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It’s not uncommon to hear social critics complain about Americans’ “increased geographic mobility” as a cause of our supposedly ever-increasing social atomism. Frequent moves break up families and communities, leaving a nation of footloose individualists in its wake.

The problem, according to an article in the April issue of Reason (not yet online, alas) by Alison Stein Wellner, a former editor at American Demographics magazine, is that increasing geographic mobility is a flat-out myth:

If anything, Americans are more likely than ever to stay put. You might think that basic fact would give the social critics and policy makers pause. But it hasn’t stopped them from asserting that rampant mobility is destroying the environment, undermining the family, and increasing anomie. More important, it hasn’t stopped them from proposing intrusive, coercive, and expensive measures to curb a problem that doesn’t exist.

In 2004 less than 14 percent of U.S. residents moved–the lowest figure since the Census Bureau began collecting the data in 1948, when the moving rate was 20 percent. What’s more, the movers aren’t going very far: Fifty-eight percent of people who moved in 2004 moved within the same county, while 20 percent moved to a different county within the same state. Nineteen percent of movers (less than 3 percent of U.S. residents) set off for different states, a bit lower than the interstate moving rate during the late 1940s. And those who move usually aren’t in hot pursuit of economic opportunity: Just 16 percent of all moves are work-related. (Most people move for reasons related to housing: to shift from renting to homeownership, to find a cheaper or more spacious place, and so on.)

In fact, she says, Americans are less mobile now than in the 19th and 20th centuries when “economic depressions, farm failures, natural disasters, and wars” crated a series of shocks that forced people to move. Our more recent settling down, on the other hand, is attributed to increased homeownership, two-career families (two careers, Wellner notes, “are less portable than one”), and that scourge of rootedness, the car. Having cars actually enables people to avoid having to move in order to be closer to work.

The interesting question is why so many of us find the mobility myth so easy to believe. Is it because we want to imagine some golden age of rootedness and community that would solve many of our social ills if we could only return to it? Do we think people of ages past had more certainty, more connectedness, more stability than our ever-changing world seems to offer?

One plausible suggestion in the article comes from historian Stephanie Coontz, who points out that the people who complain about mobility – academics, journalists, pundits – are part of a socioeconomic group that actually is more likely to move farther and more frequently than less-educated people. “It is very common,” she says, “to believe that your particular, narrow slice of the socioeconomic strata is totally representative of the population as a whole.”

The late philosopher Robert Nozick is probably best known for his book Anarchy, State and Utopia, a defense of the libertarian minimal state and an influential critique of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. But, as Gene Healy reminds us, A,S&U contains a brief but substantial discussion of moral constraints on our treatment of animals. You can read that section of the book here.

Eric links to this interesting article by two theologians in the International Herald Tribune which argues that, rhetoric notwithstanding, the (in their view, unrelievedly bad) policies of Bush and Blair are motivated by secular ideology, not Christianity. Far be it from me, as anyone who reads this blog knows, to defend the recent foreign policy moves of the Bush administration, but there are a couple of points where I want to disagree with what these gents are saying.

First, we get the now-hackneyed identification of the “fall” of the church with the ascendancy of Constantine. I realize this is a brief article, but can we get past this simplistic dichotomy of pre-Constantinian church=good/post-Constantinian church=bad? In addition to being historically dubious, it seems to me that this stance risks a seriously truncated doctrine of providence. This is sort of the highbrow version of the fundamentalist view that the church lapsed into apostasy sometime shortly after Paul’s letters were written, only to re-emerge sometime during the 16th century.

Secondly, there is the blaming of the ills of nationalism, war, racism, etc. on the ever-present bogey of “liberalism.” Are we to understand that these things don’t exist in non-liberal societies? Again we get the Christianity=good/liberalism=bad dichotomy with little or no recognition that classical political liberalism has its roots in Christianity, not only in early modern thinkers like Locke, but going back at least to the later Scholastics like Francisco Suarez and Protestant thinkers like Hugo Grotius with their concept of natural rights, international law, just war, etc.

That said, the piece makes some good points about how politicians hijack lofty religious rhetoric for less than noble purposes. Definitely worth a read.

From today’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

ROME – The sudden recovery of a young French nun suffering from Parkinson’s disease is at the heart of the sainthood case for Pope John Paul II, the Polish priest who heads the inquiry said yesterday.

The Vatican needs to confirm a miracle after John Paul’s death for the pontiff to be beatified, the first step toward his possible canonization.

Msgr. Slawomir Oder said that after John Paul died April 2, the woman’s superior-general asked all the other sisters in their community to pray to the late pontiff to intervene to help the woman. On June 2 she was cured, Oder said.

