We worship a bi-polar deity, most of us anyway. Our God is the very definition of love . . . but, like the killer bunny in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “he’s got a vicious streak a mile wide.”
We are taught that God is love. We are taught that God consigns the wicked to hell for eternity. Surely both can’t be true?
C.S. Lewis (who, like Jack Kennedy, died fifty years ago today), captured this dilemma beautifully in The Pilgrim’s Regress. It was his first crack at Christian apologetics written shortly after his conversion to Christianity in 1929. The allegory is set in the land of Puritania where a young boy named John is taken, as all young boys eventually are, to meet the Steward. Puritania is owned by “the Landlord”, a shadowy figure who has gone abroad and left his vast domains in the hands of a caretaker. Lewis was always at his best writing about children, and his description of John’s visit to the Steward is so good I will give you the whole story just as he wrote it: (more…)
It’s hard for ordinary people like you and me to evaluate the creationism v. evolution debate. We all have our opinions, of course, but most of us are taking a shot in the dark. Young earth creationists generally believe that the “Christian world view” will be lost forever if the evolutionists win. In other words, this really isn’t about science at all, it’s about tribalism. If every member of the tribe could admit to being wrong about evolution at the same moment, we could pull it off. But so long as embracing evolution means banishment from the tribe, few have the courage to change their convictions.
The pro-science people embrace the doctrine of evolution because the vast majority of biologists believe it. Some of us have a course or two in evolutionary biology and may even have read a popular book or two on the subject. But we are not scientists.
We believe in evolution because the theory makes conceptual sense.
More importantly, because an overwhelming consensus has emerged within the scientific community that evolution is the only theory available that squares with the evidence at our disposal.
Finally, we find it unlikely that 99% of the world’s biologists have joined a conspiracy to lie to the public. (more…)
The sad story of Marco Rubio explains why we won’t be seeing comprehensive immigration reform anytime soon.
Like Ted Cruz, Rubio is the child of Cuban immigrants who became American citizens without having to stand in line for day, let alone a decade. As refugees from the hated Castro regime, Cubans receive special treatment at the border and it shows in their politics.
The rising prominence of men like Cruz and Rubio is often taken as a sign that the Republican Party is sensitive to the needs and aspiration of the Latino population. But Cubans, as recipients of special favors rooted in Cold War politics, can’t feel the pain of the larger Latino community.
Consider this. In the last presidential election, only 44% of Cuban Americans supported Barack Obama, only 44% supported Obama, compared to 76% of Central Americans, 79% of South Americans, 78% of Mexican Americans, 83% of Puerto Ricans, and fully 96% of Dominican Americans. In other words, the Cuban vote went for Mitt Romney while the rest of the diverse Latino community voted decisively for Barack Obama.
These ugly facts place men like Marco Rubio in a tight place. The man has presidential aspirations and it is increasingly clear that you can’t ascend to the top job without at least the 44% Latino support George W. Bush worked so hard to get. Had Bush received 30% Latino support, he would have been beaten by two relatively weak Democratic challengers.
On the other hand, to win the Republican nomination you have to survive the primary season, and that means appealing to the Tea Party base.
Which explains why Marco Rubio, after helping draft a Senate bill that balanced tough border enforcement with a pathway to citizenship, is now endorsing the go-slow, piecemeal approach to reform favored by House Republicans. Even the deeply flawed Senate bill was too much for Tea Party loyalists because it would eventually mean more Latino voters.
In theory, the Republican Party could take its cue from George W. Bush, winning Latino support by backing sensible immigration reform. It’s just a matter of signalling to Latinos that they are welcome in the country and in the Republican Party.
But the Tea Party can’t go there. A movement built on white racial resentment (the cash value of small government conservatism) doesn’t want more non-white people entering the country.
What part of “illegal” do liberals like George W. Bush not understand?
Marco Rubio knows he can’t change this simple fact of American political life, and has adapted his politics accordingly.
Latinos, per se, are not welcome in a Republican Party controlled by the Tea Party. Rubio had to decide between being Latino and being Cuban, and he made his choice. The Tea Party loves Cubans, but despises Latinos.
