Author Archives: Rob Harrison

Well, of course they are

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I think Hugh Hewitt’s missing the point a bit on Barack Obama (which is rather like a donkey telling an elephant his nose is unimpressive, but bear with me). Hewitt writes,

What Obama has won is the heart of the left, and they don’t care that he cannot win Pennsylvania or Ohio in the fall. They want one of their own. They prefer six months of theater they produce to four years of power in which they have supporting roles.So the Democrats, fresh off the 2004 rejection of an elitist senator from the far left edge of their party, will choose to nominate an elitist senator from an even farther left precinct of their party, only one much less experienced than John Kerry.

Now, I don’t disagree with any of that; but the key here is, the Soros/MoveOn/DailyKos crowd do. First, they think Sen. Obama can win in the fall. Second, even if, should someone press them, they might concede that Hillary Clinton would have a better chance, they wouldn’t care: they believe the current climate is hostile enough to Republicans that this time they have a shot at electing a President who straight out thinks like them. They believe that this year, they have a real shot at electing “an elitist senator from an even farther left precinct of their party,” even though that didn’t work four years ago, and they’re not willing to give that up for a less-satisfying victory (another Clinton). After all, if Sen. Clinton wins, their odds of electing someone as liberal as Sen. Obama President any time in the near future go down; whereas if John McCain wins, they’ve convinced themselves that their odds of getting what they want will be even better four years from now (scroll down to the first comment). With that sort of mindset, whyever should they settle for less than what they really want in a nominee?

Children as buying machines

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That’s one of Heather McDougal’s complaints about TV on Cabinet of Wonders, in her post to which I linked last week:

2. People are trying to sell me stuff the whole time and are counting on me not noticing that they are trying to sell me stuff.2a. When people are trying to sell me stuff, they are willing to do anything they can to get me to buy it, including working really hard at making me hate myself so their product can be the solution.2b. The people who want to sell me stuff are also thinking of my children as a commodity to be bought and sold, and have absolutely no compunction about trying to turn three-year-olds into buying machines (or using the whine factor to try to get little ones to turn me into their own personal buying machine). Also, they want to make my daughters feel bad about themselves so they will buy things. Yuck.

This isn’t a secret, of course; anyone who pays attention (and especially anyone with children) can see it. Still, it’s no end galling how shameless media companies are about it; and perhaps the most galling thing is that the worst of all of them that way is Disney. Condé Nast Portfolio (an excellent magazine, btw, and a great read even if you don’t read business magazines) has an article up titled “How Mickey Got His Groove Back” which makes this appallingly clear. If you’ve never run across any of the Mouse’s cynical exercises in making money off so-called “tweens” (do we have to keep slicing childhood up into ever-smaller marketing segments?), Karl Taro Greenfeld’s opening paragraph should give you the idea:

Perhaps it was my daughters singing along with Hannah Montana—“Get up, get loud, we’re pumping up the party now!”—eight times in a row that morning. Or maybe it was the 16 times I overheard High School Musical and High School Musical 2 playing on the television in the living room, or the several hundred dollars my wife and I spend on Disney tween products—aimed at nine- to 14-year-old girls—every year. Or the fact that a magazine (thankfully, not this one) asked me to profile a Disney tween star and then, almost before I could ask “Who?,” told me that another publication had beaten them to it. Finally, after my eight-year-old daughter pointed to a picture of Hillary Clinton and said she was supporting her for president “because she’s named Hillary, like Hilary Duff,” I decided I had to know: Who is doing this to me?

I wonder what Walt would think.

Old evils never die

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they just find new sewers to hide in; as long as our hearts continue polluted, there will truly be nothing new under the sun. Thus, for example, if you think slavery was a peculiarly American crime that basically disappeared in 1865, think again. If Logan Paul Gage’s article on E. Benjamin Skinner’s exploration of contemporary slavery (an exploration recounted in detail in his book A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery) doesn’t make you want to weep, your heart is as hard and cold as the Hope diamond.

