Beliefnet
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Like Virgins
A couple of days ago I congratulated The Revealer's Jeff Sharlet for his balanced and generally respectful
article in Rolling Stoneabout young, single evangelical Christians who have embraced virgininity and sexual abstinence until marriage. The piece was a bit flip and foul-mouthed, but, well, this is Rolling Stone.
Now, there's more. Jeff's latest post on
The Revealer featuresthe reaction to the story of
R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Seminary and, as Time magazine puts it, "reigning intellectual of the evangelical movement in the U.S." Mohler liked the article, too, but expressed some of the same reservations I had:
"Anyone who thinks that the idea of sexual abstinence is a recent development tied to a political agenda within the Christian right just hasn't been in touch with conservative Christianity....
"The reporter's analysis serves as a fascinating lens through which to see the sexual values of the dominant media class. They haven't considered sexual abstinence as an option for years, and at least some of them have a hard time believing that sexual abstinence before marriage was ever considered the normative expectation for young people. Coming of age in the 1960s--or raised by parents who came of age in the 1960s--those who live in the dominant sexual culture now hear the idea of sexual abstinence as something genuinely innovative and assuredly radical."
Amazingly enough, Sharlet agrees with Mohler:
"But my argument isn't that Christian conservatives have just discovered chastity; it's that there's a new, broad embrace of it among a generation of exceptionally pious virgins who are, however, fully engaged with mainstream culture. Moreover, that Christian political activists have moved it to the center of their concerns, a notion emphasized by many abstinence activists. It's worth pointing out -- as I failed to do in Rolling Stone -- that this shift began in the early 1990s, just as the Cold War ended. What's the connection? Pre-marital sex is the new communism, the new 'evil empire.'
"Such an assertion, however, is evidence of my secular perspective. I look for explanations in worldly events. As such, my foray into the chastity movement has an inevitable 'among the natives' tone...."
It's a fascinating discussion.
Evangelicals: We Can't Play the Persecution Card Anymore
An editorial in the July issue of
Christianity Today rejoicesthat evangelical Christians are finally getting the respect they deserve from the media:
Except for cases still found in some places--Lewis Lapham's '
The Wrath of the Lamb' in the May issue of Harper's being one of them [My note: That's the essay in which Lapham touted as "good news" the supposed Death of God in the 1960s but now is peeved because
He won't stay dead]--evangelicals can no longer complain about a media conspiracy against them. We're no longer overlooked, persecuted, discriminated against, and misquoted in the mainstream news media. Clarification: the term 'news media' here doesn't include the opinion writers, whose voices in The New York Times, for example, still alternate between befuddlement at discovery of evangelicals (Had you any idea people like this existed?) and insulting them (They're the ones who believe that science and faith are mutually exclusive!)....
"The news and features reporters, editors, and producers exhibit more awareness of complexity in the evangelical world-now featuring Sojourners founder Jim Wallis, Focus on the Family's James Dobson, and voices in between. We're represented on PBS's The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, in David Van Biema's reporting for Time, and on NPR's Morning Edition."
Exhibit A in CT's argument is the recent special, "
The Resurrection of Jesus Christ" on ABC's 20/20. The show featured a raft of respected evangelical scholars, supported by several secular academics, expressing their belief in the credibility of the New Testament stories of Jesus' empty tomb. The skeptics who usually dominate such specials played only a minority role this time.
(I can testify to the change of media emphasis myself. When I reviewed Peter Jennings' special on Jesus for Beliefnet in 2000, I noted that the show was
dominated by scholars from the Jesus Seminar, with only a single academic spokesman for Christian orthodoxy, but when Jennings revisited the subject last year in
"Jesus and Paul", the balance between Jesus Seminar types and believing scholars was far more even.)
The CT editorial continues:
"[W}e really can't play the persecution card anymore. As 'players,' we will be criticized sharply still, but that's just part of life in America.....[L]et's remember that how we got here is how we will stay here: Careful scholarship. Measured proclamations. Majoring on the majors. Grassroots organizing. Patience. Prayer. Now that we're prime-time, we don't want to start acting like American idols."
