This profile of Sen. Chuck Hagel is notable for the fact that none of the positions ascribed to Hagel (a prudent internationalist in foreign policy, opposed to big government and deficits, opposed to No Child Left Behind, the new Medicare drug benefit, and agricultural subsidies, pro-life, etc.) would have, at least until fairly recently, been thought to be anything but standard conservative fare. But the occasion for this article is that Hagel is a “maverick” and a “dissident” who’s broken with President Bush and much of the rest of the GOP on several of those issues.
Whereas Hagel’s views are pretty much indistinguishable from the conservative mainstream of 5-10 years ago (I recall that he was touted by National Review for having sound foreign policy views back when he was being floated as a possible running mate for George W. Bush in the 2000 election), the conservatism of today has become increasingly polarized into neos and paleos who regard each other with distrust, if not outright scorn and hostility, with apparently little room for the kind of unhypehnated conservatism that Hagel represents.
Salonreports on get tough with Iran noises recently made by 2008 presidential contenders Hilary Clinton and Evan Bayh.
Are we really willing to go to war to prevent Iran from acquiring nukes? I mean, compared to Iran, Iraq actually would look like a cakewalk! Also, I’m unpersuaded by the claim that the crazy ayatollahs wouldn’t be susceptible to traditional deterrence and balance-of-power considerations. After all, Stalin and Mao were not exactly the most stable of fellows, and it worked with them.
Thomas Adams at the blog Without Authority has a couple of goodposts on a “modest” natural theology, especially as it interacts with modern science. Natural theology still seems to be largely on the outs in contemporary theology, owing perhaps to the influence Barth still exerts, as well as the recent trend toward seeing theology as a language game or as a discourse whose justification can only be intra-communal or intra-textual.
Interestingly, though, natural theology has made a significant comeback in the last few decades, not only among thinkers working in theology and science like John Polkinghorne (as Thomas discusses), but also among analytic philosophers of religion who have quite successfully challenged the longstanding consensus that between the two of them Hume and Kant had discredited natural theology once and for all.
In his recent book In Defence of Christianity (review here), philosopher and Anglican priest Brian Hebblethwaite contends that arguments for theism arising from phenomena like the existence of rational creatures, the intelligible order of the universe, the existence of moral values, etc., while not providing the foundation of Christian faith, can at least serve as “buttresses” or supports to it. Hebblethwaite concedes that most people’s faith comes from being raised in a religious community or having a powerful conversion experience, but the arguments of natural theology can help show how belief can makes sense of the world as we find it, thus contributing to a “cumulative case” for Christian faith (one that also includes appeals to revelation).
I think some kind of natural theology is probably inevitable, because Christians (and other theists) will always seek to understand how their faith relates to other areas of knowledge. And they will always want to know if there are reasons that can commend the faith to someone who doesn’t already share their commitments (or to the doubting part of their own selves).
Matthew Yglesias has a good response to this Andrew Sullivan post calling for “hard thinking on the left” in the wake of the Danish cartoon brouhaha:
Andrew Sullivan writes, with regard to the cartoon riots:
People keep talking about avoiding conflict. They are in denial. The conflict is already here. It is outrageous to be informed by a crowd of hundreds of thousands that the West must give up its freedoms in order to avoid violence. I’m relieved to see that this moment has forced some very hard thinking on the left. I got an email from a leftist British reader this week, passionately opposed to the foreign policies of Bush and Blair. Now he writes:
The guy says some stuff, but nevermind. I’m not buying. I’m on the left and this is forcing me into no hard thinking whatsoever.
There’s no need for hard thinking precisely because this isn’t a hard question. Of course newspapers should have the legal right to publish cartoons that offend some people. Of course the people offended by the resulting cartoons shouldn’t start throwing around threats of violence to intimidate people. But what does this have to do with “the foreign policies of Bush and Blair” or the need for “very hard thinking” on the left?
I’m not really “on the left” (well, depending on how you define things, but that’s an issue for another post) but this seems exactly right to me. The argument that one either has to side with the “foreign policies of Bush and Blair” or side with those who would crush free speech is only the latest in a long line of false dilemmas that proponents of the “clash of civilizations” view of the war on terrorism have been feeding us for roughly the last five years.
Yglesias concludes:
The problem with the foreign policies of Bush and Blair, by which I take it we mean the Iraq War, is twofold. One, the nature of the threat from the Iraqi regime was neither so large nor so acute as to make invading and occupying Iraq a reasonable method of enhancing American national security. Two, invading, conquering, occupying, and reconstructing medium-sized multi-ethnic polities ruled by long-entrenched dictators is neither an effective method of spreading liberal democracy nor an effective method of achieving humanitarian goals.
