The new American revolution?

Most informed citizens know the Bill of Rights has ten amendments; nowadays, though, most people don't remember the Tenth Amendment.  If you're one of them, here's the text:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

If you didn't know that was in the Constitution, don't kick yourself too hard—to all intents and purposes, our government doesn't either.  (The same is true of the Ninth Amendment, which declares, "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.")

Now, however, we have the first sign in a very long time that that might be about to change.  If Congress won't recognize the proper sphere of sovereignty of the states, some of the states are thinking about standing up to claim it for themselves.

Although Fox News and CNN are not telling you about it, a growing number of states are declaring sovereignty. Washington, New Hampshire, Arizona, Montana, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, California, and Georgia have all introduced bills and resolutions declaring sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment. Colorado, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Alaska, Kansas, Alabama, Nevada, Maine, and Illinois are considering such measures.

Here's the payoff from the bill introduced in the state of Washington, which follows a number of "Whereas" clauses laying out the historical and constitutional justifications for the bill:

NOW, THEREFORE, Your Memorialists respectfully resolve:

(1) That the State of Washington hereby claims sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government by the Constitution of the United States; and

(2) That this serve as a Notice and Demand to the federal government to maintain the balance of powers where the Constitution of the United States established it and to cease and desist, effective immediately, any and all mandates that are beyond the scope of its constitutionally delegated powers.

That's just one example; go to the article and you'll find links to all the bills that are currently pending in state legislatures. Knowing my old home state as I do, I'll be surprised if that one passes, but some of these will. Of course, I'm sure the initial response from the Obama administration will be to dismiss or ignore these bills; but if these states have the guts to act on this language and resist (or even seek to roll back) the federal usurpation of state power, we have a shot at reviving federalism. After all, the Tenth Amendment may be treated like a dead letter, but it's still in the Constitution; the Obama administration may succeed in buying states off, but if any of them hang in there and refuse to give up their Tenth Amendment claim, as long as they pick an issue on which they're on firm ground, it would be hard to make a constitutional case against them.

It's encouraging to see state governments asserting themselves as independent and responsible political entities, rather than as lapdogs of D.C.; here's hoping it keeps up.

HT:  Shane Vander Hart

If you can fake that, you’ve got it made

Isn’t that what they say about sincerity?  When it comes to getting on in the world, it’s a true statement, with one big “if”:  it’s only true as long as nobody catches you faking it.  Get caught, all bets are off.

Unfortunately for Alex Rodriguez, he’s been caught faking it a few too many times by now for anyone to believe much of anything he says.  It’s been revealed that he tested positive for steroids in ’03, and he’s trying to control the damage by admitting the positive test and spinning the circumstances—but why should anybody buy the line?  After all, this is a guy who . . . well, I’ll let veteran Tacoma News-Tribune sportswriter Larry LaRue tell the story:

One day in the visiting clubhouse in Cleveland, Alex called me over to his locker. His grandmother had died a day earlier, and he wanted to tell me how hard losing her had been. He had been close to her, he said, and was devastated by her loss.

Alex told me all this without showing emotion. I thought he might be trying not to, so I nodded and listened.

“The funeral is Sunday,” he said.

“Are you going?” I asked.

Alex looked genuinely surprised.

“No,” he said. After a pause, he told me he’d had a long talk with Lou Piniella, who’d asked him to play through the pain.

It occurred to me that day that Rodriguez might not be feeling anguish so much as wanting me to know he was—and to write about it. I didn’t, in part because I thought it sent too mixed a message and I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I still do, but it has gotten harder.

Alex Rodriguez never said a spontaneous thing to the media. Ever. On one level, that could be seen as caution. But over the years around Alex, it became apparent he was that way with teammates, coaches, everyone. . . .

I don’t know anyone who believes they’ve seen an honest emotion from Alex. When I watched his confessional interview with Peter Gammons and thought we might finally hear him level with the world.

Until he said he wasn’t sure what he’d taken, only that it was banned.

Alex took something for three years without knowing exactly what it was? Impossible. Alex didn’t get dressed without thinking of the impact he wanted to make with his attire. He never spoke to the press without knowing precisely what message he wanted to deliver.

And the steroid cocktail he is alleged to have consumed is not something he could have purchased over the counter at GNC—part of it can’t even legally be sold in this country.

What Alex did Monday was confess to as little as possible. He never said the word ‘illegal.’. Only ‘banned.’ He never said he’d injected anything, or been on a program.

Alex Rodriguez taking injections without knowing what was in the syringe or how would impact his body? . . .

When you think you’re just a bit smarter than anyone who interviews you, things get said that are too easily checked. Alex’s grandmother story, for instance. I talked to then-manager Piniella a bit later in the evening, and asked if he’d counseled his young shortstop about the death in the family.

“I didn’t know about it,” he said. “Alex hasn’t told me.”

Now, Alex wants the world to know he’s sorry. That whatever it was he took in Texas because of the pressure he felt after signing that contract, he stopped taking when he went to New York—where apparently, there was no pressure.

At least this time, he left Piniella out of it.

The thing about trust—and it’s something our president should remember; sure, he’s the golden boy who can do no wrong, but so was A-Rod, once upon a time—is that once you lose it, once people decide they can’t trust you not to spin them, it’s extremely difficult to get it back.

Isn't the election over?

And didn't Barack Obama win?  And if so, shouldn't somebody clue him in so he can stop campaigning and start governing?

If you're wondering that, too, after President Obama's appearance in our neck of the woods to campaign for the so-called "stimulus" bill, take heart, because we're not alone in our reaction.  Granted, he's a very effective campaigner, and his campaign appearance might do the trick—this time.  Over the long haul, though, you can't govern a country by giving stump speeches.  Making your case to the American people is an important part of the process, true (Ronald Reagan was a past master at this), but while that may help you get the rudder over to keep the nation on the course you want, it's not going to do much to propel the ship.  The president needs to have more in his arsenal than going out and holding campaign rallies if he wants to have a successful term in office.

The question is, why is President Obama still operating in campaign mode rather than in governing mode?  I'm tempted to say that it's because campaigning privileges style over substance, and that plays to his strengths.  He knows how to campaign effectively, but when it comes down to getting things done, put me down as one of the increasing numbers who don't believe he really knows what he wants to get done, let alone how.  How else do you explain the fact that he articulated an ambitious plan for the stimulus package, then not only didn't have anyone in his administration draft legislation to enact his plan, but rather let the House Democrats write a vastly different bill that doesn't meet any of the standards and qualifications he laid out—and is now laying all his political capital on the line to defend that very different bill?  This is bad governance; but it's right in line with the way he ran his campaign.  Unfortunately, now it's time and past time for him to stop campaigning and start governing.

This makes sense

One of the things that’s been hard for me to understand about our president is how all his talk of bipartisanship—and his apparent firm belief in his ability to work in a bipartisan fashion—squared with his extremely partisan voting record.  In her column today, Carol Platt Liebau makes a point that I think explains this:

From his days on The Harvard Law Review forward, Barack Obama gained a reputation for “bipartisanship.” The problem? His much vaunted bridge-building was always a matter more of style than of substance. He would treat those who disagreed with him with great politeness and civility, listen their views, and then ignore them.

In environments like a law school campus, or Chicago city politics, or Illinois state politics—where liberals overwhelmingly outnumber conservatives—bipartisan words, without action, are enough. Where conservatives are otherwise completely disregarded and routinely treated with contempt, respectful words can secure their support and even a certain degree of affection. Throughout his life, Barack Obama has blossomed primarily in liberal hothouses; perhaps it’s no surprise that he concluded that a little lip service would fulfill the demands of bipartisanship. . . .

