I had put J. D. Crossan in a kind of mental “bad liberal” box and so had mostly avoided reading him. (By which I mean I thought of him as someone whose project was strictly one of “debunking” traditional Christian claims.) But then I read Crossan and Marcus Borg’s The First Paul and liked it a lot! Oh no! Maybe Crossan’s not so bad after all! In retrospect, I think I have been overly influenced by L. T. Johnson’s The Real Jesus, which casts aspersions on the theological usefulness of “historical Jesus” research generally. I think Johnson makes some good points, but I think historical Jesus research has more relevance to faith than he allows. Which makes me wonder if there are other Crossan books I should read. Has anyone read his big historical Jesus book? Any thoughts?
Month: November 2010
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The invisible poor
Good post here from Matt Yglesias. The “welfare reform” of the 90s has been widely hailed as a success for replacing welfare with work, but as Yglesias points out, this success is premised on a strong labor market, which we manifestly don’t have now. And yet you don’t hear anyone calling for us to re-think welfare reform. (The New York Times had a good article on this several months back.)
This isn’t terribly surprising. In American politics, everyone wants to sound like they’re for the middle class, most people are actually for the rich, and pretty much no one wants to acknowledge that poor people in America even exist.
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This will either be really terrible or kind of awesome (possibly both)
This is news to me:
2010: Moby Dick is an upcoming film adaptation of the 1851 novel Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. The film is an Asylum production, and stars Barry Bostwick as Captain Ahab.
The film takes place in the modern day, and follows Dr. Michelle Herman (Renée O’Connor), who has recently joined a submarine – the USS Pequod – commanded by Captain Ahab (Barry Bostwick), who is on an obsessive hunt throughout the seas for a giant whale.
Herman becomes anxious as Ahab’s insanity worsens throughout the voyage, and crescendos as the submarine finally crosses paths with the giant whale.
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Election fallout – animals & the environment
Obviously the big news from this week’s election is the G.O.P.’s takeover of the House and seats it gained in the Senate, neither of which bodes well for meaningful action on climate change or other environmental issues. (As was pointed out in various places, all the G.O.P. Senate candidates disputed the global warming consensus and opposed action.)
Still, there were a couple of bright spots. Grist reported on a “green wave” that swept California: not only did voters decisively reject a ballot measure that would’ve overturned the state’s tough climate-change law, but they also elected a slate of green Democrats to statewide and national office (including former-and-soon-to-be-again governor Jerry Brown). The Grist article attributes this in part to a successful business-environmentalist coalition that doesn’t see clean energy and climate action as inherently opposed to economic performance.
Also at Grist, Tom Philpott discusses the election’s implications for agriculture policy reform. In short, despite a possible change for the better on the Senate side, the overall picture looks like a preservation of the status quo. It remains to be seen if any of the alleged Republican zeal for reducing spending will translate into cuts in subsidies for industrial agriculture. Congress also seems poised to continue its mollycoddling of big industrial-ag polluters.
On the animal front, there are a couple of pieces of good news: Proposition B, a measure to crack down on puppy mills, passed in Missouri. Meanwhile, in Arizona, Proposition 109–a measure designed to take wildlife protection out of the ballot initiative process and give it exclusively to the state legislature–was defeated.
Also, while not directly election related, it’s worth noting that the 2010 meeting of the international Convention on Biological Diversity, taking place in Nagoya, Japan, recently concluded with an agreement on targets for preserving biodiversity. There are questions, however, about how binding the agreement is and whether there’s enough funding to give it teeth. It’s also worth noting that the U.S. has not ratified the convention.
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Pedantry
I don’t like to be that guy–the one who airs his grammar or usage pet peeves. But this one’s been bugging me for a while. It’s the use of “myself” in place of “me.” As in: “Let Jane, Bob, or myself know if you have any questions.” The practice seems rampant in corporate America and other big organizations, maybe because people think it sounds more “correct” or official? It’s called a reflexive pronoun, people. Use it the way it was intended.
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Meet the new boss
Right-wing Utah congressman Jason Chafetz is poised to become the new chair of the committee for overseeing D.C. affairs. On his agenda: overturning same-sex marriage in the District and curtailing District autonomy more generally.
Really makes the whole “no representation” thing stick in your craw.
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Never trust anyone under 30
Young people can’t be bothered to vote; Republicans win big as a result.
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Companions on the way
I meant to link earlier to Jeremy’s helpful post on Elizabeth Johnson’s book on the saints, Friends of God and Prophets. Johnson argues for a reformed, “companion” model of the communion of saints, as contrasted with the more traditional “patronage” model.
According to Johnson (per Jeremy’s summary; I haven’t read the book), just this kind of change was set in motion by Vatican II, bringing the Catholic understanding more in line with the critique made by the Reformation. Of course, whatever the Reformers’ revised understanding of the communion of the saints, actual practice in most Protestant churches has probably been to neglect the idea altogether. (Although, I do think that for a lot of Protestants, Old Testament figures actually function in a way similar to the saints.) In any event, Jeremy’s post made me want to read the book, which I think I’ll try and get from the library.
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Two-party state
I can’t help but recall that, in the last ten years, we’ve been confidently informed by partisans and pundits of both the “permanent Republcan majority” and the “new Democratic majority” and the supposed relegation of the G.O.P. to a “rump party.” Both claims have been falsified in pretty short periods of time. Can we now accept that what we have in the U.S. is a more-or-less permanent see-sawing between the conservative party and the liberal party and that neither one is ever going to be able to claim decisive once-and-for-all victory? As T. S. Eliot memorably put it, “there is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.”
A Thinking Reed 