So to recap: Killing people or threatening to kill people over cartoons is wrong. Invading Iraq was a bad idea. That’s what I thought before this cartoon mess broke out, and it’s what I still think today. There’s nothing to rethink.
If anything, this issue might force some people into rethinking on some domestic questions. This could involve questions relating to immigration such as whether effective steps are being taken to help immigrants assimilate in a way such that they come to internalize (or at least respect) values like freedom of speech and the press, and how a society balances those values with a commitment to multiculturalism. But the connection between this issue and support for (or opposition to) the Iraq war is hard to see.
We’re ambivalent about doubt, I think. On the one hand, we admire the person whose faith is so robust that they seem to be able to act with complete trust and confidence. Other the other hand, we tend to be a little bit afraid of the person whose faith is so robust that they seem incapable of entertaining the possibility that they might be mistaken. In the old days (maybe – I wasn’t actually there) we think that doubt was frowned upon in the Church, perhaps a sign of unfaith or an unconfessed sin. These days we’re likely as not to see doubt as a good thing, even an inseparable part of faith. We say that doubt is part of “a mature faith.”
So, what role does or should doubt play in the life of faith? Is doubt something that should ideally diminish over time, something we should strive to get rid of? Or is it a constant companion since we “walk by faith and not by sight,” at least in this life?
Our modern (and post-modern) culture teaches us that every claim to knowledge or belief is suspect. The fact that there are other people who believe differently than we do can all by itself cast doubt over our own convictions. The fragility and contingency of our knowledge, the way our minds are shaped by culture, upbringing, even biology, can undermine trust in our own beliefs.
One can find (at least I do) that sometimes the things you think you believe just don’t seem as plausible as they once did. You suddenly see the once-solid edifice of your beliefs as a rickety structure held together by duct tape and chewing gum. C.S. Lewis wrote somewhere that he never felt less certain about God’s existence than after he’d just finished defending it with some kind of argument because it made him feel like everything rested on his own puny reason. I’m certainly no C.S. Lewis, so the jury-rigged nature of my own belief-system is even more apparent. Not that there are no good arguments for the truth of Christianity, but those arguments, like the people who make them, are fallible and open to revision. And most of them are inconclusive to say the least.
After all, how much of what we believe is the result of hunches, educated guesses, intuition, or weighting some experiences or pieces of evidence over others, not to mention because that’s what mom and dad/my friends/my super cool professor/Bono believes? Being the incorrigibly social animals that we are, we seem to be highly susceptible to social influences and pressure in forming beliefs.
The trendy post-modern argument that all belief-systems (or “meta-narratives”) are all equally ungrounded is of little comfort here. It’s tantamount to saying “Oh yeah, so’s your old man!” when someone challenges your epistemic credentials. While it might be nice to think that we’re all in the same (leaky) boat, it’s hardly conducive to confidence in one’s own conclusions. We’re faced with what sociologist Peter Berger called “the heretical imperative” – since we no longer see any tradition as simply given and authoritative, we’re forced to choose, knowing that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to offer compelling objective grounds for out choice (this is akin to the existentialists’ notion that we’re “condemned to be free”). Incidentally, appealing to the tradition-boundedness of rationality, as MacIntyre and others do, doesn’t seem to me to help here both because traditions themselves are far from being monolithic and impermeable, especially in the modern world, and it still leaves the question of which tradition one should submit to.
The dilemma here was well put by Kierkegaard: how can faith, which calls for complete (subjective) commitment on our part, be founded on something that is (objectively) uncertain?
If popularity is next to godliness, Eagle Brook Church is the holiest place in Minnesota.
The Lino Lakes church became the state’s largest this month, with weekly attendance of 8,000. And that’s without the cup holders.
The new $24 million building is designed to make worship as comfortable as possible, and movie-theater-style cup holders soon might draw even more people.
[…]
Critics of megachurches say high-volume big-box religion cheapens the value of worship because it appeals to the consumer culture. Instead of being quiet places of prayer and reflection, megachurches mimic the architecture and noise of malls, theaters and sports arenas.
But megachurch leaders say the style isn’t important — it’s the message. And preaching to empty pews doesn’t accomplish anything, Anderson said. He said millions have found megachurches an alternative to stuffy, traditional churches.