Bought With a Price

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(Psalm 47, Jeremiah 32:1-15; 1 Corinthians 6:19-20)

The situation was grim. The Babylonian armies were closing in on Jerusalem; barring a miraculous deliverance from God, it was only a matter of time before the capital city, the city of the Temple of God, fell—and God had made it very clear that no deliverance was coming. Through Jeremiah, in fact, he had promised Zedekiah the king that he would be captured and taken to Babylon to face King Nebuchadnezzer, and there was nothing he could do to avoid it; any effort he might make to fight Babylon was doomed to inevitable failure. That prophecy, by the way, that Zedekiah quotes here is found in Jeremiah 34—the book is not arranged in chronological order—and the details of the prophet’s imprisonment are relayed in chapters 37 and 38. Jeremiah was originally locked up for leaving the city, on charges that he was deserting to the Babylonians, which tells you how bad the situation was; but though the king transferred him to a sort of protective custody in the courtyard of the guard, he refused to set him free, because Jeremiah refused to give him a better word from God. So Jeremiah remained in custody, in a doomed city, held there by a doomed king, as the Babylonians closed in and the country fell into their hands.

It was a dark day indeed; not the sort of economic or political climate that tends to encourage things like buying property. And yet, it was in just these times, with the country dying and its independence hanging by a slender thread, that God said to his prophet, “Your cousin’s going to come and ask you to buy his field back in your hometown of Anathoth, because you’re his kinsman-redeemer. Buy it.” To explain this a little bit, “kinsman-redeemer”—the Hebrew word is go’el—is an important legal term. We’ll talk about this more later when we look at the story of Ruth, in which this plays a major part, but a go’el had several responsibilities. Most basically, under the Old Testament law, land had to stay within the family—every tribe and every family had been given its share of the land, and you weren’t allowed to permanently deprive your family of part of that inheritance by selling it outside the family—so if a person had to sell part of their inheritance, part of the family land, to make ends meet, a close relative who had the necessary resources would act as a go’el, a kinsman-redeemer, to buy the land and keep it in the family. That’s the role Jeremiah’s cousin Hanamel wants him to play.

Now, under ordinary circumstances, that would be a completely reasonable thing to do; but these aren’t ordinary circumstances, because Jeremiah’s in prison, the country’s being conquered, folks are already being taken off into exile—what on earth is Jeremiah going to be able to do with that land? Nothing, that’s what. He might as well take his money and throw it over the walls of Jerusalem into the valley of the Kidron for all the good buying that land will do him, because he’s never going to see a single benefit from his purchase; what’s more, from a human perspective, it seems likely that no one else will, either. What’s the point in upholding the law and keeping the land in the family when the family’s about to be dragged off to Babylon? What are the odds they ever come back? From the world’s perspective, somewhere between slim and none. And if they don’t, who cares who was last to own a field at Anathoth anyway?

And yet God tells Jeremiah, “Buy the field”; and so when cousin Hanamel shows up and says, “I need money—buy my field,” Jeremiah buys it. I imagine Hanamel was surprised, but that didn’t stop him from going through with the sale. Jeremiah pays seventeen shekels of silver—whether that was a fair price or not, we don’t know, since we have no idea how big the field was or what it would normally have been worth—and goes through all the proper forms of purchase; then, at God’s command, he has the documents of sale placed in a clay jar and sealed so that they will last for generations. At a time when most people would have been buying stock in Babylon, Inc., Jeremiah invests in the future of Israel. Of course, this isn’t his own idea, but God’s; it isn’t really a business transaction at all, it’s an acted parable. Jeremiah buys the field as an act of faith, as a sign of God’s promise that the exile won’t last forever—that against all earthly odds, the people of Israel will return home, and they will once again buy and sell homes and fields and vineyards; in God’s time, someone will benefit from Jeremiah’s purchase of that land. It won’t be Jeremiah—he won’t live to see it—but someone of his blood will. His investment, ultimately, is in the faithfulness of God to keep his promise.

In a way, that’s what Jesus did, too. There’s a form of biblical interpretation called typological interpretation—we see it used in the Bible itself, especially by Paul—which looks for parallels and links between events in the history of God’s people and the facts and truths of God’s redemptive plan in Jesus Christ; in the standard language, the original event is the type and the truth to which it points is called the antitype. You have to be careful reading the Bible in this way, because it’s easy to go too far; but as we see in Paul’s letters, properly used, it can help us as we seek to know God and to understand his ways. Such, I think, is the case here.

