A few more thoughts on NY-23

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First, courtesy of Josh Painter (who is, among other things, the chap responsible for the Bloggers for Sarah Palin blogroll to which this blog belongs), a worthy reflection on what Gov. Palin accomplished with her endorsement of Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman:

The media buzz today will be mostly about one aspect of the endorsement—Sarah Palin distancing herself from her party. But she has also distanced herself from her potential rivals for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, should she decide to seek it. . . .

With her endorsement of Doug Hoffman, Sarah Palin has taken a stand in solidarity with the gathering storm known as the grassroots movement in this country. The disaffected conservatives, conservative libertarians, common sense independents and blue collar Democrats (aka Reagan Democrats) who are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore always seemed to us to be former Governor Palin’s natural base constituency. These are the the people who have turned out for TEA parties and Townhalls across the country, but there are many more of them who were not able to demonstrate, but feel the pain none the less. It’s a big step for the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate to take toward earning their trust as the national public figure who best voices their concerns.

As for the Republican Party, its establishment has refused for too long to listen to the rank and file, and now it has officially been put on notice by Sarah Palin. Hopefully, it will finally pay attention to the voices of the people. Nothing else has seemed to get through to the GOP leadership. Even a recent Rasmussen poll which shows that 73 percent of Republican voters say Congressional Republicans have lost touch with their base hasn’t seemed to have had much impact on those who run the GOP Congressional and Senatorial committees. . . .

Former Governor Palin may have just taken the first big step toward leading the Republican Party back to its Reagan roots. She has thrown down the gauntlet. Now let’s see if she will pick up the banner and hold it so high that the troops will rally around it.

Second, some news about Hoffman’s ostensible Republican opponent, Dede Scozzafava, from RedState:

Jack Abramoff, present jailbird, was convicted of all sorts of crooked schemes. One of his favorites was to funnel money through various organizations into the hands of other people.

It appears Dede Scozzafava is funneling RNC, NRCC, and donor dollars through her campaign account to her family. . . .

Scozzafava doesn’t look to be just an ACORN candidate, but also more and more looks like an Abramoff Republican.

Read the post for the details, which are appalling—she can’t even wait until she’s elected to start siphoning money off the top. The more I hear about this woman, the worse the GOP (and especially the NY GOP) looks for putting her forward.

And three, all the attention he’s been getting from major conservative figures has definitely given Hoffman’s campaign a major boost; a lot of the credit for that goes to Gov. Palin, though certainly not all of it. It’s good to know he appreciates her.

Book recommendations

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No, not from me (though I second many of these, and others are on my to-read list), but from a Twitter poll taken by Johnathan McIntosh of Rethink Mission. Since it was mostly a poll of pastoral types, it’s a list of books about God, church, and leadership (including, in the “honorable mention” category, Jared’s book Your Jesus Is Too Safe, which I was glad but not surprised to see there). It’s a great list of great books (with a definite Tim Keller slant—two of his plus the Jesus Storybook Bible, a wonderful work whose author acknowledges her great debt to Dr. Keller with deep gratitude—which I think is a good thing). If you’re looking for something to read, check it out.

On this blog in history: April 22-28, 2008

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Worship as orientation
“Specifically, toward God, flat on our faces.”

Fantasy, science fiction, and the epic
“Fantasy and science fiction, at their highest, appeal to an essentially theological impulse in the human spirit.” See also “Fantasy, science fiction, and the mysterium tremendum.

“The Ascension and the Second Coming
Does Jesus teach the Second Coming? I believe so.

Prosthetics, athletics, and the human future
We need to be careful how far we go.

Answering Islam on its own terms
And those terms are religious, not secular/political.

The uncomfortable open-mindedness of Penn Jillette

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This is another remarkable video by Penn Jillette, who is I think one of the most remarkable figures of our time, musing over an occasion on which he was raked over the coals by Tommy Smothers.

