Cigarettes, terror, and Barack Obama: Glamour is Serious Stuff

So many insights, so little time!

Virginia Postrel at the Weekly Standard writes of “the deeper meaning of glamour,” opening with an anecdote about a C-Span Booknotes watcher who was disappointed that she was involved with the website “DeepGlamour” instead of something serious.

Boy, what a moron! What could be more serious than Deep Glamour? (C-Span’s founder, Brian Lamb, by the way, is a local boy made good.)

Postrel names and reminds readers of a very important pervasive, perhaps even fundamental, human reality: our ability to be persuaded by a bit of mystery – even taken in as suckers (though she doesn’t say that).

As critics who denounce movies that “glamorize violence” or “glamorize smoking” understand, glamour is much more than style. It is a potent tool of persuasion, a form of nonverbal rhetoric that heightens and focuses desire, particularly the longing for transformation (an ideal self) and escape (in a new setting). Glamour is all about hope and change. It lifts us out of everyday experience and makes our desires seem attainable. …

Glamour can, of course, sell evening gowns, vacation packages, and luxury kitchens. But it can also promote moon shots and “green jobs,” urban renewal schemes and military action. (The “glamour of battle” long preceded the glamour of Hollywood.) Californians once found freeways glamorous; today they thrill to promises of high-speed rail. “Terror is glamour,” said Salman Rushdie in a 2006 interview, identifying the inspiration of jihadi terrorists. New Soviet Man was a glamorous concept. So is the American Dream.

Barack Obama was elected partly because his “campaign’s iconography employed classically glamorous themes, with its stylized portraits of the candidate gazing into the distance and its logo of a road stretching toward the horizon.”

Glamour is Serious Stuff. Serious enough that I’m adding it as a category.

My grandmother used to recoil as we watched circus performers in tight or skimpy (by the day’s standards) outfit on black and white television: “Does your mother let you to look at that?” (That’s not a typo; that was one of her speech mannerisms unless my memory is fooling me and she really did say “allow you to look”.) She probably was dimly aware (she of humble origins, widowed at 29 years and for 65 years beyond, worker of fingers-to-the-bone) that this contraption, popularized after her 50th year on earth, was somehow subversive and potentially transformative by bringing glamour into the home in a new way.

It occurs to me that one of the implications of Postrel’s insight is that parents – if they allow their children to watch television at all – need to begin early and age-appropriately to point out the manipulativeness of so much of it, and not just the commercials. The trouble is, identifying the manipulativeness of the shows themselves requires some real work. When smoking was already accepted, who’d have thought that smoking characters were committing glamourization? When consumerism is already accepted ….

I highly commend the article.

America at 2050 – and 400 millionsub

Another voice of economic optimism for the U.S. to counter my pessimism, Joel Kotkin thinks the next hundred million Americans, mostly immigrants, will be our economic salvation. But he thinks these folks – who won’t necessarily be very upwardly-mobile – will live in the suburbs, “the best, most practical choice for raising their families and enjoying the benefits of community.”

Huh!? I’ll grant the the faux estate in the auto-dependent suburbs has become the American dream since World War II, but is it really a community-promoter? And how will they afford the $10/gallon gas to get to their jobs?

The rosy picture doesn’t work for me at that level if nothing else.

Tiger Amadeus Woods: A Lenten Meditation

It started with Jason Peters rewriting William Blake. Then John Willson performed a dental colostomy* on Tiger, with FPR contributor Jeffrey Polet, I and at least a few others taking exception to what we thought was an extremely harsh tone. Now at last Polet has published his own promised thoughts on L’Affaire Tiger.

It was timely for me. I have avoided the details of Tiger’s transgressions, but moments before clicking on a link to Polet’s piece, I stumbled across a reproduction of some of Tiger’s text messages to a porn star mistress, and they were pretty shocking. I won’t link to them. I don’t think there’s a shortage of ways to track down the salacious detail.

