Author: Alan Bean

Stories we believe in: learning from Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm

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By Alan Bean

American liberals can’t fathom the appeal of the Tea Party phenomenon.  Here we are, struggling to recover from a recession created by massive tax cuts, military adventurism, and an under-regulated financial sector and what are they asking for: more tax cuts, even less government regulation, and more military spending.

Moreover, this message sells in the heartland, big-time.

By every standard of rationality, progressive politics should be enjoying a renaissance.  The alternative has been weighed in the balance and found wanting.  And yet politicians aligned with Tea Party rhetoric are winning elections and shaping the political agenda.  How can these things be? (more…)

“To save money, let’s all quit our jobs and drop out of school!”

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A week ago, Gerald Britt wrote a column for the Dallas Morning News questioning the sanity of the program-cutting frenzy in Washington (see below).  In his blog, Rev. Britt updates his crique.  The striking conclusion to the blog post sums things up nicely:

The Rev. Gerald Britt

“In order to rebuild the economy, we must cut education spending, cut job training, cut supports for the low-income and elderly, cut access to health care for those who can least afford it AND give tax cuts to those who have no track record of utilizing tax cuts for 10 years to provide jobs to stimulate the economy?! And, after we have enacted all of these cuts, the poor and low income, the untrained, the elderly, the homeless, the hungry, the incarcerated, the sick and the poorly educated and the inadequately educated will provide the foundation for a new and revived economy?

Seriously?

It’s the equivalent of a family deciding that, in order to save money on gas, we will all quit our jobs and drop out of school.” (more…)

Adapting reality to the white viewer

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The New York Times recently ran an article lamenting the all-white list of nominees for this year’s Oscars.  Randy Shaw (see below) points out that it ain’t just the movies; television offers few characters or programs aimed at the non-white audience. 

Shaw references David Simon’s The Wire as a blessed exception to the rule and wonders why such a critical success hasn’t been emulated (except by HBO’s Treme, and that show is also produced by David Simon).

It’s simple; The Wire was always more popular with critics than with viewers.  It held its own; but Simon’s programs received only a fraction of the audience that followed The Sopranos, for instance.  Why is that?  

The answer isn’t pleasant.  White audiences don’t relate well to non-white protagonists.

Early on in the Tulia fight, several producers showed a tentative interest in bringing the story to the silver screen.  I didn’t pay much attention to the let’s-make-a-movie phenomenon because we were years away from resolution.  Secondly, I figured the story was too morally ambiguous for Hollywood.  I remember being asked if my family would be interested in playing the starring role in a film.  When I protested that the affected community should be at the center of the movie I was assured that the American viewing public would have little interest in poor black people living in an isolated Texas town. (more…)

Campolo: Why the Christian Right will Dominate

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As an evangelical Christian with a progressive social agenda, Tony Campolo has occupied and defended an uncomfortable patch of territory in the American religious world.

I’m not sure how much of the horror story Tony relates in this article is autobiographical, but we can be sure the Eastern University sociologist and American Baptist preacher knows whereof he speaks.  This frank discussion of a painful subject was written for Christian Ethics Today, a publication sponsored by moderate evangelicals seeking to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with their God.

Have you ever wondered why there are so few progressive religious voices in the popular media?  Dr. Campolo tells us exactly why that is, leaving little to the imagination.  As we seek to forge a new moral consensus for ending mass incarceration, we need to know what we’re up against.  Alan Bean

Why The Religious Right Will Dominate

By Tony Campolo

Eastern University

There are reasons why Religious Right Evangelicals will continue to dominate religious discourse, not only in their own sector of the Christian community, but also in what transpires in mainline denominations. Moderate voices, for the most part, are being sidelined and those with liberal views will find fewer and fewer means to express their opinions or gain an audience for their convictions. (more…)

McLaren: Is God Violent?

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This succinct article summarizes a chapter in Brian McLaren’s excellent book, A New Kind of Christianity.  This piece was originally published in Sojourners and has also appeared in Christian Ethics Today.  How should Christians think and feel about the criminal justice system, in general, and the death penalty, in particular?  Everything hinges on the nature of God.  Alan Bean

Is God Violent?