Perhaps that’s why the President believed that simply talking to Republicans would be enough to secure their support for the stimulus package, even though the final product reflected none of their input.

Of course, as she goes on to note, real bipartisanship requires more than that—and more than that the Obama-Pelosi administration wasn’t willing to give.  You can always find a few marginal members of the GOP to pick off, but that’s all they could manage; the result isn’t real bipartisanship, it’s what we might call “RINO bipartisanship” (kudos to Glenn Foden):

Coming home empty

And [Jesus] said, “There was a man who had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of property that is coming to me.’ And he divided his property between them. Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in reckless living. And when he had spent everything, a severe famine arose in that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed pigs. And he was longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate, and no one gave him anything.

“But when he came to himself, he said, ‘How many of my father's hired servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.”’ And he arose and came to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet. And bring the fattened calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate. For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’
And they began to celebrate.

“Now his older son was in the field, and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. And he said to him, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fattened calf, because he has received him back safe and sound.’ But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him, but he answered his father, ‘Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!’ And he said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive;
he was lost, and is found.’”

—Luke 15:11-32 (ESV)

Mary Hulst, “Coming Home Empty”


• download

Another of the high points of this year's Worship Symposium for me was Mary Hulst's sermon on this passage.  I actually would have liked her to go further in talking about the grace of the Father and the gracelessness of the older son, but even so, her message was a powerful evocation of God's grace and love, coming straight out of the fact that, as a pastor preaching to a congregation of pastors and other church leaders (which is to say, people who play the "older son" role for a living), she knew us cold.  I encourage you to listen—especially, but not only, if you're another one who does the church thing professionally.

Credo ut intelligam

With Anselm of Canterbury, I believe so that I may understand—because I understand that that's just how it works, for everybody, whether they know it or not.  (This is part of the reason wrong belief is important:  it produces wrong understanding.)  As a candidate for ordination as a pastor in the Reformed Church in America, part of my task was to write a credo—a reasonably full statement of what I believe.  Last year, I broke that credo up into ten parts and posted them.  Those ten parts cover the following topics (among other things):

• Who is God?
  
• What is God like?
• The problem of evil
• Considering humanity
• The person and work of Jesus
• Relationship with God (or not)
• The Holy Spirit and the Bible
• The gifts of the Spirit
• The church and its mission
• The coming kingdom of God

For various reasons, I wrote this as a conversation between myself and someone I knew fairly well at the time, so the sections do flow into each other to some degree.

Rivers in the desert

“Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old.
Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”

—Isaiah 43:18-19 (ESV)

This is one of the more startling moments in Scripture.  It’s startling because this section of Isaiah is full of appeals and references to “the former things,” to all the things he’s done for them in the past; indeed, immediately before this, God has anchored his promise to bring his people back home in the story of the Exodus, in the reminder that he’s done it before.  And then he says, essentially, “But forget about all that.”  So what’s the deal?

It seems safe to say that God isn’t commanding his people to collective amnesia; nor is this a license, as many Western theologians want to think, to throw out all that stuff that God says about sin (at least the sins we don’t want to believe are wrong) and judgment.  Rather, this is hyperbole designed to jolt Israel into opening their eyes and ears and actually hearing him, and seeing what God is doing. God is not only present and active in the past, but also in the present—theirs and ours—and they had no sense of that. 

They had no concept of what God was doing in their own time, or what he might be calling them to do; they knew all about the Exodus, they’d heard about it a million times before, and they would no doubt have told you they believed God had delivered their ancestors from Egypt. What they didn’t believe was that that had anything to do with their lives and circumstances. They believed God had saved, but not that he would save—and that makes all the difference. It’s not that hard to believe that God has done miracles in the past—but that he’s still in the miracle business now? That’s another matter.

And so too often, we as Christians in this country are like those Jews in captivity in Babylon—we have this nice little box labeled “God” full of all sorts of things God did a while ago, and it really doesn’t have a lot to do with how we live our daily lives. We pray, though maybe not that much, and we read our Bibles, at least a little, but when it comes to the issues we face and the choices we have to make, a lot of us are functional atheists—we do things just like the world does. Not only do we not ask God to guide us, a lot of the time, we don’t even take him into account—we base our decisions solely on “practical” considerations, things we can see and touch and quantify. And that’s not how God wants us to live. 

God wants us to remember, in everything we do, that we are children of the Lord of the Universe, that he loves us, and that he’s working for our good—including in ways we can’t predict, or see coming. He wants us to walk by faith, not by sight. He wants us to hear him saying, “See, I’m doing a new thing—it’s springing up right before your eyes. Don’t you see it? I’m making a road for you through the wilderness, and streams of living water in the wasteland. Can’t you see? Look. Open your eyes. See.”

Redefining evil for convenience

Here's Judea Pearl, UCLA professor of computer science and father of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, on "the normalization of evil":

Somehow, barbarism, often cloaked in the language of "resistance," has gained acceptance in the most elite circles of our society. The words "war on terror" cannot be uttered today without fear of offense. Civilized society, so it seems, is so numbed by violence that it has lost its gift to be disgusted by evil.

I believe it all started with well-meaning analysts, who in their zeal to find creative solutions to terror decided that terror is not a real enemy, but a tactic. Thus the basic engine that propels acts of terrorism—the ideological license to elevate one's grievances above the norms of civilized society—was wished away in favor of seemingly more manageable "tactical" considerations. . . .

The clearest endorsement of terror as a legitimate instrument of political bargaining came from former President Jimmy Carter. In his book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," Mr. Carter appeals to the sponsors of suicide bombing. "It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Road-map for Peace are accepted by Israel." Acts of terror, according to Mr. Carter, are no longer taboo, but effective tools for terrorists to address perceived injustices. . . .

When we ask ourselves what it is about the American psyche that enables genocidal organizations like Hamas—the charter of which would offend every neuron in our brains—to become tolerated in public discourse, we should take a hard look at our universities and the way they are currently being manipulated by terrorist sympathizers.

Wal-Mart Confidential

Charles Platt, a former senior writer for Wired, went to work at a Wal-Mart in Flagstaff, Arizona and wrote about it for the New York Post.  He has some interesting things to say about his experience:

My starting wage was so low (around $7 per hour), a modest increment still didn't leave me with enough to live on comfortably, but when I looked at the alternatives, many of them were worse. Coworkers assured me that the nearest Target paid its hourly full-timers less than Wal-Mart, while fast-food franchises were at the bottom of everyone's list.

I found myself reaching an inescapable conclusion. Low wages are not a Wal-Mart problem. They are an industry-wide problem, afflicting all unskilled entry-level jobs, and the reason should be obvious.

In our free-enterprise system, employees are valued largely in terms of what they can do. This is why teenagers fresh out of high school often go to vocational training institutes to become auto mechanics or electricians. They understand a basic principle that seems to elude social commentators, politicians and union organizers. If you want better pay, you need to learn skills that are in demand.

The blunt tools of legislation or union power can force a corporation to pay higher wages, but if employees don't create an equal amount of additional value, there's no net gain. All other factors remaining equal, the store will have to charge higher prices for its merchandise, and its competitive position will suffer.

This is Economics 101, but no one wants to believe it, because it tells us that a legislative or unionized quick-fix is not going to work in the long term. If you want people to be wealthier, they have to create additional wealth.