Jeremiah’s purchase of the field is a type of what Christ did for us. Jeremiah was in the city of the Temple of God, Jerusalem; his home, Anathoth, was occupied territory; he bought a field in occupied territory as a sign of God’s promise that he would reclaim that territory and his people would be restored to their home in it, and preserved the deeds in a clay jar to bear witness to that promise. In the same way, Jesus left the heavenly temple to buy a field in occupied territory—the field of our flesh; in our flesh, he bought the title to our flesh, to our very lives, with his death. We have been bought with a price. In his resurrection, gave us a sign of God’s promise that one day he will reclaim this territory and restore us to our proper home in it. And in his ascension, he took the clay jar of our flesh up into heaven with him, carrying that title deed, holding that sure hope of the fulfillment of God’s promise where nothing this world can do can get at it, or keep him from returning to fulfill that promise.

In this world, we’re under foreign occupation by the powers of sin and death; even those of us who follow Christ still fight the strong pull of sin in our lives, and our bodies still die. While we live, some of us do well under that occupation, but even then, that’s subject to change at any time; at any time, we could lose all that we hold dear. But we have this hope: this will end. The Babylonians, if you will, are not going to be here forever. The day will come when Jesus will return in power, the forces that occupy this world will be swept away, and everything, including us, will be remade new, and all will be as it is supposed to be. The people of God will live in the land he has promised us, and at the name of Jesus every knee will bow to our proper king, and everything will be, finally, right.

Song of the Week

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Hap’s latest post, “The Beauty of Broken Glass,” plays with some wonderful images, and I really encourage you to read it if you haven’t. For my part, given my brain’s tendency to spin off in random directions, it’s no surprise that one of the things it brought to mind was this song by Andrew Peterson. (My wife doesn’t care for it, but I like it quite well.)

Just As I Am
What’s that on the ground?
It’s what’s left of my heart;
Somebody named Jesus broke it to pieces
And planted the shards.
And they’re coming up green, and they’re coming in bloom;
I can hardly believe this is all coming true.Just as I am, and just as I was,
Just as I will be He loves me, He does.
He showed me the day that He shed His own blood:
He loves me, oh, He loves me, He does.All of my life
I’ve held on to this fear—
These thistles and vines ensnare and entwine
What flowers appear—
It’s the fear that I’ll fall one too many times;
It’s the fear that His love is no better than mine.
(But he tells me that)ChorusWell, it’s time now to harvest
What little that grew;
This man they call Jesus who planted the seeds
Has come for the fruit.
And the best that I’ve got isn’t nearly enough;
He’s glad for the crop, but it’s me that He loves.ChorusWords and music: Andrew Peterson
© 2003 New Spring Publishing (a division of Brentwood-Benson Music Publishing)
From the album Love & Thunder, by Andrew Peterson

Distortion

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The Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson has a column up on WorldNetDaily on the racism that infects some black churches. His analysis makes a certain amount of sense, and he may well be right that “since the exodus of men, black preachers have retooled their message to play to women’s egos”; certainly, one hears enough of that sort of complaint aimed at the white church. Where the Rev. Peterson goes wrong is in the next paragraph:

Bishop T.D. Jakes, for instance, has built an empire by targeting the emotional needs of women. His popular books include “Loose That Man & Let Him Go” and “The Lady, Her Lover, Her Lord.”

There are two main problems here, which are (predictably) interrelated. The first is that this is a gross oversimplification of Bishop Jakes’ ministry. Rev. Peterson’s statements would lead one to expect that Bishop Jakes has written a flood of books “targeting the emotional needs of women,” when even a cursory look will show the contrary. Second, Rev. Peterson writes so as to imply from context that Loose That Man & Let Him Go! is a book addressed to women encouraging them to dump the men in their lives, when nothing could be farther from the truth. In actual fact, the book is one of a number which Bishop Jakes has addressed to men urging men “to let Jesus take hold of their limitations and bondages and to come forth into the light of all God has planned for them”—a message I remember him preaching at Promise Keepers—and he’s been doing that rather longer than he’s been writing to women; the first of his books addressed to women, Woman, Thou Art Loosed!, wasn’t published until 1994. (Loose That Man & Let Him Go! came out in 1991; the title, incidentally, is addressed not to women but to the Devil.)All of which is to say that the Rev. Peterson appears to have an agenda, which he makes clear in the following paragraph:

Worse, Jakes has empowered women to assume leadership positions within the church, despite clear biblical admonitions against it.

It’s all well and good to speak of “clear biblical admonitions”; those of us who disagree with the Rev. Peterson’s school of interpretation on the role of women in the church don’t see anything of the sort, but it’s as appropriate for him to use such language as it is for me in return to say that his reading of the Bible is shallow, simplistic, and culturally bound. That’s well within the bounds of normal academic rhetoric. What isn’t, and what in fact is flat-out inappropriate, is to prop up his agenda by misrepresenting the facts. Whatever his faults and flaws (and no doubt he has many, just like all the rest of us), Bishop Jakes deserves better than that.

