“Like thieves who steal a car and cut it up in order to sell the parts, the radical right is now chopping up the sermons of Rev. Otis Moss III, incoming Senior Pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ, and trying to peddle the parts to generate new controversy,” declared a column in the Washington Post on Monday.

The column’s author, Susan Thistlethwaite, is the President of Chicago Theological Seminary. “Right-wing pundits like Sean Hannity used those same spare parts this past weekend to attempt a further political spin,” she said, indicating a NewsMax article and a thread in the Hannity.com forums that posted links to YouTube clips of Moss’ sermons.

To be fair, even a friendly reading of the NewsMax article does invite some incredulity. But as Thistlethwaite spends 500 words defending Moss’ analogies to thugs, pimps, and Tupac, it seems the columnist-seminarian misses what all the fuss is about.

Just as the media was moving on from the Wright controversy, Moss made several in-sermon gaffes that stirred up another hornet’s nest. “We have listened and watched as the wonderful work of our church has been vilified this week,” said Moss. “I guess we know a little something about crucifixion. This is an attack on the legacy of the African-American church.”

In other sermons, Moss repeatedly returns to themes of racial competition, implying in a number of instances that whites intentionally suppress the black population by holding them to inferior schools, insufficient health service, and inadequate legal representation. In particular, critics of Moss accuse him of emphasizing “the skin issue” as a metaphor to spiritual dominance.

MSNBC’s Morning Joe also reported Rev. Moss’ comments as harmful to the Obama campaign. “He came out last night and defended the old pastor,” Joe said of Moss. “He compared what they did to the last pastor to a crucifixion, he basically said, it’s not us, it’s the white media who is attacking us.”

Posted in Campaign 2008, Front Page, The Nation | 5 Comments »

In his column yesterday, The New York Times’s David Brooks, lately on a neuroanthropological kick, tackles the religious implications of modern neuroscience, saying its research portends disaster for orthodox believers—Christians, Jews, Muslims—although perhaps accommodating a generalized belief in some non-God supreme being.

“This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism,” he writes. “Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.” According to Brooks, neuroscience is moving the atheism-theism debate from culturally entrenched—thanks to the tireless militancy (and bestselling polemics) of antitheists like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and the other Four Horsemen—to irrelevant.

Because neuroscientific advances take what Christians call religious experiences and demystify them physiologically into, say, an increase in blood flow and synaptic activity in one’s prefrontal and parietal cortices, a worldview informed by modern neuroscience doesn’t have to be averse to God per se—just to a personal, miracle-working God like Christianity’s.

These recalibrated emphases on neuroscientific studies could shift the atheism-theism debate from believer and nonbeliever to Bible (or Quran) believer and Buddhist (or Wiccan, or Scientology) believer. That is, writes Mary Martin at Animal Person, cognitive scientists are “merely explaining that the feelings associated with god might not come from outside us,” and, in turn, helping to validate nontheistic religions.

Much of Brooks’ thinking appears predicated on his belief that people are hardwired “for fairness, empathy and attachment”—a belief, he suggests, that flies in the face of the theory that genes are wholly “selfish.” But few researchers subscribe to a genes-aren’t-selfish belief. Most of them, explains National Review’s John Derbyshire, a Hitchens-caliber antitheist, believe “deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment” are simply “‘cold’ survival strategies” passed directly from those selfish genes.

Derbyshire agrees with Brooks for different reasons. “We are more and more accustomed to high evidentiary standards in our work and leisure—if only from watching courtroom dramas on TV or doing quality control and evaluative work,” he writes. “It’s hard to believe the average hasn’t been creeping up, and will continue to do so. This saps away at faith in the magical and miraculous . . . Reflective people will indeed turn to a sort of ‘neural Buddhism,’ some kind of organized system of spirituality that doesn’t require us to believe in incredible occurrences in the remote past, or in the individual personality surviving death.”

Brooks maintains that, right now, “[i]n their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God.” But that “was the easy debate”: He predicts the real challenge will come “from people who feel the existence of the sacred”—i.e., again, like Buddhist nontheists—“but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits.”

