is what is the best way to do so. The values debate often seems to center around intentions and sincerity (who really cares) rather than results. Impugning your opponents’ compassion may be more personally satisfying, but it’s pretty hard to see how it will actually help those most in need. Granted, there may be people who really don’t care, but since there’s really no way of knowing that, isn’t it better to focus on the public effects of the policies they advocate?

To endlessly debate who really has “values” is as unhelpful as it is tiresome. Values need to be placed in the context of a political philosophy and an understanding of the complex causes of things like poverty, not simply used as clubs to beat one’s opponents with.

But he could do more, says Nicholas Kristof (who, I would think, has pretty good human rights cred with his reporting on sex trafficking and the genocide in the Sudan).

Kyrie Eleison

John Nichols has an excerpt from John Quincy Adam’s semi-famous Independence Day speech given in 1821 when he was Secretary of State (via Dappled Things):

And now, friends and countrymen, if the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world, the first observers of nutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind?

Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity.

She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights.

She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own.

She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.

She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right.

Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.

But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.

She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.

She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force….
She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit….

[America’s] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice.

Say what you will about the validity of this vision; it’s still notable that virtually no prominent politician in either party holds it up as a model to be emulated.

How thoughtless of me to forget my own blog birthday! Hard to beleive I’ve been at this for a year.

As legions of do-gooders (or people looking for a free concert) descended on Philadelphia this weekend, the wife and I took the opportunity to beat it out of there for some R & R.

We ended up in Jim Thorpe, PA, a town of about 5,000 souls in the foothills of the Poconos. The town, formerly Mauch Chunk, was renamed after Olympic athelete Jim Thorpe in a kind of publicity stunt/business deal with Thorpe’s widow who was looking to create a monument to her husband. The IOC had stripped Thorpe of his Olympic medals after it was disclosed that he had played semi-professional baseball. Thorpe’s medals were reinstated some thirty years after his death.

The town was at one time home to some of the richest people in America, including shipping magnate Asa Packer. On Sunday we worshipped at the Episcopal church of St. Mark and St. John, and it was evident that the church was at one time very well-endowed. The altarpiece was a hand-carved replica of one from Notre Dame Cathedral and the sanctuary featured a couple of Tiffany stained-glass windows. The early Eucharist we attended was in the small chapel, though the church warden gave us a tour afterwards.

It was also evident that the congregation has shrunk considerably, and, in fact it’s the result of two congregations (St. Mark’s and St. John’s) that had merged. Makes you wonder how long they’ll be able to keep up the marvelous old church building.

Anyway, the weather was perfect, and the town, nestled among some pretty spectacular hills, is close to Lehigh Gorge State Park, so we did some hiking on Sunday and spent most of the rest of the time enjoying the quaint little town. I also picked up a nifty book called The Study of Anglicanism from the local used bookstore. It’s a collection of essays from Anglican scholars on the various aspects of the tradition (history, theology, worship, etc.).

I don’t know that I have any particularly profound thoughts on the occasion of Independence Day. Here’s an interesting perspective from a couple of years ago from Frederica Mathewes-Green.

Mathewes-Green writes:

Give me liberty or give me death. Or give me something else. Staying alive, but under the rule of another nation? Yeah, that sounds all right, too.

Scandalous thoughts, especially this time of year. I’m a conservative Christian, born an American, born into the idea of faith intertwined with freedom. But I’ve been thinking over something I read recently. During the Jewish rebellion against Rome in the first century, religious leaders were the last to join the cause. They worked for peace and opposed revolution because, as one historian put it, “Roman rule presented no serious threat to Jewish religion.” In other words, overthrowing an oppressive government wasn’t a requisite of the faith.