Alan Bock reviews the case for nuclear proliferation. Not sure I’m convinced, but it’s worth a read.

During Lent our church has been hosting a series of guest preachers at our Wednesday night service. Last week it was a professor from the local seminary, and she offered what I thought was an interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying, rumination on the problem of evil (taking the appointed Psalm, number 77, as her text). Since her sermon seemed to express a fairly common viewpoint in contemporary Christian theology, I thought it might be worthwhile to think about just why I found it so unsatisfactory.

She started off by emphatically asserting that, contra the Pat Robertsons and Jerry Fallwells of the world, God does not cause natural disasters like tsunamis and hurricanes as a punishment for sin. Drawing on the book of Job and the story of the man born blind (John 9:1-41), she argued that such a stance is a form of “blaming the victim” for her suffering.

There is, she said, no such “explanation” for suffering. And she made what I thought was a very good point in saying that even if such an explanation was forthcoming, would we really find it satisfying? Would you really be satisfied to be told that your child was killed because it was part of God’s plan, or worse because of your sin or his? No explanation would really allow us to say “Oh, that makes sense! Now I’m satisfied that there was a good reason for my child’s death.”

Far from being the cause of, or offering an explanation for, suffering, God, she contended, is present in our suffering. God didn’t cause the Holocaust; God was suffering along with the victims. And so with all suffering in our world. The proper response is to seek the presence of he whom the granddaddy of process thought Alfred North Whitehead called “the fellow-sufferer who understands.” This notion of the suffering God has become very common in contemporary theology, to the point where it has been called a “new orthodoxy,” perhaps driven by a greater sensitivity to the victims of injustice and suffering. The traditional concept of God’s impassibility has given way to the idea that God suffers and grieves along with us.

I don’t want to deny that God suffers with us in some sense. Even the traditional view had to make room for that since Jesus obviously suffered and orthodoxy confesses him as “true God.” Though, I might mention in passing that I have a hunch that proponents of divine “passibility” are writing metaphysical checks they can’t cash. See here for a good argument for divine impassibility.

But what I find most unsatisfying about God’s suffering as a response to the problem of evil is that it lets God off the hook too easily. Take an analogy: if I lock you in a torture chamber, it’s no great commendation of my compassion if I agree to be tortured along with you. (If anything, it may be a sign of my derangement.) But God is the creator of the universe and so is responsible for what happens in the world in a way that no other “fellow-sufferer” can be. A God who can do nothing else than suffer along with us would seem to be a pretty pathetic (in both senses!) God.

The thing I found missing from this sermon was the idea that God’s response to evil is not merely to suffer, but to do something about it. In a way, the suffering God may be a reflection of our times when one can seize the moral high ground simply by professing to feel deeply anguished by some distant injustice and being deemed “uncompassionate” is the worst possible character flaw. The old Greek-influenced concept of God was one which identified the divine with reason. Now we have a concept of God defined by feeling.

But surely the good news that is the gospel is more than simply the assertion that God suffers with us, whatever truth there may be in that. Isn’t the good news that God has decisively acted in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus to deal definitively with the problem of evil in the world? Isn’t the bigger, bolder truth that not only does God suffer with us, but that God will in fact put an end to suffering, “wipe away every tear” and destroy evil once and for all?

God does not need or demand Jesus’ death so as to be able to “change his mind” about us, to be moved from wrath to mercy. That is the mistaken assumption of at least some vicarious satisfaction theories. Rather, God sends Jesus because of his immutable resolve to have mercy, concretely to do the mercy that he is. Because God insists on having mercy even in and to a sinful world, he sends not another lawgiver but his only Son, the preacher of forgiveness. The Son, therefore, does “only what he sees the Father doing.” He does mercy. God may be said to “need” the death of Jesus only in the sense that solely through Jesus can he actually do who he is. The death and resurrection of Jesus, therefore, ends the wrath of God in the creation of faith. Christ is the end of the law to those of faith.

…the “original sin” of the human race is precisely that it does not believe in a merciful God but rather in its own ability to control its destiny under law. We live inexorably, therefore, under wrath — not because God is naturally vindictive but rather because we refuse his mercy in order to keep our control. — Gerhard Forde, “In Our Place,” from A More Radical Gospel: Essays on Eschatology, Authority, Atonement, and Ecumenism, p. 111)

One of the things I like about this way of thinking about the work of Christ is that it highlights that we are the obstacle to reconciliation, not God. Often discussions of the Atonement make it sound like there is some third force – justice, honor, the law, or perhaps the devil or demons – that prevents God from being reconciled to us. But Forde’s approach allows us to maintain the New Testament view that it is God who initiates and carries out this process of reconciliation from start to finish and that we are the ones who need to be reconciled.

