Monthly Archives: December 2008

Bail out US automakers?

Posted on by | No Comments

What would be the point? It would be like Mickey Mantle’s liver transplant; it wouldn’t give GM, Ford and Chrysler a chance at new life, it would only prolong their agony. Giving them billions of dollars now merely allows them to put off the final reckoning and avoid facing the real problem: as these companies now exist, they cannot compete and will never be able to compete. Investor’s Business Daily‘s Michael Ramirez captures their situation with his usual pointed wit (click to enlarge):

When your labor costs are 55.6% higher than the other guy, that’s the kind of disadvantage you’re facing—it’s not something you can overcome, no matter how hard you try. As far as I can see, the only thing that will change this situation is when (not if, when) the Big Three declare bankruptcy and reorganize. Yes, that’s a bad solution. Yes, a lot of people will be hurt by that. Unfortunately, there aren’t any better options, and the sooner these companies take their medicine and file, the less bad it will be; delaying the inevitable will only make it worse when it finally happens.

Why we need Christ coming

Posted on by | No Comments

Joseph Bottum again, from his powerful piece “Christmas in New York”:

It’s not my fault—the cry we’ve made every day since Adam took the apple. Down somewhere in the belly, there’s an awareness of just how wrong the world is, how fallen and broken and incomplete. This is the guilty knowledge, the failure of innocence, against which we snarl and rage: That’s just the way things are; there’s nothing I can do; I wasn’t the one who started the fight; it’s not my fault. What would genuine innocence look like if it ever came into the world? I know the answer my faith calls me to believe: like a child born in a cattle shed. But to understand why that is an answer, to see it clearly, we are also compelled to know our guilt for the world, to feel it all the way to the bottom.

Cokie Roberts on Sarah Palin’s future

Posted on by | No Comments

Those who are hoping that Gov. Palin will quietly disappear into one of history’s footnotes—a group which includes Republican supporters of other 2012 contenders as well as many Democrats—would do well to listen to what Cokie Roberts has to say on the subject, because there’s a reason she’s one of the top political reporters in the country. As the daughter of two successful politicians and an experienced and gifted correspondent, she knows her field better than most. Her conviction that “there’s more of Sarah Palin in our future” is grounded in part in her observation that “the camera loves” Gov. Palin, which is certainly true and important; of more significance, though, is her comment that Gov. Palin feels “she was vastly disserved by the McCain campaign and I agree with her.” What Ms. Roberts realizes and many others do not is that many of Gov. Palin’s negatives are the result of her mishandling by the McCain campaign, not her own personality, inclinations, and gifts, and thus won’t be coming along with her. To expect those negatives to endure and drag her career down when she won’t be reinforcing them is simply unreasonable. Two years is a long time in American politics, and four years is pretty near a lifetime; Gov. Palin will have plenty of opportunities over the next few years to dispell the negative perceptions of her among independent voters, and all she’ll need to do to accomplish that is to be herself.(Note: the original article from the Boston Herald has been archived and is only available for purchase.)

Brief comment on Barack Obama’s Cabinet choices

Posted on by | No Comments

There have been a lot of comments on the people Barack Obama has chosen for various positions, and the significance of the fact that from Rahm Emanuel on, he’s opted to build a team of Bush appointees and Clintonites (including perhaps his best pick, Timothy Geithner, who looks at first blush like the best Treasury appointee in decades); but despite the skepticism of folks like Paul Mirengoff, I tend to agree with Jonah Goldberg and Victor Davis Hanson: in his appointments, President Obama has basically given the giant finger to his leftist base. I think Dr. Hanson is dead on to call this “one of [the] most profound bait-and-switch campaigns in our political history.” Throw in his perfunctory support for Jim Martin in the Georgia runoff election against incumbent Sen. Saxby Chambliss (while on the other side, Sarah Palin was barnstorming across Georgia as Sen. Chambliss’ chosen closer), and it really looks to me like he’s doing everything he can to keep the Democratic caucus on the Hill from running the show. I’m not sure if it will work, but I appreciate the effort.
Update: Here’s Investor’s Business Daily‘s Michael Ramirez’ take on this:

Reader’s guide: posts on grace

Posted on by | No Comments

A few weeks ago, I wrote that “The developing center of this blog, I think, is a core of reflections on the interrelationship between Christian theology and praxis and American politics.” That said, there are other major themes running through these posts as well; of those, surely the most important thing I think and write about is the grace of God, and why it’s so hard for us to live by.