This was a startling idea to me. But as I looked in my Bible concordance, I saw that the terms “freedom” and “liberty” are much rarer than I had thought and usually refer to freedom from sin or the Law. Political freedom is not presumed to be an unmixed good. Self-governance could lead to carelessness with the faith, while life under oppression could bear spiritual fruit. Perhaps the Jewish priests’ resistance to war against Rome was mere pragmatism; as it turned out, the rebellion was suicidal and Jerusalem was destroyed.

But Jesus, speaking at the same time, took it further. He taught his followers radical detachment from earthly power: “My kingdom is not of this world.” He taught them not just to endure but to love their enemies. America under the control of England, Israel under the control of Rome–how do they stack up? On one side, we see Patriots mowing down rows of Redcoat soldiers; on the other, we hear Jesus saying we should obey a Roman soldier and even offer to carry his pack a second mile (Matthew 5:41). On one side, Patriots are tossing tea into the harbor in defiance of British taxes; on the other, Jesus miraculously produces a coin to pay his Roman taxes (Matthew 17:27).

Yes, the Revolutionary War and the teachings of Jesus: They go together like a cake and a bowling ball.

It’s a good question: should Christians support wars of secession and/or national liberation? Pacifists will obviously say no. Okay, so what about non-violent movements of national liberation? Is that a legitimate goal for Christians? Christian pacifists often admire Gandhi, but wasn’t he a “constantinian” in his own way?

The question, it seems to me, boils down to this: is national independence a good thing? Surely for Christians it can’t be the greatest good, but if it is at least a penultimate good, then isn’t one justified in pursuing it (by just means of course)?

I’m not saying that there isn’t much to admire in the story of our nation’s birth. The liberation of our nation required great courage, and the establishment of our unprecedented government required genius. I’m very grateful that I was born in this land in freedom. No, I don’t want to go back to England, where everything, even toast, is cooked by boiling, and babies are afflicted with those wispy names, like Nigel, that were too feeble to cross the Atlantic.

However, it looks like the biblical teaching is that liberty is not necessary to the spiritual life–not even all that important in the larger scheme of things. The establishment of the American democracy isn’t an illustration of biblical principles. It’s rather an illustration of “the course of human events”–the kind of thing that happens in human history. At regular intervals, people have wars, and somebody wins and somebody loses. The one who wins gets a bonus prize: He gets to interpret what just happened. From his point of view, of course, what happened was just plain wonderful. Justice was served. Everyone on our side was heroic, and everyone on the other side was dastardly.

We are taught these views early and absorb them without question. It seems right for Yankees to rebel against England but wrong for Confederates to rebel against Yankees. It seems right to fight to set slaves free, but wrong for Native Americans to resist our taking their land. From the perspective of the winner, however things turned out is exactly the way they should have. A naive reader of history would find it a delightful story, because there is a happy ending every time.

Mathewes-Green is surely right to critique a naive “progressive” reading of history and that the spiritual life can still be cultivated under oppressive conditions. But surely that doesn’t mean we should court oppression! For every Solzhenitsyn how many Russians had their faith ground to dust under the wheels of Soviet oppression?

The fact that no political regime can bring in the justice of God’s kingdom shouldn’t prevent us from making comparative judgments about their relative merits. Augustine could favorably compare the earlier Roman Republic with the Rome of his day without confusing either with the City of God.

Interesting piece from the Washington Post trying to get the views of ordinary Africans on what they think would be helpful:

Peter Kanans, a coffee farmer whose house has no running water and a leaking roof, said he had a message for the leaders of the world’s richest countries who will meet at the G-8 summit next week: Unfair trade practices are enriching African officials and international coffee chains while village farmers grow steadily poorer.

“Like many hardworking Africans, I have a serious bone to pick with the G-8,” said Kanans, a slender man of 60 who has a college education but wears shredded flip-flops. This year, Kanans said, his crop netted about $300 — less than his brother in Delaware spends in two months on takeout cappuccinos.