To my mind, the real scandal is not that a large corporation doesn't pay people more. The scandal is that so many people have so little economic value. Despite (or because of) a free public school system, millions of teenagers enter the work force without marketable skills. So why would anyone expect them to be well paid?

In fact, the deal at Wal-Mart is better than at many other employers. The company states that its regular full-time hourly associates in the US average $10.86 per hour, while the mean hourly wage for retail sales associates in department stores generally is $8.67. The federal minimum wage is $6.55 per hour. Also every Wal-Mart employee gets a 10% store discount, while an additional 4% of wages go into profit-sharing and 401(k) plans. . . .

You have to wonder, then, why the store has such a terrible reputation, and I have to tell you that so far as I can determine, trade unions have done most of the mudslinging. Web sites that serve as a source for negative stories are often affiliated with unions. Walmartwatch.com, for instance, is partnered with the Service Employees International Union; Wakeupwalmart.com is entirely owned by United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. For years, now, they've campaigned against Wal-Mart, for reasons that may have more to do with money than compassion for the working poor. If more than one million Wal-Mart employees in the United States could be induced to join a union, by my calculation they'd be compelled to pay more than half-billion dollars each year in dues.

Anti-growth activists are the other primary source of anti-Wal-Mart sentiment. In the town where I worked, I was told that activists even opposed a new Barnes & Noble because it was "too big." If they're offended by a large bookstore, you can imagine how they feel about a discount retailer.

The argument, of course, is that smaller enterprises cannot compete. My outlook on this is hardcore: I think that many of the "mom-and-pop" stores so beloved by activists don't deserve to remain in business. . . .

Based on my experience (admittedly, only at one location) I reached a conclusion which is utterly opposed to almost everything ever written about Wal-Mart. I came to regard it as one of the all-time enlightened American employers, right up there with IBM in the 1960s. Wal-Mart is not the enemy. It's the best friend we could ask for.

On this blog in history: January 1-20, 2008

Spiritual discipline?
Considering whether blogging can be a spiritual discipline, and if so, how—a question I revisited last month.

The fantasy of the Real
On Chesterton, Tolkien, and the value of fantasy and science fiction.

Gospel witness
A comment on what it means to bear witness to Christ.

God's own fool, part II
On the preposterous idea of a crucified Messiah.

God's own fools
On being fools for Christ.

Faith in action: George W. Bush's greatest legacy

He doesn't get much credit for it from the country—it wasn't in the interest of his political opponents or the media to let that happen, since it would have interfered with the narrative of all the bad things they wanted you to believe about the man—but what George W. Bush did to fight the HIV/AIDS pandemic and other diseases in Africa was an unprecedented good on an amazing scale; and for all the difficulties with the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, that effort on the part of his administration has done a great deal of good as well.  Eventually, once the politics are out of the way, he'll get the credit for these things that he deserves.

Could the political pot boil over?

I haven't posted on Yuval Levin's essay on "The Meaning of Sarah Palin," in part because for all the things he gets right, he makes one critical error:  he mistakes Gov. Palin as "handled" and portrayed by the McCain campaign for Gov. Palin as she actually is.  He thus ends up blaming her for failing to do things which in fact she was prevented from doing (or attempting to do, at any rate) by folks like Nicolle Wallace.  I was, however, quite interested by William Jacobson's comment on Levin's article:

The politics in this country is like a simmering pot. The boiling water represents the desire of people to be left alone and to make their own way in life. The cover on the pot is the set of liberal assumptions which tells people that they have no right to lead life the way they want, and that those who have assumed the reigns of power know better. My sense is that the tighter that lid is pressed—by attacking people like Sarah Palin, by forcing government into every aspect of our lives, by appointing people like Tom Daschle who have milked the system dry—the more likely it is the pot will boil over.

The one point where I would disagree with him, regretfully, is that I don't think we can simply call those assumptions "liberal"; functionally speaking, the GOP has operated in much the same fashion over the last number of years—which is probably why the last two elections have pretty well blown the party out of the water.  (Plus, of course, while conservatism explicitly disavows the idea that "those who have assumed the reigns of power know better," our liberal critics would accuse conservatives of being those who "tell people that they have no right to lead life the way they want," and there are certain areas in which they have a case; only the purest of libertarians could really duck such a charge completely.)  Taken as a whole, though, I think Dr. Jacobson is on to something; if he is, we might have another Jacksonian revolution coming.  (This time with a woman of the frontier in the lead, mayhap?)

Do what to one another?

I was scrolling down on the Rev. Dr. Ray Ortlund's blog to rewatch the video of Aretha Franklin singing "My Country 'Tis of Thee" at the inauguration (easier than looking it up on YouTube), when this post of his from the same day, which I'd missed, caught my eye; it's titled "'One anothers' I can't find in the New Testament":

Humble one another, scrutinize one another, pressure one another, embarrass one another, correct one another, corner one another, interrupt one another, run one another's lives, confess one another's sins, disapprove of one another . . . .

"Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you." Ephesians 4:32

Dr. Ortlund, if your aim's as good with a deer rifle as it is with a blog post, I can't imagine it takes you long to fill your quota every year.  There actually are biblical senses in which "correct one another" (2 Timothy 3:16-17) and "confess one another's sins" (Daniel 9) may be appropriate, but in general . . . yeah.

Calling the (blog)roll

I've been thinking for a while now that I needed to add Conservatives4Palin to the blogroll; and then, off their blogroll, I discovered the blog Caffeinated Thoughts, which looks to be doing the same sorts of things I'm trying to do here, and figured I needed to put that one on as well.  From there, I wandered over to Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion, the blog of a conservative Cornell law professor (and contributor to American Thinker), and decided the list was up to three.

When Shane Vander Hart (and how on earth is a pastor with a name that Dutch not in the RCA, anyway?) of Caffeinated Thoughts mentioned the Conservative Web Brigade, I thought I'd check it out; having done so, I asked permission to come aboard, and they were generous enough to grant it.  As a consequence, the CWB now has its own section in the blogroll.  I've also rearranged everything else a little, moving conservative political bloggers into a separate section (or two, really, since the CWB blogroll is a distinct section) and moving the primarily theological bloggers up.  I've also moved the Anchoress and the Baseball Crank into the political-blogs section—for both, politics is only one of their concerns, but it's sufficiently predominant that that seems to be the more fitting category for them.

The Pharisees, the grace of God, and the mission of the church

I noted yesterday that Jesus judged the Pharisees for their self-idolatry and their worship of their own worship, because their focus had shifted from glorifying God to glorifying themselves.  It's worth noting as well, though, something that's closely tied to that (and that also ties back to Isaiah's critique of Israel, on which Jesus draws in John 9):  namely, they had committed their own version of blind Israel’s other biggest sin (besides idolatry).  Just as Israel had looked down on the nations as enemies, rather than seeing them as their mission field, so the Pharisees looked down on non-Pharisees as inferiors, people to avoid rather than people to bless. One of the things they objected to about Jesus, remember, was that he hung out with lowlifes and sinners, whom they themselves despised and hated. In this, too, their essential blindness was revealed, because it showed that their true focus wasn’t on God; they couldn’t see that the “people of the land” whom they loathed, the nations whom they regarded as enemies, were the people God loved and wanted to redeem, just as much as he loved and wanted to redeem them. They were, ultimately, all about themselves, and that’s not what God is on about, or wants us to be on about.

