Under the bright (Liberal) red maple leaf

I've been intending to post something regarding the PC(USA)'s recent shameful entanglement with Hizb'allah, and some of the defenses which have been offered, but I'm still mulling that. In the meantime, those who don't follow politics north of the 49th parallel might be interested in Fr. Raymond J. DeSouza's commentary on the recent Canadian federal election. During our time in BC, I used to tell people that Prime Minister Jean Chrétien was the world's only elected dictator, since parliamentary rules essentially turned the Canadian House of Commons into his personal fiefdom. It appears things have changed, which is a profoundly good thing. Here's hoping, despite Fr. DeSouza's concerns, that this opens the way for a recovery of strength by Canada's somewhat beleaguered social conservatives.

Oh, and a side note: in the article, Canadian Supreme Court Justice Ian Binnie is quoted as calling the Charter of Rights and Freedoms "the glue that holds the country together." Silly man; every true Canadian knows that Tim Hortons is the glue that holds Canada together . . .

The mystery of redemption

Of the "other important matters" referenced up above there, the most important by far is baseball; and while I have to admit there are bigger stories in America this morning, even someone so unfortunate as to not like baseball has to stop and ponder this a moment: The Boston Red Sox just won the World Series.

But it's not just that they did it after 86 years of falling short, it's how. Eleven days ago, Boston was down 0-3 and 8 innings, with the greatest closer in the game, Mariano Rivera, coming on to close out a New York sweep; the Yankees were already preparing for their 412th World Series appearance, or some such ridiculous number. And what happens? Somehow, the Red Sox punched through, launching an eight-game October winning streak that might be the most incredible thing I've ever seen happen in baseball (which is saying something). They became the first team in baseball history to come back from an 0-3 deficit to win a playoff series—finishing the sweep in Yankee Stadium! (and leaving millions of Yankee fans wandering around like Esau, wondering where their birthright just went)—then went on to sweep the team with the best record in baseball, the St. Louis Cardinals, on the biggest stage of all, gaining some measure of payback for their WS losses to the Cards in 1946 and 1967. The mind boggles. (Fortunately for one's sense of sanity, despite the fact that they now have the NFL's dominant team and baseball's reigning champion, Boston fans are still Boston fans.)

I don't just mention this as a baseball fan—that day will come if my beloved Mariners ever manage to climb this mountain (which could easily take 86 years in its own right); I'm also struck by the theology of this moment. If one believes in the sovereignty of God as I do, that Jesus Christ is Lord of everything, then that includes baseball. Which makes sense, because God is the giver of all good gifts and baseball is definitely on that list (yes, even in years when the M's go 63-99—this postseason made up for a lot of those losses). And if that includes baseball, then the Red Sox' accomplishment has a lot of things to teach us about the improbable providence of God, and about redemption, because God isn't only concerned with our "souls," he's concerned about all of life. And maybe, just maybe, in the case of the Yankees, this has some things to teach us about humility as well.

Right for the wrong reasons

The Rev. O. Benjamin Sparks, interim editor of The Presbyterian Outlook--a weekly journal covering the PC (USA)--put out an editorial a week ago titled "Praying for the Powerful," which makes an important point in a remarkably wrongheaded way. I agree with his opening sentence ("The first duty of responsible citizenship is prayer – even before we wind our way into the voting booth"), and his conclusion that "the first duty of Christian citizenship is prayer: prayer for all persons; prayer for kings and rulers to keep peace; prayer that the church catholic be kept humble before God, who made all humankind, and who desires that all humankind be saved." Unfortunately, most of what comes between them is highly problematic, to say the least.

The first problem I have with the Rev. Sparks' editorial is its smug, condescending, self-righteous leftism. I was struck, for instance, by his complaint that "factions within the church catholic are trying to capture U. S. government for religious purposes: restoring prayer in the schools, posting the Ten Commandments in public places; outlawing all abortion, and permitting or restricting gay and lesbian civil unions or 'marriage.'" I have three problems with this statement. First, "factions" is a loaded word--by connotation, it marginalizes those groups and labels them divisive. Second, "capture" is a biasing word: it implies that the U. S. government rightly belongs to those who hold other positions (no prayer in schools, no Ten Commandments, unrestricted abortion license, same-sex "marriage") and that anyone who challenges those positions is trying to steal our government from those who properly own/control it. Third, this sentence paints those with whom the Rev. Sparks disagrees with the broadest possible brush, assuming unanimity of opinion which in fact isn't present. In short, it appears that in his understanding, when liberal Christians argue for liberal political positions, that's fine, but when conservative Christians argue for conservative political positions, this is somehow sinister and inappropriate; only liberals, then, have the right to claim that their politics are supported by their faith. Such a conclusion is not only biased, it's ridiculous.

