- Mr. Rogers as you’ve never seen him!
- Go ahead, sucka! Sue me!
- America’s exceptional vulgarity.
- Bulverism lives!
- Why do some people “get it” so quickly?
- “Religious Right” ≠ Evangelicals
- Indiana New Urbanism.
- Legitimized Rapes.
Another PBS remix. Great stuff!
It’s not often that a publication almost taunts someone to file a defamation suit, but National Review seems to be telling Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann, angry at a Mark Steyn piece, to “Go ahead. Make my day.“
Americans became so desensitized to the profaning of sacred space by Act Up and the like that they cannot comprehend that violations of sacred space are very dangerous to avoiding violence in many places. The government only seems to care if the profanation can be considered ethnic. Hence, the spreading of bacon in a NYC park near the end of Ramadan is being investigated as a hate crime. However, native-born Americans going to St. Patrick’s had no real hate crime protection when there services were disrupted. Some animals are more equal than others.
(Daniel Lieuwen at Google+ – hyperlink added for generations who knew not Orwell) If you don’t know what he’s talking about, you must have been distracted by the other mostly-manufactured news story this week – you know, the one from Missouri.
An old acquaintance from boarding school days posted a overnight Wednesday-Thursday a supposedly witty Facebook image updating the tired and tiresome inanity that only women are entitled to opinions on abortion.
Last time I checked, women were more anti-abortion than men, though pro-abortion women admittedly have very high stridency levels because they’re so personally invested in their position. (Disclaimer: Since I don’t believe that truth or falsity, validity or invalidity, depends on the sex of the one arguing, I haven’t checked those statistics for more than a decade.)
But there’s a broader point. My old acquaintance was committing the logical fallacy identified by Ezekiel Bulver, “one of the makers of the twentieth [and now the 21st] century.”
In that fallacy, my acquaintance is in large, if not exactly good, company, as Leroy Huizenga irenically illustrates in connection with the “debate” (such as it is) over same-sex marriage.
It’s a small mystery to me how some people walk into an Orthodox Church and almost instantly “get it” while others don’t. I’m sure it has something to do with how consciously invested one is in a different tradition (no, I’m not committing Bulverism; it realize is hard to will oneself into a “paradigm shift”) and how comfortable one is about their tradition’s contradictions or the places where it is plainly failing.
More specifically and personally, I don’t know why, having set out to discern how the wrongness of Orthodoxy differed from the wrongness of Rome (which I had labored many hours in tendentious secondary sources to master), I was quickly overtaken by two epiphanies that undid my prior 47-or-so years of belief:
- The Bible doesn’t teach that the Bible is the sole authority for Christian faith, and the error that it is the sole authority is the source of our thousands or tens of thousands of denominations, not to mention millions or tens of millions of “spiritual but not religious” Krustians.
- The men who wrote the Nicene Creed’s affirmation of “one holy catholic and apostolic church” didn’t mean “all real Christians, whatever sect they’re in.” They meant a concrete, visible Church.
Thereupon, the die was cast, and I’m coming up on 15 years now as an official Orthodoxen.
Every religion loves its converts. Gordon Atkinson, a Baptist preacher on sabbatical in San Antonio (here and here) gets it well enough that he just might end up in the convert fold.
This piece on the First Things blog, “Why Conservatism Needs the Religious Right,” appeared Monday, and I’ve been trying to figure out what strikes me as wrong with it. It certainly isn’t the first ten paragraphs, which are are (with the exception of the fourth, which is colorfully argued, at least) excellent.
But then comes the pivot:
What does any of this have to do with conservatism and the “religious right”? Conventional wisdom has it that evangelicals represent just one leg of the proverbial “three-legged stool” of conservative politics: the “social issues” or “values” voters, in contrast to economic conservatives or foreign policy hawks. Viewed in this light, evangelical conservatives are sometimes grudgingly allowed into the conservative movement merely for purposes of electoral victory.
I think what gets me here is the complete identification of the religious right with “Evangelicals.” That bothers me because the religious right is broader than that and because, in my opinion, Evangelicals are ill-suited to providing the gravitas needed, even if the “secular public discourse” cage rusts out.
That’s the best I can do. I’ll strike it off my list unless it haunts me.
I wish I saw more of this kind of New Urbanism in my hometown. The good news, though, is that it’s sort of happening spontaneously downtown, and there’s a chance of some intentionality and neighbor input a few blocks north up 5th Street shaping the redevelopment of an abandoned block (formerly occupied by a large rental center – you know, scaffolds, little-used tools and such that moved out to a major highway.
More good news: trendy, nearby Carmel, somewhat to my surprise, is doing some New Urbanist looking stuff.
Susan McWilliams in “Legitimized Rapes” has an interesting take on the intersection of Ayn Rand worship and Todd Akins.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 