• Recently Written

  • Move Over Health Care, Pass the Election Reform!
  • Back from Hiatus
  • Ingmar Bergman is Dead!
  • The End of the Anti-Manichaeist
  • Falwell, and the Religious Right, as seen by the World
  • Religious and Political Themes in Spiderman 3
  • A British Reporter Recounts the Pressures Faced While Reporting on Scientology!
  • Romney has No Comment on Upcoming Film on Historic Massacre by Mormons!
  • My Question for the Presidential Candidates
  • Servant Leadership Must Be Willing to Step Down!

• Categories

  • Uncategorized

• Archives

  • October 2009
  • September 2008
  • August 2007
  • May 2007
  • April 2007
  • March 2007
  • February 2007
  • January 2007
  • December 2006
  • November 2006
  • October 2006
  • September 2006
  • August 2006
  • July 2006
  • June 2006
  • May 2006
  • April 2006
  • March 2006
  • February 2006
  • January 2006
  • December 2005
  • November 2005
  • October 2005
  • September 2005
  • August 2005
  • July 2005
  • June 2005
  • May 2005
  • April 2005
  • March 2005
  • February 2005
  • January 2005
  • December 2004
  • November 2004
  • October 2004
  • September 2004
  • August 2004
  • July 2004
  • June 2004
  • May 2004

• Blogroll

  • 42 dreams of Arizona Bay
  • A Pilgrim’s Digression
  • Bart Campolo
  • Christian Persecution
  • dhalgren
  • Donlan News Wire
  • escape_velocity
  • Faith and Theology
  • Foreign Notes-Ukraine
  • from vigo to vega
  • Global Voices
  • God’s Politics by Jim Wallis
  • Imitatio Christi
  • jam on bread
  • Jesus Manifesto
  • Jesus Politics
  • Kruse Kronicle
  • Levellers
  • lunablue
  • Nukraya
  • Poser or Prophet
  • shnooks
  • Solly Gratia
  • stormfront
  • t. l. blumberments
  • Talking Points Memo
  • The Evangelical Ecologist
  • Touchy Subjects
  • Ukrainiana
  • Vanguard Church
  • without a map
  • XPatriated Texan

• Admin

  • Log in
  • Wordpress
  • Photo Album
  • 
  • XHTML

• Search

Hillary Swank won her second best actress academy award. Clint Eastwood won best Director and Million Dollar Baby took the best film award. I watched “Million Dollar Baby” not too long before I started my lent fast from all movies, except maybe documentaries like “Born into Brothels” and “The Passion of Christ” for good friday. I didn’t find that the film made Euthanasia any less of an agonizing decision than it already was. I’m trying to get catholic super-blogger-stud FunkyDung at “Ales Rarus” to interact with me on why its worthwhile to spend so much energy on euthanasia. I commented the following on a post of his on Terry Schiavo:

If biblically we are all to be resurrected like Christ was, why devote so much time and energy to keep some of us biologically alive a little longer?

We need to ask how we are advancing the kingdom of God here in all of these [difficult] questions and surely err on the side of life and not let [the debate over euthanasia] detract us from the many other pressing concerns that face us today.

I know this is a difficult issue, particularly for people with aged loved ones like myself. In my Christian Social Ethics class, I pointed out that, from a consequentialist standpoint, the issue at hand is not whether someone dies, but what sort of life they are going to live for the rest of their life. I also affirmed that even a life with a much lower functionality can still glorify God and be worth saving. In my group, we agreed that it was necessary to consider the detail in the many different cases and to err on the side of life when in doubt.

I think it is also worthy of note that we should not purport to derive from the Bible definitive answers to all of the difficult ethical situations created by modern technology. The Bible is not a blueprint for right conduct in all possible ethical situations. We do a disservice to it when we make it out into such. And we do a disservice to Christianity, as was made most poignant in “Million Dollar Baby”, when we elevate our fallible traditions to the level of scriptural authority. For a good article on the brutalities of female boxing, I recommend Benjamin Wallace-Wells’s article, “Battered Women:Female boxing is brutal and hopeless“. It seems the sport is too often less about the art/skill conveyed in Million Dollar Baby and more akin to violent pornography.

dlw
ps, FunkyDung, to his credit, posts a positive review of the Million Dollar Baby by a devout Catholic friend of his that has an interest in ethics. It is well done.
dlw

Paul Musgrave, at In the Agora, has some words of wisdom for why we shouldn’t drag out the whole GWII thing in public town meetings. The debate over GWII is done and over with for now and we got many other issues to focus on.
dlw

Carlos posted a link to a commentary by Simon Barrow at Ekklesia on an uproar among British Christians over a play/movie, “Jerry Springer – The Opera“. The protests revolve around the purported rights of religious communities in Britain not to be offended and, “is a standoff with no easy winners and many likely victims.”