My second objection to the Rev. Sparks' argument is his apparent belief that our government exists to protect the rights of religious minorities but not those of this country's Christian majority. This would have come as a great surprise to James Madison, who was just as alive to the dangers of the tyranny of the minority as he was to those of the tyranny of the majority. (See Federalist #10.)

Third, there is the Rev. Sparks' seeming position that the Western church should have connived at the efforts of communist governments to keep their slaves from reading the Bible, rather than trying to smuggle Bibles behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains. In making this point, he interprets Paul's argument in Romans 13 to mean that a) no "subversion of the authority of [any] government" is permissible, that b) trying to smuggle Bibles into countries which were attempting to suppress Christian faith is such subversion, and thus that c) Paul would argue that the church should support that effort rather than trying to share the gospel message with people in those countries. Given that this conclusion is in direct opposition to Paul's own actions (see Acts 13-28), it is, to say the least, questionable. For Paul, subjection to the governing authorities had definite limits, and certainly didn't include acceding to their demands to stop preaching the gospel. (See also Acts 3-5 for the consensus of the early church on this point.)

Fourth, I cannot see how the Rev. Sparks reached his evident conclusion that if the Soviet government were still in place, we would never have seen the rise of radical Islam and all would be right with the world; this position is frankly ludicrous. Given that the rise of bin Laden and radical Islam was one of the major factors in the failure of the Soviet adventure in Afghanistan, on the one hand, and the fact that the Putin government is no less authoritarian or ruthless than the Soviets--in this area, it can fairly be said that there is no significant difference between the two--on the other, how can this argument possibly stand?

Fifth, I have serious objections to the Rev. Sparks' rather Erastian understanding of the proper relationship between the church and the state. In defining "the real business of the church" as "prayer, listening to the memories of the apostles in the light of scripture (still for them only the Hebrew Scriptures), and baptism, holding all things in common, almsgiving, and the breaking of the bread," he is speaking of the earliest Christians, but if that was "the real business of the church" then, how can it be significantly otherwise now? While he does admit that Christians should call our politicians to be moral and just (well, at least liberal Christians should), his argument makes government dominant over religion and the proper arbiter of religious disputes. Why he puts greater trust in government to act in accordance with the gospel than he does in the church is an interesting question; more importantly, for all that he talks about "the deeply Calvinistic, Reformed understanding of government written into our nation’s founding documents," this ain't it (being neither Reformed nor present in the aforementioned documents).

Sixth, it seems to me that at various points in his argument, the Rev. Sparks is a little casual with the facts, that he simply hasn't taken the time to do the necessary research; my second and fourth objections, above, would be examples of this. Perhaps the most egregious example, however, comes in this statement: "Most religions, including Christianity (though not Sikhs) harbor intolerant, angry factions hell bent on oppressing and killing on behalf of their god/gods." Excuse me? Though not Sikhs? I can only conclude that the Rev. Sparks lives in the wrong Richmond.

You see, I've never been to Richmond, VA, but I spent three years in Richmond, BC, part of five years in and around Vancouver, BC, Canada. As it happens, the metro Vancouver area has quite a large Sikh population, from which came the first Sikh premier in Canadian history, Ujjal Dosanjh (a good man whose time in that office was brief, thanks to the malfeasance of his immediate predecessor). As any Vancouver-area resident who bothered to follow the news could tell you, violence broke out in the area's Sikh temples on more than a few occasions as extremists and moderates fought for control. Further, one of the reasons why this was such a concern to the BC government was the strong linkage between those extremists and Babbar Khalsa, the Sikh terrorist group responsible for the bombing of Air India Flight 182 and a bombing that same day at Tokyo's Narita Airport (which was supposed to have been another mid-air bombing, but the bomb went off prematurely). Babbar Khalsa is the largest and worst expression of the militant strain in Sikhism which is also responsible, inter alia, for the assassination of Indira Gandhi.