I don’t recall who said “to understand all is to forgive all.” A quick Googling suggests that it’s probably a French proverb – proof again that the French are more than “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” (as Jonah Goldberg called them. I can’t help but laugh at many French jokes, as the French in my experience deserve a reputation for haughtiness. There’s a reason why one Wall Street Journal columnist always refers to John Kerry as “the haughty, French looking Senator from Massachusetts who, by the way, served in Vietnam.”). But Polet’s analogy between Tiger and a tempestuous genius of an earlier century puts things in an edifying perspective. It helps to understand, and to me “feels right,” as I try to empathize with the temptations of superstardom.

I could meander off into some personal reflections about how easy it is to condemn X immediately after condemning Y’s condemnation of Z, but I won’t.

* “Dental colostomy” is a euphemism for the slang phrase “chewing him a new [body part omitted].” I think I coined it.

It’s safe to go back in the water again

(This brief blog likely will be of interest only to Orthodox readers.)

I had unsubscribed to the Ochlophobist blog for a while because he got off, it seemed to me, on an unedifying prolonged rant against the Antiochian Archdiocese. But I can report that it’s relatively safe to go back in the water again, and that this March 8 posting made me wince in a most edifying way. And of his past 25 blogs, the only one that poked at things Antiochian seemed fairly well-placed.

Conscientious Objector to the Culture Wars

(This may be the most controversial and polemical thing I’ve posted. I’ll tell you in advance, and in conclusion, that I’m disinclined to be dogmatic about most of it. Your mileage may vary.)

* * *

One of the minor irritants in my life is Franky Schaeffer. I’ll go long spells without thinking of him, and then I get a catalogue from his publishing company, or maybe he pops up in the news (having once again found limelight). And I seethe.

But lots of people love limelight. Why does he, of all people, irritate me? Probably because his life is so parallel to mine, through all the twists and turns.

Evangelical: Check.
Produced the movie Whatever Happened to the Human Race; watched the movie as a turning point.
Now Orthodox: Check.
Religious Right activist: Check.
No longer Religious Right activist: Check.
60-something years old: Check.

But he’s too strident and angry. He’s sort of a Christian James Howard Kunstler (another approximate contemporary of mine) but without Kunstler’s ubiquitous F-Bombs. Kunstler acknowledges that his speeches are a form of theater (listen to Kunstlercast #103 here); I think that’s true of Schaeffer, too, though he’d probably deny it.

I sense, too, that my reasons for dropping out of the culture wars are different than Schaeffer’s. I sense that partly because he seemingly just changed sides, now inveighing against his former friends, writing screeds, kiss and tell books, dubious fiction (his Calvin Becker fiction trilogy was quite calculatedly ambiguous about the extent to which it was autobiographical), paranoid apologies for Barack Obama, and sucking up to media personages who call him things like “a former leader of the anti-choice movement.” (They just love to get some sound-bites from an angry ex-whatever.)

But I really dropped out because:

The culture wars are unwinnable on the present terms.
I suspect that the strident tactics make most things worse rather than better.
I don’t really trust my former allies.
I don’t really trust the candidates we’re supposed to vote for.
I still don’t trust my former adversaries.
If I’m a prominent culture warrior, it will spill over harmfully into other areas.
Maybe I’m just a worn out old hippie pacifist.

1. The culture wars are unwinnable on the present terms. We may get a majority vote for the “right” side on this issue or that, but that will not end the war. There will be other battles. There will be guerilla warfare. There will be no peace, and there’s only a minimal chance for the “Right” to win. Not until the Right’s own culture changes.

Changing culture is the work I’m about now – feeling my way rather than barreling ahead. That’s much subtler work than culture war. I’m not sure how good I am at it. But I’m convinced, to take just one Culture War example, that we won’t stop abortion until we change the toxic combination of unchastity and avarice that gets women pregnant and then justifies aborting the innocent child to maintain prosperity (greater or lesser).

The Right is not with us on that. Fox Radio recently aired an ad, between Glen Beck and Bill O’Reilly, for an online service for married men seeking adulterous affairs. (I didn’t hear it, but read about it from someone who didn’t note the incongruity of this appearing on a putatively conservative news source.)

Whaddya think? I’m betting that the ad wasn’t there for the 13 liberals who were eavesdropping on Fox that day, but for the red-meat, red state regulars.