However, the real problem here is that the

offended are bad at interpreting texts – which is why they also make unreliable, rigid and unimaginative expositors of the Bible. The Word made flesh, taking on the mess of humanity, is too much for them to bear. They prefer something safe, prescriptive and sanitised. …
The show is not, as they claim, an attack on God, Jesus or Christianity. It is instead an attack upon the values of modern television, and, specifically, upon the American TV show Jerry Springer.

What is then to be done? The answer is to take on the uphill and messy task of “debate, argument and education about culture within the Christian Church.”

At issue is resolving the

hankering among many Christians for the dying edifice of Christendom: the withering ideal of a supposedly “Christian society” preserved from decay by the power of a state Church and by the reservation of a privileged place in governance for its members.

To confront this, Barrow boldly asserts, “that neither Christians, nor Muslims (nor humanists) can [politically] call all the shots. And nor should they.”

Barrow then ends on a pastoral note. He considers and empathizes with the discomfort that the realization of their disempowerment may have for some. He calls on others to respond in a non-mocking matter to the religious right, both in Britain and the US and then he proffers that the end of Christian Church’s past privileged position in society/polity may be a blessing. It may be a blessing because it frees us take the person of Jesus more seriously, without wedding his status to a (theological) system of manipulation and control. For what we need”is a religion of thought not rage, love not intimidation, laughter not fear, witness not war, sign not censorship, reason not retribution, life not death. “

Amen to that! For me, what seems to be at stake is whether we become people that immediately wield the sword of the state in censorship or imposition of our moral values on others or people that reflect on our political conduct as part of our testimony to the power of the Cross in our lives.
dlw

Tony Jones, a fellow Minnesotan who is studying at Princeton, has a number of good recent posts dealing with sociocultural reflections on USEvangelicalism and Practical Theology(PT). I was attracted to his posts because I’ve long been interested in the cultural issues surrounding White USEvangelicalism. I also am much more interested in the sorts of theological/philosophical questions that emerge in our extant policy issues. And, since I am rooted intellectually in the social sciences, I inevitably bring a good deal of that to the table.

Tony’s first post includes observations from the sociology of religion about USAmerican Evangelicalism. After pointing how, USAmerican Evangelicalism, among others, has managed to disprove the secularization hypothesis with its vitality as a subculture in the US, he points out how the research of Christian Smith in American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving shows that the sine qua non of USAmerican Evangelicalism is often its hyper-evangelism(my word:contrast is with hyper-individualism in that it puts a distorted overemphasis on evangelism within the wider context of missiology) that effectively neuters its ability to make constructive changes in society and tends to piss off non-evangelicals. Tony also points out how many evangelical institutions are not going to want to change this distinctive, because it undergirds their existence. I feel this strongly, since my father is a professor at Bethel College and very much appreciate the economic stability his job has provided for my family. I agree that Bethel’s appeal for many of its students and employees stems from its academics and its distinctiveness from the other MN liberal arts colleges. (Sidenote:Check out this thought-provoking post on what College is and isn’t.)

Tony ends this post on a reflective note about the emergent church’s attempt to negotiate a different kind of relationship with culture than evangelicalism has. The fear is that they become accomodationist liberals and the hope is that they reflect seriously on their various cultural influences and value effective social change.

Tony then shares with us about what is practical theology. PT has a more empirical focus that interacts with the social sciences on the extant questions of its day. It differs from systematic theology in that it is less apologetically geared to buttress the position of the church in society and more geared to develop rules for Christian life and ministry. Tony’s working def’n of PT is theological reflection that is grounded in the life of the church, society, and the individual and that both critically recovers the theology of the past and constructively develops theology for the future. In a later post, he raises the questions of how theology should be interdisciplinary and how we should frame the “real-world” issues that we ground our theological reflection in.

