Well, if you look at the record, of the three remaining candidates, who’s produced the most bipartisan legislative solutions?
Sen. John McCain. As Charles Krauthammer concludes, “Yes, John McCain—intemperate and rough-edged, of sharp elbows and even sharper tongue. Turns out that uniting is not a matter of rhetoric or manner, but of character and courage.”
I’m not one for links posts, but between the flu and this other crud, I have very little energy for thought, and the articles that I thought I might comment on are piling up. So, thematic links post on the Obama worries and caveats that are starting to percolate. (Which doesn’t mean, btw, that he’s a bad guy or unworthy to be president; it just means he’s human. In his domestic life, of course, his wife has never let us forget that. As a politician, though, his essential appeal has been the image that he’s better than everyone else, that he can lead us into a new political age, and all that; which makes relatively small black marks look much worse than they would for everyone else, because a large part of his campaign has been that he doesn’t have any.) The majority of these I found through RealClearPolitics.
Sen. Obama: all hat, no cattle?
Obama the Messiah of Generation Narcissism (Kathleen Parker)
Obama Lacks Reagan’s Audacity (Blake Dvorak): To wit, where Reagan won by proudly raising the conservative banner his party scorned and carrying it all the way to the White House (“Reagan’s response to the charge of being a conservative was, Yes, I am. And here’s why you should be, too'”), Sen. Obama has refused to do that for liberalism, despite being more liberal than Reagan was conservative.
Would President Obama really help our image abroad?
Certainly that’s one of the cases he’s making for himself, that he would restore America’s international popularity (something Sen. Clinton is also saying she would do). Would his pledged actions in fact accomplish that? Maybe not.
“A senior Latin American diplomat says, ‘We might find ourselves nostalgic for Bush, who is brave on trade.'” This from Fareed Zakaria, one of those observers who should always be taken seriously. This one applies to both Democratic contenders, of course.
Obama’s First 100 Days (Michael Gerson)
The Myth of America’s Unpopularity (Michael Gerson): The fact is, as the Pew report shows, we really aren’t that unpopular in most of the world. (As long as we don’t send troops, anyway.) I can attest to this, at least for some countries, and I know others who would say the same about other parts of the world.
Is Sen. Obama just another Chicago pol?
I don’t know, and I hope the answer is “no,” but I suspect we’ll know more than we want to before all’s said and done.
Barack Obama and Me (Todd Spivak): The brief memoirs of a journalist who covered Sen. Obama during his days in the Illinois State Senate.
Beyond that, go here if you want to dive into the Rezko story. I had thought Sen. Obama a Democrat I could respect, even if he’s far too liberal to vote for; I hope I wasn’t wrong.
And . . . can he handle the scrutiny?
Folks in the media are starting to wonder.
“No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty—except, of course, books of information.
The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of
are those which it would have been better not to have read at all.”—C.S. LewisGiven that, one would hope that children’s Bibles would be books worth reading at the age of fifty; one would hope they would be a joy to read to our children. Unfortunately, however (at least from my experience), that isn’t often the case. It’s too bad, because our older two really enjoy the one we kept; it isn’t great, but it’s good enough. Still, you always want something better for your kids—and now, I think we may have found it. Ben Patterson, who was something of a mentor of mine during his time as Dean of the Chapel at Hope College, and whose judgment I trust implicitly, has a thoroughly positive review up on the Christianity Today website of The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every Story Whispers His Name; Sara and I got halfway through it and decided we want a copy. It’s not just the review itself, either, because there’s a link to The Jesus Storybook Bible‘s version of Genesis 3, which I think validates Ben’s glowing comments. Of all the things for which he praises this book, I think the most important is that it “manages to show again and again the presence of Christ in all the Old Testament Scriptures, and the presence of the Old Testament Scriptures in the life of Christ.” That’s something too many adults don’t see—perhaps, in part, because they never learned it from their children’s Bibles.