TownHall.com syndicated columnist pages every day have ads for “conservative” slogan t-shirts draped on attractive young lasses, selling conservative politics, like everything else, with sex. Today there’s a sexy avatar for some video game, too. It’s all a racket.

This could as well go under the caption “I don’t really trust my former allies.” But on present terms I think the idiocy of modern pseudo-conservatives belongs in this “unwinnable” category, if only because their position on the sexual side of the culture wars seems to be “anything goes, so long as it’s not gay.” That’s a losing position long-term as well as being a sign of untrustworthiness.

2. The Culture Wars are unwinnable on present terms partly because stridency and contempt beget stridency, contempt and alienation.

Whichever side of the Culture Wars you’re on, think about the fundraising letters you get. Are you edified by their tone? Do you appreciate the sober, educational emphasis? Do you find yourself walking away with something of substance to ruminate on?

If so, I’ve got bad news for you: you’re an idiot. (Shall I write that slower? You. Are. An. Idiot.)

The groups who used to send me fairly sober letters have gone strident. The groups that used to send me strident letters are now frothing at the mouth. And I’m sure the other side is doing the same. Shrill is the new green.

I don’t care who fired the first volley. That’s lost in the mists of history like the instigation of the Hatfields versus the McCoys. I’d like the shooting to stop. I’d like artificial divisions to end. I suspect there’s more common ground than either side presently will admit because of how things have been framed. Let’s tone it down a bit and then explore what the real divisions are. The more we insult the other side, the more we paint both sides into corners from which dialog, let alone truce, is impossible.

3. The culture wars are unwinnable on the present terms, too, because there’s darned little difference between the two sides on some of the deep presuppositions.

They’re both, ironically, secular. One side is secular because they don’t believe in any divine rules. You know which side I’m talking about. (Hint)

The other side – my side – is mostly secular because they functionally believe that God’s only presence in the world is His rules. They “honor” Him by keeping his rules – sort of the way a rank amateur “paints” by number. That’s why I don’t really trust them. The tranformative significance of the Incarnation: God the Son, Who took on our flesh forever – qui sedes ad dexteram patrem (who sits at the right hand of the Father) in resurrected human flesh – is lost on them. God is up to something more than commandment monitoring and forgiving transgression of the commandments. The incarnation changes everything.

“Love God and do as you will” would strike them as modern relativism. They’re very anti-relativist. Except on Ecclesiology. Then they’re apt to utter Babbitry like “Isn’t it swell that there’s a church for every taste!”

At the other end from the relativist “conservatives,” there’s a Protestant Church in my home town that produces a disproportionate share of Religious Right activists. Several of them have been elected to public office. But they’re theonomists, or more specifically Reconstructionists. If they had their way, there would be 18 Old Testament Capital Crimes in our law books – including sassing parents. They’d shut down my Church and desecrate its icons. They might, for all I know, execute me for one of those 18 capital offenses for the icons in my home prayer corner.

“And what more shall I say? For the time would fail me to tell of …” the folks I encountered who dreamed of kingdoms, feigned righteousness, broke promises, shot off their mouths, tried to set fires, escaped the edge of euphemisms …. (Cf. Hebrews 11:32-34) These are the folks with whom I’d be a “co-belligerent” (Francis Schaeffer’s coinage to distinguish temporary and unreliable political friends from reliable “allies”) were I to continue in the culture wars. And they outnumber many-fold any well-formed Christians of historical and liturgical bent.

We Orthodox have been here before. After the attempted union with the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Florence (see also here), the Orthodox decided they’d risk rule by Sultan over rule by Pope.

That is not a throw-away line: I’m not so sure a secularist regime would be worse than what Christian Reconstructionists would bring upon me and my fellow Orthodox Christians that I’m willing to be bedfellows with Recontructionists.

4. In the current terms of the Culture War, the highest form of involvement, other than sending money in response to strident or frenzied letters, is to vote for Republicans. Any Republican.

In 2000 and 2004, it was Dubya. He was, we were told, a good Evangelical Christian. He cited Jesus as his favorite philosopher. He talked about America walking humbly in the foreign policy world.