I’m an informed outsider to Tony Jone’s emergent church community and pretty much a novice in social theory and theology. I think ideally one would want to do both practical and biblical theology (defined here as theology that engages the biblical worldview of Yeshua of Nazareth as he was remembered by the early Christian Church in the Bible.) that takes into consideration the insights of systems theory. I mean, otherwise, what is the point of calling it theology? Why not just call it social theory with a good deal of historic Christian Theology-speak thrown in, aye?

Yet, I am very interested that there has been such a thing as PT that is under revival. Maybe I should get myself over to Princeton to study this sort of thing some more. That’s exactly what I need in my life, you know more school/hell of the sort that Tony describes.
dlw

Bob over at I am a Christian Too has a number of good recent posts. His most recent one nominates U2 singer Bono for president of the World Bank. It brings attention to Bono’s organization Debt, AIDS and Trade in Africa(DATA) that seeks to raise awareness of Africa’s problems and lobby governments to help solve them. He makes the important point that Bush will be having a lot of say-so over the selection of the next World Bank president and that the US’s rep will be affected by who he selects. This clearly is an issue that deserves some concerted activism in the future. It might also be good to lobby for a public confession and disavowal of using economic hitmen in the future and to take other measures to realign the principals of the World Bank so that it will be more for the world and less of a bank in the future.

Bob also shares some reflections on Wallis’s growing movement associated with his book “God’s Politics”. Herein Bob shows that he knows God in that he displays the spirit of truth, rather than error(1 John 4:6), in his willingness to listen to his fellow believer and his conviction over his own past crass partisanship. He points out how the media too easily passes over nuance and compromise in favor of entertaining controversy. He also relates a story told by Wallis about how his attempt to meet with Dobson to discuss finding common ground on the matter of gay-rights was vetoed by the fundraising department of Focus on the Family. It seems the special interests that benefit from our political polarization have gained the upper hand in our politics, at the expense of the rest of us.

At the root of Wallis’ movement is the concern to root out the cultural wars from continuing to poison our democratic process so that more priority can be given to the poor, the environment and more alternatives to state-based violence to deal with our int’l problems exacerbated by our growing inter-connectedness through globalization.
I could nitpick Wallis, reitarating my own ideas for compromise on the cultural wars issues, but it seems to be more important to point to the fruits of his ministry in that he has given hope to others, like Bob and I.

dlw

Courtesy of Steve K., Ted Olsen has an insightful commentary on the Time’s 25 most influential evangelicals that us bloggers were raving about not long ago. The main points are that our influentials are based on their media exposure, not their service in ministry or knowledge of Scripture. And we are ourselves driven very much by a media that sacrifices understanding for hype. Sounds to me like a recipe for disaster or a prescription for making sure that the control of the media in the US does not get too concentrated.

Ron Sider, in his book “The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience“, decries the lack of accountability for parachurch organizations, like his own Evangelicals for Social Action(ESA). All it takes is enough start-up money and one can set up a parachurch organization and broadside a wide audience with one’s own idiosyncratic message of how we should let our lights shine. Sider expresses a wish that USEvangelical Protestants had a central organization, somewhat similar to the papacy, that would provide biblical/theological accountability to the many organizations that claim to do God’s work, but who may subvert it through their concern with their bottom lines and, thus, fail to call us to be counter-cultural in our lives and ministry.
dlw

Courtesy of Big Chris and then Carlos at Jesus Politics, Chuck Colson has advanced his own ten moral issues facing the US and slammed the muddled Moral Equivalency of the Religious Left with some muddled thinking of his own. And, Wallis has responded.

Colson’s position on abortion is similar to that of friar jape at the New Pantagruel. He is an apologist for privileging in our political activism, abortion and other issues of the sanctity of (unborn) life. He, like me, is against the perfectionism of Mark Noll. He thinks Wallis et al. presumes that all issues are morally equivalent. He argues that upholding the value of human life undergirds all other issues and principles. He doesn’t go into what it means to be consistently prolife or what we should do when neither major candidate is “consistently pro-life”. More importantly, he doesn’t deal with how all of the consequences of how we act politically affect our public witness to others, which affects our opportunity to build relationships with others and ulimately our ability to share about our faith with others. From that standpoint, all issues may not be morally equivalent, but they are all morally relevant and should give us more pause as we deliberate over how to act politically.