Shoving Gay Marriage Down People's Throats in Canada
Kathy Shaidle, my favorite orthodox Catholic in Toronto, has been posting furiously (with lots o' links) on
Relapsed Catholicon the
Canadian Parliament's 158-133 voteto force gay marriage upon all of Canada's provinces, even those whose residents don't want it. (
Spain also enacted gay-marriage legislationyesterday). Although the new Canadian legislation, Bill C-38, claims not to force churches whose beliefs dictate otherwise to marry gay couples, Parliament refused to make that protection airtight:
Here (via Kathy) is
Girl on the Right:
"[T]the amendment to Bill C-38 which would have given additional protection to religious institutions against being forced to perform gay marraiges some day (and that day will come, mark my words) was voted against. The parliamentarians who voted against that amendment have all but come out (so to speak) and decreed war on religion in Canada.
Here's
Angry in the Great White Northpredicting that judges in Canda's provinces will eventually order protesting churches, especially the Catholic Church, to permit same-sex ceremonies:
"But churches will defy judgments that demand that their properties be made available for gay marriages. Then some politician will make the mistake of bringing up the tax-exempt status of churches....
"Canadians are far less religious than Americans, so there's a fair chance such legislation will go through. It won't revoke tax exempt status, but will firm up the rules about when that status should be revoked (essentially, the churches should shut up)."
And here, finally, is an
opinion letterthat the Canadian law firm Lang Miller sent to Parliament before the bill was passed:
"There is little doubt that, if passed, Bill C-38 will be used by provincial governments and others to override the rights of conscience and religion of ordinary Canadians."
It's going to be tough up there for people whose religious beliefs or moral principles tell them that a marriage can take place only between a man and a woman.
Once We Were "Christers"
Now the new term of disdain is "Christianist." It's been floating around the fringes of left-wing blogosphere for months (
Google the wordand you'll see what I mean). Now, mainstream blogger Andrew Sullivan has picked up the word himself; it's a substitute for his older designation, "theocon."
Here's
Andrew on a recent pollshowing that 84 percent of Republicans approve--horrors!--of the way President Bush is doing his job:
"This strikes me as a direct result of the [Karl] Rove strategy of brutal partisanship, Christianist pandering, and general fiscal and military fecklessness."
And it's also, as
William Safire has noted, a favorite word of New Yorker columnist Hendrik Hertzberg, who has used the word "Christianist" to describe both the supporters of the late Terri Schiavo and Republican Rep. Tom DeLay.
As David Blankenhorn writes for
Familyscholars.org:
"As best I can determine, a Christianist is someone whose political views are significantly influenced by their Christian faith, or more precisely, influenced by Christian faith in a way that makes those views unattractive to people who... go around calling people 'Christianists.' Of course, we used simply to call these people 'Christians,' but apparently that's not quite stigmatizing enough."
Vast Right-Wing Christian Film Conspiracy, Part 2
Last week I blogged about screenwriter/former nun Barbara Nicolosi, who was being bird-dogged by New York Times reporter James Ulmer for a story he was writing about the vast right-wing conspiracy to get--horrors!--religious films made in Hollywood.
Ulmer informed Barbthat he was going to call her a "Catholic activist" in the story, even though what she really does is head
Act One, an interdenominational organization that trains people of faith to write for the movies. When confronted by Barb on that,
Ulmer said: "Yeah. Yeah...I know...but I had to call you something."
Well,
Ulmer's story came outin the NYT on Sunday, and it's about...the vast right-wing conspiracy to get--horrors!--religious films made in Hollywood. It's also a snooze, a hodgepodge of reminiscences about the box-office success of the "
The Passion of the Christ," info about the annual
Liberty Film Festival, which is actually secular-conservative in focus, and some wan efforts to tie Christian film-making to Big Conservative Money. Ulmer writes of:
"...discreet, religiously based outreach and financing initiatives, including gatherings arranged by the Wilberforce Forum, the Virginia-based evangelical public policy group whose chairman is the former Watergate figure Chuck Colson and which has a mission to 'shape culture from a biblical perspective,' according to its Web site,
wilberforce.org. Last September, [two Christian producers] flew to Maryland to meet with top Christian powerbrokers on Capitol Hill in a forum co-sponsored by Wilberforce.