By Brian McLaren

I recently received a note from a pastor and missionary we’ll call Pete. It went like this: ”I have read most of what you have written, including A New Kind of Christianity…I would say I am in agreement with [much of what you write], but I do think you bring disservice to this argument in the evangelical world when you shun the ‘violence’ of God and the subsequent need for the cross’ justification, which was also quite violent.” (more…)

McWhorter: end the drug war and racial tension evaporates

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John McWhorter

John McWhorter is a conservative African-American who enjoys needling white liberals and the “racism-is-still-real” brand of civil rights advocacy.  For over a year now McWhorter’s take on race has taken on a decidedly libertarian tone.  He’s for legalizing drugs; all of them.

The Cato Institute’s current newsletter contains a PDF version of McWhorter’s new message.  The version I have pasted below appeared last year in The New Republic.

If you are a fan of HBO’s The Wire (the best television of all time in my opinion), the essential features of McWhorter’s argument will come as no surprise.  African-American youth have little incentive to look for conventional work because drug money comes so easy.  As a result, hundreds of thousands of black males are doing time on drug charges, inner city street gangs slaughter one another in turf battles, black children have no fathers, black women give up on finding a marriage partner, and everything goes to hell. (more…)

Haley Barbour won’t denounce KKK license plate

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Nathan Bedford Forrest

Haley Barbour would like to take a run at the presidency, but his close identification with Old Dixie keeps getting in the way.  This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and the Sons of Confederate Veterans are sponsoring a vanity license plate venerating the memory of Confederate commander  Nathan Bedford Forrest.  By all accounts, Forrest was a bold and ruthless leader with a gift for guerilla warfare, but he comes with a little baggage. (more…)

Texas history texts ripped by conservative group

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By Alan Bean

“If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'”  – George Orwell, 1984

George Orwell learned how easily the past is misremembered as a combatant in the Spanish Civil War and during his years with the BBC in WWII.  Orwell is a hero to both the left and the right because he believed in relating historical fact as objectively and honestly as fallible flesh is able. 

As the culture wars rage, it is incumbent upon partisans on the left and right to police their own side of the conflict.  When 57% of Republicans believe the president is a Muslim, 45% believe he was born outside the United States, and 24% believe Mr. Obama may be the antiChrist, we’ve got a problem that only Republican leaders can effectively address.  We aren’t selling out when we critique our own people; we’re ensuring that the game is fairly played.

That is precisely what the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute has done in its report on the historical curricula taught in American schools.  Their dissection of the Texas State Board of Education’s distorted historical vision is utterly devastating.  I have pasted some of the pithy highlights below, but I urge you to read the entire report. (more…)

Grisham’s “The Confession” is captivating

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Reviewed by Charles Kiker

John Grisham, The Confession, Doubleday, 2010

John Grisham’s novels are always good reads. This one is—no other word is adequate—captivating. It is a must read for anyone interested in the injustice of the criminal justice system, especially in Texas and especially as regards capital punishment. It is a recommended read for those not interested in the injustice of the criminal justice system, in the hope that they might get interested.

It is a work of fiction, but not really. So many real events have been worked into this novel that I had to remind myself occasionally that I was not reading the Dallas Morning News, or watching the evening news on television. For example, the judge and the prosecutor are sleeping together—and they are not husband and wife—during the trial of Donte Drumm. The Court of Criminal Appeals closes at 5:00 PM and will not let attorneys in at 5:07 even though they know attorneys are on the way for a last minute appeal. Coerced confessions, jailhouse snitches, perjured testimony—it’s all here. (more…)

Jesus, Ayn Rand and the art of the impossible

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Maybe Jesus didn't really mean it

By Alan Bean

My wife Nancy and I are teaching a confirmation class at our Methodist church in Arlington, Texas.  While we are stuffing our students’ heads with information about the Bible, God, Jesus, the Church and Christian discipleship, we thought we should also let the Bible speak on its own terms.  We decided to work through an entire book of the Bible in the course of nine months and settled on the Gospel of Mark; it’s the shortest and most succinct of the Gospels. 

Mark is also the most brutal document in the Christian New Testament, in the sense of assaulting modern sensibilities.  It isn’t just that Jesus performs miracles of healing every time he turns around (we moderns could attribute that to the power of suggestion); it’s the bits about money and power that sting the most. (more…)