I’m going to go through Colson’s ten moral issues.
1. Sanctity of Life: Preserving sanctity of life by resisting the encroachment of abortion, euthanasia, cloning, and embryonic stem cell research.
dlw: This presumes that we are human beings at conception and that we Christians have the definitive answers to these very difficult issues that the Bible does not directly address. There is good reason for us to care about the policies surrounding many of these issues, but we do not need to make a crusade out of them.
2. Religious Liberty: Defending the persecuted Church and others of faith around the world, and defending freedom of religion here at home.
dlw:This would be a great venue for political activism, though we do need to pick our battles, no doubt.
3. Human Rights: Protecting human rights, whether it’s stopping sex-trafficking, slavery in Sudan, or the spread of AIDS.
dlw:Once again, great venue, but one that we will not be effective on if we do not pick our battles better wrt the cultural wars issues.
4. Marriage: Protecting by law the traditional heterosexual definition of the family.
dlw:Why on earth should the legal def’n of the family be the only point under the ways we can protect the family? That is a serious omission by Colson. There’s other stuff we can do to bolster families that will garner more bipartisan support and be more successful than wasting our political capital on amendments that will not pass.
5. Terrorism: Strengthening America in the War on Terrorism and in the clash of civilizations against radical Islam.
dlw: I think we also need to admit that our policy wrt the middle east has been fallen and admit that our consumerism/over-dependence on oil has made us to tolerate some very bad governments in the middle east. We must not be hypocritical.
6. Judiciary Roles: Restoring the constitutional role of the Supreme Court and restricting judicial activism.
dlw: Judicial activism is inevitable because the forms of social, economic and political relationships that need to be governed are changing in matters that do not permit precedent to dictate what ought to be law. Colson and many others need to read up more on law.
7. Faith-based solutions: Advocating faith-based solutions to societal problems.
dlw:That’s fine, but the real issue is whether or not and how faith-based initiatives should receive federal funding. We must be sensitive to how we act in Church-State relations affects our witness to others.
8. Marginalized Citizens: Caring for the poor and restoring prisoners. Preserving the financial stability of health care for the elderly and disabled.
dlw:There are limitations to how voluntarism can provide security for the poor. We need to care about the structural issues that affect crime and prisoners, just as well as ministering to prisoners. We must not baptize social security privatization plans as the way to shore up the provision of stability for the elderly.
9. Education: Improving education and promoting choices within the educational system.
dlw:we need to reduce the tension of the cultural wars so that there is more space to teach about values in public schools. School choice has not empirically proven to be an effective way to improve the quality of education.
10. Media: Challenging the negative impact of the mass media on culture — including speaking out against pornography, sexual exploitation, and violence.
dlw:We also should speak out against the concentration in the media and find ways to tax most advertisements calling on us to consume and subsidize advertisements calling on us to give to help the poor in the under-developed world.

And the list could go on…Much of the critique I made of Ron Sider’s pre-election letter can be applied to Colson. There will always be disagreement as devout believers consider the many issues we could spend our political capital on and how we should weight the different issues. What we end up deciding does not merit the label, “biblically-balanced”, since the balances we work out are not based on principles derived solely from the Bible.

OTOH, Wallis’s message to both parties

is that protecting life is indeed a seamless garment. Protecting unborn life is important. Opposing unjust wars that take human life is important. And supporting anti-poverty programs that provide adequate support for mothers and children in poverty is important. Neither party gets it right; each has perhaps half of the answer. My message and my challenge are to bring them together.

Here Wallis, perhaps wisely, glosses over the inherent ambiguities surrounding when human personhood should begin and emphasizes that the consistent pro-life approach should weight more the protection of already-born lives and pick one’s battles better on saving unborn lives.

