This was the sort of week I had last week: I was helping my 3 year old do puzzles downstairs while my 22 month old, Sophia was upstairs in my room watching TV. I went to check on her and found that she had pulled open the (thankfully empty) bottom drawer on the entertainment center and pooped in it. She won’t keep her diaper on, … Continue reading Our House is a Very, Very, Very Fine House
True story: a few nights back as I was getting ready for bed, my husband asked me, “what are you thinking about over there?” “The influence of early Christian views of women on the later status of women in the western world.” Because aren’t these the things everyone thinks about while they brush their teeth at night? Other people’s master thesis are my night time … Continue reading The reason that I blog
Last week I wrote a post titled “Transcending Race and Delusional Conservatives” outlining several ways that mainstream conservative thinking about race is wrong. (And I am coming at this as a conservative myself, mind you.) Today, in the Washington Post, Gary MacDougal wrote a column titled “Jeremiah Wright’s Wider Toll” which is one of the worst examples another conservative misconception about race that I have seen: the “if they would just get over it, they would be successful” meme. The premise of the column is that Jeremiah Wright’s worst offense is preaching a message of racial grievance which leads to a lack of personal responsibility and effort by those stuck in inner city communities.
Now, there is a grain of truth behind the idea that an emphasis on racial barriers can create the perception that it is not worth trying because failure is inevitable. It can also contribute to an inability to overcome normal setbacks and obstacles, since their presence may well be seen as evidence of the futility of trying to attain success as an African American. However, in the hands of many conservatives this relatively small factor in the disparity of outcomes between whites and blacks becomes the entire explanation for problems in black America. The thinking is that if African Americans would just let go of their anger and resentment, stop seeing themselves as victims and take responsibility for their own actions, African Americans would experience as much success as any other group in America.
There are many problems, fallacies and illogical assumptions with this line of thinking. I’ll start with the most obvious one as demonstrated by Mr. MacDougal’s column:
Imagine getting up each morning to go to work in a society that doesn’t want you, doesn’t respect you and seeks to hold you back. Your spiritual leader has told you this, after all. . . If this is the message you got from your mentor, would you expect that you could succeed? Would you try very hard, if at all?” [emphasis mine] Continue reading “Conservative Delusions About Race, Part II”
Over at Christianity Today, there is an article by Mark Galli, the author of Beyond Smells and Bells: The Wonder and Power of the Christian Liturgy about the appeal of liturgy to evangelical Christians. The article is called “A Deeper Relevance”. I found his words on the church’s attempts to be “relevant” to be particularly interesting:
something more profound and paradoxical is going on in liturgy than the search for contemporary relevance. “The liturgy begins … as a real separation from the world,” writes Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann. . . It is precisely the point of the liturgy to take people out of their worlds and usher them into a strange, new world—to show them that, despite appearances, the last thing in the world they need is more of the world out of which they’ve come. The world the liturgy reveals does not seem relevant at first glance, but it turns out that the world it reveals is more real than the one we inhabit day by day.”
One of my frustrations with the church is that while there seems to be a never ending quest for relevance, we are not called to be relevant. We are called to be set apart, to live in ways which are wholly different from the world around us, to care about things which the world cares nothing for and to care very little for that which the world sees as important. Much of our quest to be relevant seems to me to be in stark contrast with the biblical instruction: “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Romans 12:2
In practice, it can be hard to figure out what this means. Does Christian music which sounds like it could be playing on the adult contemporary station count as being conformed to this world? Continue reading “Is it time to reclaim liturgy?”
I mean that really. I hope that God has and continues to bless Peggy Noonan greatly. Because she has stood in the face of the ridiculous demagoguery which has surrounded the whole Obama-Wright debacle and spoken sense where sense has not been welcomed. Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan talks about her indifference to Pastor Wright’s ranting and puts it into some perspective:
I also think that if Hillary Clinton wins because of the Wright scandal, it will leave a sad taste in the mouths of many. Mr. Obama reveals many things in his books, speeches and interviews but polarity and a tropism toward the extreme are not among them. What happened with Mr. Wright should not determine the race. Mr. Obama’s stands, his ability to convince us he can make good change, his ability to be “one of us,” that great challenge for a national politician in a varied nation, should determine the race. . .