Though Jewish, Brooks demurs from joining the hand-wringing, saying he’s “not qualified to take sides” even though he is watching the neuroscience science community “joining hands” with mysticism “in unexpected ways”—by which he presumably means “any at all.” The result, he argues, is a new science-based movement that emphasizes “self-transcendence” over “divine law or revelation.”

Orthodoxy will be under attack more than ever, as a defense is laid for neural Buddhism. “Orthodox believers,” he says, are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. . . . We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.”

As proof of where this path leads, Brooks cites a prescient Tom Wolfe essay from Forbes in 1996, written well ahead of the curve, lamenting neuroscience’s Nietzschean move to bury God and make science soulless, sending “modern man plunging headlong back into the primordial ooze”—the very move cheered by Hitchens and the anti-Expelled crowd, particularly Dawkins, who appears in the film.

Posted in Front Page, The World | 13 Comments »

Former Georgia Republican Rep. Bob Barr launched a Libertarian Party presidential bid Monday, promising an alternative to the big government approaches of all three presidential candidates. While in Congress, Barr was a key leader in the impeachment proceedings against former President Bill Clinton. Seeing that Republicans are no longer fiscal conservatives, Barr left the Republican Party two years ago.

Barr’s campaign platform includes themes that Republicans of old used to value. Barr believes that government spending at all levels is out of control.

Tens of billions of dollars in corporate welfare - essentially aid to dependent corporations - should be eliminated. Largesse for middle- and upper-income Americans, particularly so-called “entitlement” programs, must be cut. Billions in so-called defense spending, which protects America’s populous, prosperous allies rather than Americans, must be eliminated.

Barr would push to adopt a national sales tax, replacing the Internal Revenue Service and all federal income taxes, as well as payroll taxes. Barr would also push to repeal the 16th amendment, which authorizes Congress to levy an income tax in order to keep his fair tax proposal permanent.

Barr disagrees with government making surrogate decisions about the lives of citizens, seeking to restore our founding fathers’ belief in liberty and recognizing that responsible citizenship requires everyone to be held accountable for the good and bad decisions they make. Barr says, “the sustained government attack on the sanctity of the rights of the individual, including their right to be secure in their privacy and property, has created a moral and Constitutional crisis.”

On immigration, Barr wants to restrict access to public services for undocumented aliens because, to date, such access exists to the detriment of those who would enter the country to work productively and also increases the burden on taxpayers.

On national defense, Barr is tired of using the U.S. military as the world’s police force: “Our great military has been too willingly and quickly used for purposes other than national defense.” Barr wants to use our military when foreign aggressors attack, not simply for interventionist initiatives.

Although Barr may have entered the race too late, there are millions of Americans who might be willing to vote for Barr to protest government monopoly power and spending promoted by both Democrats and Republicans, as some have recently argued. Over the past decade, Barr reminds us, total government spending nationwide (state, local and federal) has increased from $2.9 trillion to $5.1 trillion in 2008.

For those looking for real change in Washington in 2008, Bob Barr may pose a challenge to both big government Republicans and even bigger government Democrats.

Posted in Campaign 2008, Front Page, The Nation | 12 Comments »

I was leafing through the February 18, 2008 Newsweek at the optometrist’s office and found this article: “How to Train a Husband.” Subtitle: “Want an obedient spouse? A new book says you should coach them like animals.”

Having not much else to do while I was waiting for my son, I decided to play with this a while, and switch around all the gender words as I read, starting with the title:

“How to Train a Wife: Want an obedient spouse? A new book says you should coach them like animals.” (Wow! Much more arresting.)

Paragraph one: “…Sutherland, a journalist who spent a year at an animal-trainer school and decided to apply the trainers’ techniques to [his wife’s] annoying habits.”

The article cites a current BBC reality show called “Bring Your Husband to Heel,” in which a dog trainer teaches women how to make their husbands sit and stay. I wonder how that would play if we snapped the leash (or “lead”) on the wife rather than the hubby.

I don’t know what goes on in the inner sanctum of publishing, but I’ll bet my revised version of this Newsweek article — even presented as tongue-in-cheek — would be dead in the water if I pitched it to an Editor. I know that partly from hanging around the greeting card section of CVS, where you will find “stupid husband” cards but no “stupid wife” cards. And I know it partly from just being alive in a century and a country where there are carefully enforced, unstated double-standard gender-bashing rules.