When I put up my earlier post on atheism, I didn’t expect the response I got (though perhaps that’s only because I hadn’t run across Samuel Skinner before; as much time as he spends on other people’s blogs arguing his position, he really ought to start his own). I probably shouldn’t have been surprised, however; what I described as the adolescent atheism of the self-impressed isn’t an attitude conducive to taking criticism well, or to having one’s heroic self-image challenged. Given that, I probably should have expected someone to take umbrage; after all, when you consider yourself the only rational person in the room, as Mr. Skinner evidently does, it’s a little hard to have someone tell you your thinking is shoddy, adolescent, self-deluded and shallow.
Given that there was a response, however, the arrogant, dismissive, and hostile tone of that response was no surprise at all. As R. R. Reno notes, that sort of tone is becoming de rigeur from atheists these days.
The intemperate, even violent tone in recent criticisms of faith is quite striking. Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens: They seem an agitated crew, quick to caricature, quick to denounce, quick to slash away at what they take to be the delusions and conceits of faith. And the phenomenon is not strictly literary. All of us know a friend or acquaintance who has surprised us in a dark moment of anger, making cutting comments about the life of faith.
This isn’t how it used to be; atheists of past generations could be calmly superior, unconcerned in their certainty that religion was dying away. Voltaire, for instance, calmly predicted that Christianity would be extinct within fifty years of his death. Why the change?
I suspect the answer is to be found in part in this comment from historian Paul Johnson: “The outstanding event of modern times was the failure of religious belief to disappear.” The calm face of atheism past was founded on its smug certainty that religion was on its way out; that certainty no longer holds, so atheists must actually deal with religion, and as Dr. Reno concludes,
There is something about faith that agitates unbelief. . . . As Byron recognized, modern humanism can easily become cruelly jealous of the modest claims it stakes upon the noble but fragile human condition. To believe in something more—it can so easily seem a betrayal. And because the reality of faith cannot help but ignite a desire for God in others, it is not hard to see why our present-day crusaders against belief take up their rhetorical bludgeons. They fear the contagion of piety.
It seems to me, then, that the sheer persistence of religious faith is eroding the urbane face of atheism, exposing the violent impulse underneath; though Mr. Skinner tried to deny it in his comments, there is a link between atheism and nihilism, because atheism is ultimately a belief in nothing. It isn’t alone in this, either; there are many who consider themselves religious believers who actually, at the core, share that faith in nothing; as the Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has written, the common religion of our culture “is one of very comfortable nihilism.”
As modern men and women—to the degree that we are modern—we believe in nothing. This is not to say, I hasten to add, that we do not believe in anything; I mean, rather, that we hold an unshakable, if often unconscious, faith in the nothing, or in nothingness as such. It is this in which we place our trust, upon which we venture our souls, and onto which we project the values by which we measure the meaningfulness of our lives.
This is, as Dr. Hart notes (in what is truly a brilliant article), the inevitable logical consequence of
an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess . . . a society that believes this must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate a very particular moral metaphysics: the unreality of any “value” higher than choice, or of any transcendent Good ordering desire towards a higher end. Desire is free to propose, seize, accept or reject, want or not want—but not to obey. Society must thus be secured against the intrusions of the Good, or of God, so that its citizens may determine their own lives by the choices they make from a universe of morally indifferent but variably desirable ends, unencumbered by any prior grammar of obligation or value.
As Dr. Hart goes on to demonstrate, this is the logical consequence of Christianity, which strips away all other gods, leaving only one choice: Christ, and the paradoxical freedom of the gospel, or nothing, “the barren anonymity of spontaneous subjectivity.” As already noted, there are many who would say they worship Christ who in truth worship at the altar of their own freedom of choice; but they at least have another option before them, however imperfectly or confusedly they may understand it. For the atheist, there is no other option than “an abyss, over which presides the empty, inviolable authority of the individual will, whose impulses and decisions are their own moral index.” Indeed, atheism is a commitment to want no other option; and faith, even as confused as it often is, threatens that commitment. That, our “present-day crusaders against belief” simply cannot tolerate, and so they “take up their rhetorical bludgeons” to destroy “the contagion of piety” once and for all; and when they march, they march under the banner of Nothing to eradicate belief in Something—or rather, Someone.