Umm, what was that about grace?
One of the biggest mistakes we can make is to forget the difference between grace and justice, and start to imagine that we have earned God’s favor.

1 Timothy and the misdirected conscience of the West
The word “gospel” means “good news,” and the gospel of grace truly is good news . . . but we often don’t receive it as good news, because it isn’t what we want to hear

.The Christian discipline of forgiveness
Forgiveness, repentance, and the Gordian knot
We not only need to receive grace, we need to give it—for our own sake as well as for others’.

Justice and mercy
A thought on the relationship between the two.

The lust of the world, the grace of God, and the heart of the church
Why do we keep sliding into legalism? Because legalistic religion lets us take the credit.

The crucial challenge of living by grace
The key to living by grace is gratitude to God.

The cost of grace
On grace as God’s free gift, and why it isn’t cheap.

No matter how far you run, the Father’s heart goes farther
We’re all prodigals in need of grace—and we’re all offered it, whether we want it or not.

From the library

Posted on by | No Comments

A couple days ago, I pulled The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract off the shelf for a little light reading, and was interested to run across this item (the title is original):

YOU’D HAVE A HECK OF A TIME PROVING HE WAS WRONGIn 1960 Jackie Robinson went to visit both of the presidential candidates, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. He endorsed Nixon. In 1964 Robinson worked for Barry Goldwater. He felt that Lyndon Johnson, by politicizing the race issue, would ultimately undermine support for civil rights—as, of course, he did. Robinson realized that civil rights gains could not continue without the support of both political parties. “It would make everything I worked for meaningless,” Robinson told Roger Kahn, “if baseball is integrated but political parties were segregated.”

Make of that what you will, but Jackie Robinson was nobody’s fool. I’m reminded of the question someone asked recently (I don’t remember where I read it), would Americans have been so ready to elect Barack Obama to the White House if they hadn’t grown used to seeing first Colin Powell and then Condoleeza Rice on the news every night as Secretary of State?

The cost of grace

Posted on by | 2 Comments

A week or so ago, I posted a quote from Dan Allender:

The cost for the recipient of God’s grace is nothing—and no price could be higher for arrogant people to pay.

Bill over at The Thinklings picked that up and posted it there as well, being kind enough to tip the hat to me; in so doing, he sparked a bit of an objection from Joseph D. Walch, whom Thinklings readers will recognize as the site’s resident Mormon commentator. His concern, as it seems to me, was that Dr. Allender’s quote promotes cheap grace; but though his concern is laudable, I think he misunderstood the quote. Walch wrote,

I do believe there is one (and only one) thing that we can offer God that is truely our own: our will (as C.S. Lewis has so beautifully and repeatedly illustrated). Release man from indebtedness to God by saying we owe God nothing; and Man will find other gods ‘worthy’ of his time.

He’s right, but he’s also talking past Dr. Allender here, I think. The point of Dr. Allender’s quote, it seems to me, is that it’s impossible to earn God’s grace, because we cannot do enough or be good enough to merit God’s approval. This is the truth which is so bitterly hard for the arrogant to accept, that we have nothing to be arrogant about. This is the sense in which grace is absolutely and utterly free.

The distinction between cheap grace and costly grace, drawn so well by Dietrich Bonhöffer, deals with what you might call the other side of salvation: not how we’re saved, but what our salvation means for how we are to live (in technical terms, not justification but sanctification). The latter aspect, I think, is what Walch is concerned about here. The key is, though, that to say that grace is a free gift which we can do nothing to earn is not to say anything about whether we owe God anything in return. Indeed, I think it underscores what we do owe God, which is a debt universally acknowledged to anyone who sincerely gives a gift: gratitude to the giver appropriate to the gift (remembering always that “it’s the thought that counts”). What Bonhöffer calls cheap grace is, I believe, a matter of insufficient gratitude—of gratitude which doesn’t understand (or care about) the magnitude and meaning of the gift God has given us. When once we begin to understand, dimly, how great that gift is, and how much reason we have to give thanks, we end up in the same place as Isaac Watts:

But drops of grief can ne’er repay the debt of love I owe;
Here, Lord, I give myself away—’tis all that I can do.

In this sense, as Bonhöffer says, grace is costly indeed; but this doesn’t contradict Allender’s point. If anything, it reinforces it. The greatest cost of grace is the cost to our ego of accepting that it’s free.