I don't offer this to bash Sikhs in any way, shape, or form, or to blame the Sikh faith for the embrace of terrorism by some of its adherents; my point isn't to single Sikhism out, but rather to point out that the Rev. Sparks did so wrongly, in ignorance. Sikhism as much as any religion may be said to "harbor intolerant, angry factions hell bent on oppressing and killing on behalf of their god/gods," and he should have done the research to find that out before off-handedly declaring otherwise.

In general, I don't think this editorial did The Outlook credit, which is too bad; not only does the publication deserve better, but I think the Rev. Sparks' thesis is important for Christians to keep in mind. Unfortunately, while he's right in his main point, he's right for all the wrong reasons.

Still here

Rather a long hiatus, that--crazy summer + technical problems = dead blog. Oh, well . . . life here in the mountains is settling back into winter calm (which might seem odd, but outside the ski towns it really is pretty quiet up here once Labor Day passes), and we have time to think again.

One of my aims this winter is to read Solzhenitsyn's The Red Wheel--I started the first book, August 1914, years ago but was sidetracked before getting very far. It may seem like an odd ambition, but I was spurred to it by Daniel Mahoney's recent piece in First Things, "Traducing Solzhenitsyn," which is a brief consideration of the various ways in which Solzhenitsyn has been misrepresented and slandered in the West. It's no surprise, really; he's a true prophetic voice, and the established order doesn't like prophets much. It never has. (Though if you listen to debates in the mainline churches, you'll hear a fair number of people claiming the prophetic mantle for themselves--usually followed by yet another spiel as to why God supports the Democratic Party agenda. Funny, that.)

What NARAL doesn't want you to know

It's been quite a month, but life's settled down again, mostly. I haven't seen The Passion of the Christ yet, nor am I looking forward to it, but I imagine when I do it will spark a few thoughts. What caught me today was this article on the lack of regulation of American abortion clinics; I'm not sure which horrifies me more, the stories of how bad some of those clinics have gotten, or the fact that the abortion industry has been fighting regulation tooth and nail. Shouldn't "women's reproductive health" be more than a slogan? I have relatives who are nurses and doctors, and I've spent plenty of time in hospitals, both as a patient and as staff, and while I respect and appreciate most of my colleagues in healthcare (well, former colleagues, now), I have no illusions as to the necessity of regulation--and neither do they.

"If you think you understand . . ."

I often disagree with Fr. Andrew Greeley—make that usually disagree—on matters of theology, but I respect and enjoy his work all the same; while I think he argues from many incorrect first principles, he's a man of considerable perception and insight. His latest piece in the Chicago Sun-Times, "There's No Solving Mystery of Christ," is a well-written recovery of one of St. Augustine's greatest insights. As Fr. Greeley puts it in his closing line, "If Jesus makes you feel comfortable with your agenda, then he's not Jesus." Amen. Now there's something that both liberals like Fr. Greeley and conservatives like me really need to bear in mind.

(Note:  the original article is no longer online; the link has been repointed to a reposting of the original article.)

Cannibalism between consenting adults

You might not have heard this, but the lawyer for Armin Meiwes, the German cannibal, is defending his client's actions on the grounds of mutual consent--Meiwes wanted to eat somebody, Bernd Brandes wanted to be eaten, and who is the state to interfere with the actions of two consenting adults? Unfortunately, as the inimitable Theodore Dalrymple points out, he has a case. Can modern philosophy and jurisprudence really come up with any coherent reason to convict him?

Sex, please, we're British?

Sunday's London Telegraph printed an eye-opening article on sex education in the US and the UK. The US has gone in the direction of abstinence education where the UK has emphasized safe sex and pregnancy prevention. The result? Teen pregnancy rates in the US are the lowest they've been in a decade, while the UK is "the pregnancy capital of Europe."

Gee, maybe there's something to be said for traditional morality after all . . .

A tree grows in Brooklyn

Who ever came up with the term "common sense," anyway? There are few things less common, unfortunately—especially in politics. During Advent and the Christmas season, you can really see that in the tortured compromises we come up with to let people celebrate. To me, the answer has always seemed obvious: stop trying to censor celebrations, stop trying to censor faith or keep it out of the public square, and just let everybody in. Fortunately for me, Peggy Noonan agrees with me, and she's made a better case for it than I can.