I do not feel a sense of honest anger or violation at his [Jeremiah Wrights’s] remarks, in part because I don’t think his views carry deep implications for our country. I have been watching America up close for many years – if you count a bright childhood, for half a century. I have seen, heard and respected the pain of a people who were forced to come here when they did not want to and made to live in a way that no one would want to. Who could deny them their grief or anger? I have seen radicalism and extremism, too. I have seen Stokely Carmichael, the Black Panthers, the Black National Anthem, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Louis Farrakhan. I came to see their radicalism as, putting the morality of policy based on rage aside, essentially unhelpful and impractical. It wouldn’t work as an American movement, not long-term. Hatred plays itself out, has power in the short-term but is nonsustaining in the long. America, and this is one of its glories, has a conscience to which an appeal can be made. It may take a long time, it may take centuries, but in the end we try hard to do the right thing, and everyone knows it. Hatred is a form of energy that does not fuel this machine and cannot make it run.” Continue reading “God Bless Peggy Noonan”
I came across a blog post today by Father Stephen, an Orthodox priest about the problems with taking scriptures literally. On this blog, I have tended to focus on how insisting on taking scriptures literally leaves us vulnerable to being unable or unwilling to deal with reality or to losing our faith altogether when our literal understanding comes into conflict with reality. Father Stephen points out another, probably more important problem with a literal approach to scriptures: it engenders a shallow reading of scripture. From his post:
The Scriptures, particularly those of the Old Testament, are frequently misread (from a classical Christian point of view) in a literal manner, on the simple evidence that the New Testament does not read the Old Testament in such a manner. Rather, as is clearly taught by Christ Himself, the Old Testament is “re-read” from a Christological point-of-view. Thus Jonah-in-the-belly-of-the-whale is read by the Church as Christ in Hades. The first Adam in the Garden is but a shadow and antitype of the Second Adam – the One who truly fulfills existence in the “image and likeness” of God. The Passover and the deliverance from Egypt are read as icons of the true Passover, Christ’s Pascha and the deliverance of all creation from its bondage to death and decay. Such a list could be lengthened until the whole of the Old Testament is retold in meanings that reveal Christ, or rather are revealed by Christ in His coming. . .
A “literal” reading of the Old Testament would never yield such a treasure. Instead, it becomes flattened, and rewoven into an historical rendering of Christ’s story in which creative inventions such as “Dispensationalism” are required in order to make all the pieces fit into a single, literal narrative. Such a rendering has created as well a cardboard target for modern historical-critical studies, which delights itself only in poking holes in absurdities created by such a flattened reading.”
Now, I do know that it is possible to see the deeper Christological meaning of the scripture stories while also maintaining a belief that these things are literally historical events, recorded in scriptures. And certainly there are certain things which we need to be literally true. For example, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:17 “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.” Continue reading “Is Reading Scriptures Literally, Literally Wrong?”
So, I’m reading an article in the Chicago Tribune this morning about the whole Miley Cyrus debacle. If your hiking party left you stranded in a cave for the last week and you have been blessed not to hear about it, young Ms. Cyrus is age 15 and star of Disney’s hit show Hannah Montana. She appears in a Vanity Fair photo shoot this month … Continue reading Who’s your role model?
Richard Cohen at the Washington Post wrote an interesting column today titled “Words Heard Differently”. He starts by riffing off George Bernard Shaw’s observation that The USA and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language. Today, it’s white Americans and African Americans who are suffering that fate. How true that is. A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned a story coming out … Continue reading Separated by a Common Language
that my dear sister Maggie will never be able to run for public office. You see a few years ago while attending UIC, she took a class taught by unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers. She even consumed a meal at his home. And laughed at his jokes! Obviously, there is something wrong with poor Maggie’s judgement and she just wouldn’t be fit for public office due to her “close association” with Mr. Ayers. A real patriot would have stormed out of the class in disgust and taken a bad grade for the country.
That’s at least 2 down for my siblings: Maggie has ties with an unrepentant terrorist and I have a long standing, personal relationship with a man who has been know to say that the government deliberately assasinated all the strong black leaders to protect itself and has uttered the words, “I hate white people” more than once. (That would be my husband.) Who knows what sort of evil malcontents my other siblings have associated with. Heck, my father once said that Jimmy Carter was the last good man in the white house. Surely the fact that his children still maintain relationships with him (and occassionally ask for money) is proof positive that none of us are fit for so much as a city council seat.
I can only hope that others have been wiser in their associations than my family or soon we’ll completely run out of people fit to serve in public office! What ever is this world coming to?
For the slow on the get-go folks out there, yes I am making fun of the brohaha over Barack Obama and his various unsavory associates.
Actually, I read the only in-contact-with-the-real-world explanation for Obama’s ongoing relationships which I have seen a couple of days ago. Dean Barnett over at the Weekly Standard writes that a couple of months ago he called dozens of Obama’s former Harvard Law classmates: Continue reading “I am sorry to announce . . .”
By now you’ve probably heard about the hardships caused by rising prices on staple food items for poor people around the world. There have been protests and riots in Haiti, Bangladesh, Egypt, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Indonesia and Senegal. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, Sam’s Club and Costco have also placed limits on the amount of bulk rice which can be purchased at one time.
My question is how do we respond to these sorts of problems. President Bush has announced an increase in food aid, which might help NGOs whose work feeding people in danger of starvation continue their work in the face of rising food prices. However, it is hard to see how $200 million is going to fix the problem of people who are working and who had been self-supporting a few months ago, but are now priced out of the food market. Besides, we know from long experience that while food aid may be a necessary band-aid to prevent starvation, it doesn’t provide a long term solution and tends to come with many negative unintended consequences.
My question is if America is willing to actually sacrifice for the good of people a world away? Would you support a moratorium on the import of rice for 60 days (accompanied by tax breaks to help those in the industry who would be negatively affected) to take pressure off the international rice market? Continue reading “Dinner, Food Riots and You”
The Upside Down World 