Posted in Front Page, Odds & Ends | 25 Comments »

Thomas L. Friedman says he wants a president who can focus on getting America “back to work.” He writes in his New York Times column, “Who Will Tell the People,” that the Iraq war is distracting America from reaching its potential. “People want to do nation-building,” he says, “They really do. But they want to do nation-building in America.”

Friedman blames the declining economy on the neglect of traditional values because of preoccupation with Iraq. Noting that working and studying hard, saving, investing and living on a budget “have given way to subprime values,” he refers to the current housing crisis. The National Association of Realtors reports that foreclosures have caused median single-family existing home prices to drop 7.7 percent during the first quarter of this year compared to 2007. The economic situation can also be seen in the rising number of unemployed citizens, which the U.S Department of Labor records as up to 5 percent of the population. But Friedman doesn’t cite statistics. He concludes America is falling behind in the technological and economic spheres based on his observations of New York’s transportation centers compared to ports in Singapore and Germany. He says his arrival abroad made him feel as though he had flown “from the Flinstones to the Jetsons.”

In a Letter to the Editor the following day, Joy Jurnack agreed, saying [I] “believe in this great nation, but want to see it concentrate its dollars and sense on those of us who live between our borders. We want to help others,” she says, “but our infrastructure is near the fracturing point, and it is high time we concentrate on us.”

Friedman was not impressed with Senator Hillary Clinton’s recent TV ad that portrays her as the experienced official ready to answer the “Red Phone at 3 a.m. in the White House bedroom.” Anyone can do that. Instead, he wants “a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people.”

In a comment in response to John Cole’s Balloon Juice blog post on the column, a reader disagreed with the idea that involvement in Iraq is the cause of America’s economic downslide, but reiterated Friedman’s desire for a president who will help the situation. The blogger writes that he wants a president who will tell the American public, “‘OK, here is what we are doing to ourselves. We can’t fix it overnight, but we can make it better, one step at a time.’”

Jurnack says she hopes that the next president will have the ability to foster the values Friedman lists. That would fill her prescription for what she says America needs, which is a dose of “tough love.”

Posted in Front Page, The Nation | 23 Comments »

Robert Novak published a Washington Post column yesterday that has two of its main subjects – Mike Huckabee and Michael Farris – voicing strong objections.

Cushioning the statement with lots of disclaimers, Novak said an anonymous, “experienced, credible activist in Christian politics” told him Huckabee “embraced the concept that an Obama presidency might be what the American people deserve. That fits what has largely been a fringe position among evangelicals: that the pain of an Obama presidency is in keeping with the Bible’s prophecy.” The source also said homeschool activist Mike Farris privately embraces the same view.

Novak noted that both Huckabee and Farris denied the source’s claim, and they did so again after Novak published his column. Huckabee told ABC News the rumor was “total and absolute nonsense!” and the “unnamed source” was an “unbrained source.” On his Huckablog, he demanded, “Where do people dream up this stuff?” If Huckabee really is, as rumored, McCain’s top pick for vice president, the information is even less likely to be true, and there’s even more reason to loudly deny it.

Mike Farris told God-o-Meter, “I’m not supportive of the Obama presidency for any reason,” although he hasn’t endorsed McCain and told God-o-Meter he won’t mobilize evangelicals to campaign for him.

The column continues the discussion of where the evangelical vote will go this election. Farris’ position, says God-o-Meter, is an example of McCain’s main problem: Evangelicals may pull the lever for McCain but they won’t campaign for him. In the meantime, Democrats are intensifying their efforts to win religious-minded voters. The Plank’s Christopher Orr speculates that “a good many non-extreme Christians” will consider Obama as “clearly the more religious of the two candidates, a man who speaks, and has written, evocatively about the role of faith in his life.”

But will it work? Spiritual Politics’ Mark Silk points out that a Sunday Rasmussen poll found that evangelicals support McCain 69 percent to 28 percent — possible evidence that most evangelicals don’t share the view that the “plague” of an Obama presidency is just what America needs.