I guess I would like to see more religious leaders take on the notion that we are human beings at conception, but I know how much anger and vitriole openly taking such a position can bring. And yet, our dogmatism on this non-essential matter has misdirected our political activism and harmed our ability to help change other’s hearts and that is why it must be discussed.

dlw
ps, I issued a challenge of sorts to Wallis at the discussion board on pro-life at sojourners where I used to post. I reiterate my questions to Sider and challenge Sider and Wallis to raise them before the USEvangelical community. The questions are:

Whether there is any chance of making and keeping first trimester elective abortions illegal in the near future and if not whether it is pure folly to press for two SupCourt nominees that would reverse Roe-V-Wade?(Roe only restricts completely our ability to restrict first trimester abortions, since it affirms a woman’s right to elect an abortion in defined circumstances.) Whether or not homosexuality is both chosen and not chosen and what implications that fact should have for our political activism?

We’ll see if we can sponge some more feedback/interaction on this blog off of Wallis and Sojourner’s increased publicity from his book, God’s Politics.

I just received an email from the inter-faith alliance entitled, “Stop Religious-Based Employment Discrimination”. It begins with..

The US House of Representatives is expected to vote on H.R. 27, “The Job Training Improvement Act,” next week. This is the first vote on the faith-based initiative in 2005 and a crucial vote for the 109th congress.

Simply put, this Bill allows religious organizations receiving federal tax dollars for their job training programs to discriminate based on religion when hiring staff.

This represents a dramatic shift in government policy towards religion as it repeals longstanding civil rights protections which have traditionally protected people of faith and goodwill from religious employment discrimination in federally funded job training programs.

I disagree with them on this bill. I think that non-profit organizations inevitably require an ideology to cohere as a group. The existing laws discriminate in favor of secular over religious ideologies. There are many reasons to critique the existing faith-based initiatives and Amy Sullivan has done a good job of summarizing them. Yet, that doesn’t mean some such initiatives cannot receive some federal aid for parts of their work. The separation of Church and State in the US has historically implied their autonomy, not their segregation. While the cultural wars have been poisoning our democracy and one can easily view the BushAdmin’s faith-based initiatives from a cynical machiavellian perspective, the root of the problem is not in how people’s faith have informed their politics, but rather the relatively shallow habits of political deliberation that inform their political activism. Albeit, it is also true that evangelicals’ theological beliefs affect their habits of political deliberation/action.
dlw

Spiritual Capital is an interdisciplinary social scientific research initiative on the economic and social consequences of religion and spirituality, made possible with funding from the John Templeton Foundation. The program seeks to integrate the concept of spiritual capital into the human sciences by supporting rigorous and innovative research to build a network of scholars for a new field of study.

I’d like to get involved with something like this, someday. I’m not sure how I’d be able to do it in the immediate present, since I’m preoccupied with seminary/Swedish Baptist Pietism/USAmerican Pragmaticism and finding some way to subsist for the next two years. But I may look into other Christian academics in the twin-cities area who may have an interest in the subject and see if I can collaborate with them, somehow.
dlw

You can find info on the writing conference I attended this past weekend here. I recommend Jana Riess’s plenary speech on “writing for your mother” and her presentation of “How to Write a Book Proposal”.

Random thoughts from my notes:One interesting point the presenters made is that when an academic writes for a popular audience that it helps to presume that your audience is composed of people with PhDs in different fields. They do not need to be talked down to, but they also do not need a literature review or a description of all the exceptions to the rule. They want you to sift out the more important information for them and are more likely to be interested in why you personally are interested in a subject. It helps to read material outside of your main area of research and to pay more attention to its writing. It also pays to be an infectious communicator of ideas and maybe to have an Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder(ADHD, like Greg Boyd). While there are fads in the publishing industry, they come and go and it is important to write about something you care about and on which you have something to say in a way that is distinct from what has been written in the past. A writer without passion is like a squid squirting ink. It is easier to get the attention of an editor if you are an academic. Editors get many cold proposals and they pay more attention to people they know. One needs to know something about the different publishers as well and to choose which publishers one submits your work to wisely. You can submit to multiple publishers, but need to inform them of all the publishers that you are submitting to. One needs to be willing to be edited and to consider the realities of publishing, this includes a willingness to talk about your book as product. There also was a good deal of nut and bolts about the publishing industry. It really is a monte-carlo as to what sells, but name-recognition and the way your book is presented and advertised makes quite a difference(which reminds me that I need to rework my blog someday). And as I mentioned before, one can use one’s blog writing to prove that you can sustain a significant readership, but it is necessary to differentiate your book from what you write about in your blog so that people will be willing to buy the book.

dlw

Next Page →