The reason, I think, is that the Pharisees had lost sight of the fact that their relationship with God was all about grace, not about their own effort—and make no mistake, they should have known that; we often miss it, too, but the Old Testament really is just as much about the grace of God as the New Testament. That’s why Jesus is the fulfillment of the law, not its replacement. They had lost sight of the fact that even for all the work they put in, they didn’t deserve God’s favor any more than the tax collectors, prostitutes, and foreigners they held in such contempt, and so they failed to understand that their proper response to God and his grace was not to keep it to themselves but to share it. They failed to understand that God calls his people to mission—to the mission of the Servant, to be agents of grace for the world.

This is Obama's America

When the abortionist didn't show up in time, a Florida baby was thrown out with the trash.

After all, what can you expect when we have a president who can call a baby a punishment?  This is what he voted for.

I can't even bear to copy this—just go read it.  Other links are here, on R. S. McCain's blog; and as Jared Wilson rightly says,

If you're pro-choice or a pro-lifer who's not all that concerned about a pro-choice culture and this disturbs you, why?

The only difference between this incident and what happens in all abortions is that the baby is usually killed inside the womb. They just didn't do it in a timely fashion this time.

Either way, a baby is killed and thrown away like garbage.

Stories like this and the advances in pre-natal technology are catching up with the abortion industry. One of these days we will wake up to how barbaric abortion is. We'll suddenly realize how uncivilized we really are.

A thought or two in response to Culture11

There's been a fair bit of chatter recently in certain conservative circles about the demise of the website Culture11. I have to be honest, I read this with a certain amount of bemusement, since (as Mencken might have put it) I must confess I never knew Lord Jones was alive to begin with; I'm not sure if that makes me un-hip, or what—but then, as a mainline pastor in small-town north-central Indiana, I'm probably un-hip by definition anyway, so I'm not too worried.

In any case, I'll confess that what strikes me about the conversation over the demise of this website is all the heavy breathing over the word "conservative." Don't get me wrong, I'm not one to get all bent out of shape over the use of labels; they're useful shorthand. I'm perfectly content to be called a conservative, because in this context, that's the label generally used for people who believe what I believe; if "liberal" still carried its classical meaning, I'd be perfectly content to be called that, too. It saves lengthy explanations, and that's useful.

The conversation over Culture11, though, has a different quality, with lots of talk about the "alternative right," what it means to be a "true conservative," the deriding of "neocon echo chambers" and the like.  What I see here, besides infighting and back-stabbing, is a concern for the label as such, and an almost Jacobin impulse to ideological purity—manifested, since the guillotine isn't actually an option, by loud declarations of excommunication of the heretics.  I see, quite frankly, a great deal of narrowness of perspective, marked by chronological snobbery ("that's so 2001-04") and snobbery of provenance (if it comes from Person X, or Group X—such as "the 2nd and 3rd generation neocons who rule the roost on FOX," who are "bereft of all discernible signs of culture"—then it must be bad), and a vast ugliness of attitude.  There's precious little grace shown here toward those with whom people disagree, only the attitude that "if you aren't my definition of conservative, then you're the enemy just like everyone else."

Now, granted, none of these folks know me from a hole in the ground (I think I commented on Joe Carter's blog once or twice, but that's about it), so my reaction to this spat doesn't really matter any; but I know what I'd say to these folks if I could, or to anyone else who finds themselves arguing in this sort of spirit.

Grow up. Search for truth as best you can, come to the best conclusions you can reach, and don't worry about who else holds them, or whether they're sufficiently contemporary, or any of that junk. That kind of thing is, to be blunt, juvenile.  Argue your positions with respect for those who disagree, and with openness to learn from them—and remember that politics and culture are pragmatic arenas, and that to get anything done, you have to build alliances and forge coalitions; hyper-puritanism leads finally to self-isolation, and the only door out of that trap is the abandonment of all the principles for which you fought in the first place.  Don't pronounce anathemas on those who agree with you on most things—that, too, is juvenile; find common ground, and work with them.  Remember, you too are imperfect; that's why we all need grace.

The Minnesota Senate race continues

I swear, you just can't make this stuff up.

The gang that couldn't govern straight

Never put yourself in a position where your party wins only if your country fails.

—Thomas Friedman

It hasn't been a good start for the new administration.  In the first couple weeks, we've seen them announce standards and then not keep them; we've seen two of Barack Obama's nominees withdraw for legal and ethical reasons (following another nominee who had previously done so, and yet another who should have); we've seen the House Democrats running the show on his first big piece of legislation, which consequently has turned into a legislative albatross; we've seen him back down on some aspects of that legislation after some complaints from our allies; we've seen the response to the big ice storm botched; we've seen the appointment of a new ambassador to Iraq botched (which is not to say that Gen. Anthony Zinni would have been a better choice than Christopher Hill—I have no reason to think he would have been—but rather that offering a guy a job, thanking him for accepting it, telling him to get ready to go to work, and then actually hiring someone else behind his back without letting him know you've done it is no way to run a railroad); we've seen Iran rattling sabers, apparently emboldened by the President's comments; and unfortunately, we've seen all this addressed by a McClellan-esque disaster of a press secretary who isn't helping his administration at all.  Only two weeks in, and some people are already deeply worried, while others are asking, "Who is Barack Obama?" and others yet are beginning to think that the administration is "on the verge of combining the competency of Carter and the ethics of Nixon."

For my part, I don't think the most pessimistic talk is warranted—yet.  Granted, no recent administration has gotten off to this bumpy a start, but false starts and missteps aren't uncommon for new administrations; after all, you can't really rehearse this.  (Compare this article on the beginning of the Bush 43 administration, which managed the transition much better than the Obama administration has so far—courtesy of Dick Cheney, who had already seen it all and done most of it—but had some similar legislative splats.)  These are bright people, and it's perfectly reasonable to hope and expect that they'll figure out what they need to figure out, and do a better job of managing the job as time goes on.  On the other hand, we've seen a few troubling trends from the campaign repeating themselves in the early days of the administration, most notably President Obama's tendency to duck unpleasant conversations—not telling Tom Daschle to withdraw his nomination, not telling Gen. Zinni he wasn't getting the job after all, not going to Kentucky, not answering questions on William Lynn, and so on.  As such, there's reason for concern that some of these problems may persist, and that the comparisons to President Carter may ultimately prove out.  That would be a bad thing for the country; and so, as a believer in Thomas Friedman's dictum, I will be (along with many others I know) praying it doesn't happen.

The blindness of self-worship

Jesus said, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.” Some of the Pharisees near him heard these things, and said to him, “Are we also blind?” Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have
no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains.

—John 9:39-41 (ESV)

There are a lot of folks who have trouble with these verses.  For some, it’s a matter of not understanding Jesus’ rabbinic way of talking; I actually had an elder use this as an example of her contention that “there are lots of contradictions in the Bible.”  Others, more seriously, wonder why Jesus says here, “For judgment I came into the world,” when he told Nicodemus in John 3, “The Son of Man did not come into the world to condemn the world, but to seek and save those who are lost.”  The answer is that this isn’t a statement of what Jesus wanted to happen, but simply what he knew would happen; there are those who, in the face of God’s offer of salvation, do not want it.  They would prefer to hold fast to their idols, to gods of their own invention, which they can control.  They refuse to believe they need Jesus—they think they can see just fine without him, thanks—and in their refusal, their true blindness is revealed and confirmed.  It isn’t that Jesus judges them, but that in response to his coming, they judge themselves.

