Jim Wallis speaks at John Carroll University Commencement
Rev. Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners, spoke at the
commencement at Jesuit John Carroll University.
Faith is for changing the big things," Wallis said. "Things that nobody thinks can be changed. Things that others say are hopeless, where the odds are against us. That is indeed the time for faith. I want to ask our graduates today a special question: What is the big thing you're going to do? ...
Thanks to
Qusan for pointing this out.
Majority would vote for Hillary
USA Today says ...
For the first time, a majority of Americans say they are likely to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton if she runs for president in 2008, according to a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday.
Fifty-three percent of poll respondents say they'd probably support Clinton in a run for president. ...
God-talk in the GOP
Sojourners has an article by David Domke and Kevin Coe called
God-talk in the GOP (registration required).
George W. Bush is delivering two commencement addresses this spring. One will be Friday at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland - an unsurprising venue. The other took place last week at Calvin College, a small evangelical Christian school in western Michigan. The latter is the latest attempt by the administration and the Republican Party to use God for political gain.
In the past two months alone, GOP leaders have invoked God in public discussions about the medical care of Terri Schiavo, judicial-nominee votes in the U.S. Senate, and the treatment of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay over charges of unethical conduct.
Welcome to the new world of religious politics, made successful by President Bush and increasingly adopted by other Republicans.
For some time now there has been a heated debate regarding whether Bush is different from other presidents in his religious rhetoric. Here's the answer: He is. What sets Bush apart is how much he talks about God and what he says when he does so. ...
Pastoral Letter for Memorial Day
Bill Sinkford, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, has written a
Pastoral Letter for Memorial Day.
As the death toll in Iraq continues to climb, many of us, as people of faith, are struggling to find a way to respond.
As a religious community, Unitarian Universalists do not say that war is never justified: we are not a “peace church.” But most of us view war as an absolute last resort, to be embarked upon only when all other avenues have failed, or when we have been attacked. Most of us do not believe this war met those tests. Many of us have written our legislators, some of us have stood vigil for peace, a few of us have protested. Almost all of us fear that this occupation will damage our credibility as a freedom-loving nation; almost all of us fear that we are, with our own hands, helping to birth the next generation of terrorists who will threaten our safety. ...
The assault on NPR
Tom Ashbrook, host of WBUR's "On Point," distributed nationally by NPR, writes
an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe ...
When government media masters ask broadcasters to replace news with music, watch out. That was the Kremlin's way on bad days in Soviet-era Moscow. Days when someone important had died. Days when things had gone badly wrong.
Now, the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson, is ushering in an era when National Public Radio member stations may, reportedly, soon be encouraged by the corporation to shift their programming from news to music. ...
Mass. group set to push for universal healthcare
The
Boston Globe says ...
A coalition of religious and community groups will launch a drive today to put universal healthcare on the 2006 state ballot, in a proposal that would raise the cigarette tax to buy coverage for more people and would require all but the smallest Massachusetts businesses to cover their workers.
The Greater Boston Interfaith Organization argues that its approach would go further to reduce the ranks of the state's 500,000 uninsured than the alternatives under consideration on Beacon Hill that are backed by Governor Mitt Romney and Senate President Robert E. Travaglini. The Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, which includes 65 religious congregations and community groups in Eastern Massachusetts, says its plan would cover everybody by expanding the state's insurance program for the needy and by forcing businesses to provide coverage.
My church is a founding member of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization.
Iraqis to American evangelicals: M.Y.O.B.
uruknet.info says that American evangelicals don't need to tell Iraqis about Christianity, because Christianity has been in Iraq for a lot longer than it's been in the U.S.
Enough is enough for the Christian community in Iraq. The head of Iraq’s largest Christian community, Patriarch Emmanuel Delly, recently scathingly attacked the evangelical Christians who have taken their crusade to Iraq since the illegal U.S. invasion of March 2003.
Delly told Al-Jazeera News on May 19 that Iraq did not need Christian missionaries because its churches dated back long before Protestantism. He objected to the aspect of trying to convert Muslims and said, "You can’t even talk about that here." ...
Thanks to
The Green Knight for passing this along.
Abortion pill puts woman in jail
South Carolina's
The State reports ...
A migrant farm worker from Mexico, Gabriela Flores has struggled to support her three young children.
So when the 22-year-old became pregnant again last year, she didn’t know what to do — especially when the father refused to help, she told Lexington County sheriff’s deputies.
Flores resorted to an abortion using illegal drugs sent to her from Mexico and wound up in jail for four months under a rarely used state law that makes it a crime for a woman to perform an abortion on herself. ...
A beautiful argument in favor of embronic stem cell research
On May 24,
Fausto wrote ...
Did you hear about the press conference/spectacle Dubya staged at the White House today to rally opposition to stem-cell research? He invited a bunch of families to bring their cute-as-the-dickens toddlers to help him. He dressed the kids in t-shirts that said, “I’m a snowflake baby”. You see, these kids had once been surplus embryos from in-vitro fertilization (IVF) therapy that were frozen for storage, then thawed out and given to other infertile couples for gestation. Bush’s point was that every embryo is a precious baby waiting to be born, and that using them for experimentation rather than giving them the opportunity for birth is a grossly immoral affront to our common humanity.