Being un-churchly is exactly the point of Eagle Brook. First-timers could be excused for thinking they were in a mall or a high school, with bright, open spaces and a lack of religious decoration.
“That’s our cafe on the left,” said Anderson, as he gave a tour of the building in December.
Next to Cafe 5000 is the religious bookstore, Beyond Books. Next to that is the Box Office, offering tickets for events aimed at nonmembers.
“That’s so you can check out the church without feeling you have to join,” Anderson said.
Inside, the sanctuary looks like a large theater, with comfortable movie-style seats with armrests. The razzle-dazzle services include comedy sketches, rock music from an 11-piece band and staging that would fit right in at the Guthrie Theater. There are no pews, no Bibles, no hymnals, no stained-glass windows.
The church is designed to feel homey. Which brings us to the cup holders.
“Our little coffee shop is humming on Sunday mornings,” Anderson said. “It’s a huge hit.”
But church leaders figured it was difficult to stand, sit or praise the Lord with your hands in the air while worrying about dumping a hot latte onto fellow Christians. So they decided to add cup holders — anything to boost their reputation for putting people at ease.
“You can’t underestimate the value of energy and buzz,” Anderson said. “Those things bring people through the door.”
Fr. Jim Tucker has a good balanced post on the cartoon controversy:
A number of editorials make the point that if media can disrespect Christianity (Rolling Stone’s current cover, for instance), Islam shouldn’t be given a free pass. That’s playground logic. In reality, media shouldn’t take great, offensive swipes against Christianity, either (or any serious religion, for that matter). But that “shouldn’t” is a moral “shouldn’t,” not a legal one.
[…]
Obviously, burning down embassies is not a proportional response to cartoons, but I don’t see why mass protests shouldn’t be. Those protests, though, ought to be aimed at the newspapers that make the decision to print inflammatory and irresponsible content, not at the governments that refrain from forbidding it. I think that one of the reasons that these protests (even minus the rioting) seem so excessive to us is that we have lost the intensity of our own piety.
Here’s a Christian-specific question, though. Interpretations vary on how we are to understand Jesus’ admonition to “turn the other cheek” (e.g. does it forbid all use of force to defend oneself or others), but nearly everyone agrees that it means that we aren’t supposed to retaliate against insults we receive as Christians. So, is it un-Christian to protest (even in a civil way) when someone blasphemously depicts Jesus or the Blessed Virgin or mocks Christianity in some other way? And how do you tell the difference between turning the other cheek and a decadent tolerance that can’t get angry about anything?
Jennifer tagged me with this meme, and who am I to say no?
Four Jobs I’ve Had 1. Pizza Delivery Boy 2. Street Department worker (included such fun tasks as shoveling asphalt, clearing downed tree branches, painting crosswalks, etc.) 3. Stock room manager at the Gap 4. Assitant Editor at a book publisher
Four Movies to Watch Over and Over 1. Star Wars (the original trilogy, but, like Jennifer I think Empire repays the most multiple viewings) 2. It’s a Wonderful Life 3. Ghostbusters 4. A Fish Called Wanda
Four Places I’ve Lived 1. Greenville, Pennsylvania (my hometown) 2. Lafayette, Indiana 3. Berkeley, California 4. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Four TV Shows I Love to Watch 1. The Office 2. Scrubs 3. Battlestar Galactica (though, due to our lack of cable I’ve been watching it on DVD and am a season behind) 4. The Way of the Master – that awesome show where Kirk Cameron and that Australian guy are talking about Jesus from inside Alcatraz (A prison – get it? It’s a metaphor! For sin! Get it??) Did I mention I don’t have cable?
Four Places I’ve Been on Vacation 1. Maui (even better than you’d think) 2. Prince Edward Island (yes, I’ve seen the Anne of Green Gables house!) 3. London 4. Yosemite National Park
Four Favorite Foods 1. Vegetarian chili with a thick hearty bread of some sort 2. Pizza 3. Filet mignon (I know, I’m supposed to be a vegetarian, but darn it, is there really anything better?!) 4. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (just like the Prez!)
Four Places I’d Rather Be Right Now 1. Home in bed with beloved wife, cats, and a book 2. On a road trip 3. Hanging out with my college buddies, of whom I’ve seen far too little in the last several years 4. Walking in the woods
Four People I’m Tagging (should they choose to accept it, and my feelings won’t be hurt if they don’t) 1. Josh 2. D. Klein 3. Jack 4. Eric
A Thinking Reed 