Apropos of nothing in particular, this is an interesting little story from Japan, courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle; check it out, I’ll bet it makes you grin.
Have you ever thought about how little we remember for ourselves anymore? Scholars talk about how cultures move from being oral cultures, in which the stories are passed down by word of mouth and held in the collective memory of the tribe, to written cultures, in which they are preserved in books, and now to what they’re calling “secondary orality,” as we move away from the written word; but it isn’t a move back toward a primary reliance on human memory. Instead, we’re simply replacing written media with visual/aural ones—the reliance on technology continues, as we outsource our memories to books, pictures, video, computers, PDAs, and the like. Indeed, a PDA is basically a handheld prosthetic memory; if you have one, and you remember to use it and keep it with you, you don’t have to remember what you need to do, where and when you need to do it, who you’re going to do it with, or what their phone number is—just press the right button, or buttons, and the box remembers it all for you and tells you what you need to remember when you need to remember it.
The advantage to storing so much of our memory outside ourselves, I think, is that less of our brain is needed for that task, which means there’s more of it that we can use for other purposes, like inventing new things. I don’t know if anyone’s ever looked into this, but that might explain the accelerating pace of technological progress. After all, each new invention that frees up a little more of our brainpower from the work of memory gives us that much more brainpower to come up with new ideas and new ways of doing things—and gives us ways to record and store those increasingly more complex ideas, allowing us to interact with them more easily and quickly; and as these inventions enable us, more quickly, efficiently, and completely, to share those with others, that multiplies the effect. So in that sense, maybe the fact that we don’t remember as much ourselves, that we rely on other means to do it for us, is one cause of all the material benefits science and technology have given us.
There are downsides, too, though. Not only can all those things break, or get lost, or simply not be where we need them when we need them, there’s also the fact that our memories tend to be less vivid and immediate, more distant from us—less real, we might even say. Rather than being part of our present reality, they come to us as shadows of another time. To be sure, this would be the fate of most of our memories regardless, and there will always be things we would rather let slide into oblivion—but what about the key moments in our lives, the ones that make us who we are? Consider that to a large part, memory is identity. The more distant our memories become from us—a problem worsened by the speed and busyness of life in the Western world, which leaves us little time to stop and reflect, and remember—the more distant we become from ourselves, and thus from others, and from God.
(Update: I first wrote this, for other purposes, back in the summer of 2006, so I may actually have gotten to this idea first, as I [probably naively] thought I had; but in the interim, David Brooks has gotten here too, from a quite different angle—neither fact of which is surprising.)
Christian music legend Larry Norman died last Sunday morning at the age of 60. In one sense it wasn’t surprising, as his health had been terrible for a long time; in another, though, it was a shock. This man rocked the world for Jesus Christ, casting a vision that all too few Christian musicians have had the wisdom (or the nerve) to follow; and if he was a difficult saint, that was true of many of those whose vision rose above the mediocrity of CCM (most notably Keith Green, Mark Heard, and Rich Mullins)—because they were the people who simply could not be comfortably at home in this world.
Larry Norman helped a lot of people see Jesus who might not have otherwise, and he helped many more see the vast world of possibility in Christ beyond the conventional wisdom. I include myself in that category; his great albums were fifteen years old and more when I first heard them, and they still blew me away. Indeed, they still do, another fifteen years on. Michael Spencer is right: “Almost thirty years later, the word masterpiece is not wasted on the entire endeavor.” The church is richer because of Larry Norman, and would be richer yet if more of its artists had emulated his unflinching integrity and high sense of mission. I’m glad for him that he’s been released to the peace for which he longed.