Heart-tuggingly sympathetic, isn’t it?
Maybe, but it’s also a freakin’ cynical, bald-faced, goddam lie. ...
Evolution and direct observation
Canadian Cynic shows us what happens when the required "direct observation" that creationists say is necessary for something to be scientifically valid is carried to an extreme. What would you think if you called your local police to report a burglary and heard the following:
"Now, calm down," says the sergeant, "it's like this. Used to be, when we got a call like this, we'd be right out, do stuff like take pictures, dust for fingerprints and all that; scientifically, you know. But -- and here's the funny thing -- turns out that's not science at all. Turns out that, unless you have an eyewitness -- you know, someone who actually saw all this happen -- it's not really science. So, sorry to say, we can't help you out there. I mean, we could come out and poke around but, it not being science and all, it wouldn't really do a whole lot of good."
Pastor stands by sign saying Quran should be flushed
I often wonder how much better off we'd all be if priests and ministers, instead of criticizing other religions and practices, spent the same amount of time helping their own followers be better people. For example, here's the beginning of an
article in the News and Observer:
A Baptist minister refuses to apologize for a church sign saying the Muslim holy book should be flushed.
"I believe that it is a statement supporting the word of God and that it (the Bible) is above all and that any other religious book that does not teach Christ as savior and lord as the 66 books of the Bible teaches it, is wrong," said the Rev. Creighton Lovelace of Danieltown Baptist Church. "I knew that whenever we decided to put that sign up that there would be people who wouldn't agree with it, and there would be some that would, and so we just have to stand up for what's right."
The sign certainly isn't going to change the opinions of anyone who doesn't believe that in the first place. And, in my mind, it makes the church look hateful. So what's the point?
"Hands Off Public Broadcasting" campaign
Media Matters for America has launched a
Hands Off Public Broadcasting campaign
to monitor, analyze and fight back against efforts to turn PBS, NPR, and other public broadcasting outlets into yet another outlet for conservative misinformation.
Religious Leaders speak out against attacks on religious liberty inherent in impending filibuster vote
From the Unitarian Universalist Association ...
(May 19, 2005) As the Senate begins debate on the nominations of judges Janice Rogers Brown and Pricilla Owen, a vote on the so-called nuclear option to cut off filibusters against judicial nominees is expected in the Senate in the next week. The leaders of many religious organizations have expressed deep concern over attacks on religious liberty which underly the legislative impasse which exists in the US Senate.
The Rev. William G. Sinkford, President of the Unitarian Universalist Association said in a statement issued last month, "No one religious group or political party can ever hold a monopoly on spiritual conviction," said Rev. Sinkford. "In fact, political opinions vary widely even within particular faith communities. Within my own tradition, Unitarian Universalists experience diversity of opinion as a true blessing. Many different theological viewpoints are able to thrive within our congregations because we have agreed that we need not think alike to love alike."
Sinkford continued, "To claim that minority-party senators and their supporters are acting 'against people of faith' because they wish to preserve the Senate filibuster is an affront to millions of devout Americans.
"Senator Frist has crossed an important line in our American tradition," concluded Rev. Sinkford. "The Constitution wisely ensures that there are no religious tests for political offices. While private groups, including churches, have a guaranteed right to speak out on social issues, a democracy's highest elected leaders must hold themselves accountable to all of 'we, the people.' I believe that Senator Frist has
a moral responsibility to declare unequivocally that the political views of the American people do not define the depth or quality of their faith. Our nation was founded on this inspired principle, and we imperil the precious freedoms of all our citizens when we cease to honor and protect the separation of church and state."
The UUA has made available extensive material related to this issue including petitions, information for newsletters and orders of service, sample letters to legislators, opinion pieces, and much more. For complete information, please visit
http://www.uua.org/news/2005/050519_nuclear.html .
So What's Hillary Up To?
The Nation, in an article written by Greg Sargent called
Brand Hillary, says no one has hit it exactly on the head.
Yet if you watch Clinton on one of her upstate swings, as I did earlier this spring, it becomes clear that neither story line gets it right. What's really happening is that Clinton, a surprisingly agile and ideologically complex politician, is slowly crafting a politics that in some ways is new, and above all is uniquely her own.
Clinton's evolving approach -- call it Brand Hillary -- is sincerely rooted in her not-easily-categorized worldview, but it's also a calculated response to today's political realities. In effect, she's taking her husband's small-issue centrism -- its trademark combination of big but often hollow gestures toward the center, pragmatic economic populism and incremental liberal policy gains -- and remaking it in her own image, updating it for post-9/11 America with an intense interest in military issues.
At the same time, she's also experimenting with an increasingly national message about smart government and GOP extremism and testing new, unthreatening ways of revisiting her most politically disastrous issue: healthcare. In one setting after another, she offered the same impromptu-seeming refrain: "You may remember that when my husband was President, I tried to do something about healthcare. Well, I still have the scars to show for it. But I haven't given up." That's a line worthy of the man Hillary married -- you can picture Bill sitting at the kitchen table in Chappaqua, repeating the line and chuckling, "That's good. That's really good."
Rod Parsley's World Harvest Church
An article in The Revealer called
Destination Christian Nation discusses an Ohio megachurch and its pastor Rod Parsley.