Then 9-11 came, and he turned into a fierce Commander In Chief. And, oddly, Imam-In-Chief, as he assured us that “true Islam is a religion of peace.” (Well I’m glad he cleared that up!)

And then came, too, the second inaugural, when he declared as U.S. policy the eradication of tyranny from the world and the planting of democracy. If you don’t understand how delusional that is, read it again: eradicating tyranny from the world. As national policy.

Many Religious Right figures in 2008 backed Mitt Romney, Mormon and heir of a 50s moderate Republican, George Romney. Mitt was, deep down, one of us – despite his left-leaning administration as governor of Massachusetts – they assured us. Now they’re pushing Sarah Palin, about whom I’ll not say much except that I do not now support her and see no sign that she has the goods to gain my support later. (I don’t even think she’s all that “hot,” for whatever that’s worth.)

I’m not gonna play Charlie Brown the placekicker to the GOP’s Lucy Van Pelt any more.

5. I still believe pretty much what I believed before on what makes for good living and a just society. I’ve even kept a hand in the debates by writing letters to the editor on a few hot-button issues. Those letters are far less demonizing of the opposition than the sort of letters I used to write. But I check the online comboxes and see that the other side has no lack of equally-but-oppositely mad partisans of its own, leveling vitriolic attacks on me, no matter how reasoned my argument, just because I reach conclusions they don’t like.

But even at more elite levels than smalltown cyberpaper comboxes, I’m still convinced that the other side is untrustworthy. One occasionally will catch one of them committing candor, as has Chai Felblum of Georgetown law school. Imagine a constitutional case with this issue:

Whether the inferred right to marry a member of the same sex, which is inferred from the right to engage in homosexual sodomy, which is inferred from the right to privacy, which is inferred from penumbra of he 4th, 9th, 10th, 14th and other consitutional amendments, is of sufficient constitutional gravity to warrant compromise of the explicit constitutional command against laws prohibiting the free exercise of religion?

Chai Feldblum would answer “yes.” I’m not making up her response (though I did make up the highly tendentious – but brutally accurate – faux issue statement). I appreciate her candor.

But her candor tells me that there’s no home for me in the left where Frank Schaeffer has seemingly pitched his tent.

The Orthodox Wedding service includes, for just one example, “grant unto these Your servants …a peaceful life, length of days, chastity, love for one another in a bond of peace, offspring long‑lived, fair fame by reason of their children, and a crown of glory that does not fade away.” You can’t pray that with integrity over a same-sex coupling, whatever you might think of it otherwise.

So while the Chai Feldblums of the world might not smash my icons like the Reconstructionists, they’ll soon enough take away my Church’s tax exemption, or otherwise put on the squeeze, because they’ll consider us a hate group for continuing the two-millennia-long practice of connecting marriage to procreation.

6. If I’m a prominent culture warrior, it will spill over harmfully into other areas of life. I was reminded Sunday how diverse my parish is. We have Romanians and Russians who were born, or even came of age, under communism. We have Greeks who think that 2nd Amendment mania is barbaric (in at least one case with justification that I can’t gainsay – a family member gunned down in cold blood by someone who went postal). We have young people and middle-aged academics who lean left. We have demographically unknown visitors most Sundays. I have something to learn from some of them.

Just as I don’t want someone to ask me “why are you here since you’re not Greek?,” I don’t want people of Right-leaning disposition to come up to me at Church and make some dismissive remark, which they assume I’ll find hilarious or profound, about a Left-leaning idea that may be held by another parishioner within earshot. I don’t want there to be ethnic, racial, socio-economic or political barriers to people. Political trash talk about trifles at Church is apt to drive people away though we have a faith in common and should be together on Sunday.

7. Maybe I should try a bit more empathy. Maybe I’m not angry because, unlike Frank Schaeffer, I have a day job, with a comfortable living, and don’t have to raise a fuss to sell my newest book. Maybe a brain or personality disorder prompted Franky to call Barack Obama’s election “miraculous” and to prophesy epochal political healing on Obama’s watch.