Now, Jesus is drawing this language from Isaiah, who repeatedly associates blindness and deafness with the worship of idols instead of the one true God—idols being blind and deaf lumps of inert material, those who worship them become as blind and deaf as the false gods before whom they bow; and the interesting thing about this when it comes to the Pharisees is that they weren’t blind in the same way as the people Isaiah was talking about—or at least, they would have said they weren’t.  They knew the prophet’s complaint about the people of his time; they knew the dangers of idolatry, of worshiping the gods of the nations, and they were devoutly opposed to that. Their whole effort, their whole reason for existence, was focused on worshiping God faithfully and keeping his law as well as they possibly could.  They no doubt saw themselves as the exact opposite of the blind and deaf Israel against which the prophet spoke.  And yet Jesus makes the same charge against them:  they are willfully blind.

The biggest reason for this is that they were no longer truly worshiping God, for they had made an idol of their own religion; their focus had shifted from worshiping God and giving him glory to worshiping their own purity and glorifying themselves.  They were worshiping their own worship, and their true god was their idea of their own wonderfulness.  While they would no doubt have balked at 7 Simple Steps to Your Best Life Now, the spirit of their religion was really very similar to that sort of American self-help/therapeutic religion, just as it's very similar to the idolatry of style, taste and preference practiced in so many of our congregations that underlies American Christianity’s “worship wars.”  Our worship is supposed to be our gift to God and the window through which we look at him; they had stopped looking through the window and started looking at it, shifting their focus from the Giver to the gift.  Too often, if we’re honest, I think we’d have to admit that we do the same.

The careless grace of God

Again he began to teach beside the sea. And a very large crowd gathered about him, so that he got into a boat and sat in it on the sea, and the whole crowd was beside the sea on the land. And he was teaching them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root, it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. And other seeds fell into good soil and produced grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirtyfold
and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.” And he said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

And when he was alone, those around him with the twelve asked him about the parables. And he said to them, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God,
but for those outside everything is in parables, so that

they may indeed see but not perceive,
and may indeed hear but not understand,
lest they should turn and be forgiven.

And he said to them, “Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables? The sower sows the word. And these are the ones along the path, where the word is sown: when they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them. And these are the ones sown on rocky ground: the ones who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with joy. And they have no root in themselves, but endure for a while; then, when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away. And others are the ones sown among thorns. They are those who hear the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful. But those that were sown on the good soil are the ones who hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.”

—Mark 4:1-20 (ESV)

Craig Barnes, “Careless Grace”


• download

Craig Barnes is one of my favorite preachers, and I was glad to see that he would be preaching and teaching at this year's Worship Symposium; I’ve already referenced the workshop of his which I attended, and I’ll be commenting on that at greater length soon (I’d meant to do so already), because he had some very important things to say.  I didn’t attend his seminar, but I was there for the opening service on Thursday morning, structured around the Parable of the Sower, at which he preached.  This is a great and deep parable, but it seems to attract bad sermons; thankfully (if unsurprisingly), the Rev. Dr. Barnes’ message wasn’t one of them.  Indeed, it’s a marvelous meditation on God’s extravagant grace, and on our proper response:  listen, wait, and see.  It's well worth your time.

Why America needs Sarah Palin, Part II

• Fiscally responsible leadership, for Alaska and the nation


• A vision and perspective from outside the Northeastern elite


• A pro-life vision which is not only political, but personal, as seen in the lives of her youngest son, Trig, and her grandson, Tripp

Republican stupidity continues

The silver lining to the storm clouds that washed away so much of the GOP in 2006 and 2008 is that in the process they washed away many of the people responsible for shipwrecking the party, and most of the illusions those people promulgated.  Unfortunately, that's only "many" and "most," not all, and we do have some big-government Republican quislings still hanging around.  One of those guys is Charlie Crist, governor of Florida; I cringed every time he was mentioned as a potential running mate for John McCain, I cringe every time I hear him mentioned as a potential presidential candidate in 2012, and with this latest stunt of his, he should be ashamed to call himself a Republican.  I'd say he ought to just change parties and be done with it, except that I'm not sure the Democrats would want him either.  Here's how the Wall Street Journal sums it up:

Who needs Mother Nature to cause a catastrophe? Florida's politicians are busy creating an unnatural disaster in their state insurance market that will blow away taxpayers when the next big hurricane hits. And we mean taxpayers across America.

Last month State Farm pulled the plug on its 1.2 million homeowner policies in Florida, citing the state's punishing price controls. The state's largest insurer joins a raft of competitors that have already reduced or dumped their property and casualty business in the Sunshine State, including Prudential, Allstate, Nationwide and USAA. This is the inevitable result of Governor Charlie Crist's drive to control property-insurance premiums. The Republican also lobbied his GOP legislature to make the state government a giant competitor in the market, undercutting private insurers. . . .

Every month in Florida, State Farm loses $20 million. So it finally said, No mas.

Meanwhile, Floridians have been signing up with Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the state-run insurer that Mr. Crist unleashed in 2007. Because it has an implicit taxpayer guarantee, and because its actuarial assumptions are, well, loose, Citizens can offer lower premiums than private competitors can. Citizens has become the largest insurer in the state, with 1.1 million policies.

Mr. Crist has thus guaranteed that Floridians, rather than the global insurance industry, will be on the hook for property damage when the next Katrina hits. Citizens is facing more than $400 billion in potential exposure, yet Citizens Chief Financial Officer Sharon Binnun was recently cited in the South Florida Sun Sentinel as saying it had only $3.4 billion in net assets. . . .

Some 25% of the coastal property in U.S. hurricane zones is located in Florida, and another storm is inevitable. To pay for those claims when they come, Mr. Crist will either have to raise taxes on Floridians, or beg Congress for a rescue. . . .

It's scary to imagine the bill taxpayers will get when the next big hurricane hits Florida. It's even scarier to think Mr. Crist is being touted as a potential GOP candidate for the White House.

No kidding.

Disproving Beethoven, and other failures of thought

My lovely wife has been sitting at her computer and intermittently reading me bits from an essay by Dorothy L. Sayers titled "The Lost Tools of Learning." Like most Sayers, it's thoughtful, incisive, pungent, and frequently funny. She identifies the problem with education in her time (a problem which I don't think has changed all that much in the 62 years since she wrote this piece) this way:

Another quotation from the same issue of the TLS comes in fittingly here to wind up this random collection of disquieting thoughts—this time from a review of Sir Richard Livingstone's "Some Tasks for Education": "More than once the reader is reminded of the value of an intensive study of at least one subject, so as to learn 'the meaning of knowledge' and what precision and persistence is needed to attain it. Yet there is elsewhere full recognition of the distressing fact that a man may be master in one field and show no better judgement than his neighbor anywhere else; he remembers what he has learnt, but forgets altogether how he learned it."

I would draw your attention particularly to that last sentence, which offers an explanation of what the writer rightly calls the "distressing fact" that the intellectual skills bestowed upon us by our education are not readily transferable to subjects other than those in which we acquired them: "he remembers what he has learnt, but forgets altogether how he learned it."

Is not the great defect of our education today—a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned—that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils "subjects," we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning. It is as though we had taught a child, mechanically and by rule of thumb, to play "The Harmonious Blacksmith" upon the piano, but had never taught him the scale or how to read music; so that, having memorized "The Harmonious Blacksmith," he still had not the faintest notion how to proceed from that to tackle "The Last Rose of Summer." Why do I say, "as though"? In certain of the arts and crafts, we sometimes do precisely this—requiring a child to "express himself" in paint before we teach him how to handle the colors and the brush. There is a school of thought which believes this to be the right way to set about the job. But observe: it is not the way in which a trained craftsman will go about to teach himself a new medium. He, having learned by experience the best way to economize labor and take the thing by the right end, will start off by doodling about on an odd piece of material, in order to "give himself the feel of the tool."