Parsley is a self-described "patriot pastor" and a solid Christian Nation man -- which is to say that he believes, based on an extremely selective and distorted reading of U.S. history, that the U.S. was founded as a Christian country and has a special Christian calling in world affairs. That's trouble for any nation inclined toward a secular policy, as much of Europe is.
... Rod Parsley -- who, on every single issue, including economic ones, is dedicated to conservative Republicanism -- says that he is neither Democrat nor Republican -- he's a "Christocrat."
Jacoby: Why Islam is disrespected
Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe says
Christians, Jews, and Buddhists don't lash out in homicidal rage when their religion is insulted. They don't call for holy war and riot in the streets. It would be unthinkable for a mainstream priest, rabbi, or lama to demand that a blasphemer be slain. But when Reuters reported what Mohammad Hanif, the imam of a Muslim seminary in Pakistan, said about the alleged Koran-flushers -- ''They should be hung. They should be killed in public so that no one can dare to insult Islam and its sacred symbols" -- was any reader surprised?
... But what disgraces Islam above all is the vast majority of the planet's Muslims saying nothing and doing nothing about the jihadist cancer eating away at their religion. It is Free Muslims Against Terrorism, a pro-democracy organization, calling on Muslims and Middle Easterners to "converge on our nation's capital for a rally against terrorism" -- and having only 50 people show up.
I think Jacoby brings up a legitimate point. I've often wondered why imams don't rise up in outrage against the death and destruction being caused by extremist Muslims. If they do, I don't hear about it.
Way too involved
I'm getting way too interested in this religion thing. I was looking at a Washington Post news feed, saw an article titled
'The Log' Puts Paul in Ranks of Top Inventors and I said to myself ... the apostle Paul was an inventor??
Lost your faith?
Try consulting
Glorious the Magic Genie Faith Builder.
And no, I don't get a commission.
ACLU opposes govt funding of "Silver Ring Thing"
The
Boston Globe reports ...
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in federal court in Boston yesterday challenging the US government's funding of a faith-based abstinence program called the Silver Ring Thing, arguing that the public contribution of more than $1 million violates the constitutional separation of church and state.
... In its suit against the US Department of Health and Human Services, the ACLU contends that the program's primary aim is to spread Christianity. The civil libertarian group cites several pieces of evidence, including a Silver Ring Thing newsletter that says the Pennsylvania-based ministry instructs young people that ''a personal relationship with Jesus Christ [is] the best way to live a sexually pure life."
Buchanan sees 'war' within conservatism
The Washington Times, a source I wouldn't ordinarily look towards, has
an interview with Pat Buchanan which begins
Pat Buchanan speaks of American conservatism in the past tense. "The conservative movement has passed into history," says the one-time White House aide, three-time presidential candidate, commentator and magazine publisher.
"It doesn't exist anymore as a unifying force," he says in an interview with The Washington Times. "There are still a lot of people who are conservative, but the movement is now broken up, crumbled, dismantled."
An interview with Bishop John Shelby Spong
BeliefNet has
an interview with Bishop John Shelby Spong, a leader of the worldwide liberal Christianity movement. Within the interview is this:
What is the basis for your faith?
I have to start at the basics, and that's God. And the thing that I think you have to say about God first is that nobody knows who God is, nobody knows what God is. I don't care what they say--all any human being knows is how they believe they have experienced God. They do not know what God is.
That would be like a horse saying they know what a human being is. A horse knows how a horse experiences a human being. And even when you say, this is my "God experience," there is always the possibility that you're deluded. And a lot of deluded people think that they have had "God experiences" and hear voices. So I start with that--I can't tell you who God is or what God is; I can only share what I believe my God experience is.
I think that's a good start for anyone's faith - Christian or not. After adding two more definitions of God (the source of life, and the source of love) and bringing Jesus into the discussion, he says
I have no difficulty asserting the traditional Christian claim that somehow God was in this Christ. I don't know that Jesus is different from Debbie or Jack, except in degree. I think he's so fully human, that he can be a channel through which people can experience this transcendent God presence. That's a very different way of approaching the Christian story, but it's one that I think is the future, because the old mythology doesn't work
As a non-Christian Unitarian Universalist, I could almost buy into that.
About Hartshorne’s Divine Relativity
Progressive Ink!, while researching theological alternatives for religious liberalism, finds Charles Hartshorne.
This search led me to Charles Hartshorne, a process theologian, who discarded the traditional view of G.O.D. and developed a philosophical theology which colored divinity as an entity which was perfect in change and evolved along with humanity's empirically realizable reality(ies) and in relation to the world. G.O.D., in other words, is completely relative. This G.O.D was the very embodiment of all possibility, but this possibility could change and consequently led to subsequent change and growth in G.O.D. itself. G.O.D. also could never be surpassed by humanity or any other ... things (for lack of better nouns), but G.O.D. could surpass G.O.D., and in fact grow (evolve). This is what I know so far concerning Hartshorne's theological alternative for liberal religion. I have more reading to do ... but it sounds like basic process theology, which is beckoning me to take a second and deeper look. It may be the most accessible alternative theological shape religious liberalism can draw from.
