Peter Edman
Moderator Joe Loconte has an article in the Wall Street Journal for 1 July 2005 on the latest resurgence of politically liberal Christians.
In ”From Gospel to Government,” Loconte discusses the current “Christian Alliance for Progress” and gives some context from recent history.
It proffers an agenda “founded firmly on the teachings of the Gospel.” Some students of the Gospel may be surprised at how neatly such an agenda fits the Democratic Party platform . . .
They can at least be comforted that they are not alone—the sermon from Tom Wright I linked to earlier included comments that in the UK, the people pushing for religion in public life are more on the left.
Loconte helps me articulate something I’ve been struggling with for a few weeks now:
A final weakness of Christian progressives is one shared by some Christian conservatives: the impulse to leap directly from the Bible to contemporary politics. . . .
In all of it, there is little room for political philosophy, or civil society, or even an appreciation of the different roles of church and state. Whatever the argument--whether it’s a big government approach to poverty or a pacifist stance on terrorism--Bible verses are at the ready. Call it fundamentalism from the left.
And that seems to be a large part of the problem. Peace in the Middle East, to take an example not at random, is all well and good, but where is the prudential argumentation on how to achieve it? Martin Peretz at The New Republic has some well-deserved and extremely pointed criticism of the latest Anglican initiative in that region, which, he notes, “ignores so many facts that it boggles the mind.”
Granted this is difficult, but the response to one fundamentalism is not a different kind of fundamentalism—nor is it secularism. Wright’s sermon helps point in the right direction. But it looks, to put it mildly, like we’ve still got work to do here.
Sightings, Faiths and Worldviews, Public Square, Thu 30 Jun 2005
In anything that does cover the whole of your life—in your philosophy and your religion—you must have mirth. If you do not have mirth you will certainly have madness.
G. K. Chesterton
The X-Files and the Enlightenment Myth
Humanitarian ‘Impulses’ vs. Convictions
The U.N.’s Human Rights Charade
The Greatness of Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008)
Social Justice and Conservative Politics
Islamist Ideology in the UK: Doing Fine
John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace by Jonathan Aitken.
A new biography based on previously unpublished papers.
The Real Digital Revolution: Social networking is changing the marketing landscape: “Brand advertising can’t stretch the truth anymore or try and gild the lily. Because if it does, we’re going to find out about it, find out that you’ve been lying to us all along about extras that don’t work and specials that aren’t special. And our reaction is not going to be pretty.” (Alan Wolk, AdWeek; h/t: Ryan Moede • 2008 08 27)
Après Lewis: ‘As it turns out, Tim Keller’s “The Reason for God” (2008), the book recommended by my friend, is the best of the “Mere Christianity” wannabes. Mr. Keller argues that the usual objections to Christianity—that it is a straitjacket, that there cannot be just one true religion—are themselves the product of a particular (secular Western) point of view. He then builds an affirmative case for Christianity, suggesting that the Big Bang and our appreciation of beauty are clues pointing to God and that Christ’s resurrection was so unlikely both to Greeks and Romans (who viewed the material world as weak and corrupt) and to Jews (who expected any resurrection to come at the end of time) that it cannot be dismissed as the clever marketing strategy of a new religion. If this sounds a little like N.T. Wright, it isn’t accidental: Mr. Keller draws liberally from him, as well as Lewis, Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga (a professor at Notre Dame) and others. “The Reason for God” is as sensible and winsome as one would expect from the pastor of a latticework of churches that draw more than 5,000 attendees in New York City every Sunday, most of them young, single, urban professionals. But it too is no “Mere Christianity.” It does not have the original arguments or the magical prose of Lewis’s classic.’ (David Skeel, Wall Street Journal • 2008 08 15)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: the line within: ‘Solzhenitsyn was far from endorsing the thesis of the “banality of evil” as Hannah Arendt had expounded it. Nor did he see totalitarianism as the ultimate source of the evil that it promotes. Rather totalitarian government is the great mistake, made for whatever noble or ignoble purpose, of putting the final goal before the present dilemma. It is this which gives evil intentions the same chance as good ones, which enables the criminal and the psychopath to compete on a level with the saint and the hero. Yet even in totalitarianism the evil belongs to the human beings, and not to the system. This is the remarkable message that Solzhenitsyn, crawling from the death-machine, carried pressed to his heart.’ (Senior Fellow Roger Scruton, in openDemocracy • 2008 08 11)
Atheism and Evil: Could it possibly improve things to believe that the long pain of human evolution was set in motion by chance alone? The atheist view of the world is actually rather bleaker than that of Jews and Christians: Suffering under the weight of evil is meaningless, and so is any struggle against evil. Everything in the atheist’s world begins and ends in randomness and chance. Few atheists seem to be as rigorously honest as Friedrich Nietzsche, who warned that if God is dead, it is wishful thinking to hold that reason alone can confer “meaning” on life. Reason has been outmoded by chance. (Michael Novak, First Things: On the Square • 2008 07 29)
• Christopher Nolan’s Achievement: The Dark Knight (2008 07 22)
• Unplanned Parenthood (2008 07 21)
• What makes a supervillain? (2008 07 19)
• Pope’s Speech at Barangaroo (2008 07 17)
• Hollywood’s Hero Deficit (2008 07 17)
Culture Wars: The Struggle To Control The Family, Art, Education, Law, And Politics In America by James Davison Hunter.
A riveting account of how Christian fundamentalists, Orthodox Jews, and conservative Catholics have joined forces in a battle against their progressive counterparts for control of American secular culture.