"'The idea was to start tying money from Washington's right-to-life movement to key Hollywood players,' said a participant who asked not to be named to protect his relationship with Wilberforce."
There's much, much more of this. And by the way, Barbara Nicolosi is indeed referred to as a "Catholic activist."
But the Times Is Trying to Be Fair!
You wouldn't guess it, of course, from
James Ulmer's Vast Right-Wing Christian Film Conspiracy piece, but the Gray Lady really is trying to cover religious conservatives more fairly and respectfully. At least that's the gist of the memo "
Assuring Our Credbility" that Bill Keller, the NYT's executive editor just handed out to his staff (click
Get Religion) for a fine roundup on the issue.)
Keller wrote:
"Too often we label whole groups from a perspective that uncritically accepts a stereotype or unfairly marginalizes them. As one reporter put it, words like moderate or centrist 'inevitably incorporate a judgment about which views are sensible and which are extreme.' We often apply 'religious fundamentalists,' another loaded term, to political activists who would describe themselves as Christian conservatives."
The memo was in response to a
report from the Times's Credibility Committee, set up after the Jayson Blair scandal, that had urged the Times to hire "talented journalists who happen to have military experience, who know rural America first hand, who are at home in different faiths." The committe noted:
"We should...increase our coverage of religion in America and focus on new ways to give it greater attention. . . . We should take pains to create a climate in which staff members feel free to propose or criticize coverage from vantage points that lie outside the perceived newsroom consensus (liberal/conservative, religious/secular, urban/suburban/rural, elitist/white collar/blue collar)."
And that report in turn followed former Times Ombudsman Daniel Okrent's blistering assessment last summer of the Times's coverage of those who hold different religious or moral values from those to be found inside the heads of most of its staffers:
"If you're examining the paper's coverage of these subjects from a perspective that is neither urban nor Northeastern nor culturally seen-it-all; if you are among the groups The Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide (devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews, Texans); if your value system wouldn't wear well on a composite New York Times journalist, then a walk through this paper can make you feel you're traveling in a strange and forbidding world."
I'm not holding my breath for big changes in the Times' condescending coverage of people who take their faith seriously--but Keller's memo is a step in the right direction. As "Get Religion" poster "Brant" puts it: "[T]here are about a million "evangelical Christians" living in the New York metro area.....Something tells me it's at least a good business move to quit deriding a million people - residents of your own city! - as a bizarre band of extremists."
No "Reframing" for Katha Pollitt
Over at The Nation, columnist
Katha Pollitt is mad as hellat
George Lakoff, the University of California-Berkeley linguist who's lately been advising the Democrats on how to
"reframe" liberal ideassuch as higher taxes and gay marriage so as to make them palatable to the majority of U.S. voters who currently oppose them. One of Lakoff's reframing projects is abortion, as support for abortion on demand has been slipping steadily for the past 10 years, with some 59 percent of Americans now saying that most abortions should be illegal, according to a
Gallup poll in April. Lakoff suggests that abortion activists quit talking about "choice" and start focusing on rape victims and other hard cases about which most Americans are sympathetic.
Katha doesn't like that--or any other Democratic efforts to find common ground with pro-lifers. And she doesn't like Hillary Clinton either, for calling abortion "tragic." Katha says:
"'Reframing' abortion is actually a kind of deframing, a way of taking it out of its real-life context, which is the experience of women, their bodies, their healthcare, their struggles, the caring work our society expects them to do for free. Lynn Paltrow, the brilliant lawyer who runs
National Advocates for Pregnant Women, thinks the way to win grassroots support for abortion rights is to connect it to the whole range of reproductive and maternal rights: the right to have a home birth, to refuse a Caesarean section, to know that a miscarriage or stillbirth--or simply taking a drink--will not land you in jail. The same ideology of fetal protection that anti-choicers wield against abortion is used against women with wanted pregnancies. More broadly, Paltrow argues that the right to abortion would have more support if it were presented as just one of the things women need to care for their families, along with paid maternity leave, childcare, quality healthcare for all, economic and social support for mothers and children, strong environmental policies that protect fetuses and children."