The situation in Zimbabwe worsens

Posted on by | No Comments

As the deadlock between Robert Mugabe and the democratic opposition continues—as his intransigent refusal to offer anything but the appearance of power-sharing prevents the formation of a functional government—the cholera epidemic there that began in August is spiraling out of control. According to the Telegraph,

More than 425 people have died since the outbreak in August and the number is expected to rise due to poor sanitation worsted by the onset of the rainy season.Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has accused the government of under-reporting the deaths, saying that he believed more than 500 people had died and half a million were affected by cholera. Zimbabwe’s dilapidated infrastructure has made clean water a luxury, with many people relying on shallow wells and latrines in their yards. . . .Hopes for easing the humanitarian crisis have dimmed as President Robert Mugabe and Tsvangirai have been locked in a protracted dispute over how to form a unity government after controversial elections earlier this year.Zimbabwe’s economy has collapsed under the weight of the world’s highest inflation rate, last estimated at 231 million per cent in July but believed to be much higher.

If the report in The Independent is correct, even Tsvangirai is understating the scope of the disaster:

A senior official in the health ministry told The Independent yesterday that more than 3,000 people have died from the water-borne disease in the past two weeks, 10 times the widely-reported death toll of just over 300. “But even this higher figure is still an understatement because very few bother to register the deaths of their relatives these days,” said the official, who requested anonymity.He said the health ministry, which once presided over a medical system that was the envy of Africa, had been banned from issuing accurate statistics about the deaths, and that certificates for the fraction of deaths that had been registered were being closely guarded by the home affairs ministry.

As Peter Davies points out, Mugabe isn’t responding to this disaster like a man who cares about his country and its people, either; his actions make clear that all that matters to him is keeping power, never mind the cost.

Mugabe refused to grant entry visas to Zimbabwe for “elder statesmen” Ex US President Carter and former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan last week, when they offered to visit the beleaguered country. Mugabe has much to hide.

Unfortunately, the South African government hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory here; rather than taking a strong stance against Mugabe’s blatantly illegal rule, they’ve essentially aided and abetted him in hanging on to power, and provided him cover as he does so. Zambia and Botswana have shown signs of wanting to stand up to Mugabe, but South Africa is the big power in the region; as long as they refuse to tell him he has to let go of the reins, no one else is going to be able to budge him (short of a sniper with good aim).Pray for Zimbabwe. I had hope for a while there that Mugabe might actually be willing to share power, and that things might get better . . . but short of divine intervention, it isn’t going to happen. Please, pray for Zimbabwe.

Further thought on the discipline of Advent

Posted on by | No Comments

In the essay I mentioned yesterday, Joseph Bottum suggests that “maybe Christmas . . . lacks meaning without Advent.” That may sound strange, but I think he’s right. We live in a culture to which spiritual disciplines like self-denial are largely a foreign concept; to our society, the way to prepare to celebrate Christmas is by indulging ourselves in spending, consuming, and celebrating—shopping, throwing parties, shopping, decorating, shopping, eating, and more shopping. The problem is, that doesn’t prepare our hearts to celebrate, and still less to worship God; it just burns us out, leaving us sick of the whole thing. It essentially makes the celebration about the celebration—it makes it a matter of working ourselves up to the proper pitch of enjoyment just because everyone else is, and of making merry because we’re supposed to make merry—and that’s a very empty thing, with no substance to it, and really a very tiring one. Though the church tradition of preparing for Christmas with a season of reflection and self-examination and repentance is quite foreign to our world’s way of thinking, there’s a real wisdom to it if you stop and think about it.Advent, if we take it seriously, disciplines our anticipation and the emotions that go along with it, in part at least because it focuses our attention on just why we look forward to Christmas; as Bottum puts it, it “prepares us to understand and feel something about just how great the gift is when at last the day itself arrives.” After all, the message of Christmas is that the light shines in the darkness—which means we need to understand the darkness if we really want to understand the light. We need to understand the darkness not just in our world, but in our own lives, to really appreciate what it means that through Jesus Christ, God has caused his light to shine in our hearts. We need to look at sweet baby Jesus wriggling in a bed of straw, cooing and sucking his fist, and realize that that fat little hand is the same hand that scattered the stars across the night sky—and the same hand that reached down and formed the first man out of riverbank clay—and that he comes to us as God’s cosmic Answer to sin and death. Which means that if we’re going to take Christmas seriously, we need to begin by taking Advent seriously.(Excerpted, edited, from “Out of Chaos, Hope”)