I'm not a theologian or theology student, nor have I ever taken a theology course. But to me, the idea of what is called G.O.D. in that description sounds so ... ordinary. Or maybe not ordinary ... perhaps better than us, but not different from us. My first reaction to this is that I like my Higher Power, at the very least, unchangeable. I have a hard enough time understanding a Higher Power that's static; how the heck am I gonna understand something that isn't what it was a couple of minutes ago?
Massachusetts paper
The Lowell Sun reports ...
A Kansas-based evangelical group plans to picket Englesby Intermediate School [in Dracut, MA] June 6 after a student won an essay contest writing about openly gay comedienne Ellen DeGeneres.
A flier from the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka [home of GodHatesFags.com] singles out a Women in History essay written by a 12-year-old student who chose DeGeneres as her subject. The invective-laden leaflet includes a photo of the Englesby School and a grotesque devil. The diatribe attacks the staff, labeling it a “homo-fascist regime,” among other things.
The Westboro Baptist Church website maintains an extensive list of sites they're going to picket. The school mentioned in the article is not on their list; however, they have a number of other sites in Massachusetts they're planning on picketing June 4-6.
Priest Denies Gays' Supporters Communion
The
Associated Press via the Washington Post says ...
A Roman Catholic priest [in St Paul, MN] denied communion to more than 100 people Sunday, saying they could not receive the sacrament because they wore rainbow-colored sashes to church to show support for gay Catholics.
Before offering communion, the Rev. Michael Sklucazek told the congregation at the Cathedral of St. Paul that anyone wearing a sash could come forward for a blessing but would not receive wine and bread.
Now it's not just being gay that gets you denied communion (a travesty in itself), it's
supporting those who are gay.
Some might suggest that it's not up to me to decide that denying communion to gay Catholics is a bad thing, and that I should let the Church make its own rules. I'm fine with that - as long as the Church is consistent. Let the Church deny communion to those who have lied during the week ... to those who have had "impure thoughts" about those to whom they were not married ... to those who refused to help the poor and instead bought a bigger SUV ... to those parents who brought potential harm upon their children by letting them eat fast food ... and I'll be glad to support refusing communion for gays.
Let's just see if there would be anyone left to receive it.
Amy Smith: Vote 'Wrong', Go to Hell?
Amy Smith has a good commentary in the
LA Times about the repercussions of the actions of Pastor Chan Chandler of the East Waynesville Baptist Church in North Carolina.
The charge used to be that Democrats were godless, a party of secularists run amok. That changed somewhere around the time when Barack Obama boomed, "We worship an awesome God in the blue states!"; progressive minister Jim Wallis became one of the best-selling authors in the country; and Americans began to reconnect with their history, including centuries of religiously motivated political causes such as abolition, women's suffrage and the civil rights movement.
So having failed to prove that Democrats are all secularists, conservatives now assert that liberals are not religious enough. U.S. senator and former Sunday school teacher Hillary Clinton is accused of faking religion when she talks about faith. Pope Benedict XVI talks about a smaller, purer Catholic Church and the first to be counted out is Father Thomas Reese, a liberal Jesuit who was the editor of America magazine until he was forced to resign last week.
Conservative leaders use the phrase "practical secularists" to describe believers who they feel are inadequately observant. CNN host Wolf Blitzer buys into the spin and suggests on-air that conservative columnist Robert Novak is a better Catholic than the devout Paul Begala, presumably because Begala is a Democrat.
This is a debate that conservatives are going to lose. Because you don't have to be liberal or conservative to be offended by the idea that a political or religious leader can decide whether your faith is good enough.
Thanks to
Holy Weblog for pointing this out.
Three articles in New Republic
Philocrites discusses three articles in
New Republic that will be of particular interest to liberal Christians and other people unhappy with the rising political clout of conservative white Evangelicals. None of them offers good news, he says, although their analysis is illuminating.
Indiana UU Church's tax-exempt status threatened by Republican Party
The Associated Press via WISH-TV in Indianapolis, IN has a report which begins ...
The Reverend Lisa Doege says she was shaken up when the Indiana Republican Party called her and warned that a church program on Social Security might cost the church its tax-exempt status.
Friday's South Bend Tribune reports a Republican staffer called the First Unitarian Church on Monday, a few hours before University of Notre Dame economics professor Teresa Ghilarducci spoke there.
Thanks to
Talking Points Memo via
Left Coast Unitarian for pointing this out.
Mononucleosis is a disease that "whores" get.
At least that's what a Catholic girls' school in Chicago says, according to
The Chicago Sun Times.
Former students at Mother McAuley Liberal Arts High School say that was part of a lesson given by a teacher who disclosed a student's case of mono and explained it was spread by "sexually active girls."
Now, the target of those comments -- 2004 graduate Rebecca Alvarado -- has filed suit against two teachers, the dean and principal at the all-girls Chicago Catholic school, claiming her privacy was violated and her reputation damaged.
Lou Dobbs of CNN offers his "facts" on evolution
Media Matters for America notes that
During a debate on "the origin of life," CNN host Lou Dobbs stated on his own authority: "The fact is that evolution, Darwinism, is not a fully explained or completely rigorous and defined science that has testable results within it." The National Academy of Sciences (NAS), which advises the federal government on "scientific and technical matters," disagrees with Dobbs' "facts" about evolution.