I like
Amy Welborn's response to this:
"Aside from the central point, Katha, why should environmental policies protect fetuses? What's to protect? Who cares? Why?"
To Those Who Think Religion Is Dangerous: Think Again
Mark Steyn has this must-read column
in the U.K. Daily Telegraph:
"There aren't many examples of successful post-religious societies. And, if one casts around the world today, one notices the two powers with the worst prospects are the ones most advanced in their post-religiosity. Russia will never recover from seven decades of Communism: its sickly menfolk have a lower life expectancy than Bangladeshis; its population shrinks by 100 every hour, and by 0.4 per cent every year, a rate certain to escalate as the smarter folks figure it's better to emigrate than get sucked down in the demographic death spiral.
"And then, of course, there's the European Union....Every day you get ever more poignant glimpses of the Euro-future, such as it is. In East Germany, whose rural communities are dying, village sewer systems are having a tough time adjusting to the lack of use. Populations have fallen so dramatically that there are too few people flushing to keep the flow of waste moving. Traditionally, government infrastructure expenditure arises from increased demand. In this case, the sewer lines are having to be narrowed at great cost in order to cope with dramatically decreased demand....
"A political entity hostile to the three principal building blocks of functioning societies - religion, family and wealth creation - was never a likely bet for the long term."
But of course the European Union and its social-democrat architects continue to chug along believing that religion is irrelevant, the family can be replaced by the government, and wealth creation is possible without people to create the wealth.
Woody Allen, Moral-Equivalence Man
James Lileks
hits the ceilingover Woody Allen's interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel
in which the filmmaker said the following:
"The history of the world is like: he kills me, I kill him. Only with different cosmetics and different castings: so in 2001 some fanatics killed some Americans, and now some Americans are killing some Iraqis. And in my childhood, some Nazis killed Jews. And now, some Jewish people and some Palestinians are killing each other."
Note that it's "some fanatics," "some Americans," and "some Iraqis"--but not "some" Jews. Guess it's possible, if you're Woody Allen, to refer to 3,000 murdered terrorism victims as "some"--but a stretch to say that about 6 million annihilated Jews.
Here's what Lileks has to say:
"'Some Nazis killed Jews, and now some Jewish people and some Palestinians are killing each other.' Same thing. Without the ability to make moral distinctions based on motive, consequences, the ethical constructs of various parties, everything is equal, and you end up with people like Woody Allen: a tiny speck of compacted narcissism, revolving around the dead sun in an empty universe. What's left? Well, thank heavens for little girls."
You're in Firing Hands With Allstate
Want to write a statement saying you oppose gay marriage because it's not in accord with your religious beliefs? Watch out--that statement could get you fired. Even if you write it at home, on your own time, and on your own computer. Even if you never say anything hostile about gays but merely express your view that gay marriage undermines an age-old and sacred institution.
That's what happened to J. Matt Barber, who lost his 5-year job as a manager for the Allstate insurance company
because he wrote this columnfor several conservative websites (as reported by
WorldnetDaily):
"Marriage between one man and one woman, and the nuclear family have forever been cornerstones of civilized society....Regrettably, there are at present, many within the militant homosexual lobby who wish to take a sledge hammer to those cornerstones-- many who hope to undermine both the historical and contemporary reality of marriage and family-- many who, through judicial fiat, aim to circumvent the Constitution, the legislative process, and the overwhelming will of the people in an effort to redefine marriage. Accordingly, the unsolicited, oxymoronic and spurious expression 'same-sex marriage' has been forced into popular lexicon."