(Update: At some point between October 2009 and October 2015, Penn took that video private.  The video below is of the occasion of Smothers’ verbal assault.)

The Anchoress, writing about Penn’s video, had some things to say that bear consideration. I particularly appreciated this:

Unchecked capitalism does have its drawbacks; it often so enthralls the capitalist with the material that he forgets the world around him, and lives an increasingly insular—and insulated—life.

But it is not only the greedy capitalist who can become insulated; the ideologue who will only speak with like-minded people is in the same walled-off compound, where it becomes easy to see label someone whose ideas are different than yours as “evil” and “lesser;” to ignore human commonalities in the quest to not simply disagree, but to destroy the other.

In a way, it’s a little like an extreme Islamist cutting out the tongue of the heretic, in order to silence his dissent. They fear allowing another point of view, because it threatens to unsettle; it might persuade others away from the fold. It is a threat to power, control and illusory “peace.” It does not submit. . . .

We see that behavior, of course, on both sides. My email has as many people telling me that this politician or that is “evil” from the right as people telling me I am evil, from the left. . . .

But what is interesting about these Jillette videos is that he seems determined not to be insulated in his life. He will meet with anyone, talk to anyone—engage in a respectful exchange of ideas. When I was being raised by blue-collar, union-loving Democrats, this is what I was taught was “liberal” behavior: a willingness to hear all sides, be respectful and open-minded.

And that would seem to be precisely the opposite of what Tommy Smothers was advocating to Jillette. For that matter, I cannot help but find an irony, there. Smothers was furious that Jillette would talk to “the enemy,” Glenn Beck, but he (and the left) were furious when President Bush would not talk to Iran. All Jillette is doing, really, is what Obama is now doing with Iran: talking to “the enemy” without preconditions. You’d think Smothers would admire that, after all. Yes, irony.

What we call “liberalism” today is something strikingly illiberal. As I twittered before turning in last night, when did “tolerance” become a demand for ideological purity above all else?

Read the whole post—there’s a lot more there, including a moving meditation on Penn’s naked honesty and introspection; you don’t see many people wrestle with things as openly, or indeed anywhere near as openly, as he does. I don’t agree with his politics, and I don’t agree with his atheism; but however wrong I may think his conclusions about what is true may be, he seems quite clearly to be a seeker after truth, rather than after winning the argument or pleasing a particular group of people or any of the other substitutes we human beings tend to find. Indeed, he seems committed to taking the hard questions head-on rather than ducking them or dismissing them, and to treating those who ask those questions with respect rather than defending himself by attacking them. This is a rare and honorable thing, and worthy of great respect.

Bucking the machine

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For those of you who haven’t been following the special election in New York’s 23rd Congressional District (a solid GOP district whose previous officeholder was appointed Secretary of the Army), it’s gotten quite interesting. The Democratic Party’s first choice begged off—the district, which covers eleven rural counties in the northernmost part of the state, has been in GOP hands since the Civil War, and he appears to have figured a ritual loss wouldn’t do much for him—but they managed to find a solid candidate, a local lawyer named Bill Owens. The New York Republican Party, though, might have been worried that the Democrats wouldn’t be able to find somebody, since they basically nominated a Democrat of their own for the seat: they hand-picked a candidate, Dede Scozzafava, who’s not just to the left of the House Republican caucus, she’s to the left of half the Democratic caucus. Michelle Malkin described her as “an ACORN-friendly, union-pandering, tax-and-spend radical Republican, ” and if anything, she actually understated the case.

Apparently, Scozzafava was handed the nomination by the party machine as an act of favoritism because of her connections with county GOP chairmen in the state—the machine picked one of its own, and hang principles. The amazing thing is that the national party machine fell into line behind them; though 90% of House Republicans refused to support Scozzafava, the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee sent donations in the six-figure range to keep her campaign afloat, and Newt Gingrich endorsed her. All this despite the fact that there is a true conservative in the race: Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman, who according to reports has now passed Scozzafava in the polls and is setting his sights on Owens.

