The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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News: Kvetching

David Brooks’s NYT editorial today puts Gen. McChrystal’s removal in cultural context.  Everyone in DC and in the military kvetches, Brooks says; it’s part of the culture, part of the way political groups maintain their cohesion over against everyone else.  It has always been so.  What has changed in the last few decades, though, is the development of a media ethic of exposure that replaced the ethic of reticence sometime after Vietnam.

Brooks concludes: “The reticent ethos had its flaws. But the exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important.

“Another scalp is on the wall. Government officials will erect even higher walls between themselves and the outside world. The honest and freewheeling will continue to flee public life, and the cautious and calculating will remain.”

News: Homosexual Monogamy?

An article in the January 28, 2010 issue of the New York Times cites a study that indicates that, contrary to the defenses offered for a change in law, gay marriage does not nudge homosexuals toward monogamy:

“A study to be released next month is offering a rare glimpse inside gay relationships and reveals that monogamy is not a central feature for many. Some gay men and lesbians argue that, as a result, they have stronger, longer-lasting and more honest relationships. And while that may sound counterintuitive, some experts say boundary-challenging gay relationships represent an evolution in marriage — one that might point the way for the survival of the institution.

“New research at San Francisco State University reveals just how common open relationships are among gay men and lesbians in the Bay Area. The Gay Couples Study has followed 556 male couples for three years — about 50 percent of those surveyed have sex outside their relationships, with the knowledge and approval of their partners.”

News: Obama’s Prize

The announcement of Obama’s Peace Prize was greeted with gasps, but on reflection it makes sense.  Obama is, after all, our first Scandinavian President.

News: Wind power

Cambridge physicist David JC Mackay (Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air, online at www.withouthotair.com) offers a sobering analysis of the practicality of wind power as an alternative energy source for the UK: “Let’s compare this estimate of British wind potential with current installed wind power worldwide. The windmills that would be required to provide the UK with 20 kWh/d per person amount to 50 times the entire wind hardware of Denmark; 7 times all the wind farms of Germany; and double the entire fleet of all wind turbines in the world.

“Please don’t misunderstand me. Am I saying that we shouldn’t bother building wind farms? Not at all. I’m simply trying to convey a helpful fact, namely that if we want wind power to truly make a difference, the wind farms must cover a very large area.”

News: Populist ricochet

Ross Douthat writes, “If the Western leadership class survives the current crisis, after all, the lesson they’re going to draw from it is relatively simple: We must never let this happen again. And while that impulse could be a spur to greater decentralization and democratization, it’s more likely to be produce greater supranational regulation, more expansive bureaucracy, and a more hand-in-glove relationship between big government and big business than existed before the crisis. In theory, one way to respond to a ‘populist whirlwind’ would be to make governments more accountable to the voting public. But in practice, I suspect, the more likely response will be to build stronger dikes and firewalls against the dangerous and unpredictable masses, producing post-crisis institutions that are even more insulated from democratic accountability than they were before.”

News: AIG again

Jim Rogers of Texas A&M responds to Charles Krauthammer’s argument that the Congressional response to the AIG bonuses are unconstitutional (posted here last weekend):

“I agree that Congress’s action w.r.t. the AIG bonuses is bad policy. I’m always baffled by the need to read unconstitutionality into bad policies. Stupid laws are not necessarily unconstitutional.

“In any event, Krauthammer is flat-out wrong as to the illegality and the unconstitutionality of what Congress is attempting to do.

Continue reading…

News: AIG in Perspective

Charles Krauthammer has a sharp analysis of the AIG bonus fiasco: “in the scheme of things, $165 million is a rounding error. It amounts to less than 1/18,500 of the $3.1 trillion federal budget. It’s less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the bailout money given to AIG alone. If Bill Gates were to pay these AIG bonuses every year for the next 100 years, he’d still be left with more than half his personal fortune.”

He argues that the Congressional effort to confiscate the bonuses away is illegal and unconstitutional: “And there is such a thing as law. The way to break a contract legally is Chapter 11. Short of that, a contract is a contract. The AIG bonuses were agreed to before the government takeover and are perfectly legal. Is the rule now that when public anger is kindled, Congress will summarily cancel contracts?

“Even worse are the clever schemes being cooked up in Congress to retrieve the money by means of some retroactive confiscatory tax. The common law is pretty clear about the impermissibility of ex post facto legislation and bills of attainder. They also happen to be specifically prohibited by the Constitution. We’re going to overturn that for $165 million?”

News: Paglia on Rush

Camille Paglia can be depended upon for thinking for herself.   In an essay at Salon.com, she calls for Obama to be freed from the “flacks, fixers and goons — his posse of smirky smart alecks and provincial rubes, who were shrewd enough to beat the slow, pompous Clintons in the mano-a-mano primaries but who seem like dazed lost lambs in the brave new world of federal legislation and global statesmanship.”

She also puts in a vigorous defense of Rush Limbaugh’s right to offend and right to earn a good living doing it: “This entire fracas was set off by the president himself, who lowered his office by targeting a private citizen by name. Limbaugh had every right to counterattack, which he did with gusto. Why have so many Democrats abandoned the hallowed principle of free speech?”

News: Propaganda of the Deed

Summarizing the lessons drawn from Steve Coll’s recent The Bin Ladens, Fred Halliday writes (in NYRB), “although the attacks on Manhattan and Washington in September 2001 were direct hits on American soil, Osama bin Laden’s aims do not encompass the defeat of the United States, or the conquest of the West, by, or ‘for,’ Islam: the attacks on Europe and the US are, in Arabian tribal terminology, ‘raids.’  The ‘planes operation,’ as it was originally called when it was first conceived in 1998, was designed to be a spectacular piece of theater, what anarchists used to call ‘Propaganda of the Deed,’ a provocation that would draw the US military into further, and costly, conflicts in the Middle East, primarily Afghanistan.  This was also the original purpose of the attack on the USS Cole in Aden harbor in October 2000, an operation that failed to sink the missile-carrying vessel, but that did kill seventeen American servicemen.”