The NAS considers evolution "the central unifying concept of biology" and "one of the strongest and most useful scientific theories we have."
Ike on Social Security
David Sirota reminds of this November, 1954 quote by Republican President
Dwight D. Eisenhower:
Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are...a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
Amen, Ike.
Thanks to GrassRootDems.org via Eschaton for pointing this out.
Christians shouldn't date
At least that's what it says
here at Bibletopics.com. According to the site, the first few reasons are:
- Dating promotes lust and moderate sexual activity, opening the door for fornication.
- Dating develops a self-centered, feeling-oriented concept of love.
- Dating creates a permanent endorphin-bond between two people who will not spend their lives together.
- Dating teaches people to break off difficult relationships, conditioning them more for divorce than marriage.
But wait - there are more reasons. Lots more.
Thanks to Jesse Taylor at Pandagon via Eschaton for pointing this out.
Business Week: Earthly Empires
Now even
Business Week is covering how evangelical churches are borrowing from the business playbook. It starts ...
There's no shortage of churches in Houston, deep in the heart of the Bible Belt. So it's surprising that the largest one in the city -- and in the entire country -- is tucked away in a depressed corner most Houstonians would never dream of visiting. Yet 30,000 people endure punishing traffic on the narrow roads leading to Lakewood Church every weekend to hear Pastor Joel Osteen deliver upbeat messages of hope. A youthful-looking 42-year-old with a ready smile, he reassures the thousands who show up at each of his five weekend services that "God has a great future in store for you." His services are rousing affairs that often include his wife, Victoria, leading prayers and his mother, Dodie, discussing passages from the Bible.
Osteen is so popular that he has nearly quadrupled attendance since taking over the pulpit from his late father in 1999, winning over believers from other churches as well as throngs of the "unsaved." Many are drawn first by his ubiquitous presence on television. Each week 7 million people catch the slickly produced broadcast of his Sunday sermons on national cable and network channels, for which Lakewood shells out $15 million a year. Adherents often come clutching a copy of Osteen's best-seller, Your Best Life Now, which has sold 2.5 million copies since its publication last fall.
To keep them coming back, Lakewood offers free financial counseling, low-cost bulk food, even a "fidelity group" for men with "sexual addictions." Demand is brisk for the self-help sessions. Angie Mosqueda, 34, who was brought up a Catholic, says she and her husband, Mark, first went to Lakewood in 2000 when they were on the brink of a divorce. Mark even threw her out of the house after she confessed to infidelity. But over time, Lakewood counselors "really helped us to forgive one another and start all over again," she says.
US judge voids Nebraska's ban on gay marriage
According to the
Associated Press via the Boston Globe ...
A federal judge yesterday struck down Nebraska's ban on same-sex marriage, saying that the measure interferes not only with the rights of same-sex couples but also with those of foster parents, adopted children, and people in a host of other living arrangements.
The constitutional amendment, which defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman, was passed overwhelmingly by voters in November 2000.
Kraft Supports the Gay Games - some object
BlogActive says
The American Family Association is going after Kraft Foods for sponsoring the Gay Games. On their site they ask people to write to Kraft to object to sponsorship of the Gay Games
and they give a link to email Kraft thanking them for their support.
Beyond Red vs. Blue
The
Pew Research Center for the People and the Press have just released a 116-page report that says Republicans are divided about the role of government, and Democrats are divided by social and personal values.
Coming out of the 2004 election, the American political landscape decidedly favored the Republican Party. The GOP had extensive appeal among a disparate group of voters in the middle of the electorate, drew extraordinary loyalty from its own varied constituencies, and made some inroads among conservative Democrats. These advantages outweighed continued nationwide parity in party affiliation. Looking forward, however, there is no assurance that Republicans will be able to consolidate and build upon these advantages.
Republicans have neither gained nor lost in party identification in 2005. Moreover, divisions within the Republican coalition over economic and domestic issues may loom larger in the future, given the increasing salience of these matters. The Democratic party faces its own formidable challenges, despite the fact that the public sides with them on many key values and policy questions. Their constituencies are more diverse and, while united in opposition to President Bush, the Democrats are fractured by differences over social and personal values.
These are among the conclusions of Pew's political typology study, which sorts voters into homogeneous groups based on values, political beliefs, and party affiliation. The current study is based on two public opinion surveys a nationwide poll of 2,000 interviews conducted Dec. 1-16, 2004, and a subsequent re-interview of 1,090 respondents conducted March 17-27 of this year. This is the fourth such typology created by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press since 1987. Many of the groups identified in the current surveys are similar to those in past typologies, reflecting the continuing importance of a number of key beliefs and values. These themes endure despite the consequential events of the past four years especially the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq.
Thanks to Matthew Yglesias for pointing this out at
The American Prospect.
The spirituality of Mr. Rogers
When I first saw Mr. Rogers quite a few years ago, I quickly wrote him off as pandering to kids in a sing-song voice. Then, one day, I got who he was, and became incredibly impressed with the depth of his simple message.
Holly Lebowitz Rossi has an article in Beliefnet called Mister Rogers' Theology of 'Neighbor' which is worth reading.
The book is called "The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers." How was Mister Rogers’ faith simple?