According to WorldnetDaily, Barber said that was hauled into the company's human-resources office at its headquarters in Northbrook, Ill., shown a copy of the column, and informed, "Here at Allstate we have a very diverse community." Barber explained that column reflected his own personal Christian beliefs and was not intended to represent Allstate's views. The column did identify Barber as an Allstate employee, but Barber says that was without his knowledge or permission. Nonetheless Barber was promptly suspended, escorted off company premises by a security guard, and a few days later, fired. The Illinois Department of Employment Security later determined that Barber had been terminated after an unnamed organization complained to Allstate about the column.
Now Barber is suing Allstate under federal employment-discrimination laws, with the help of the
Christian Law Association, the organization that represented the parents of Terri Schiavo.
I hope the judge throws the book at Allstate. As Patrick Sweeney of Extreme Catholic
writes: for every Matt there are thousands who read about this and are saying to themselves 'Not me. I am not going to speak out. I won't risk my job.'"
Even More Commandments Confusion
I made an error in my post yesterday on the Supreme Courts' two Ten Commandments decisions. I wrote:
"The real explanation for the decisions might lie only in the convoluted mind of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the swing vote for the majority in both decisions."
It was actually Justice Stephen G. Breyer who provided the swing vote in the two 5-4 rulings holding that it's OK to mount the Ten Commandments on the lawn outside the state capitol (
in Texas) but not OK to mount them on the wall inside a courthouse (
in Kentucky). That makes me even more confused than I was yesterday. O'Connor is a onetime conservative who's been getting ever more liberal ("growing," in liberal-speak) since she took the high court bench after being appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1981. So it makes sense that she might have straddled the fence on the Ten Commandments cases, voting one way in the Texas case and the other in the Kentucky case.
But Breyer, a Clinton appointee, is a liberal, and the liberal position is government-sponsored religious symbols hurt the feelings of atheists and thus violate the First Amendment's ban against the establishment of religion. So what was Breyer doing on the fence? Talk about a convoluted mind!
That's because, although legal scholars all over America are doing their darndest right now to figure out a rationale that might make the two rulings consistent with each other, they can't. Four Supreme Court justices think the Commandments have a "religous purpose" and would have banned them in both cases, and four Supreme Court justices think the Commandments are indeed religious, but so what? Breyer was the only one on the court to see a distinction between the two cases, so it's his mind, not the great body of U.S. constitutional law, that the scholars should be picking.
John Podhoretz says it best
:
"Individually, the decisions are arguable. Taken together, they are nonsense on stilts. One says you cannot display the Ten Commandments on state property. The other says you can. That's the way it comes down. Period.
"Oh, sure, the permissible displays are outside, while the impermissible displays are inside. And the permissible displays are surrounded by other displays that aren't necessarily religious in nature, while the impermissible displays are surrounded by other displays that might be considered religious in nature.
"This isn't madness. This is just silliness."
And
George Will asks whyit is that anyone could deem a display of the Ten Commandments unconstitutional in the first place:
"[Thomas] Jefferson, who coined the metaphor 'wall of separation' about relations between church and state, also allowed the War Office and Treasury to be used for religious services that were open to the public. The Supreme Court chamber also was used for services....
"So why is today's court preoccupied with the supposed problem of mere displays of the Commandments? Because beginning about 25 years ago the court evidently decided that the establishment clause's historical context, and the Framers' intentions regarding it, are irrelevant."
As Will points out, the drafters of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause sought to ban two things: state-sponsored churches a la Europe and government favoritism of one religion over another. They didn't seek to ban all expressions of religion on public property just to make those who don't believe in religion feel better.
You're Confused About the Ten Commandments Rulings? So Am I
It beats me: It's OK, says the Supreme Court, for a state government to put a sculpture of the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the state capitol (in Texas) but not to display them on the courthouse (in Kentucky).
What's amazing is that the majority of justices in both of these 5-4 decisions agreed that there was a "religious" purpose behind both of the Ten Commandments displays.