This probably means that comprehensive immigration reform will have to wait until the Republicans suffer another defeat in the presidential election of 2016. Latino support for the Democratic candidate, no matter who it is, will be even stronger than it was in 2012. When a political party signals its’ contempt for a large portion of the electorate it must live with the consequences.
If your ambition is to hang on to a Senate seat in the American South, opposing immigration reform makes sense. If the goal is the win the White House it’s quite another matter. The Republicans have effectively opted to be a regional party dedicated to the care and feeding of the White electorate. That’s a winning combination in places like Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, but for the party of Lincoln, it is a long-term disaster in the making.
A new ACLU study highlights the consequences of sentencing non-violent offenders to Life without parole (commonly known as LWOP). Here’s the lede:
For 3,278 people, it was nonviolent offenses like stealing a $159 jacket or serving as a middleman in the sale of $10 of marijuana. An estimated 65% of them are Black. Many of them were struggling with mental illness, drug dependency or financial desperation when they committed their crimes. None of them will ever come home to their parents and children. And taxpayers are spending billions to keep them behind bars.
On a related note, Doug Berman notes that Sam Hurd, who once caught passes for the Dallas Cowboys, could be sentenced to life without parole after pleading guilty to a single drug transaction in April. Hurd actually received a sentence of fifteen years, but because his case involved a large quantity of drugs, life was an option. Hundreds of non-violent offenders have not been so lucky. (more…)
It is hard to believe that two full decades have passed since R. Albert Mohler ascended to the presidency of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. To celebrate this momentous occasion, the seminary has produced a twenty-five minute documentary documenting the heroic stand Dr. Mohler took against the progressives and liberals who controlled the seminary prior to his arrival.
Earlier this morning I posted a video by Chimamanda Adichie, a Nigerian storyteller. It’s a TED talk delivered in Oxford, England. Adichie says that when we limit ourselves to one story about a person or a people, no matter how well-researched and compelling, we are bound to get almost everything wrong. The truth emerges from many stories; one story, taken alone, will always be a lie.
Southern Seminary’s celebratory documentary is, without apology, a single story. It is not surprising that none of the “progressive” or “liberal” professors who once marred the heritage of James Petigru Boyce, the seminary’s founder, were asked to comment. The only representatives from this apostate assemblage are Dianna Garland and Molly Marshall, the only women who appear in the documentary. Dr. Mohler, we are told, courageously forced these women to resign their teaching positions in the face of overwhelming outrage.
The documentary doesn’t obscure the fact that nobody supported the president’s draconian behavior. Louisville’s Courier-Journal took editorial exception to Mohler’s tactics. The student body and all but four professors were adamantly opposed. Virtually no one associated with the pedagogical process at the school agreed with Al Mohler, and yet he stuck to his guns.
What is a seminary? The flesh and blood people who currently walk the halls, offices and classrooms, or the tiny band of slavery-endorsing Confederate Calvinists who founded the school in 1859? According to the documentary, the answer is neither. The seminary is defined by the Abstract of Principles penned by Basil Manly Jr., who combined bits and pieces from a number of Baptist confessions into a single document.
Professors Garland and Marshall signed the Abstract in good faith. They interpreted the document in one way; Dr. Mohler interpreted it very differently. Mohler’s interpretation prevailed because he had the support of the conservative movement and they didn’t. It was sumple power politics. Many stories were reduced to a single narrative by brute force and the seminary was saved.
The documentary doesn’t trouble itself with the fact that almost half of the folks voting at the the denominations annual convention showdowns opposed the spirit of the conservative movement. It didn’t matter. A slim majority supported the movement, and that was all that mattered.
I wonder if the folks who produced this bit of hagiography are troubled by the fact that every single person featured is a white male? I doubt it. They could have lined up a conservative female student who attended Southern in 1993 and supported Dr. Mohler’s ascendancy. There must have been at least one–Southern had 3,000 students at the time.