Sometimes the word "simple" is confused with the word "simplistic," and it wasn’t. His philosophy of life is not simplistic, but it’s simple in that there are some basic tenets to it that seem simple but are so profound and so hard to live out on a daily basis. Probably the central tenet of his faith and the theme of the Neighborhood is just the idea of loving your neighbor. When I asked him who is your neighbor, he said, whoever you happen to be with at the moment. So right there, there’s no loophole—that means we have to love everybody.
He said, once you realize that everybody’s your neighbor, you have a choice. You can either be an advocate or an accuser. An accuser is somebody who only sees what’s awful about themselves so they look through those eyes and look for what’s awful about their neighbor. An advocate is somebody who looks through the eyes of God at their neighbor and sees what’s good about that person because they’re created in God’s likeness. That’s a very simple, basic truth, but to live that out in our daily lives is tremendously difficult.
When we wonder about our spirituality - which Unitarian Universalists often do - it's worth thinking about how Mr. Rogers viewed life.
Why strict churches are strong
Slate has an article called
The Power of the Mustard Seed which says "It isn't easy to explain why some people submit enthusiastically to religious law, especially when you're talking to people who have never had the slightest desire to do so." After a bit of intro, it continues
In his 1994 essay "Why Strict Churches Are Strong," which has become quite influential in the sociology of religion, economist Laurence Iannacone makes the counterintuitive case that people choose to be strictly religious because of the quantifiable benefits their piety affords them, not just in the afterlife but in the here and now.
Iannacone starts by asking why people join strict churches, given that doing so exacts such a high price. Eccentric customs invite ridicule and persecution; membership in a marginal church may limit chances for social and economic advancement; rules of observance bar access to apparently innocent pleasures; the entire undertaking squanders time that could have been spent amusing or improving oneself.
According to Iannacone, the devout person pays the high social price because it buys a better religious product. The rules discourage free riders, the people who undermine group efforts by taking more than they give back. The strict church is one in which members with weak commitments have been weeded out. Raising fees for membership doesn't work nearly as well as raising the opportunity cost of joining, because fees drive away the poor, who have the least to lose when they volunteer their time, and who also have the most incentive to pray. Fees also encourage the rich to substitute money for piety.
What does the pious person get in return for all of his or her time and effort? A church full of passionate members; a community of people deeply involved in one another's lives and more willing than most to come to one another's aid; a peer group of knowledgeable souls who speak the same language (or languages), are moved by the same texts, and cherish the same dreams. Religion is a " 'commodity' that people produce collectively," says Iannacone. "My religious satisfaction thus depends both on my 'inputs' and those of others." If a rich and textured spiritual experience is what you seek, then a storefront Holy Roller church or an Orthodox shtiebl is a better fit than a suburban church made up of distracted, ambitious people who can barely manage to find a morning free for Sunday services, let alone several evenings a week for text study and volunteer work.
The Case of the Stolen Church
Of all the problems I've seen churches have, here's a new one: according to
WCBD in Charleston, South Carolina ...
A Mount Pleasant congregation is dealing with the loss of their church after they say some one broke the locks off a trailer and stole it.
"We found the lock shattered on the ground and the simply took the trailer away." Said Jeremy Howell Pastor of Point Hope United Methodist Church.
Commweal comments on dismissal of magazine editor
Commonweal Magazine, an independent journal of opinion edited and managed by lay Catholics, isn't happy about the Vatican's dismissal of the editor of
America magazine.
American Catholics, including most regular churchgoers, get their news about the church from the secular media, not from church spokespersons or official pronouncements. Most Catholics read about papal encyclicals in the papers; they don’t read encyclicals. It therefore behooves the hierarchy, if it wants to communicate with the faithful (or re-evangelize them), to act in a way that does not lend credence to the still-widespread impression that the Catholic Church is a backward-looking, essentially authoritarian, institution run by men who are afraid of open debate and intellectual inquiry. It is safe to say that the Vatican’s shocking dismissal of Rev. Thomas Reese as editor of the Jesuit magazine America has left precisely such an impression with millions of Americans, Catholic and non-Catholic alike.
Dr. Hager's Family Values
An article in The Nation discusses a Bush Administration appointee to the Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ...
Late last October Dr. W. David Hager, a prominent obstetrician-gynecologist and Bush Administration appointee to the Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), took to the pulpit as the featured speaker at a morning service. He stood in the campus chapel at Asbury College, a small evangelical Christian school nestled among picturesque horse farms in the small town of Wilmore in Kentucky's bluegrass region. Hager is an Asburian nabob; his elderly father is a past president of the college, and Hager himself currently sits on his alma mater's board of trustees. Even the school's administrative building, Hager Hall, bears the family name.
That day, a mostly friendly audience of 1,500 students and faculty packed into the seats in front of him. With the autumn sunlight streaming through the stained-glass windows, Hager opened his Bible to the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel and looked out into the audience. "I want to share with you some information about how...God has called me to stand in the gap," he declared. "Not only for others, but regarding ethical and moral issues in our country."
There's obviously just a little more combination of religion and government than we need. But you do need to
read this particular article ... how he treated his former wife doesn't exactly square with his professed values.
Thanks to Matthew Yglesias for pointing this out.