Posted in Campaign 2008, Front Page, The Nation | 6 Comments »

Since many college students define “evangelical” as “anti-homosexual,” it’s worth noting “The Washington Declaration of Evangelical Identity and Public Commitment” that a bunch of evangelicals signed last week. This Manifesto stresses “the Evangelical message, ‘good news’ by definition, is overwhelmingly positive, and always positive before it is negative…. Just as Jesus did, Evangelicals sometimes have to make strong judgments about what is false, unjust, and evil. But first and foremost, Evangelicals are for Someone and for something rather than against anyone or anything.”

The declaration, developed by evangelicals including Rick Warren and Os Guinness, opposes both “liberal revisionism and conservative fundamentalism.” Liberals “have tended to accommodate the world… to the point where they are unfaithful to Christ; whereas those more conservative tended so to defy the world that they resist it in ways that also become unfaithful to Christ.”

Theological liberals, the declaration contends, typically have “an exaggerated estimate of human capacities, a shallow view of evil, an inadequate view of truth, and a deficient view of God. In the end they are sometimes no longer recognizably Christian.” But the declaration also accurately criticizes the tendency of fundamentalism “to romanticize the past, some now-lost moment in time, and to radicalize the present, with styles of reaction that are personally and publicly militant to the point where they are sub-Christian or worse.” What’s important to remember: “The Gospel of Jesus is the Good News of welcome, forgiveness, grace, and liberation from law and legalism.”

What does all of this mean for public policy? “We cannot back away from our biblically rooted commitment to the sanctity of every human life, including those unborn, nor can we deny the holiness of marriage as instituted by God between one man and one woman.” At the same time, “we must follow the model of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, engaging the global giants of conflict, racism, corruption, poverty, pandemic diseases, illiteracy, ignorance, and spiritual emphasis.”

The declaration also calls for neither a Christian America nor a secularized one, neither a sacred nor a naked public square, but rather “a civil public square – a vision of public life in which citizens of all faiths are free to enter and engage the public square on the basis of their faith, but within a framework of what is agreed to be just and free for other faiths too. Thus every right we assert for ourselves is at once a right we defend for others. A right for a Christian is a right for a Jew, and a right for a secularist, and a right for a Mormon, and a right for a Muslim, and a right for a Scientologist, and a right for all the believers in all the faiths across this wide land.”

The declaration’s bottom line: “We should neither privatize nor politicize faith; the church should be identified neither with the religious right nor the religious left.” In contrast with “being unquestioning conservatives and unreserved supporters of tradition and the status quo, being Evangelical means an ongoing commitment to Jesus Christ, and this entails innovation, renewal, reformation, and entrepreneurial dynamism…. Evangelicals part company with reactionaries by being both reforming and innovative, but they also part company with modern progressives by challenging the ideal of the-newer-the-truer and the-latest-is-greatest by conserving what is true and right and good.”

Posted in Front Page, The Nation | 30 Comments »

After the death of his beloved wife “H.,” C.S. Lewis began to notice a disturbing phenomenon with respect to his memory of her:

…I am thinking about her nearly always. Thinking of the H. facts — real words, looks, laughs, and actions of hers. But it is my own mind that selects and groups them. Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the H. I think of into a more and more imaginary woman. Founded on fact, no doubt. I shall put in nothing fictitious (or I hope I shan’t). But won’t the composition inevitably become more and more my own? The reality is no longer there to check me, to pull me up short, as the real H. so often did, so unexpectedly, by being so thoroughly herself and not me. ( A Grief Observed)

I have noticed the same phenomenon with respect to my thoughts of God. When I drift away from close daily intimacy with him in his Word, I begin, ever so subtly, to reconstruct him in my own image. This process begins to happen some time before I realize it, of course, when I am still convinced that I know exactly who God is. It’s only when I come back to the Bible that I realize how dangerously close I had come to constructing an idol — a god made to look and sound like the desires and opinions of Andree Seu.

Lewis continues like this: “The most precious gift that marriage [let me substitute “adoption in Christ”] gave me was this constant impact of something very close and intimate yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant — in a word, real.”

Posted in Front Page, Odds & Ends | 36 Comments »

As the Burmese constitutional vote rumbled on, ink and internet presses lit up with stories lambasting the polling schedule—everywhere but China.