Maybe so—he’s letting Phil Gramm develop his economic policy. (Actually, it sounds like Sen. Gramm has effectively become not just his chief economic advisor, but his chief political advisor.) Apparently, though I hadn’t known it, the two have been close friends for a long time, and Sen. Gramm considers Sen. McCain a strong ally as well; certainly he endorsed Sen. McCain in ringing terms. It sounds, further, like a McCain administration might well resurrect the old conservative dream of Phil Gramm as Treasury Secretary; so far, Sen. Gramm is saying he wouldn’t want to do that, but I suspect that one way or another, he’d end up the primary influence on economic policy—Sen. McCain admits it isn’t his strong suit, and it’s clear that he’s identified Sen. Gramm as the person whose advice he should follow in that area. (Given Sen. McCain’s strong record of opposition to special interests and pork-barrel spending, the real allegiance between these two men should be clear; this is no marriage of convenience.) If that doesn’t allay the concerns of fiscal conservatives, I’m not sure what could. It certainly allays mine.
This month’s mailing for the InterVarsity Press Book Club arrived with two familiar names on the cover: the featured Main Selection this month (there’s another one as well) is Is Your Lord Large Enough?: How C. S. Lewis Expands Our View of God, by Dr. Peter Schakel. Lewis’ name, of course, is familiar to many; Dr. Schakel’s name is less so, but in the world of C. S. Lewis scholarship, he’s an important contributor. Walter Hooper, in a blurb on this book, calls him “the wisest and humblest of C. S. Lewis’s commentators,” and I think that’s a fair assessment. Of course, I’m biased in this matter. I majored in English at Hope College, where Dr. Schakel is Cook Professor of English (and chaired the department during my time there), and in addition had him as my Sunday school teacher for a while; in that time, I came to have a very high opinion of him, both as a professor and as a godly man, and to hold him in great affection and esteem. That said, I think my opinion is accurate; I’ve valued other things he’s written (a list which includes Imagination and the Arts in C. S. Lewis: Journeying to Narnia and Other Worlds, Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of Till We Have Faces, The Way into Narnia: A Reader’s Guide, and, among other textbooks, Approaching Poetry: Perspectives and Responses, co-written with Jack Ridl), and I look forward to reading this one. It’s certainly a worthwhile topic; most of us have the tendency to let our view of God shrink, and there are few people better than C. S. Lewis to help us correct that tendency.
I don’t tend to talk much about sports here—I do that other places (some of them listed to the left) where the conversation is already going on—but as a long-time fan of the Seattle SuperSonics (one of my earliest memories is of listening to part of the 1979 NBA Finals with my dad) I had to say this: Thank you, Bill Simmons.
In six years of writing for ESPN.com, this is the longest piece I’ve ever sent to my editors — nearly 15,000 words of anguished e-mails from Sonics fans around the country. I spent the past 24 hours sifting through them and whittling them down the best I could. Don’t print this baby out. Read it, skim through it, do whatever you need to do. But definitely check it out.
Here’s why the Seattle situation should matter to everyone who cares about sports: After being part of the city for 41 years, the Sonics are being stolen away for dubious reasons while every NBA owner and executive allows it to happen, including David Stern, the guy who’s supposed to be policing this stuff. I think it’s reprehensible to watch someone hijack a franchise away from the people who cared about the team and loved it and nurtured it through the years. It belittles not just the good people of Seattle, but everyone who loves sports and believes it provides a unique and valuable connection for a city, a community, family members and friends.
Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to let an entire fanbase speak. In the end, thanks to the efforts of Save Our Sonics (the brainchild of Brian Robinson, Steven Pyeatt, and the other folks behind SonicsCentral—Sonics fans everywhere owe those guys a huge debt of gratitude), with special appreciation for the work of Seattle city attorney Tom Carr, I continue to believe that Seattle will not lose its team; still, the ongoing threats and arrogance and insults and mendacity we’ve had to suffer from Clay Bennett and his ownership group, and the possibility that despite everyone’s best efforts and all the emotional and financial support invested in this team over the past four decades, these robber barons might actually be allowed to steal our team, have taken a real toll. Thank you, Bill, for letting us speak.Update: Here’s his follow-up. I don’t agree with every idea he has, but I love the walk-on idea; and again, thanks to Bill Simmons for giving us a voice and a platform.