Cognitive surplus, Web 2.0, and the transformation of media

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Clay Shirky, author of the recent book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, has a fascinating piece up on his blog called “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.” An edited transcript of a talk he gave at the Web 2.0 conference, it’s the most remarkable analysis of societal transformations I think I’ve ever run across. He begins with the insight of a British historian

that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. . . .And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. . . . It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

The key insight here is that major societal shifts, if they happen quickly, require some sort of lubricant to get people over the hump until they can adjust to the change of circumstances. (When that lubricant is missing, we get relapses; the case of the USSR after the fall of the Communist Party might be taken as an example.) And for us?

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened—rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before—free time.And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV. . . .And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

He overstates the degree to which that free time went into TV; a lot of that time went into volunteer service organizations as well, especially among homemaking women. Still, the broader point holds, and I think his analysis of the current situation does as well. The shift we’re beginning to see, as he presents it, is this:

Media in the 20th century was run as a single race—consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share. And what’s astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this [cognitive] surplus and do something interesting, is that they’re discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they’ll take you up on that offer.

Media as triathlon—as an interactive activity rather than merely a consumptive activity. I think he’s on to something here. For example, how many people these days get their news surfing the Web, following links, blogging, commenting on blogs, and the like, not simply absorbing the news but participating (even if only on the fringes) in a conversation about the news? And perhaps most crucially, how many of our children are growing up with this as part of their mental framework?

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing. It’s also become my motto, when people ask me what we’re doing—and when I say “we” I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that’s what I’m going to tell them: We’re looking for the mouse. We’re going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?” And I’m betting the answer is yes.

It’s a brilliant article, and I think offers a critical insight into what’s happening in Western culture, and what’s likely to happen next. I recommend you read the whole thing.HT: Heather McDougal

This is the ending of a beautiful friendship

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and from the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s perspective, Barack Obama started it; Barack Obama betrayed him first. That piece in the New York Post has to make Sen. Obama, David Axelrod, and the rest of the folks in that campaign break out in a cold sweat for what the Rev. Dr. Wright might say or do next. I criticized the Rev. Dr. Wright yesterday for betraying Sen. Obama’s friendship and the good of his country, and I still think his willingness to hurt this country in order to take down Sen. Obama is despicable; but what I wasn’t thinking about yesterday is, as a pastor, how would I feel if I were in his shoes? How would I react to being dumped, downplayed and disavowed by someone whom I’d pastored for twenty years, whom I’d mentored and supported and encouraged and poured my life into, and whom I considered a friend? I’ve seen that sort of thing happen to colleagues (admittedly for much lower stakes than a presidential race, and for much less provocation than the Rev. Dr. Wright has given), and I’ve seen how it devastated them; now that I’ve thought about it, I have a much easier time understanding where he’s coming from. I still think he’s in the wrong; I still think he should follow Jesus’ command to turn the other cheek (and that his tendency to preach that to white folk and not to himself and his own congregation captures much of what’s wrong with his understanding of Christianity); but his behavior makes more sense to me now. There but for the grace of God . . .

In the meantime, though, it’s interesting what this whole episode has revealed about Sen. Obama (and, as Hugh Hewitt notes, to wonder what more it might yet reveal; if someone sits down with the Rev. Dr. Wright to ask him a couple hours’ worth of questions about his twenty-year friendship with Sen. Obama, he may very well answer them fully). As more than a few people have noted, the Rev. Dr. Wright didn’t say anything about HIV, or 9/11, or Louis Farrakhan, that we hadn’t heard before—the only new material he had was aimed squarely at Sen. Obama; it was only when the Rev. Dr. Wright came after him that he felt the need to denounce his “former pastor.” Thus Anna Marie Cox asked on Time‘s blog,

Is it overly cynical of me to think that Wright diminishing Obama as a mere politician was the true tipping point? Because that seems to be one of the few new arguments (ideas? rants? conspiracy theories?) that Wright made. Sadly for Obama, it may also be the only correct one.