This is, I think, very much to the point even today—and that despite a great deal of talk from educators about "teaching children how to think, not what to think." The reasons for that, and her proposed solution, she lays out in the body of the essay. As to the evidence of the continuing accuracy of her diagnosis, I offer the utter familiarity of this episode from over six decades ago:

We find a well-known biologist writing in a weekly paper to the effect that: "It is an argument against the existence of a Creator" (I think he put it more strongly; but since I have, most unfortunately, mislaid the reference, I will put his claim at its lowest)—"an argument against the existence of a Creator that the same kind of variations which are produced by natural selection can be produced at will by stock breeders." One might feel tempted to say that it is rather an argument for the existence of a Creator. Actually, of course, it is neither; all it proves is that the same material causes (recombination of the chromosomes, by crossbreeding, and so forth) are sufficient to account for all observed variations—just as the various combinations of the same dozen tones are materially sufficient to account for Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and the noise the cat makes by walking on the keys. But the cat's performance neither proves nor disproves the existence of Beethoven; and all that is proved by the biologist's argument is that he was unable to distinguish between a material and a final cause.

You could replace "well-known biologist" with "Richard Dawkins" in that paragraph, and nobody would bat an eye.

Yet at present

We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away. For if the message spoken by angels was binding, and every violation and disobedience received its just punishment, how shall we escape if we ignore such a great salvation? This salvation, which was first announced by the Lord, was confirmed to us by those who heard him. God also testified to it by signs, wonders and various miracles,
and gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will.

It is not to angels that he has subjected the world to come, about which we are speaking. But there is a place where someone has testified:
"What is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him?
you crowned him with glory and honor
and put everything under his feet."

In putting everything under him, God left nothing that is not subject to him. Yet at present we do not see everything subject to him. But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.

In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering. Both the one who makes men holy and those who are made holy are of the same family.
So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers. He says,
"I will declare your name to my brothers;
in the presence of the congregation I will sing your praises."

—Hebrews 2:1-12 (NIV)

In checking to see if Calvin had started posting audio and video from this year's Symposium yet (they haven't), I was reminded that there were a few from last year's that I'd really wanted to post, and that I had forgotten to do so.  Of those, the one I most wanted to post was Scott Hoezee's sermon from the opening worship service, on which I commented briefly last January; a brief comment just doesn't do the sermon justice.  It's been rattling around in my mind ever since, and when I listened to it again this evening, I knew I still wanted to post it.  I can't embed it, but the link to the audio is above; it's a powerful statement of hope in Jesus Christ in the midst of the brokenness of our world.  I encourage you to listen.

A modest proposal on the definition of marriage

I offer this with two notes.  First, this isn't a "modest proposal" in the satirical sense, along the lines of Jonathan Swift; I am serious.  Second, this isn't my own idea; I ran across it some years ago and no longer remember who came up with it.  That said, here is the proposal.

I would be willing to support same-sex marriage given two conditions:
the abolition of no-fault divorce and the recriminalization of adultery.

Those who argue that it's absurd for heterosexuals to oppose redefining marriage to include homosexual couples on grounds of the sanctity of marriage while tolerating divorce for non-biblical reasons have a point; where they go wrong, in my judgment (and, I believe, on the biblical standard) is in arguing for combining the two.  The best course, I think, would be to hold the line on the definition of marriage while reversing the no-fault revolution—but I don't expect that to happen.  (To tell the truth, I don't expect to see my own proposal realized either, but we'll get to that.)  As a realistic matter, politics is a matter of tradeoffs (except for short periods), and you have to give something to get something.  Given that, I think that no-fault divorce and the lifting of formal societal sanction on sleeping around have done more damage to the institution of marriage than would inclusion of same-sex couples in that institution, and so I think the tradeoff would be, on the whole, beneficial.

Including the recriminalization of adultery in this deal would also ensure that those homosexuals who supported it were actually serious about marriage.  There are those who argue that the true agenda behind the push for same-sex marriage is the desire to bring down the institution of marriage, or at the least render it irrelevant; and I'm quite sure there are those for whom that's true.  I'm also sure there are those for whom it isn't.  The willingness to advocate and enter into legal marriage on grounds that would make that marriage much more consequential (and the violation of it much more consequential) would draw a clear and unambiguous contrast between the two groups.

As noted, I would be very surprised to see this proposal enacted, since there are a lot more heterosexuals who would be inconvenienced by it than there are homosexuals whom it would benefit.   I suspect for instance that most liberal heterosexuals, if these were the only terms on which they could win marital status for same-sex couples, would refuse.  Their attitude, I think, would likely mirror that of New England environmentalists who are eager to see species in other parts of the country added to the threatened and endangered lists, but much less eager when it's a species like the New England cottontail; easy to stand on your principles, after all, when it only inconveniences other people.

I also suspect that many conservatives would dislike my proposed deal.  Part of that is that many would disagree with my arguments for it; just because I believe that it would, on the whole, strengthen the institution of marriage doesn't mean that everyone has to agree with me, or that I'm necessarily right.  Part of it too is that, given the divorce rate among evangelicals and fundamentalists, you have to figure that even many conservative Christians would balk at reversing the no-fault revolution.

I don't know how prominent people of homosexual inclination would react if this modest proposal were ever seriously debated; I suspect some, at least, would advocate for it with a certain sardonic humor, pleased to see the onus put on heterosexual America for once.  I do think, though, that if people were forced to discuss it seriously, the conversation would be both enlightening and entertaining; and who knows?  We might even learn something.

Political psychopathology

That wasn't the title of Peter Berkowitz' recent column on "Bush hatred and Obama euphoria," but it might have been.  (Although "pneumatopathology," a pathology of the spirit, would really be more to the point.)  This is not speaking, of course, to opposition to one and support of the other, or even to intense dislike of the policies of one and strong approval for the policies of the other, but to something which goes beyond both.  As Berkowitz writes,

Bush hatred and Obama euphoria—which tend to reveal more about those who feel them than the men at which they are directed—are opposite sides of the same coin. Both represent the triumph of passion over reason. Both are intolerant of dissent. Those wallowing in Bush hatred and those reveling in Obama euphoria frequently regard those who do not share their passion as contemptible and beyond the reach of civilized discussion. Bush hatred and Obama euphoria typically coexist in the same soul. And it is disproportionately members of the intellectual and political class in whose souls they flourish.

To be sure, democratic debate has always been a messy affair in which passion threatens to overwhelm reason. So long as citizens remain free and endowed with a diversity of interests and talents, it will remain so. . . .

In surveying the impediments to bringing reason to bear in politics, it was not [Alexander] Hamilton's aim to encourage despair over democracy's prospects but to refine political expectations. "This circumstance, if duly attended to," he counseled, "would furnish a lesson of moderation to those, who are ever so much persuaded of their being in the right, in any controversy."

As Hamilton would have supposed, the susceptibility of political judgment to corruption by interest and ambition is as operative in our time as it was in his. What has changed is that those who, by virtue of their education and professional training, would have once been the first to grasp Hamilton's lesson of moderation are today the leading fomenters of immoderation.

Bush hatred and Obama euphoria are particularly toxic because they thrive in and have been promoted by the news media, whose professional responsibility, it has long been thought, is to gather the facts and analyze their significance, and by the academy, whose scholarly training, it is commonly assumed, reflects an aptitude for and dedication to systematic study and impartial inquiry.