While on the subject of holidays: I ran across an interesting opinion piece from the New York Times on Kwanzaa, written by a woman named Debra J. Dickerson. The piece is titled " A Case of the Kwanzaa Blues," and it raises some significant concerns about the holiday, concerns I suspect most people (especially those who haven't studied much history) haven't considered. Whatever you might think of Ms. Dickerson's position, I think her comments deserve careful consideration.

"There's too much to do—I'm bored."

Think that sounds silly? Think again. As Charles Colson notes in one of his BreakPoint commentaries, psychiatrist and theologian Richard Winter has made a compelling case for just that thesis in his book Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment. Here's Colson quoting and summarizing Winter:

When stimulation comes at us from every side,' he writes, 'we reach a point where we cannot respond with much depth to anything. Bombarded with so much that is exciting and demands our attention, we tend to become unable to discriminate and choose from among the many options. The result is that we shut down our attention to everything.' That is, we get bored.

Over-stimulated and bored, we start looking for anything that will give our jaded spirits a lift. Winter says that boredom explains the rise in extreme sports, risk taking, and sexual addiction. 'The enticements to more exciting things have to get louder to catch our dulled attention,' he writes.

I think Winter is dead on, but there's more to be said (which he might well say in his book, for all I know). Speaking theologically, the root sin here is the sin of sloth. Now, we tend to think of sloth as laziness, but there's more to it; the ancients defined sloth as "the sin of not caring enough about anything." C. S. Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters, produced a vivid picture of a person fallen into sloth: "a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off," because there is nothing that such a person cares about enough to pull them out of such a rut and give zest to life.

Sloth, at its peak, is what we know as despair; and if Winter's analysis is correct—and I believe it is—it's because sloth has become a major besetting sin of people in our culture. We simply don't care enough to do the work of engaging the world around us, but we still crave stimulation, and thus we demand stimulation without work; and thus the cycle begins. As to what has created this situation . . . well, I think Eastern Orthodox theologian David Hart has done an excellent job of explaining that in his essay "Christ and Nothing." If you're up for some serious philosophical reflection, check it out.

Captors, or rescuers?

If you aren't familiar with DEBKAfile, you might want to fix that. It's a site run by an ex-Mossad agent who still has, and uses, his old contacts. The site is decidedly pro-Israel, as you'd expect, but as long as you bear the bias in mind, it's a great source for information and analysis. Case in point: an article on the site which argues that Saddam wasn't in hiding, he was a prisoner, perhaps held by another clan which was in blood feud with him and his clan. That would certainly explain his odd submissiveness.

"That's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown."

Well, maybe not according to CBS execs back in 1965, when "A Charlie Brown Christmas" first aired; seems they thought it was way too religious—and they didn't like the jazz, either. Apparently, even though they went ahead and ran it, they planned to bury it afterward. But then people loved it, and it won an Emmy, and so it was back the next year, and the year after that, and the year after that . . .

I can just imagine Lucy's reaction to those network suits who tried to kill "the longest-running cartoon special known to man" 38 years ago: "You blockheads!"

"All Americans"? Uh-huh, riiight . . .

I don't subscribe to Time, so I was late in reading Charles Krauthammer's Nov. 17 column, in which he flatly declared, "The goodwill America earned on 9/11 was illusory. Get over it." I regret the delay; imho, Krauthammer hits the nail on the head most of the time, and this column is one of his best. He does a valuable service in exploding the myth that Le Monde's famous "We Are All Americans" editorial actually signaled a real shift in French attitudes (or anyone else's) toward our country. Read their editorial and his column, and see what you think.

Iowa meets Iraq

Denver's pretty fortunate in its newspapers; I wouldn't call either the Rocky Mountain News or the Denver Post world-class, but they're better than a great many major newspapers in this country. (Detroit? Uggh.) That still puts them well below the papers we enjoyed in Canada, but the Great White North seems to be unusually blessed in that department. The key thing is that the Denver papers, unlike many, have a number of writers worth reading; and one of them, News columnist Bill Johnson, is currently on assignment in Iraq, and sending back good material. I recently discovered his Dec. 11 piece, covering his initial impressions of Baghdad; it's an interesting column all the way around, but particularly so for his report of an event that didn't get any other play in the US media, so far as I know: an anti-terrorism rally in the city's Furdoise Square. From his description, it doesn't sound like all that much, but hey, it's a start.