Maybe Frank’s suburban Boston parish (I think he’s in Brookline, Michael Dukakis‘ hometown) has a leftist litmus test and he caved in. Or maybe he’s rebelling against his upbringing in neutral Switzerland as I declare myself a Swiss-like neutral in the Culture Wars.

Or maybe I’m not angry, by and large, because I’m a child of the 60s, a former Conscientious Objector to conventional war, and now old enough that I’m kind of tired of fighting of all sorts – worn out, if you will. Maybe we really need young, testosterone-crazed Christian guys (and gals crazed by whatever crazes women) who still are eager for a fight. I see my role as one to ask questions of any such young hotheads from the perspective six decades gives. Such as the ones implied by what I’ve just written.

* * *

So who am I hangin’ out with these days if not with the Alliance Defense Fund and the acolytes of R.J. Rushdoony? Check the bloglinks to the right* – Especially Front Porch Republic (“Place. Limits. Liberty.”), Distributist Review (guardedly). Small Is Beautiful has taken on new meaning for me. (My benighted generation got a few things right before we sold out or got complacent – and appreciating E.F. Schumaker was one of them).

I can’t even rule out Father Stephen. Nothing he writes is “about politics,” but everything he writes is about sane, human and humane living, which surely connects up somehow.

Basically, I’m going back and rethinking all things political and cultural. I’m wisdom-hunting. I read Wendell Berry essays and poetry, Bill Kauffman books, Russell Kirk’s Conservative Mind, Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, Scott Cairns’ Poetry, W.H. Auden (“For the Time Being” is now on my list for every Advent).

My conversion to Orthodox Christianity started it in a way. I soon realized that the Church has not always prevailed, and has produced martyrs in every century. And that’s okay. Better we should lose honorably than win by selling our souls.

(Note: When I changed my blog theme, the sidebar went away and anachronistically renamed my blog, which was “Tipsy Teetotaler” when this was written.)
Update 6/14/24: I opened with “I’m disinclined to be dogmatic about most of it,” but I re-read it today and it stands up awfully well. It meanders, stream-of-consciousness style, but I still feel the same way. And, by the way, I don’t consider Trumpist ascendancy a “win” for what I considered the Right when I wrote.

Architecture and Starkitecture

In an era where Houston’s SuperDome can be a “church” for Joel Osteen and his followers, it’s good to know that there still are those who take Church design seriously. It’s especially good to know since I’m chairing my Parish’s Building Committee as we’ve outgrown our current quarters.

Our current quarters are in the American Orthodox genre of “hermit crab.” We take whatever shells other critters abandon – in this case, a “Kingdom Hall” abandoned by Jehovah’s Witnesses (I remember when it was new around 1960):

I recall our Priest, Father Charles, lavishly dousing the interior with holy water, noting that it would take a lot to drive the heresy from the place. But even after adding the cost of holy water, the price was right.

But our next move, we think, should be to something permanent, and thus properly Orthodox. More on that later.

The Wall Street Journal reviews two designs of a Notre Dame-trained Architect, Duncan Stroik, working in a traditional Latin Church vocabulary (subscription may be required). While the Narthex view of The Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe left me lukewarm at best, I’m glad I clicked the slideshow link. The first aerial, showing the domed cruciform sanctuary behind the Narthex persuaded me to keep reading and looking, discovering “the splendor of the nave and sanctuary.”

The Thomas Aquinas College chapel is more appealing from the outside, but the interior disappoints with white painted plaster that reminds me too much of the Puritan minimalism of New England Congregational Churches. To be sure, the columns, flooring and aisles would give a Puritan the vapors, but the whiteness seems discordant to me – too “post-Vatican II.”

So why with such historic forms available have Catholics built modern monstrosities for the last 50 years?

10parent_cap3-articleLarge — Is this excretion a sick joke?

I’ve never been Catholic, and I well know how easy it is to misunderstand a tradition from outside it, so I’ll not speculate.

Before I published this, Ross Douthat of the New York Times picked up the same Wall Street Journal story. Follow his links for proof that butt-ugly brutalism ain’t necessarily cheap.