From the avalanche of vehement and ignorant attacks on Bush v. Gore and the oft-made and oft-refuted allegation that the Bush administration lied about WMD in Iraq, to the remarkable lack of interest in Mr. Obama's career in Illinois politics and the determined indifference to his wrongness about the surge, wide swaths of the media and the academy have concentrated on stoking passions rather than appealing to reason. . . .

By assembling and maintaining faculties that think alike about politics and think alike that the university curriculum must instill correct political opinions, our universities cultivate intellectual conformity and discourage the exercise of reason in public life. . . . They infuse a certain progressive interpretation of our freedom and equality with sacred significance, zealously requiring not only outward obedience to its policy dictates but inner persuasion of the heart and mind. This transforms dissenters into apostates or heretics, and leaders into redeemers.

Kentucky as test case: the rhetoric/reality gap widens

Of course, the storms that passed to the south of us last week didn't only affect Kentucky, but that seems to have been the worst-hit state, so it stands in for the whole mess (just as Katrina hit Mississippi, too, but you didn't hear nearly so much about that because unlike Louisiana, Mississippi had a competent [GOP] state government that managed the disaster effectively); and that mess, it seems to me, is important for understanding what we can expect from the Obama administration in times of crisis—and this is definitely a crisis, with over a million people suffering, and a number of deaths.  For those not used to dealing with ice storms, J. G. Thayer explains:

The problem with ice storms is magnitude. They cover vast areas, and the damage is systemic. They can wreak havoc on electric grids. Utilities can find themselves having to deal with thousands of broken lines and hundreds of broken poles. . . .

It’s been about a week since Kentuckians got pounded, and they’re still digging out. Half a million people were still without power as of Saturday night, and almost half that many have no water. Emergency shelters are still open, and the governor has mobilized every single member of the National Guard to assist.

Now, by way of comparison, here's Barack Obama in May 2007:

In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died—an entire town destroyed.

Actually, the death toll was 12, so then-Sen. Obama overstated the magnitude of the tornado's damage somewhat, but that's still a tragedy; he certainly didn't apologize for using it as an opportunity to bash the Bush administration for sending the Kansas National Guard to Iraq:

Turns out that the National Guard in Kansas only had 40 percent of its equipment and they are having to slow down the recovery process in Kansas.

Now, here's this from the Obama White House website:

President Obama will keep the broken promises made by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He and Vice President Biden will take steps to ensure that the federal government will never again allow such catastrophic failures in emergency planning and response to occur.

President Obama swiftly responded to Hurricane Katrina. Citing the Bush Administration's "unconscionable ineptitude" in responding to Hurricane Katrina, then-Senator Obama introduced legislation requiring disaster planners to take into account the specific needs of low-income hurricane victims.

OK, so the point appears to be clear:  the Bush administration didn't care about disaster victims and didn't do enough to respond to their needs.  Can we do better?  Yes We Can!  Which offers a not-so-implicit promise:  We will.

In Kentucky, we have the first test of that promise, and so far, Barack Obama is failing.  Miserably.  Under the Bush administration, FEMA was savaged for its poor response to Hurricane Katrina; so, did they respond quickly and effectively to help those suffering from this storm system?  No.  Why?  Because it might be dangerous and difficult.  According to FEMA spokeswoman Mary Hudak, "We have plenty of folks ready to go, but there are some limitations with roads closed and icy conditions."  I'm sorry, but that's just pathetic.  For crying out loud, it's a natural disaster—of course there will be limitations.  You find a way to overcome them, or you aren't doing your job.  That's the standard to which FEMA was rightly held in 2005, and it's the standard to which they need to be held now.

Also, the White House website trumpets the fact that in 2005, Sen. Obama visited the area hit by Katrina several times; has he bothered to go to Kentucky?  No, though he did find time to throw a Super Bowl party (with strips of $250 a pound Wagyu steak).  He did get around to declaring a federal disaster area—two days after the storm went through, and only after he'd been asked to do so by Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear.  Compare that to the way the Bush administration and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal handled Hurricane Gustav, essentially pre-positioning the federal response.  For all that the current administration brags that they "have learned the lessons of Katrina," they clearly haven't learned them as well as the Bush administration did.  Their rhetoric, as always, is fabulous; their follow-through, however—as is the emerging pattern—doesn't measure up.

And then, of course, there's the press.  Have they been on top of Barack Obama on this the way they were on top of George W. Bush?  Well, as the Anchoress writes,

Americans are freezing and dying but I guess I’ve missed Anderson Cooper flying to the midwest and crying and Geraldo shouting, “where is the help?” I guess I’ve missed members of the press demonizing President Obama for eating steak and having cocktails with the press while people are freezing and without food.

When a million people in flyover country are suffering, and 42 people have died, we don’t hear much about it. If this was New York, Washington, Boston, (or if the president had an R after his name) you’d see non-stop reports, and the press would be roundly criticizing FEMA’s absence, and the White House’s disregard. Right?

Right.  Or as John Hinderaker put it,

Is Barack Obama an insensitive lout who serves $100 per pound steaks to his elite guests and turns up the heat in the White House high enough to grow orchids while a million of his countrymen are without power and dozens are freezing to death? If not, why not?

Solely because that is not the story the media want to tell. Many on the web—but no one in the mainstream media—have commented on the fact that Obama has not even pretended to do anything about the massive ice storm that has disabled much of Kentucky and neighboring states. It took days for FEMA to swing into action. Why is that not a scandal? Days went by before Kentucky's governor called out the National Guard. Why did no one blame Obama for failing to call out the Guard sooner? Probably because he lacks the constitutional power to do so; but the Constitution hasn't changed since 2005. . . .

A basic reality of our time is that our mass media are monolithic, and what they choose to report (or not report) depends on what fits the narrative they are pushing on the public. If our reporters and editors wanted to portray Obama as clueless and out of touch with ordinary Americans, he has given them ample opportunity to do so. But because they are Democrats and he is a Democrat, they have no desire to tell that story. So "let them eat steak" is not a theme you'll be seeing on the evening news.

J. G. Thayer sums it up well:

If George W. Bush’s handling of Katrina was really such an executive catastrophe, then President Obama’s indifference to the suffering of Kentuckians is unforgivable. But since no one is objecting this time around, what does that say about the motives behind the outrage over Katrina?

Memo to Kentucky from the MSM:  we don't actually care about your suffering, we care about its political value.  Since it has no political value, never mind.

The fact of the matter is, this won't be President Obama's Katrina moment (whether or not it should be), because the MSM won't let it be, and it's just not big enough or horrifying enough for those not directly affected by it.  But if he and his administration aren't shaken up by their poor response to this storm and its aftermath, and if they don't learn the necessary lessons from it, they will have one.  Something will come along from which their media lapdogs can't save them, and whether they believe it possible now or not, the Obama administration will be broken just as the Bush administration was.  Right now, they're sowing the wind; if they don't make some major changes, the time will come when they reap the whirlwind.

Is the Crystal Cathedral about to shatter?

Maybe, if the AP story has it right:

The church is in financial turmoil: It plans to sell more than $65 million worth of its Orange County property to pay off debt. Revenue dropped by nearly $5 million last year, according to a recent letter from the elder Schuller to elite donors. In the letter, he implored the Eagle's Club members—who supply 30 percent of the church's revenue—for donations and hinted that the show might go off the air without their support.