But that’s just the problem. Women aren’t supposed to attend seminaries designed to prepare men for pastoral ministry. Any female student studying at Southern in 1993 must, in retrospect, be viewed as a child of darkness.
The producers could have interviewed a seminary secretary, I suppose, but who cares what secretaries think? The folks featured in the film are heavy hitters, men of substance, great minds.
If you asked Al Mohler, or any of the long list of white male worthies appearing in this documentary, why they don’t believe women should serve in positions of ministry or hold authority over men in any ecclesiastical capacity, they would tell you it doesn’t matter how they feel or what they think. They don’t personally have a problem with women; God has a problem with women. He says so in His inerrant word.
If you could travel back in time and ask James Petigru Boyce why he wore the uniform of an army dedicated to maintaining the institution of slavery and the principle of white supremacy, he would likely say much the same thing. It wasn’t a matter of whether the founders of Southern Seminary believed Negroes were inferior to Caucasians and thus fit only for the status of chattel property. The founders didn’t create black people as an inferior species; God did that. He said so in the same inerrant Word that, in the opinion of virtually every gentleman theologian working in the Southern states in the mid nineteenth century, celebrated slavery as the revealed will of God.
I have long argued that a preference for reading the Bible literally became popular in the South because it allowed theologians to trump the radically inclusive teaching of Jesus with select quotes from the Apostle Paul and the Old Testament. If you start with Jesus you will never end with slavery or the systematic exclusion of women. So you start with the handful of passages that appear to sanction your pet prejudices and then argue that, because the Bible speaks with a single voice, Jesus must have endorsed the virtue of slavery (in the nineteenth century) or the systematic humiliation of women (late twentieth century). What’s good for the father must be good for the son.
A young Al Mohler with Billy Graham
What happens when the Christian faith is reduced to a single story? In the mid-nineteenth century you get slavish support for the institution of slavery? In the early twenty-first century, you get an all-white, all-male institution preparing pastors for leadership in all-white, male-led congregations.
If the men and women who taught at Southern Seminary when I was student there were liberal in any sense, it was only because Jesus was telling them to grow beyond a rigid orthodoxy that relegated women to secondary status and a religious tradition that condemned the civil rights movement as thinly-disguised communism.
These folks loved the South, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the heritage of Southern Seminary; but their primary allegiance was to Jesus Christ.
I was surprised to discover that the documentary freely admits that Al Mohler had been dreaming of being president of Southern Seminary for at least a decade when, at the tender age of 33, his dream was suddenly realized. The story of Al calling up his pal, Danny Akin, at an ungodly hour to share the exciting news that the trustees had offered him the big job is more-than-just-a-little embarrassing. When young leaders are thrust into positions of great responsibility, aren’t they supposed to be humbled and awed by the enormity of the task before them?
According to the documentary, Al Mohler was thrilled to death to have been chosen “for such a time as this” because God, long before the foundations of the earth were laid, had ordained that it should be thus. (Yes, it actually says that.) Who is Al Mohler to argue with a God who ordains slavery, relegates women to the kitchen, and chooses thirty-something neophytes to lead a time-honored institution?
That said, we can only marvel at the wonders Al Mohler has wrought. He has survived his critics. He has evolved into the intellectual voice of conservative evangelicalism. And it won’t be long before he will be celebrated as the elder statesman of the New Calvinism he now champions.
It’s always nice to see a boy chase his dreams and catch them . . . even if he has to ruin a few hundred careers to make it happen.
“I’m going to try and download every movie ever made, and you’re going to try to sign up for Obamacare, and we’ll see which happens first.”
This faux challenge from Jon Stewart to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius gets to the essence of public bafflement over the disastrous launch of the Affordable Care website. We have traveled so far down the digital highway, people think, that there’s almost nothing computer technology can’t do . . . like downloading thousands of movies on demand. So, why can’t a simple government website allow people to sign up for medical insurance? How hard can that be?
Here’s our deep suspicion: the Obamacare website failed because everything the federal government touches turns to garbage. While the IT wizards in private industry remake the world, this clanky old government website can’t accomplish simple tasks. Wouldn’t you know it?