Kenyan coffee farmers Peter Kanans and his wife, Olivia Waithera, said canceling debt and giving aid would not benefit ordinary Africans. Many said the G-8 should work to end corruption and improve basic services. (By Emily Wax — The Washington Post)

“Even if they cancel the debt, even if they give our governments aid money, ordinary Africans will not benefit,” he said. “That money will only make the corrupt people richer and Africans international beggars for decades to come.”

[…]

On the world’s poorest continent … feelings about debt relief and aid money are far more nuanced than many Westerners may realize. Africans interviewed this week, from farmers to artists to health workers, say they are grateful for the outpouring of sentiment, and glad to hear that glamorous musicians and actors are championing their cause and that college students are wearing bracelets with the slogan, “Make Poverty History.”

But they also said there was a dangerous disconnect between what the industrialized nations see as solutions and what Africans believe they need. Instead of debt relief and more aid, many Africans said they wanted the G-8 to focus on ending corruption and on improving roads, courts, banking and secondary education.

Another useful step, many Africans said, would be to end Western countries’ trade subsidies for their own farmers, which make it impossible for African industries to do much more than survive. Debt relief, some asserted, is actually hush money to get free trade advocates off the backs of European countries, the United States and Japan, which offer huge subsidies to their corn, cattle and cotton farmers and thus undercut African farmers’ ability to enter the market.

[…]

Ousmane Sembene, the prominent Senegalese-born filmmaker, shocked a crowd of earnest young people in London during a talk in early June when he condemned the G-8 and the Live 8 concerts as “fake,” and added: “African heads of state who buy into that idea of aid are all liars. The only way for us to come out of poverty is to work hard.”

Sembene used the example of cotton, which African countries grow but none of the G-8 countries buy. Instead, he said, they subsidize their own cotton farmers and then dump used clothing on the African markets, crippling Africa’s domestic clothing industries.

More here. Well worth a read.

Here’s a sharp column by newish NY Times-ter John Tierney. Some key bits:

The natural impulse to dislike outsiders is so strong that it barely matters who the outsiders are.

When experimental psychologists divide subjects into purely arbitrary groups – by the color of their eyes, their taste in art, the flip of a coin – the members of a group quickly become so hostile to the other group that they’ll try to deny rewards to the outsiders even at a cost to themselves.

And when the members of a group really have something in common, like family ties, they’re willing to fight outsiders even if it means their own deaths. Xenophobia produced genetic rewards for hunter-gatherer clans. When the evolutionary psychologist J. B. S. Haldane was asked whether he would lay down his life for his brother, he replied, “No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins.”

Iraqis have their own version of that line: “My brother and I against my cousin; my cousin and I against the world.”

Because marriage between cousins is so common in the Middle East – half of Iraqis are married to their first or second cousins – Arabs live in tightly knit clans long resistant to outsiders, including would-be liberators. T. E. Lawrence learned that lesson when trying to unify Arabs early in the last century.

“The Semites’ idea of nationality,” he wrote, “was the independence of clans and villages, and their ideal of national union was episodic combined resistance to an intruder. Constructive policies, an organized state, an extended empire, were not so much beyond their sight as hateful in it. They were fighting to get rid of Empire, not to win it.”

Today’s liberators in Iraq like to attribute the resistance to Islamic fascists’ fear of democracy and hatred of the West. But those fascists know that an abstract critique of Western ideology isn’t enough to attract followers. In their appeals they constantly invoke the need to expel foreigners from their soil, a battle cry that is the great common denominator of suicide bombers around the world.

Maybe, as President Bush hopes, Americans can stay long enough in the Middle East to jump-start democracy and reduce the long-term risk of terrorism. But in the meantime, they’re bound to face resistance, no matter how noble their intentions.

During the Civil War, Union soldiers were amazed to see poor Southerners without any stake in the slavery system defending it in suicidal charges. But there was a simple explanation, as a barefoot, emaciated Confederate captive famously put it when a Union soldier asked him why he kept fighting: “Because you’re here.”