1
I don’t share the anxiety many conservatives have about Islam in America (Islam in Europe is a different matter, for particularly European reasons). For better or for worse, post-Christian America is going to turn Islam into Moralistic Therapeutic Deism too.
Rod Dreher, stating as expectation what I somewhat suspected. Read the linked blog and you’ll see why.
2
Viktor Orban is not making it easy to believe that a civilized but illiberal democracy is coming to Hungary:
More than 400 private news outlets have been brought under the control of a holding company run by close allies of Mr. Orbán, including his personal lawyer and a lawmaker from his party, Fidesz. While proponents defend the move as promoting “balance” in Hungarian media, critics say it amounts to a thinly veiled return to a communist-style centralized state-media system. Adding credibility to the objections, Mr. Orbán issued a decree exempting the holding company from scrutiny by the agency charged with protecting competition against excessive concentration. Meanwhile, one of the two remaining major opposition newspapers shut down after the government ceased advertising in it.
…
Mr. Orbán has also appointed Maria Schmidt … as head of a new Holocaust museum designed to depict Hungary’s role in a more favorable light than does the existing museum, which acknowledges the Hungarian state’s collaboration in deporting more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz.
Ms. Schmidt has … said the extermination of the Jews represented a marginal point of view not among the Nazis’ principal war aims. When the Hungarian Jewish community criticized her, she responded that “some groups would like to consider their ancestors’ tragic fate an inheritable and advantageous privilege.” In so doing, she declared menacingly, “they exclude themselves from our national community.”
3
It was an enormous heroic undertaking that if I told you the whole story, you’d be breathless with admiration, so I will just say this: my wife and I — mostly my wife but I was there, too — have moved from a three-story house in St. Paul to a two-bedroom apartment in Minneapolis. We did it, shed ourselves of truckloads of material goods, and now enjoy the gift to be simple and the gift to be free. Period. End of story.
We did it because it dawned on us that we were two people living in a few corners of a house for ten and that if we didn’t move, the county would send social workers who specialize in dementia issues.
But the beauty of the move is psychological, how it puts dead history behind you and opens up vistas shining and new. This is the American solution to just about any problem: get out of town. I worked in St. Paul for forty years and got sandbagged a year ago and felt bad about it and now I’m in Minneapolis and am over it. So there.
Glad to hear that Gary. Of all the #MeToo tales, yours seemed the most improbable.
Cos? His was bitterly disappointing, but somehow not improbable.
4
“There is almost nothing that our mainstream media will not celebrate if it is labeled pro-LGBT.“
This and its followup story are very disturbing: An eleven-year-old transvestite boy dancing provocatively in gay bars for bills handed up from the audience, enabled by his parents (bad) and valorized by ABC’s Good Morning America (horrifying).
As one comment to the source blog said, “Where’s Fred Phelps when you need him?”
5
The precedent of Clinton’s acquittal is Trump’s greatest shield. The hard political lessons Republicans learned along the way — especially during the 1998 midterm elections, which saw the Democrats pick up five House seats after a year of GOP attacks on Clinton (no change occurred in the Senate) — should also caution the Democrats.
But it won’t. The difference now is the militarized industrial news complex that simply must be fed. It will gorge itself on impeachment. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the incoming chairman of the Judiciary Committee, will be the new Peter Rodino for those old enough to recall the Nixon impeachment drama. Rudolph W. Giuliani will be reprising the role played by James Carville in the Clinton impeachment drama, going after critics and prosecutors of Trump the way the Ragin’ Cajun went after independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr and team.
It will be a ratings bonanza. Who likes ratings bonanzas? Who can command the media — or any particular outlet — and appear on 10 minutes notice? Who, in short, might learn to love “the process”? Trump, of course. It isn’t a normal presidency seeking normal historical achievements. He already has some of those in his massive tax cut, his two justices on the Supreme Court, a much-needed military rebuild and a new realism regarding China. This president can look at his markers already down on the table and actually come to relish the battle.
Don’t be surprised. Be prepared.
Hugh Hewitt, who may be, like Brer’ Rabbit in the Joel Chandler Harris stories, using some reverse psychology.
I’m nevertheless inclined to think that impeachment might backfire on the Democrats and that removal by the Senate would be very bad for the country, one-third or more of which would say “See: If you try to drain the swamp, they’ll crucify you.”
Heck, we might even see a new religion, with Trump as its deity. Would even that break the (somewhat oversold) Evangelical thralldom?
6
“I’m not saying it should be a hotel or a party,” former inmate Cecil Fluker told the county council, “but damn, can we come out alive?”
Michael Gerson on the Cleveland penal system, a mere microcosm of our problems.
7
Walk over to your bookshelf and pull off books by three of your favorite Christian writers—old or young. If the person is a pastor, the author’s biography will mention his church’s name. Of course. But if he or she isn’t, there is a 99 percent chance it won’t. It’s just him. Or her. They are a free-floating, self-defining Christian.
Have you ever thought about where James Dobson goes to church? Or J. I. Packer?
It’s the same thing with your favorite Christian artists. Did you ever wonder where Amy Grant attends? Or Lecrae?
I’m not blaming these individuals. I’m just saying that evangelicalism teaches us to think of them as…I don’t know…voices. Celebrities. Hovering-in-the-air personalities. Something. But as local church members? It’s an institutionally clunky and strange thought.
So it is with us non-celebrities. We identify ourselves as “evangelical” before we do “member of Cheverly Baptist Church” or “Covenant Presbyterian.” That church may have shared the gospel with us, nurtured us into the faith, publicly affirmed our profession of faith, fed and strengthened us into maturity, and corrected us when we veered off course, but we still view ourselves independently from it, like the child who goes to college and forgets all about his or her family.
…
My friend Sam Emadi has noticed that Christians book stores typically separate the “Christian life” section from the “church” section. “Why aren’t those one section?” he asks. Good question.
Jonathan Leeman. I had kind of thought that this sort of “free-floating, self-defining Christian” celebrity was a distinctive of “women’s ministries,” but maybe not.
8
Alan Dershowitz Is Lying To You, says Popehat.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 