This evening, Sarah Palin joined the battle, endorsing Hoffman for Congress. She said this summer that she would work for the election of conservative candidates regardless of party, and now she’s backed up those words by standing against her own party to support a candidate she can believe in:

The people of the 23rd Congressional District of New York are ready to shake things up, and Doug Hoffman is coming on strong as Election Day approaches! He needs our help now.

The votes of every member of Congress affect every American, so it’s important for all of us to pay attention to this important Congressional campaign in upstate New York. I am very pleased to announce my support for Doug Hoffman in his fight to be the next Representative from New York’s 23rd Congressional district. It’s my honor to endorse Doug and to do what I can to help him win, including having my political action committee, SarahPAC, donate to his campaign the maximum contribution allowed by law.

Our nation is at a crossroads, and this is once again a “time for choosing.”

The federal government borrows, spends, and prints too much money, while our national debt hits a record high. Government is growing while the private sector is shrinking, and unemployment is on the rise. Doug Hoffman is committed to ending the reckless spending in Washington, D.C. and the massive increase in the size and scope of the federal government. He is also fully committed to supporting our men and women in uniform as they seek to honorably complete their missions overseas.

And best of all, Doug Hoffman has not been anointed by any political machine.

Doug Hoffman stands for the principles that all Republicans should share: smaller government, lower taxes, strong national defense, and a commitment to individual liberty.

Political parties must stand for something. When Republicans were in the wilderness in the late 1970s, Ronald Reagan knew that the doctrine of “blurring the lines” between parties was not an appropriate way to win elections. Unfortunately, the Republican Party today has decided to choose a candidate who more than blurs the lines, and there is no real difference between the Democrat and the Republican in this race. This is why Doug Hoffman is running on the Conservative Party’s ticket.

Republicans and conservatives around the country are sending an important message to the Republican establishment in their outstanding grassroots support for Doug Hoffman: no more politics as usual.

You can help Doug by visiting his official website below and joining me in supporting his campaign:
http://www.doughoffmanforcongress.com/donate3.html.

Good on you, Governor.

On the blessed inconvenience of children

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The quote atop The Thinklings‘ front page today is one of my favorites, from Gary Thomas:

Kids’ needs are rarely “convenient.” What they require in order to succeed rarely comes cheaply. To raise them well will require daily sacrifice of many kinds, which has the wonderful spiritual effect of helping mold us into the character of Jesus Christ himself. God invites us to grow beyond ourselves and to stop acting as though our dreams begin and end with us. Once we have children, we cannot act and dream as though we had remained childless.

We’ve been thinking about that here this week, since our older girls’ parent-teacher conferences were last night. It’s interesting talking with their teachers (and listening between the lines a bit) and realizing how many of the parents they have to deal with who really don’t get this, or perhaps refuse to get this. I wonder if perhaps we’re seeing a spillover effect of the abortion regime—after all, if it’s legally acceptable to kill an unborn child because letting that child live would be too inconvenient, that deals a heavy, heavy blow to the idea that we have a responsibility to put the needs of our children ahead of our own. The sad irony is, this means that many adults never learn how much better life can be once we “stop acting as though our dreams begin and end with us”; it’s the children who have the most to lose, but their parents’ lives are impoverished as well.

Embracing the wildness of faith

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Bill over at The Thinklings put up a post yesterday quoting Chesterton at length (something almost always well worth doing) on the value of fairy tales for children, and concluding with some additional thoughts of his own:

This really resonates with me, because from a young age I rode like a squire through the Arthurian legends, crouched quietly in the belly of the horse with Odysseus, galloped alongside Centaurs in Lewis’ Narnia, and went into the dreadful dark of Moria with Frodo and Sam. These led me one day to open up a Bible and begin reading what Lewis would call the “true myth” of the ultimate, and fully historical, defeat of the dragon.

