Michael Gerson writes the best thing he’s written since – well, since I turned disreputable by writing him off as a predictable neocon:
But while “Noah” tries (and fails) to reconceptualize religion, the surprise hit “God’s Not Dead” positively discredits it. This movie is an extended exercise in evangelical wish fulfillment. (Freud is evidently not dead, either.) The plot: Fresh-faced Christian lad bests abusive, atheist philosophy professor at his own game, and then the professor converts just before he dies. Along the way, a Muslim girl gets beaten by her father and converts, and a liberal blogger gets cancer and converts. Everyone is a willing, pliant participant in a vivid fantasy, vaguely bringing to mind a very different kind of film.
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Here evangelicals could learn from Catholic writers, whose art was often better than their lives. Evelyn Waugh comes to mind. In “Brideshead Revisited,” the working of grace leaves everyone — Sebastian dying at his monastery, Charles and Julia forgoing their love — both shattered and transformed. In Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory,” a bad priest — the alcoholic father of an illegitimate child — unknowingly reenacts the Passion and becomes a saint and martyr while believing himself a failure. In Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation,” Mrs. Turpin — respectable, upright, odious — is granted a vision of souls climbing toward heaven in which the respectable come last and “even their virtues were being burned away.”
Dale Coulter claims that Evangelicals were against abortion earlier than most versions of modern history acknowledge. This observation struck me as particularly plausible:
The consistent Evangelical position through the 1950s across denominational lines was that abortion was morally wrong. The question, then, is how to account for the clear shift toward a more lax view on abortion by the end of the 1960s. There are multiple causal factors, one of which was the birth defects crisis that followed the authorization of thalidomide in the late 1950s and 1960s. Thousands of babies were born with severe defects as a result of doctors administering thalidomide during the early stages of pregnancy.
A second factor was renewed concerns about overpopulation that had Evangelicals reconsidering their position. Finally, there was a concerted effort to resist Catholic notions of natural law as part of determining the Evangelical position. The result led to a more lax position on abortion in some Evangelical organizations like the Southern Baptist Convention and the symposium on birth control sponsored by Christianity Today in 1968.
Nevertheless, this lax view was not universally held even at the time. Methodist ethicist Paul Ramsey argued against abortion in Fabricated Man in 1970. His thought influenced the Wesleyan wing of Evangelicalism because of the historic connection between Methodism and the holiness movement.
The scandal of Southern Baptist Romophobic softness on abortion is fairly well known, but the reminders of thalidomide and the late 60s talk of overpopulation help put Evangelical equivocation in perspective.
Of the resistance to natural law I recall nothing. But I do recall that IVCF at Bradley could not assign a topic so benign to a locally prominent Peoria Presbyterian pastor as to prevent him going off on an anti-Catholic rant. We once assigned him to exegete Hannah’s prayer (“you’re so good at explaining scripture, Pastor X!”) and, I kid you not, he turned it into an anti-Catholic rant at least briefly.
Reihan Salam, childless, in his mid-30s, earning more than the median $51,900, thinks he should pay more tax
even though I also believe a not inconsiderable share of my tax dollars are essentially being set on fire by our frighteningly incompetent government. Leviathan is here to stay, whether I like it or not, and someone has to pay for it. That someone should be me, and people like me.
We might disagree on the details, but we’re agreed on that main thrust.
In an era of intentionally “child-free” “married” people and “marriages” of pairs who couldn’t – no matter what – make a baby together if they boogied all night, every night, a curmudgeon who thinks marriage is about children should favor a tax policy that favors not “marriage” per se, but childrearing.
And the more the merrier. If Salam is right, one good way to start would be a $17,000 per child per year dependency deduction.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry notes that Picasso “stole” Demoiselles d’Avignon from Cézanne, but by “steal” means that Picasso made it his own, while someone who “copies” doesn’t make it his own:
So for example, a lot of people (myself included) think the institution of the small group has been vital to the growth and robustness of Evangelical Protestantism. So,we should totally steal that. But maybe the answer isn’t just having Catholic small groups. Maybe the answer is using the small group concept to renew the Catholic concept of confraternities, which were absolutely thriving in the 19th century but now aren’t being heard from so much. (This is just one half-baked idea on one example.) But we should definitely send some double agents at Tim Keller’s urban church-planting conferences.
Anyway, the point is: brothers and sisters, we have license to steal. Let’s steal everything we can. (How’s that for a bumper sticker?)
How he gets to this suggestion is even more fascinating than the Picasso/Cézanne example; a Papal Encyclical gives the license to steal apparently.
No Evangelicals in this item. Sorry:
I am not overly fond of The New Yorker magazine with its incongruous mix of politically correct articles and advertisements for outrageously expensive goods. However, on March 20, 2014, the magazine carried an intriguing story by Alexander Stille, entitled “An Anti-Gay-Marriage Tea Party, French Style?”.
I wish I had time to watch the new Cosmos, but I don’t. For those who do, though, there are some quibbles here and here with its failure to note important aspects of the Roman Catholic Church’s issues with Giordano Bruno, who, apparently, is given mythical “martyr for science” status a bit too easily.
More specifically, throwing out a novel cosmology, a matter of theologoumena, doesn’t give you a free pass for heretically denying the Trinity and the Divinity of Christ, matters of dogma.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 