Meanwhile, on my side of the Great Schism, we have a rising younger architectural star, Andrew Gould, whose temple designs have only been realized once so far. Orthodox parishes in America tend to be much smaller than Roman Catholic parishes, and our temples are proportionately smaller as a result. But an advantage we have, which I think militates in favor of “doing it right” when we build our temples, is that we aren’t liturgical innovators. Our Liturgies are extraordinarily stable. We don’t need to build something cheap so we can knock it down in a few decades to erect what the folks at Fuller Seminary tell us is the Big New Thing God Is Doing to Grow Your Church. My exploration of Church design-build firms for and with our Building Committee suggests that in the current Protestant world, design is often driven by sociological Church Growth theories, and that the big design-build firms promote those theories.

Andrew’s home parish, Holy Ascension near Charleston, may now look relatively stark on the interior, but those white wall are plaster, and will be covered with icons over the decades to come. It is a work in process in that sense, as I believe has been true of most Orthodox temples over the millennia. His whole portfolio of Ecclesial design work bespeaks permanence.

The plaster walls of the properly Orthodox temple Andrew designed and we hope to build, will also receive icons in the future:

The setting is rural – the source of some personal regret for me, since not one current member of our parish will be within walking or normal biking distance – and commodious. Though I wish we could have afforded a site closer in, I’m excited by the prospects. One of the deepest human needs, I’m convinced, is worship, and an architect whose designs aren’t conducive to that should be used for kindling. (The syntax of the prior sentence isn’t what I intended, but I’m going to let it stand, if you catch my drift. Call it serendipitous.)

Even when I was a kid, we didn’t go to the farm

Georgetown Porcher Patrick Deeneen asks “what’s wrong with this commercial?”

He wasn’t able to wait very long before volunteering his answer. But before you peek at his answer, let’s try another one. What’s even wronger with this commercial?

Hint: The only medical malpractice case I won for a client involved a small-town doctor who didn’t “palpate” the ribs and abdomen of a traumatized patient (because of revulsion at her obesity, we hypothesized) who was bleeding to death internally from exactly the injuries that a physician trained in trauma would expect. His examination might as well have been a cheery “Hi, Ellen!”

Anyone here use Skype? My daughter-in-law is an immigrant. For 10 years, she only “saw” her grandmother occasionally via Skype. Grandma flew to the U.S. 8 days ago. Guess which my daughter-in-law prefers?

Nothing against Cisco or Skype, but reality is better than virtual reality most of the time.

Meaning as a matter of adjacent data

I recently bought a book of essays by E.B. White, the author of Charlotte’s Web and co-author of the perennial Elements of Style. It is, as of now, unread. White reportedly is a fabulous essayist – which these days may seem the equivalent of being first runnerup in the local hula hoop competition since, unnoticed by me, all the cool kids apparently have wandered off to read fiction.

But my preference for nonfiction over fiction finds a little vindication in this book review at the Chronicle of Higher Education. Excerpt:

David Shields’s punchy manifesto in defense of documentary creativity—against what he sees as the novel’s anemic anachronism—takes in a wider sweep of contemporary reality genres, from the memoir and lyric essay to cinéma vérité, karaoke, hip-hop, and Project Runway … The novel of plot and character, by his lights, is an inherently nostalgic form, a Victorian holdover inadequate to the imaginative challenges our zeitgeist poses.

… Shields is a flamboyant aphorist. He has assembled a montage manifesto from 618 epigrams, assertions, and sound bites, ranging in length from three words to one paragraph … we live in an age of “continuous partial attention.” … Ours is an age of opinionated inattentiveness and, as such, an age for which the aphorism is ideal. That instinct underlies Reality Hunger‘s episodic design: The units of thought are so small that you can start the book anywhere. Yet, en masse, Shields’s aphoristic shards create a comprehensive argument against the novel’s superiority and in favor of nonfictional creativity …

…Crucially, Shields has the brio to create convincing bridges among his plunderings.

As in:

“The life span of the fact is shrinking: I don’t think there’s time to save it.”

“Memory: the past rewritten in the direction of feeling.”

“Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage. Meaning ultimately is a matter of adjacent data.”

“Genre is a minimum-security prison.”