Robert H. Schuller, who is of course the church's founder, handed over the senior position at the Crystal Cathedral to his son Robert A. Schuller a few years ago; after a while, though, it appears he decided he didn't like what his son was doing, because last fall he removed his son from the television broadcast.  After that, the younger Schuller's resignation as senior pastor (which was announced last November 29) was inevitable, merely a matter of time.  The resulting upheaval, of course, has badly damaged the organization.  I was particularly struck by this comment:

Melody Mook, a 58-year-old medical transcriptionist from El Paso, Texas, said she stopped her $25 monthly donation and is looking elsewhere for her spiritual needs. She said she dislikes the guest pastors.  "I feel hurt and confused, and I'm not sure that I want to sit and watch when I know there's problems beneath the surface," she said. "You feel like you're in somebody else's church every Sunday."

I read that and I have to wonder, didn't she realize it's been "somebody else's church" the whole time?  She lives in El Paso, for crying out loud—she's not a part of that congregation, and never has been.

I have mixed feelings about this situation.  On the one hand, this could have and should have been avoided; after all, it's not as if no one saw it coming.  The transfer of power from elder to younger Schuller has been planned since 1997 or so, and for that whole time, people familiar with the situation have been saying it wasn't going to work.  I remember being a part of a conversation in the summer of 1998 among folks from various parts of the Reformed Church in America in which people expressed two main concerns:  one, that Robert A. Schuller didn't have the gifts for the position to which his father wanted him to succeed; and two, that Robert H. Schuller would never really be willing to let anyone else run the show independently, not even his son.  As a consequence, I doubt many close observers of the situation are surprised at how the transfer of authority has played out.  I realize there was no way that the RCA's Classis of California was going to tell the elder Schuller "no," but they should have.

On the other hand, maybe it would be for the best if the Crystal Cathedral did shut down.  It's generated a lot of money and a lot of publicity over the years, but to what real benefit to the kingdom of God?  Maybe it would be better to shut the doors, let the property revert to the Classis of California, and let the classis and the Synod of the Far West figure out how best to use it.  I know there's been some discussion in the past about starting a new denominational seminary in the West; the campus could be used for that purpose, and you could probably cover a lot of the expenses of starting and running a new school by renting out the great glass sanctuary itself to some other church for Sunday services.  Or maybe it would be better just to sell the whole thing and use the money to fund church plants all over southern California.  I don't know, but there would be lots of options.

The bottom line here, I think, is that this is what happens when you build a church on a personality and a media strategy rather than on the gospel of Jesus Christ.  If the driving force in a church is anything other than the gospel, and if the congregation's chief loyalty is to anyone but Jesus, that church is built on the sand, and it cannot and will not endure.

Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.

—Matthew 7:24-27 (ESV)

An observer's guide to the "new politics"

Since we're now into February and the new administration is underway, it seems a reasonable time to stop and evaluate what Barack Obama's "new politics" look like so far.

• Announce strict new rules on the hiring of lobbyists—then refuse to apply them to anyone you actually want to appoint.


• Declare a new era of transparency and accountability—then stop posting transcripts of the daily White House press briefing (and, in fact, remove the old ones), irritatedly duck questions you don't want to answer, and allow your appointees to lie to the Senate.


• Declare that along with transparency, the rule of law will be one of the touchstones of your administration—then appoint people to your cabinet who don't pay their taxes until they get a cabinet appointment (or perhaps some time after that); throw in the fact that one of those appointees, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (whom even liberals think is a sleazebag), was named to regulate an industry which paid him more than $220,000 over the last two years.


• Declare an end to the Bush administration's approach to dealing with terrorists—such as "the imposition of stringent limitations on the ways in which U.S. agents can question terror suspects, an executive order mandating the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, and the freezing of all detainee prosecutions"—but leave enough loopholes to ensure that the rules don't have to be applied if they're ever inconvenient.

In short, posture a lot about things like "the greatest ethical standard ever administered to an executive branch," "bringing change to Washington," and "the moral high ground" to cover over the fact that the reality is just D.C. business as usual.  Funny, but the "new politics" looks just like the old politics.

Update:  Including the fact that the American people will only put up with so much.  Tuesday afternoon, Tom Daschle withdrew his nomination.

A quick reader's guide to postmodernism

courtesy of Brad Holland.  This was published in 1996, so more has happened since then, but mostly, it still applies.

The narrow mind of the literary world

As my lovely wife posted recently, the British novelist Julian Gough wrote an excellent blog post a while back on the self-deluded ghetto that is modern literary fiction.  His post was occasioned by a review in the Guardian—a review of a lit-fic book by a British author, by a British lit-fic author—that was very impressed with the book in question for the originality of its central theme.  The only problem?  Well, here's what Gough has to say:

This is the first line of the review: "The Opposite House is not the first novel to suggest that migration is a condition, not an event; but it may be the first to contend that the condition afflicts no one so profoundly as the gods."

Now, I couldn't quite believe that was her opening claim. But it was.  She really thought that her stablemate at Bloomsbury was probably "the first to contend" that migration "afflicts no one so profoundly as the gods". And editors and sub-editors had let this stand.

Which means that nobody involved in the whole process was aware that Neil Gaiman had spent nearly six hundred pages, in his novel American Gods (which is not "literary", nor published by Bloomsbury), writing about nothing but how migration profoundly afflicts the gods.

I'm not surprised by this—nor, I suspect, is Gough, since in the first paragraph of the piece, he's already diagnosed the main problem with the modern literary ghetto:  it's

a ghetto that doesn't know it's a ghetto: a ghetto that thinks it is the world.

I have no problem with people enjoying literary fiction; I think a lot of it's badly overpraised, but some of it's worthwhile.  What I do have a problem with, as I've noted before, is precisely this attitude Gough puts his finger on, that lit-fic isn't a genre, but rather is simply what's worth the attention of the serious reader.  This is, not to put too fine a point on it, pure tripe from beginning to end, as B. R. Myers demonstrated at some length a while ago in The Atlantic (much to the anger and discomfiture, it should be noted, of the the mandarins of the lit-fic world; but though they did a fine job of dismissing his points and pulling rank on him, I don't recall anyone actually disproving his arguments).  Between them, Myers and Gough do a fine job of blowing away the pretentions of modern literary fiction and its acolytes, and showing that their affectation of superiority to the rest of the publishing world has no grounding in reality; in so doing, they demonstrate that the self-proclaimed openness and wideness of vision of the lit-fic world is in fact astonishingly myopic and narrow-minded.

Would the real issue please stand up?

Lots more to blog about from the Worship Symposium, and I'll get back to that in a more serious way tomorrow; but I wanted to note separately a comment Craig Barnes made by the by in his workshop on Saturday to this effect:  "The reason Presbyterians are so hung up on talking about sex is that it enables them to avoid talking about the fact that the [PCUSA] is dying. . . .  Presbyterians would rather talk about sex than death."

It's an interesting point, and I have a sinking feeling he's more or less right.  I'm not one who thinks we can just pretend our intradenominational disputes over sexual ethics aren't there, or aren't significant, because they are—but I have tended to think that if we could somehow just agree to put everything on hold for a while and put our energies instead into revitalizing older churches and planting new ones, as my other denomination (the Reformed Church in America) is doing, that the Presbyterian Church (USA) would be a lot better off, and in a much healthier position to have (and survive) the debate.  If the Rev. Dr. Barnes is right, though, I'm not so sure; if he's right, we'd just find something else to sabotage ourselves.  Which suggests that some other approach is in order.  I just wish I had an idea what.