Echoes of Ozymandias

The capture of Saddam Hussein is the biggest news this world has seen in a while, but the way in which he was captured was almost more interesting--he could have suicided, as he'd always said he would do, he could have fought back (his position was ultimately hopeless, but he could have killed as many soldiers as he had bullets if he had wanted to), but instead he meekly submitted. Judging by the initial reactions of the Arab media, I think his submission might mean more in the end than the fact that he was captured.

When the previous President Bush fought Saddam, the fact that Saddam remained in power was a tremendous boost to the Iraqi tyrant's image, because it allowed him to present himself as a survivor who could never truly be defeated. So much for that.

No guru, no method, no teacher

I've been on a Van Morrison kick lately, courtesy of a friend of mine who loaned me some of his albums which I don't have. I appreciate Morrison's music, but even more the depth and vision of his lyrics; recently I came across an article by Carl E. Olson titled "The Incarnational Art of Van Morrison" which captures that beautifully. As Olson puts it, Morrison's work at its best "is rooted in reality (uncommon in much pop and rock music) and seeks to incarnate spiritual truth and meaning in concrete forms, themes, images, and narratives."

Another false solution

I've had a couple of people recommend Dan Brown's book The Da Vinci Code, but I haven't gotten around to reading it (with a three-year-old, a six-week-old, and sermons to write every week, I'm a little behind on time for new fiction—new adult fiction, at least). After running across Sandra Miesel's evisceration of the book in the September issue of Crisis, however, I think that's just as well; I still intend to read it, but now I'm aware it won't be for pleasure. The abuse of history to serve contemporary causes infuriates me, and from Miesel's analysis, this book is a particularly egregious example of that offense. Clearly, though, that hasn't stopped a lot of people from buying into its portrayal of history and Christianity.

Another piece worth reading on this book is one Miesel co-wrote with the Catholic theologian Carl E. Olson; this is the first part of what will be a two-part article.

"Evangelism"? What's that?

Now, this is just sad; but maybe it contains the seeds of hope, too. Apparently, the controversy over Avodat Yisrael, the Messianic Jewish congregation planted recently by Philadelphia Presbytery of the PCUSA, has started Presbyterians thinking about evangelism—many for the first time. According to Leslie Scanlon, the reporter who wrote the piece, "For some Presbyterians, the idea of evangelizing people in the United States—as opposed to China or Africa or Latin America—is sort of a new thought." As a firm believer in the importance of sharing the gospel, I find that cause for depression. Still, if this is what it takes to start the PCUSA doing evangelism again, if this is what it takes to renew the denomination's commitment to planting churches (which is the best large-scale evangelistic strategy there is), then so be it.

And as someone with good friends who are Messianic Jews (some of whom are part of the Messianic Jewish community in Jerusalem, which is not an easy place to be), here's hoping more of them are like Avodat Yisrael—however much flak we take for it.

Backlash

An article by Uwe Siemon-Netto, UPI's religious-affairs editor, posted on The Layman's website (and nowhere else, oddly enough), reports that the latest Pew survey has shown a public backlash in America against homosexuals, perhaps driven in part by the recent court decision in Massachusetts. It isn't that Americans want to deny equal rights for homosexuals or mind being around them, that much is clear from the survey; but almost all groups (including Democrats, by a small margin, though Siemon-Netto doesn't mention that datum) oppose gay marriage. The only exception, understandably, is those with no religious affiliation.

I'm not sure of the exact significance of this, but it does make one think.

"The Occupation of Iraq Means Liberty"

The problem with most of the news the US gets from Iraq is that it gets it from Westerners; even the statements we get from Iraqis are filtered through Western media. There is a cure for that problem, though: MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute). I was particularly struck a few weeks ago by a piece they posted excerpting (at length) three columns by an expatriate Iraqi, who flatly declared, "the occupation is a blessed and promising liberation for Iraq, even if the U.N., Europe, Russia, India, and all the Arabs say otherwise."

Kamel al-Sa'doun, writing from Norway in a London-based Arabic daily, makes this argument for two reasons: the evil of the Saddam regime (which, he notes, it was easy for his supporters in other Arab nations to ignore—they didn't have to live through it), and the past history of American occupations. His hope for Iraq is "a safeguard that will create an open vista in which we can thoroughly reexamine our assumptions, just like Germany, South Korea and other nations . . . which the Americans liberated." Here's hoping he gets his wish. We certainly owe Iraq no less.