But this simplistic analysis is wrongheaded.
The government’s website is an amalgamation of dozens of private companies contributing individual pieces to the larger puzzle. Prior to launch, IT company reps told their congressional inquisitors, our little puzzle piece worked just fine. But when they put the puzzle together nothing worked. The picture on the puzzle box showed a puppy rolling in a green meadow; but the completed puzzle looked like giant robots battling it out in a dystopian moonscape. Our firm can’t be held responsible for a system failure.
This happens all the time. When you download a movie, you are using relatively simple software designed to perform a simple task. Impressive, to be sure; but straightforward. When you create a computer program designed to link dozens of discrete systems into a working whole, things can quickly go south.
The difficulty of integrating a series of very different computer systems came home to me when I was researching the unjust treatment of the IRP-6, a group of IT pioneers from Colorado Springs working to create software for the federal government. The scene is post-9-11 America. Washington officialdom has realized that the attack on the twin towers exploited the fact that American law enforcement agencies lacked the technology to coordinate diverse databases and intelligence systems. Dozens of huge household-name IT companies had been working to fix the problem without success.
IRP, a small, underfunded operation in Colorado, believed it could contribute the puzzle pieces that would make the giant robots look more like a puppy. Some federal officials were interested until the FBI decided to treat the IRP professionals as common criminals and throw them in prison for over a decade. You can read the whole tragic story here.
When I listen to the talking heads lament the egregious failures of the Obamacare rollout, I am reminded of the decade-long failure of the intelligence community to integrate intelligence systems that didn’t speak the same language. It wasn’t just that the FBI couldn’t share intel with the NSA; even the various departments within the FBI functioned as communication silos.
Here is the section of my IRP-6 story that discusses the problem as it relates to the FBI. (more…)
Glenn Greenwald reported this morning that NSA Director General, Keith Alexander is now insisting that newspapers must be forced to stop publishing leaks from the likes of Edward Snowden. Apparently, Mr. Alexander is unfamiliar with the First Amendment.
Greenwald notes that German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, wasn’t perturbed by revelations that the NSA has been spying on millions of German citizens until it was revealed that her own personal communications had been hacked. How very human of her.
The argument against publishing leaks is predicated on national security concerns. In short, Leaks make us vulnerable to terrorist attacks. But the NSA surveillance hasn’t been restricted to terrorists. According to Greenwald, “Our reporting has revealed spying on conferences designed to negotiate economic agreements, the Organization of American States, oil companies, ministries that oversee mines and energy resources, the democratically elected leaders of allied states, and entire populations in those states.”
In other words, American leaders like President Barack Obama have been hypocritical, arguing that their surveillance activities reflect a dedication to international stability while behaving as if nothing matters beyond American self-interest. (more…)
“I do not believe that we are going to heaven together, but I do believe we may go to jail together.”
It is hard to know which side of the comma in that sentence is the most disconcerting.
Why would the mouthpiece of conservative evangelical orthodoxy risk offending an almost exclusively Mormon audience by, in essence, consigning them to conscience eternal torment in the world to come? (more…)
God delights in all of us, all the time, no matter what.
We have been talking about the silence of “messy middle” churches and the need for a prophetic public theology.
Our silence, I have suggested, is a consequence of ideological diversity. Messy middle pastors can’t address issues like immigration, poverty, homelessness and wealth inequality without sparking a culture war meltdown in the pews. We have nothing to say on the big issues of the day because nothing can be safely said.
Some of my readers agree with my diagnosis of the disease but have suggested, politely and off the record, that nothing can be done. Churches can engage in ministries of charity (food pantries, soup kitchens and the like), or we can focus on issues like payday loans and human trafficking that enjoy wide, bipartisan appeal. But a big-picture prophetic public theology is a non-starter.
I have more sympathy with this counsel of despair than you might imagine. Prophetic preaching often goes wrong because it starts wrong. (more…)
By Alan Bean
By Alan Bean
By Alan Bean
Friends of Justice 