Perhaps even more telling is Scott Johnson’s comment on Power Line:

In Obama’s eyes, the most serious wrongdoing in Wright’s statements is their disrespect of Obama. From the revered father figure who could not be disowned, Wright has become the the father from whom separation must be achieved in favor of his own identity, or the boorish relative who cannot be tolerated. The adolescent grandiosity and adolescent pettiness of Obama’s remarks are perhaps the most shocking revelations of this entire episode.

The further Sen. Obama goes, the smaller he gets (and with him, his poll numbers). He’s even managing to make Hillary Clinton look good by comparison.

Ascension Day

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On this day on which the Western church celebrates the ascension of Jesus, I wanted to point you to the homily Fr. Richard John Neuhaus gave on the Feast of the Ascension last year at the annual Memorial Mass for Catholic military chaplains, “Bearing Witness in a Time of War.” It is, I think, a powerful reflection on the reality and significance of the divided sovereignty to which we as Christians in this world owe allegiance. “We bear witness to what is to be, and, for those who believe, already is. The Church—her ministers and her members—is the people ahead of time.”

Pretzelbyterianism

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Yesterday, the PC(USA)’s highest court, the Permanent Judicial Commission of the General Assembly (GAPJC), issued the most befuddling court decision I’ve ever heard of (at least since Rose Bird last served on the California State Supreme Court). Faced with a disciplinary case against a Presbyterian pastor, Jane Adams Spahr, who had conducted same-sex marriage ceremonies and made no bones about having done so, and a denominational constitution that forbids doing so, they decided, essentially, this:

  • Presbyterian pastors cannot perform same-sex marriage ceremonies because this is forbidden by the church’s constitution
  • Therefore, what Rev. Spahr performed were not same-sex marriage ceremonies, because this is, by definition, impossible
  • Therefore, she cannot be guilty of the charge, because she was charged with “doing that which by definition cannot be done,” which, by definition, could not have happened
  • Therefore, she cannot be disciplined for doing something she couldn’t possibly have done

Never mind, of course, the fact that she did do it, or at least represent herself as having done it . . . The problem here is that the GAPJC confused a legal prohibition (it is not legally possible for you to do this) with an ontological prohibition (it is not intrinsically possible for you to do this), and thus concluded, essentially, that it’s impossible for human beings to break the law because the mere existence of the law makes breaking it impossible. If this logic applied in our courts, no one would ever be guilty of anything—this logic makes the very concept of guilt impossible by definition.Of course, they don’t really believe that themselves; and so they also made it clear that “a same sex ceremony is not and cannot be a marriage . . . Officers of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) who are authorized to perform marriages shall not state, imply, or represent that a same sex ceremony is a marriage because under W-4.9001 a same sex ceremony is not and cannot be a marriage.” Unfortunately, having said that, they then pretended to believe that the Rev. Spahr hadn’t done precisely what they said she “shall not” do, thus enabling them to avoid the question of whether she shouldn’t have been disciplined for that, at least; this, of course, leaves that question hanging wide open for the next case (and there will most certainly be a next case, if only to test whether GAPJC will have the stomach to discipline people for defying their “shall not”). For now, though, they’ve tied themselves into such knots to avoid having to discipline the Rev. Spahr, they aren’t really Presbyterians anymore—they’re Pretzelbyterians.(Update: with his usual critical acumen, Ed Koster, Stated Clerk of Detroit Presbytery, has identified a few more major kinks in those knots that hadn’t occurred to me.)All this reminds me of a song by the great Steve Scott, whose album I happen to have been listening to this afternoon; this one struck me quite forcefully, given the current situation.

Ship of FoolsSome have called us heroes;
Others say we’ve lost our mind.
Some have called us visionaries;
Others say that we’ve gone blind.
But we’re done with their traditions—
We don’t want to get trapped—
So we’ve thrown away the anchor
And we’ve thrown away the maps.Sail away (sail away) on the ship of fools;
Sail away (sail away) on the ship of fools.The city quotes the jungle,
And the jungle quotes the heart;
In this wilderness of references,
We’re lost before we start.
There’s an aching contradiction
At the center of the search;
We’re moving ’round in circles,
But getting closer to the edge.ChorusAre we prisoners of confusion,
Or are we masters of our fate?
Are we caught in this illusion?
Is it really all too late?
Shall we try at navigation,
Or are we victims of the tide?
Do we have a destination
Or are we just here for the ride?ChorusWords and music: Steve Scott
© 1990 Northern Sierra Music
From the album Lost Horizon, by Steve Scott