Meaning as “a matter of adjacent data.” I can relate to that. In a sense, it’s the motif of this blog.

Speaking of Faith

A remarkable program airs on Public Radio in much of the country: Speaking of Faith, with Krista Tippett, from American Public Media. Our local NPR affiliate doesn’t carry it, but it is available as a podcast, too, and I’ve been listening for a few years now.

SOF is not where to go for Orthodoxy, large- or small-O. (If you want an orthodox Christian version, subscribe to Mars Hill Audio.) But in a country where public schools shun religion, even as an academic study, thus tacitly marking it off as singularly unimportant (or at least unworthy of study), it is heartening to have a significant public institution that recognizes, as does SOF, that (1) faith matters are important and (2) faith is not confined to organized religions.

I risk misunderstanding if I don’t digress for a moment:

I don’t mean by point 2 to deprecate organized religion. “I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church,” after all. My point is that many ideologies that purport to be secular are in practice part of the same genus as explicit religion. SOF seems to understand that by covering a wide array under its “Faith” umbrella.
I am not a fan of “religion” or “organized religion” in any generic sense, anyway. Ask me about a specific religion and I may have an opinion, but not about religion in general. Or even about “atheism.” (“What God don’t you believe in? … Ugh! Good for you! I don’t believe in that one, either.”)

Beyond the two heartening messages enumerated above, I find much at SOF that allows me empathically to understand common human yearnings that that most religions share. (I note that without intending to imply equivalence of religions in satisfying those yearnings.)

SOF programs range from unbearable (e.g., her show on Voodoo lacked any deep yearning I could relate to) to intriguing to delightful. Even the March 4, 2010 show, where Tippett interviews a guy with a bunch of Just-So Stories about the “Evolution of God” included some thought-provoking moments (sometimes a just-so story sounds plausible).

I should mention that the BBC has podcasts that repeatedly take up religious topics and discuss them at a fairly high level – higher that SOF when tends toward the touchy-feely. But I’m still grateful that SOF is on the American airwaves.

Does economic growth rot the culture?

Georgetown political theorist Patrick Deneen thinks genuine conservatism is incompatible with global capitalism and that confusion of the two is a cold war artifact. I’ll not equivocate about this one: I very strongly suspect he’s right.

Other stimulating excerpts:

My goal has been (I hope) in particular to deepen some of our political understanding and vocabulary, to make visible to more readers some of the deepest presuppositions of modern politics and even the deeper philosophical ideas that inform discrete political issues. By enlarging the view and elongating the perspective, I also hoped that some other overlooked possibilities might be entertained – particularly beyond the worn and largely unproductive contemporary political positions adopted by the Right and the Left.

…

[M]any modern proponents of democracy believe that true democracy will only be achieved when we have overcome all “particularity.” The root of the contradiction of modern democratic theory is the idea that there are only two justifiable and desirable conditions of humankind – the radically individuated monad and the globalized world community. Any intermediate grouping or belonging is seen as arbitrary and the locus of limitations – hence, unjust.

…

Technology aids and abets the modern project of eviscerating attachments to local places and cultures. Not long ago, thinkers like Emerson and Dewey praised the liberating and transformative potential of the railroads and telegraph; today, it is the internet and Facebook. [No, the irony is not lost on me.]

…

I think there is great systemic danger in the not-distant future due to a coming (or already arrived) energy crisis. This will be a traumatic experience for a civilization that has been built around the assumption of permanently cheap energy. I would submit that our economic crisis, our debt crisis, and our moral crisis are all pieces of this larger energy crisis. Because our way of thinking treats problems as separate and discrete, we tend not to see their deeper connections. I would be happy to elaborate on this, but won’t presume to take up the space to lay this out in this venue. The thinker who has best articulated the contemporary tendency to treat all problems as “parts” while ignoring the whole is Wendell Berry.

(I found the interview linked above through Deneen’s own summary at Front Porch Republic, which also reminds me that he was interviewed by Ken Myers at Mars Hill Audio Journal, an excellent resource for commuters or people who like something other than frenetic music on the iPod when they work out, walk, bike or whatever.)