As Forde puts it elsewhere:

But why then must Jesus die? Bearing in mind that this “must” is always a posteriori, not a priori, not an abstract, logical “must” determined beforehand but one that flows out of what the act itself accomplishes, perhaps we can say something about how it might look “from God’s point of view.” If what we have been saying about the murder of Jesus by us is at all the case, then God’s “problem” comes more immediately into view. God’s problem is not that he can’t be merciful until he has been satisfied but rather that he won’t be satisfied until he succeeds in actually having mercy on whom he will have mercy. God, that is, won’t be satisfied until he succeeds in actually giving the concrete, unconditional forgiving he intends. As we can see from Jesus, God’s problem is how actually to have mercy on a world that will not have it. The question for God is whether he can really succeed in getting through to a people that likes the idea of forgiveness but doesn’t want an actual forgiver, a world that turns everything God purposes to do into a theory with which to protect itself from him. God’s problem is just how actually to have mercy, how to get through to us. (“Caught in the Act: Reflections on the Work of Christ” in A More Radical Gospel, p. 94) [Read the whole essay here]

When asked why God couldn’t simply up and forgive sins rather than going through an elabortate scheme, Forde’s reply is that he did. Forgiving sins just is what God was doing in Jesus, because it was, it seems, the only way to do it. Or, as he put it in Theology Is for Proclamation, Jesus is the man in whom God “does God” to us.

On Forde’s view we are well-advised to stick as closely as possible to the brute facts of Jesus’ preaching, suffering, and dying. Too often Atonement theories skip over this messy reality to uncover the metaphysical machinery supposedly lying behind it (or “above” it in some heavenly transaction). For Forde Jesus quite literally bears our sins on his body in that he comes preaching forgiveness and we respond with mockery, beating, scourging, and death. In not retaliating Jesus shows that he is the “perfect victim,” as Rowan Williams describes it in his book on the Resurrection. He’s the only one not caught in the cycle of returning evil for evil. Jesus enacts God’s love and forgiveness, and we can’t even put a stop to it by killing him, as the Resurrection shows.

I like this account of Christ’s work, but I do wonder if it gives short shrift to some of the concerns that motivated the traditional Atonement theories. Thoughts?

This article has a lot of good information on the Fair Trade coffee movement, its history, and some of the controversies involved.

This is exciting news:

In July 1973, Johnny Cash spent several days in the studio at his House of Cash offices in Hendersonville, Tennessee, recording songs and telling tales with just an acoustic guitar and his virile craggy baritone. He sang Tin Pan Alley hits, traditional folk and gospel tunes, new originals and favorite covers by the Louvin Brothers and Johnny Horton, among others. He recited poetry and reminisced about his teenage job as a water boy on a river-dredging crew and the hours he spent glued to the radio, loving and learning the very songs he sang in these sessions.

But Cash, who died in September 2003, never issued any of these intimate performances. The tapes were shelved at House of Cash, where they sat forgotten and undisturbed until 2004, when his son John Carter Cash asked Steve Berkowitz, senior vice president of A&R at Legacy Recordings, Sony BMG’s reissue imprint, and producer Gregg Geller for help in cataloging the hundreds of reels stored at the Hendersonville office. “Periodically, I would come across a white tape box with the House of Cash label on it that said ‘Johnny Cash, Personal File,’” says Geller. “My sense is he had a concept album in mind, and these tapes were the beginning of that process.”

Cash’s dream finally comes true with the May release of the two-CD set Personal File, compiled by Geller and featuring forty-nine previously unissued solo Cash tracks, half from July ’73 and the rest from similar, later House of Cash demos made in the late Seventies and early Eighties. Personal File arrives at a peak of posthumous Cashmania, fueled by the success of the biopic Walk the Line. The single-CD compilation, The Legend of Johnny Cash, is selling more than 40,000 copies a week, according to SoundScan.

But Personal File delivers a Cash even his most devoted fans have never heard before: at the height of his career and vocal power, telling the story of his life in music, as if he were sitting across from you. “This is his ‘Basement Tapes,’” says Berkowitz, “as close as you can get to him singing on the porch.”

(via Thunderstruck)

Friend of this blog and Lutheran pastor Chip Frontz (pictured) has set up a blog to accompany a Lenten class he’s teaching on the Ten Commandments. He invites feedback, questions, and comments regarding both the content and format. It also has a very clever title: DECAbLOGUE.

Check it out.