But in the Kentucky courthouse case,
McCreary County vs. ACLU of Kentucky, Justice David Souter wrote the majority opinion ruling that the existence of a religious purpose rendered the display unconstitutional, a violation of the First Amendment's ban on the establishment of religion (I'm paraphrasing Lyle Denniston's
summary of the decision on SCOTUSblog. But in the Texas case, Van Orden vs. Perry, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who, along with other Supreme Court conservatives, dissented to the Kentucky ruling, wrote the majority opinion essentially saying: So what if there was a religious purpose?
Here's what Rehnquist wrote
: "'Of course, the Ten Commandments are religious -- they were so viewed at their inception and so remain. The monument therefore has religious significance....Simply having religious content or promoting a message consistent with a religious doctrine does not run afoul of the Establishment clause."
I'm tempted to throw up my hands along with my favorite
law professor-blogger Cacciaguida, who writes: "There are depths of confusion only the U.S. Supreme Court can lead us to."
But I'll try seriously to figure this out. One explanation is the Ten Commandments are sort of like a Christmas creche. The Supreme Court ruled years ago that it was all right to display an image of the Baby Jesus on public grounds at Yuletide, as long as you surrounded Him with a sufficient number of Santa's reindeer and Frosty figurines. Similarly, the Texas capitol display includes, besides the Ten Commandments, a number of secular monuments to Texas's legal and historical past. By contrast, it's likely either no or very few other wall ornaments were mounted next to the Ten Commandments on the walls of the two Kentucky courthouses in that case. That's why I think National Review Online's
John Podhoretz is wrongwhen he says that the
U.S. Supreme Court's hearing roomitself,
which includes an image of Mosesholding the Ten Commandments on its sculptured panel (and also on its outside frieze), may be now be in violation of the Establishment Clause. John forgets that Moses appears in both places in the company of several secular lawgivers, including Hammurabi and Solon. So the Supreme Court probably won't have to sandblast Moses away as John fears.
Then again, the real explanation for the decision might lie only in the convoluted mind of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the swing vote for the majority in both decisions. The good news is that it's O'Connor, not the very ill Rehnquist as expected, who's now rumored to be about to retire.
Pray for Susan's Baby
The Washington Post offers the
latest report on Susan Torresof Arlington, Va., brain-dead and thus legally dead, whose body is attached to a ventillator and IV tubes so that her unborn baby, four months along when she succumbed to cancer, can develop sufficiently to survive outside the womb. The next two weeks will be the most critical, for there are two things alive inside Susan's body: the baby and the cancer, a malignant melanoma that metastized to the spinal tumor that killed her on May 7 and continues to grow, just as the baby does.
Her husband, Jason Torres, has been living at the hospital at his wife's bedside. The baby is now kicking--but it is now a race between the baby and the cancer, which has already spread to Susan's lungs and could reach her womb and destroy the placenta--or her tumor-ridden body just might quit. Furthermore, as the Post reports, "people have said it is demeaning to use her body as an incubator" and "[s]ome have questioned the enormous amount of money being spent on the thinnest of hopes."
Fortunately, more than half of Jason's estimated $300,000 in medical bills has already been covered by donations of as little as $15 and as much as $15,000. Checks can be sent to Faith in Action, a Catholic group (Susan Torres was a committed Catholic), but what Jason Torres and his child really need now is prayer. Two weeks of prayer.
A Prayer for Our Military
The Anchoress offers
an open letterto our fighting men and women, especially in Iraq:
"When I am ready to go to bed, I feed the fish, and lock the doors and windows, I pet the dog and say good night to her and warn her off the couches. I close the lights - lights which work so well, I don't even think about the fact that in some parts of the world electricity is a sometime thing. I slip in between clean sheets. Clean. Sheets. Another wonder that seems so normal, so natural, that I needn't even think about it.....
"And then I pray for you. I think of men and women in uniform, away from home. Some are afraid. Some are bored. Some are wishing they had a dog to pet and warn off the couch, some perhaps are wishing they had clean sheets. Some are injured only a little, some are injured gravely. Some write letters home wondering if we think of them, if we even remember that they are out there, doing hazardous or lonely duty. They see images and read articles and hear stupid, politically motivated rhetoric and wonder.will I be spit on when I go home? Is the left back at that point, again? Will I have to worry, when I am finally home, that I will leave behind the smiles and kisses of the Iraqi children, here, children who have lived under tyranny and are only just beginning to taste freedom - who have no conception of all the world has to offer.in order to endure the sneers and taunts of over-privileged trust fund babies who have been fed on freedom all their lives, who find romance in something other than liberty and who have no conception of what the world is like outside their painted doors and comfortable beds and their narrowly-lived lives?"