"Our Whole Lives" sex-ed program mentioned in Boston Globe
Philocrites talks about an article by Bella English in
today's Boston Globe which discusses the vogue among teenage boys for online porn.
She talks to alarmed parents, adolescent psychologists, and boys and girls about the phenomenon — including a dozen eighth- and ninth-grade Unitarian Universalists enrolled in the "Our Whole Lives" comprehensive sex-ed program developed by the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations and the United Church of Christ.
Needed: Responsible Demagoguery
Matt Miller, writing in the New York Times (registration required) thinks Democrats should quit carping.
You'd never guess from the Democratic hysteria that President Bush's plan to "progressively index" Social Security is an idea we liberals may one day want to embrace. So farsighted Democrats who want to (1) win back power and (2) use that power to fix big problems should quit carping about Bush's evil "cuts" and punish him instead with what I call Responsible Demagoguery: harsh politics that leaves sound policy intact.
In the "Laws that need to be repealed" category ...
The Boston Globe reports ...
Boston is a finalist for hosting a big convention for minority journalists, but a 1675 law requiring the arrest of Native Americans who enter Boston could prevent the city from winning the bid.
Officials in City Hall and at the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority met yesterday with the executive director of Unity: Journalists of Color Inc. to discuss repealing the state law, which has remained on the books despite being widely considered unconstitutional.
California Panels Reject Gay Marriage Ban
The
Associated Press via iWon reports ...
Conservative groups in California say they will try to gather enough signatures to put an initiative banning gay marriage on the ballot in 2006.
The announcement came Tuesday after committees of state lawmakers rejected a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriages and strip away a long list of rights granted to domestic partners in recent years.
"This disturbing display of arrogance against marriage and the voters means average Californians must take matters into their own hands," said Randy Thomasson, president of the Campaign for Children and Families.
But Democratic state Sen. Sheila Kuehl, the first openly gay person elected to the Legislature, predicted otherwise. "This is about America, the place where no civil rights movement has ever failed," she said.
Gay Men Respond Differently to Pheromones
The
Associated Press via iWon reports ...
The sexual area of a gay man's brain works a lot like that of a woman when exposed to a particular stimulus, researchers say.
In an experiment, men and heterosexual women sniffed a chemical from the male hormone testosterone. The homosexual men's brains responded differently from those of heterosexual males, and in a similar way to the women's brains.
"It is one more piece of evidence ... that is showing that sexual orientation is not all learned," said Sandra Witelson, an expert on brain anatomy and sexual orientation at the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada.
Problems at the AFL-CIO
The
New York Times (free registration required) reports ...
Already facing upheaval and dissent from several union presidents, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. saw its problems escalate last week when the federation laid off about a fourth of its staff and the chairman of its public relations committee resigned in a fit of pique. Not only that, but four of the nation's largest unions demanded that the A.F.L.-C.I.O. remove their members' names from its master political list of 13 million workers because of a feud over sharing information.
And further ...
The A.F.L.-C.I.O., a federation of 57 unions, has been in tumult for more than six months, ever since the federation's largest union, the Service Employees International Union, threatened to quit, complaining that the organization was doing far too little to reverse labor's decline.
Family Research Council opposes HPV Vaccine
New Scientist reports that the
Family Research Council opposes a vaccine to prevent the human papilloma virus.
The trouble is that the human papilloma virus (HPV) is sexually transmitted. So to prevent infection, girls will have to be vaccinated before they become sexually active, which could be a problem in many countries.
In the US, for instance, religious groups are gearing up to oppose vaccination, despite a survey showing 80 per cent of parents favour vaccinating their daughters. "Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV," says Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council, a leading Christian lobby group that has made much of the fact that, because it can spread by skin contact, condoms are not as effective against HPV as they are against other viruses such as HIV.
"Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a licence to engage in premarital sex," Maher claims, though it is arguable how many young women have even heard of the virus.
NPR's religion reporter not necessarily objective
According to
Media Matters for America, you can't take NPR's religion reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty's reports as objective.
At the 2003 Baptist Press National Student Journalism Conference, according to an October 13, 2003, Baptist Press article, Hagerty discussed with conference attendees the effect of her religious beliefs on reporting:
When you or I as Christ-followers go to work each day, we have to perform our jobs in a fundamentally different way from other people because our employer is Christ, and everything we do has to be run through the filter of this question: How does Jesus Christ view my performance? It raises the bar higher than the most demanding editor or supervisor could possibly do.
[...]
What's important is that [one's colleagues] begin to think differently about Christianity. And I actually think that's what we're supposed to do as Christians. We're supposed to draw people, through the power of attraction, to Jesus Christ just as He drew people to Himself.
[...]
Early in my career at National Public Radio, I decided that being true to my God had to be the nonnegotiable. If it meant losing my job, so be it. ... In the long run I had to think, is a story or even is a career ... more valuable than my relationship with God and eternal treasure in heaven? And I think the answer is no, and the decisions we make count for eternity.
Baptist church kicks out Democrats
North Carolina station
WLOS reports that
East Waynesville Baptist asked nine members to leave. Now 40 more have left the church in protest. Former members say Pastor Chan Chandler gave them the ultimatum, saying if they didn't support George Bush, they should resign or repent. The minister declined an interview with News 13. But he did say "the actions were not politically motivated." There are questions about whether the bi-laws were followed when the members were thrown out.