As parents we should, of course, protect our kids. But I think Chesterton makes a compelling case here for not limiting them with politically correct, neutered fiction that contains no dragons. How will they ever know that the dragon can be killed?

I think Bill’s absolutely right about that. As Chesterton says in the essay he quotes,

Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

This is much the same point Russell Moore makes in the post I quoted Monday, and so it’s no surprise that Bill follows up today by quoting Moore as well. He also adds an extended quote from Danielle at Count the Days on the absurdity that passes for “Christian education” in so many places. It’s a great post:

The other day, in my Religious Education class, this question was posed to us:

“What do you want to teach a child by the time they are 12?”

During class we were supposed to get in groups and discuss what we thought kids need to know by that stage in their lives, and honestly, I was kind of appalled by the answers I heard. . . .

One girl had the audacity to call me “harsh” because I said that they need to know that they are sinners. How can anyone have an appreciation or understanding of salvation without first knowing what sin is and that they are a sinner? I understand that the average child cannot comprehend the intricacies of theology, but what Jesus-loving Children’s Minister can look at the kids in their ministry and knowingly keep the whole Truth from them? Bible stories are great and important in building a foundation for these kids, but knowing who Zaccheus was, or being able to sing the books of the Bible in order isn’t going to get anyone any closer to Heaven. Just sayin’.

I guess the reason it frustrated me so much was because I was thinking of my own (future/potential) children. I don’t want my ten/eleven/twelve year old thinking that “being a good person” or being “obedient” means anything without having a personal, intimate relationship with Christ. I mean sure, I want obedient children ;), but in the grand scheme of things that would not be on the top of my list.

And then perhaps the most important point she makes is this:

Children can be taught all kinds of things as long as they are taught in love and kindness. Give kids the opportunity to understand, instead of withholding Truth from them. Offer them the whole Gospel, not just cartoons or cut-and-dry facts. I know I probably sound like some hardcore beat-truth-into-them type of lady, but I hate the thought of kids wasting what can be the most influential years of growth on pointless trivia or partial Truth.

Amen. This is something of a soapbox of my own, and has been for a while—I don’t post on it a great deal, just on occasion, but it’s something I care quite a bit about in my congregation, and with my own kids—that so much of what we call “Christian education” in the church is just awful, trivial, milk-and-water stuff aimed at teaching kids to be nice, dutiful little serfs rather than at raising them up as followers of Jesus Christ.

The problem is, I think, that too many adults—and not just adults in the church, either—have lost touch with the wildness of the world, and the wildness of their own hearts. Part of it, as N. D. Wilson says, is that our rationalistic and rationalized, scientific and scientistic, we-are-civilized-and-we-can-control-everything culture tends to teach us to see all things wild and perilous as evil; we have tamed immense swaths of our world, made it comfortable and predictable, orderly and obedient, and so we see these as good things, and anything that threatens them as bad.

This logically leads us to lose sight of the wildness of evil, both within us and outside us. Hannah Arendt had an important insight when she wrote of “the banality of evil” (an insight which I believe is much less understood than quoted), but it’s equally important for us to understand that while evil is indeed dreary and banal, uncreative and far less attractive than it likes to pretend, it is not thereby tame and predictable and contained. We get reminders of this when things like 9/11 happen, but if we can convince ourselves that such things are outside our own experience—that their lesson doesn’t apply to us—then we do so as quickly as possible, convincing ourselves that our own lives are still safe and tame and under our control.

The consequence of this domesticated worldview for the church is that too often, we’ve tamed our faith. We have trimmed it to fit what this world calls reality instead of letting our faith expand our souls to fit God’s view of reality, and we have ended up with a domesticated faith in a domesticated God. After all, if we don’t see our world as a big, wild, uncontrollable world that threatens us and makes us uncomfortable, we don’t need a big, wild, uncontrollable God who makes us uncomfortable and calls us to fear him as well as love him; a god sized to fit the tame little problems we’ll admit to having will do nicely.