And she reminds us that although our soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen may not have clean sheets to sleep on, those detainees at Gitmo--over whom our military personnel are reviled, do.
A Liberal Christian I Can Like
I was so busy on my own guest-block last week that I didn't get a chance to read my opposite number
Amy Sullivan's week-long guest-blog. Anyway, I'm already sick of the religious liberals' latest meme: "We're good Christians, too; in fact, we're better Christians than you are." The idea is that right-wing Christians get hung up on li'l old side issues like abortion and the sanctity of marriage, whereas left-wing Christians excel at obeying Jesus' real command, which was to help the poor--which the left-wingers invariably interpret as government handouts and socialized medicine.
But I finally did read Amy's blog last Friday and found these genuinely interesting remarks about a liberal Christian who actually believes in Christian teaching: Bob Casey, the pro-life Pennsylvania Democrat who's running for the Senate seat of a pro-life Republican, Rick Santorum:
"In a heavily Catholic state like Pennsylvania, the best way to defeat Santorum might be to run a pro-life Dem. But that has not stopped women's groups from howling and attacking the party's leaders for letting this happen. At a conference in early June, NOW president Kim Gandy went after John Kerry and Howard Dean by name for suggesting that Democrats might consider running pro-life candidates in tough races. NARAL has already expressed its disgust by coming out with an early endorsement of Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island because he is pro-choice, even if his party virulently is not."
This--along with Casey's race itself--is energizing. I don't take most liberal Christians seriously because they're all too willing to junk age-old Christian teaching about the sanctity of life and the sanctity of the body in order to hop onto the train of fashionable secularism with its cargo of sexual libertinism and abortion "rights." Casey's different--just as the Democratic Party itself was once different, in the long-ago days before it barred Casey's pro-life father, the late Pennsylvania Gov. Bob Casey, from speaking at the 1992 party convention. With Democats like Casey, I can put forth my views about what constitutes Christian social policy--that welfare programs are morally debilitating and socialized medicine a prescription for substandard treatment--and seriously listen to their arguments to the contrary. We can respectfully disagree, because we're agreed on the fundamental issue of the value of human life. That's why, although I'm a card-carrying Republican, I'm a strong supporter of the courageous
Democrats for Life.
At any rate, I'm glad I don't live in Pennsylvania and won't have to make a choice in the Casey-Santorum race.
True Love Waits
Jeff Sharlet, editor of the press-and-religion blog
The Revealerhas a surprisingly
sympathetic article in Rolling Stoneabout a topic on which most of the press is unsurprisingly unsympathetic: virginity.
In his story, titled "The Young & the Sexless: A New Generation of Young Men and Women Is Embracing Celibate Life," writes about the new face of American evangelical Christianity: a 24-year-old religious-studies graduate student at New York University and his friends, all of whom are determined to wait until marriage to have sex. Writes Sharlet:
"Matt Dunbar is a handsome young man, though his face is still ruddy with acne. He has rounded cheeks, a soul patch beneath his lips and soft eyes that hold yours like he trusts you. He's not a prude. He will say the word "f---," but he will never, not even in the wedding bed he hopes God has prepared for his future, embody it as a verb. He will make Christian love. What most of us call sex he calls communion, and he believes it can happen only within marriage.
"Chastity is a new organizing principle of the Christian right, built on the notion that virgins are among God's last loyal defenders, knights and ladies of a forgotten kingdom. Sex outside of marriage is, in the words of D. James Kennedy, pastor of the influential Coral Ridge Ministries in Florida, "an uprising against God." But if sex is the perfect enemy of the blessed lifestyle, it is also the Holy Grail for those who wait."