Myanmar held voting Saturday in all but the two hardest-hit regions, where the ballot was delayed until May 24. Official reports claimed a “massive turnout” for the referendum, which decided whether or not to adopt a constitution drafted by the ruling generals.

China commended the junta’s commitment to carrying out the election on schedule, and praised the referendum process for allowing “free and secret casting of votes on the draft constitution and open counting of the votes to ensure the referendum be free and fair.” Liu Zhenmin, China’s deputy representative to the UN, expressed on Saturday his belief that “with the sincere assistance of the international community, the Myanmar government and people will surely overcome the disaster and rebuild their homeland.”

But critics from the Wall Street Journal said Myanmar should have postponed the referendum to focus on averting further tragedy. The New York Times reported that the government evicted homeless refugees from schoolhouses to use the buildings as polling stations. Other reports told of national officials and generals cheerfully casting their ballots on state television while thousands of refugees lined the streets of Yangon, waiting for help. An Al-Jazeera article emphasized the election’s ill timing and the urgency of bringing aid to the refugees before disease sets in.

One precinct official, when asked about the ballot, said he thought most people did not know what they were voting for, and admitted he had never read the constitution in question. The Times of India reported “visible intimidation” of voters, including orders to affix fingerprints to ballot papers. Reuters quoted a former Australian ambassador who said, “People are absolutely preoccupied with survival—food, water, health, their relatives, getting their jobs back, rebuilding their houses. Politics is the last thing on their minds at the moment.”

Sunday, the Burmese junta reported 28,458 confirmed dead, with 33,416 still missing. Most international analysts predict over 2 million people have been affected by the storm, and the UN fears the death toll will top 220,000. Diplomats in Yangon told Al Jazeera that the casualties may already number over 100,000.

Posted in Front Page, The World | 2 Comments »

I despise cards. Not playing cards, which in the right company are essential. I mean the ones with canned sentiment, the ones we are expected to buy for birthdays and graduations and deaths of pets, and for events marketed by card companies, like Sweetest Day and Grandparent’s Day. I despise the whole commercial enterprise of card-giving, and most of all the notion that two human beings who know each other can’t think of anything meaningful to say at the most important moments in their lives, and therefore must resort to choosing between maudlin declarations churned out by the minute from the basements of hack writers waiting for that big screenplay break.

I’m thinking about cards because it’s Mother’s Day, and I didn’t buy a card for my wife. I would have given my mother the same treatment, but my wife is in charge of all Mother’s Day activities other than her own, and so my mother is getting a card. My wife disagrees with my assessment of the American card fetish. She believes card-giving is a valuable exercise, if only because it is an expected means of showing affection. Someone with my emotional truncation — she doesn’t say this, because she is too kind, but nobody could blame her for thinking it — ought to welcome the opportunity to buy a card in lieu of sharing his feelings.

Coming from the Ernest Hemingway and Flannery O’Connor school of expression, however, I believe that my mother and my wife and anyone else who knows me ought to understand that when I ask them to pass the salt, I am really saying that I love them dearly.

I know it’s not what I value in the gift, but what the recipient values. I read The Five Love Languages, after all, which means I’m acquainted with the four love languages of women. But I just can’t bring myself to buy a card. My oldest son made a card for his mother — maybe I could go that route. The problem is, he’s only eight, but he already has more artistic skill. Plus, she might put whatever I draw on the refrigerator, and I just don’t need that humiliation.

And that’s the problem, I’m so self-centered that I keep coming back to how her gift affects me. I should just buy a card, because otherwise, anything I give her is like a cake without icing. Yet I just can’t do it. It’s the principle of the thing.

So instead, I’m going to check the spelling in this essay, and go to Best Buy, and get her the Mac laptop she’s been coveting. That ought to take her mind off the card. Shock and awe worked in Iraq; it will darn sure work in my house. Which leaves me safe until the next card-giving occasion. And I won’t be buying a card then, either, because I despise them.

Except the ones that contain money, which can always be sent to me care of WORLD Magazine. If my card boycott continues, I’m going to need them.

Posted in Front Page, Odds & Ends | 27 Comments »