Thanks to
Eschaton for pointing that out.
Thanks to ChaliceChick, more details are here.
Getting people to connect
Kung Fu Monkey has a great essay called
Learn To Say Ain't. Written by someone who's done stand-up comedy, it's a great commentary on getting people to hear your message. In part, he says
Now, the fine line here is that, the audience also always knows when you're being dishonest. That's worth hitting again. When you are on stage, the audience's collective mind can tell when you're not being yourself. And even more importantly, they can tell when you're lying to be one of "us". (Like Kerry hunting, or Dukakis in the tank). Changing yourself to fit the audience would be the wrong lesson to take from "Learn to say 'ain't.'" No, the lesson Boats was teaching me was that there's no problem with relaxing a bit and showing that you're not one of "them." He was teaching me that connection is a half-way game -- just extend out a little, and the audience will come the rest of the way. They will extend the boundary of "us" if you advance toward it. That was the genius of "compassionate conservatism."
People will relax and trust you when you're not trying to dazzle them with brainpower. It's okay to be the smartest guy in the room, but that shouldn't be the point of it. This is a liberal weakness, because they often seem to operate on the dual fuels of statistics and sputtering. They foolishly believe that the smartest, most morally equitable, most well-reasoned argument is the right one.
Listen up, Democrats.
Thanks to MyIrony for this one.
Myths of Democratic Renewal
Ruy Teixeira of The Emerging Democratic Majority Weblog feels that
Rather than pursue the changes necessary to address this failure [that they are bedeviled by public perception that they stand for little and lack clear ideas to deal with the nation's problems], however, much of the Democratic party seems in thrall to one or another of a series of myths about how the Democrats can renew their popular appeal.
These myths, according to the article, appear to include George Lakoff's concept of
framing.
Teixeira seems to feel that clarifying the Democrats' message isn't enough. He believes that Democrats have to change what they believe in before they can be accepted.
I disagree. Republicans - especially the ultra-conservatives who appear to be in charge these days - have had a decade of very carefully couching - or framing - their message in terms which the public finds acceptable. For example, they're calling the estate tax - a tax on relatively large estates which Republicans are against - the death tax which implies that most people people who die will have to pay it. So everyone becomes against it - especially the vast majority of people whose estates would never have to pay it. Republicans who use this type of framing have been very successful at it; yet Teixeira believes Democrats shouldn't do what's been proven to be successful.
U.S. Treaty With Tripoli 1796-1797 - We're not a Christian Nation
Authored by American diplomat Joel Barlow in 1796, the
treaty was sent to the floor of the Senate, June 7, 1797, where it was read aloud in its entirety and unanimously approved. John Adams, haven seen the treaty, signed it and proudly proclaimed it to the Nation.
Article 11 of it states:
As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
The Number Of The Beast just changed
Philocrites says it ain't 666 anymore.
Tutu: God is not a Christian
BeliefNet had
an email interview with Beliefnet, Bishop Desmond Tutu, author of the new book
God Has A Dream. In the interview, BeliefNet asks
Is your book relevant to non-Christians or people with no religious faith?
And Tutu answers
I believe so very much. Because love is universal. I mean, you don't have to believe in God to know that loving is better than hating. We are trying to remind them that all of us are fundamentally good. The aberration is the bad person. God is not upset that Gandhi was not a Christian, because God is not a Christian! All of God's children and their different faiths help us to realize the immensity of God. No faith contains the whole truth about God. And certainly Christians don't have a corner on God. All of us belong to God. Even the nonbeliever is precious to God. And one simply tries to remind them that they are made for transcendence. They are made for goodness.
Retaining UU Youth when they leave high school
Dan at
Yet Another Unitarian Universalist Blog has a good post on ways to retain our UU youth after they leave high school.
More believe the country is headed in the wrong direction
NewDonkey.com says ...
There's a blizzard of public opinion research making its way into publication that consistently makes one big point: growing majorities of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction (or, to use the train metaphor which a whole generation of pollsters has conspired to impose on us, America is on "the wrong track"). George W. Bush's approval ratings have dropped to their pre-9/11 level, while his main priorities, especially Social Security privatization, are more unpopular every day. And the Republican Party and the Republican Congress are getting down there into the dangerous territory of being perceived as a menace to the country.
But--Democrats are not yet benefitting from this wreckage. And it's not too hard to understand why: for (largely) sound tactical reasons, they are focused on opposing the GOP agenda rather than projecting any positive agenda of their own. But that can't go on forever. Negative perceptions of the Democratic Party on security, the role of government, and (to a lesser extent now that the GOP is lurching off the right-wing edge) culture have not gone away.
Repeat after me: we need to frame our message. We need to frame our message. We need to ...
Two visions of gay rights
Social Gospel Today, in a piece entitled
Gay Rights Movement Increasingly Conceptualized as Struggle for Equality, suggests there are two arguments for gay rights:
- Privacy Rights
- An heir to the equality rights of Brown and the Civil Rights Act of 1964
The article argues that the first vision of Gay Rights is both easier for the Right to oppose and less persuasive on the merits than the second vision.