The only problem I've got with Sharlet's story is that--as his "knights and ladies of a forgotten kingdom" indicates--he assumes that chastity is a kind of impossible medieval fantasy, like riding around in chain mail looking for dragons to slay. As Lauren Winner, evangelical author of "
Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity" would doubtless argue, it's tough to try to save yourself for marriage, and it has ever been so, even during the Middle Ages, but it's not impossible with plenty of prayer.
Caution: This is a Rolling Stone story. Expect flipness, garish diction, and many uses of the F-word and references to F-deeds.
Don't Just Get Ordained--Do It on a Boat!
Members of the Catholic women's ordination movement don't seem to want to settle just for being ordained. They want to be ordained on a boat. It's probably like getting married on a boat--tres chic, n'est-ce-pas?
Coming up in July is the
scheduled ordination as Catholic priestsof nine Canadian ex-nuns and others in the middle of the St. Lawrence River. And last night, the original boat-ordination gals, the "Danube Seven" as they're called, resurfaced on a BBC broadcast
of the secret ordinationof yet another woman, as a deacon. The Danube Seven chose the river dividing Germany and Austria as their ordination spot in 2002 and then were promptly declared excommunicated by Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. As is well known, Catholic theology holds that only men can validly become priests.
I missed the BBC program myself, but
this BBC news storycontains photos of the Danubettes in ordination action. Seems that some of them mysteriously became bishops over the last three years.
For choice comments on and quotes from the ceremony,
click to Catholic Lightand also to
Diogenesof Catholic World News.
And for those of you who plan to be vacationing near Ottawa this summer, the July 25 ordination sounds like a not-to-be-missed event. There are still some 280 seats on the boat left of the 500 available, at only $85 apiece.
Sunday Mass in the People's Republic of Berkeley
Lida of Veritas. Quid Est Veritas?
reports on a mistake she made: going to the 7:30 a.m. Mass at the Newman Center chapel at the University of California at Berkeley. (Hat tip to
Cacciaguida.)
There, Lida heard the following during the Creed from the woman next to her:
"We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son she is worshipped and glorified....she has spoken through the prophets."
Lida notes--and I can confirm this myself because I've been there, too--that the Berkeley Newman Center is the kind of place where a certain number of Mass attenders decide to get into "non-sexism," so they subsitute the word "God" every time "He" or "Him" comes up in the liturgy, and then say it in very, very loud voices. Most of these folks, I might add, look a little on the old side to be UC-Berkeley students, so I don't know where they come from.
The good news is that on my last visit to the Newman Center I noticed that the number of "God!"-shouters had noticeably diminished. That's because practicing Catholics in Berkeley are increasingly Vietnamese immigrants who don't go in for aggressive non-sexism.
Which Is Worse, "Joshua" or "The Da Vinci Code"?
Amy Welborn is compiling a
"Bottom Ten" listof the worst and most malevolent Catholic books in print. "
The Da Vinci Code" is on her list, natch--but so are the following:
Slots #9 and #10 on Amy's list are still open. Do drop over to her discussion thread to contribute your own nominees.
Amy also links to this survey by the National Association of Pastoral Musicians calling for Catholics to submit their selections for the liturgical hymns (or "songs," in pastoral musician-lingo) that have made a difference for them.
This is your chance, all ye who are sick of "On Eagles' Wings." If your favorite hymn...er, song is "Salve Regina" or "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence" or "Sing of Mary Pure and Lowly," let the pastoral musicians know about it!
Advertisement
Advertisement
|
About Beliefnet Our mission is to help people like you find, and walk, a spiritual path that will bring comfort, hope, clarity, strength, and happiness. More about Beliefnet. |
Help |
Media Kit |
Subscribe |
Legal Copyright © Beliefnet, Inc. and/or its licensors. All rights reserved. Use of this site is subject to Terms of Service and to our Privacy Policy. Constructed by Beliefnet. |
Advertisement
|
| beliefnet |
Comments
Add Comment »To comment on this content you must be a registered user:
Sign-Up or Log-In