News: China

Yesterday, Hillary Clinton disappointed human rights activists by degrading the role of human rights issues in her discussions with Chinese.   Differences on human rights will not, she said, interfere with the common interests of the US and China.

Today, she commends the Chinese for bailing out the US by continuing to buy Treasury bonds.

Make that: Differences on human rights will not keep the US from desperately asking the Chinese to prop up the US economy.

News: Russian Orthodoxy

In a largely negative review of John and Carol Garrard’s Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent (TNR, December 31), Leon Aron notes the importance of Orthodoxy in contemporary Russian politics: “Orthodoxy is now all the rage among the Russian elite.  The formerly godless KGB and Komsomol graduates who rule the country and own much of it are suddenly gripped by religious fervor.  Vladimir Putin kept a small private chapel next to his Kremlin office . . . , and undeoubtedly he now has another one in the government’s ‘White House’ building on Novy Arbat.  In a series of widely published photos from Putin’s summer vacation in 2007, an Orthodox cross was featured prominently between the president’s bare and mighty pectorals, a rifle with a telescope sight firmly in his strong hands and a hunting knife dangling from his belt. . . . 

Continue reading…

News: Outing Obama

One of the delicious results of McCain’s Palin pick is that it exposes Obama as just another politician, willing to get down and dirty with the rest of them.  No more Obama the transcendent, Obama the supra-partisan, Obama the inventor of a new politics.  Of course, nothing wrong with being another politician; that’s what politicians are.  But Obama had staked his future on his elevation above politics.  With Palin threatening his lead, he no longer has that luxury.

News: Misunderestimating the opposition

Gerard Baker says in the London Times: “It never ceases to amaze me how the Left falls again and again into the old trap of underestimating politicians whom they don’t understand. From Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to George Bush and Mrs Palin, they do it every time. Because these characters talk a bit funny and have ridiculously antiquated views about faith, family and nation, because they haven’t spent time bending the knee to the intellectual metropolitan elites, they can’t be taken seriously.”

News: Palin

Noemie Emery gives a 14-point analysis of what Palin does for McCain over on the Weekly Standard web site.  Number 14 is: “Counter-intuitively, makes the issue of Obama’s light resume more potent than ever. Her lack of experience is no more than his is. And he’s–to use a term from Alaska, and the Iditarod–their lead dog.”

News: Clever Drudge

Drudge couldn’t care a whit for Hillary Clinton, but his increasingly provocative headlines (most recently, “Diss-Off”) for a story on how Obama never considered Hillary as a veep candidate can have only one result: To get Hillary’s supporters, already cool toward Obama, hopping mad.

News: Context, context

Reader Chris Jones rebuked me, rightly, for putting up Dana Milbank’s version of an Obama quote and accusing him of a Messiah complex.  Here’s a fuller version of the quotation, which makes it clear that Obama was actually saying the enthusiasm was about America’s importance and not his own:

“It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign, that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It’s about America. I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.”

News: Messiah complex

Dana Milbank reports that Obama told a House delegation yesterday: “This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for,” adding: “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.”

Yes, indeed, a return to American tradition, particularly the American tradition identified by Daniel Walker Howe in his Pulitzer-winning What Hath God Wrought, that is the tradition of modeling political campaigns on camp meeting revivals.

News: Who’s not at Lambeth

David Virtue has a long, long list of non-participants at Lambeth, many representing the most vibrant portions of the Anglican communion.  He estimates that 450-500 Anglican bishops are missing.

News: Chinese Fight Club

Mara Hvistendahl writes in the July 9 issue of TNR that increased violence is one likely result of China’s abortion policy: “After almost 30 years of the policy, China now has the largest gender imbalance in the world, with 37 million more men than women and almost 20 percent more newborn boys that girls nationwide.” She cites historical and sociological studies that link violence to absence of females.  According to David Courtwright, “the immigrants and westward immigrants who shaped early America. . . were largely young single men, who are – today as well as then – disproportionately responsible for drug abuse, looting, vandalism, and violent crime.” She suggests that “The coming boom in restless young men promises to overhaul Chinese society in some potentially scary ways.”

News: Obama’s subtexts

In an intriguing piece in TNR, writer Cinque Henderson – who identifies himself as one of the few remaining Clinton supporters among African-Americans – explains Obama’s use of “hoodwinked” and “bamboozled” (not the first words to spring to Obama’s lips, one would think) in the South Carolina primary: “It comes from a scene in Malcolm X, where Denzel Washington warns black people about the hidden evils of ‘the White Man’ masquerading as a smiling politician: ‘Every election year, these politicians are sent up here to pacify us,’ he says.  ‘You’ve been hoodwinked.  Bamboozled.”  Obama was “helping to convince blacks that the first two-term Democratic president in 50 years, a man referred to as the first black president, is in fact a secret racist.”

Henderson also challenges Obama’s implication that Jeremiah Wright is typical of the lack church: “He generalized Wright’s ridiculousness to distract from his individual choice to worship under a buffoon for two decades.  I have a cousin who attended Wright’s church for three weeks, and then left, never to return. . . . Barack needed to protect his reputation as a race-healer and unifier, so he told a lie about black religious life to help keep the glow of his own reputation alive.”

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