There are various antidotes to that, but one of them is, to bring this back around to Bill’s post, to Chesterton, and also to Tolkien, a keen acquaintance with the world of faerie. We need stories that do not only show us the wildness of evil somewhere else (for many of our movies and books do that much), but that show us the wildness of evil in our own hearts, and also the wildness of good. We need stories that powerfully communicate, not only rationally but also viscerally, the truth that (to borrow a line from Michael Card) there is a wonder and wildness to life, that true goodness is a high and perilous thing, and that the life of goodness is an adventure. We need to learn to hear the call to faith as the call expressed so well by Andrew Peterson in his song “Little Boy Heart Alive”:

Feel the beat of a distant thunder—
It’s the sound of an ancient song.
This is the Kingdom calling;
Come now and tread the dawn.

Come to the Father;
Come to the deeper well.
Drink of the water
And come to live a tale to tell . . .

Take a ride on the mighty Lion;
Take a hold of the golden mane.
This is the love of Jesus—
So good but He is not tame.

Photo © 2008 by Wikimedia user Corinata.  License:  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. 

Grace for the poison tongue

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We do amazing evil with our words. “The pen is mightier than the sword,” our folk wisdom tells us, and to hear the way people tell it, you’d think they’re mostly opposed, that the pen mostly seeks to resist the sword; but in truth, the pen is at its mightiest when it’s egging the sword on. It’s easier to exhort people to evil than to good; it’s easier to tear them down than to build them up; it’s easier to wound than to heal; it’s easier just to let our tongues flap in the breeze of our thoughts than it is to control them (thoughts or tongues, take your pick). Indeed, James 3 argues at some length that no one has ever yet succeeded in controlling the tongue, and I think the apostle is right; we can control it to some degree, but it always escapes us in the end.

Which means we need grace; we need to be forgiven for the evil that we do. It’s beyond our power to be good enough on our own. It also means that we need to show grace to others, even (and perhaps especially) when they show us none. Just as we struggle to control our tongues, and sometimes fail, so too others are going to fail sometimes, for we all stumble in many ways; that’s just life in a tomato can, as my old organist would say. We have been given grace, because we desperately need it; in return, we must show grace to others, because they also desperately need it, whether they acknowledge that need or not.

If someone says something they shouldn’t, it may be my responsibility to correct them, but if so I’m called to do so with love and grace; if I do so harshly and gracelessly, am I not as much at fault as they? Or if I upset or offend someone else, and they speak harshly to me, what is my responsibility to them? Because they spoke without grace, is it okay if I respond in kind—or do I need to show them grace anyway? Clearly, I need to control my tongue whether they’ve controlled theirs or not.

It’s not my place to decide whether they deserve grace—none of us deserves grace. Grace doesn’t come from what we deserve, it comes from the love of God; and it’s only as far as the love of God fills us and motivates us that we’ll be able to control our tongues and show his grace to others. Which means that the bottom line here isn’t “try harder,” it’s “submit yourself to God, draw close to him, and let him do in you what you can’t do in yourself.” The only way to live in grace is to live by grace.

(Partly adapted from “A Greater Judgment”)

Life with cat

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One of my Facebook friends posted this first video the other day; it cracked me up, so I went looking for more. Turns out the guy who made it, Simon Tofield, has his own YouTube channel which I had somehow, inexplicably, missed over the last year or so. I’m glad I found it, because this is truly a man who understands the humor of living with a cat.

The imperial history of SW Asia

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courtesy of Maps of War.  If you wanted to be persnickety, you could certainly critique their presentation, but it succeeds in its purpose—it gives you a feel for just how many empires have rolled through what is usually (wrongly) called the Middle East (the map’s focus is more on the Near East, and includes the whole of the broader region of Southwest Asia), and how it’s often served as a crossroads for imperial expansion.