Midwestern Mugwump (mw)2

Happy Reformation Day

After having successfully turned back your clocks (except in certain parts of the country that contain prominent Catholic universities), you can crack open a cold brew and celebrate Reformation Day by toasting Martin Luther with his favorite drink. Yes, October 31, 2004 is the 487th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to door of the Castle Church at Wittenburg. So read the document, have a drink, and celebrate the Reformation. You can also go and listen to (and of course sing along with) Luther's most famous hymn (though beware, the music comes up automatically). Go ahead, sing all 4 verses - in your deepest baritone, if you can. Luther's devil is powerful, but his God is more powerful. I've been promised that our church will do so (and hopefully they'll crank up the organ).

And for my Roman Catholic friends - Let them be anathema. Okay, not at all, just kidding. How about praying for us, your schismatic brothers and sisters in Christ, and for the future unity of the church, as we all should be doing.

Happy Reformation Day, its a much more robust holiday than that other thing tomorrow.

Apologies and Judgments

CT has an interesting article entitled - Why I Apologized to Planned Parenthood - which is worth reading. I'll state up front that I don't agree with parts of it, but the overall point and tone of the article is a wise one and so I'll stay away from highlighting the weaknesses. Its conclusion is 'simple' in that way that all of Christianity is simple - easy in theory, but impossible in practice without God's grace.

Abortion is the tragic ending of a precious life, but when I think of people who choose or perform this death act, rather than feeling hate or condescension, I get a lump of love in my throat, with a longing to hug them, and pray, "Father forgive them, they don't know what they're doing." Technically, some of them know exactly what they're doing and may even flaunt it as their right. But remember those who cheered and jeered during the Lord's crucifixion. They were the very ones Jesus asked his Father to forgive.

It really is worth a read. I'll admit that I'm much better at judging than I am at exhibiting grace, so this is a good reminder.

Peering over the edge

Ted Olsen at Christianity Today has an excellent couple of posts up about a pair of deeply unsettling liturgies that appeared (and have since been removed) from the Episcopal Church, U.S.A.'s website for Women's Ministries. The first post - Episcopal Church Officially Promotes Idol Worship - describes a "Women's Eucharist" that is not only "taken almost completely (without attribution) from a rite from Tuatha de Brighid, 'a Clan of modern Druids … who believe in the interconnectedness of all faiths'" but also intentionally makes use of language and symbols explicitly associated with Old Testament idol worship. Read the whole post for a more complete articulation of the interconnections. There is also a "Liturgy for Divorce" that has a profoundly unbiblical view of marriage in its acquiesence to the dissolution of marriage "love dies." Compared to praying to goddesses, this is mild.

Today's post - Beyond the Episcopal Church's Pagan Eucharist details more closely the personalities behind the pagan rite - an Episcopal priest who also posted the rite at a neo-pagan site. The pages have been orphaned from the EC(USA) website and the introductory language changed, but no apology or other accounting. Again, read the whole piece as it is carefully done and articulates the issues clearly.

Besides being appalled at either the liturgical and Biblical obtuseness of this segment of the EC(USA) or the deliberate syncretism and flouting of basic Biblical prohibitions on idolatry, one wonders if it is this kind of thing that N.T. Wright was talking about in his excellent interview at the CT site. In the discussion (and elsewhere), he implies that there are other more important fish to fry (which there are) and that the Windsor Report is designed to lay the beginnings of setting up a process (really, what could be more Anglican than that) to mediate disputes. If you care about the Episcopal Church, read the whole thing.

I must admit, I found the image of "fireproofing the house" (Wright's phrase) to be quite jarring. It made me wonder if Wright and others saw the 'room' of the Episcopal Church as already burning and unable to save. But what happens to the people who are 'trapped' (in that they can't switch to oversight by another bishop) in the burning room?

UPDATE - CT has another Weblog update with a 'response' from ECUSA. GetReligion also picks up the story, whose assessment I agree with.

As Keith Jackson might say - "Ohhh, Nellie."

ANOTHER UPDATE - CT reports that the Bishop of Pennsylvania has issued a statement about the reports including the classic line (How could he not have caught the irony here, but it seems unlike a bishop to make light of somehting like this?) - "I will not allow this situation to turn into a witch-hunt of any sort." That is too funny.

Economics and Life

Michael Perry provides a response to Russell Hittinger's letter to Perry and Cathleen Kaveny about voting for Kerry. Perry's response is thoughtful, measured, and interesting (though I disagree with the swipe taken at George and Bradley at the end - it isn't just "Rambo Catholics" that have degraded political discourse among Christians - the conversation at Mirror started on a not particularly generous rhetorical note). It does have one element that I thought was odd and worth comment.

Perry makes a (not uncommon) comparison to the abolition of slavery comparing the positions of two possible candidates - one who advocates against slavery, the other who doesn't do so, but hope being what it is, advocates "economic policies will very likely result, within a generation, in the withering away of the institution of slavery." Say what? As the economists say, "assume a can opener."

Perry goes on to say - "In my judgment, a faithful Catholic could reasonably decide to vote for B, notwithstanding the fact that A is morally opposed to slavery and would try to abolish it and B is not morally opposed to slavery and would not work to abolish it, as a way of expressing "solidarity" with the victims of slavery." Sure, if Kerry can heal the economy and thus do away with abortion - but how does that analogy, not to be uncharitable, pass any form of credulity? Is that what is meant by "Hope is on the Way"? Wow.

Again, this relates to my confusion about the absolute reliance on weak economic arguments (in a generation?) regarding a topic that is fundamentally not about economics (it may involve economics, but I don't think it does - "fundamentally"). Clearly Perry's students at Emory are quite a bit unlike my vociferous colleagues in law school and quite unlike the people his 'blogging colleague met in the park. I must admit, I'm surprised, but clearly optimism springs eternal.

Alasdair MacIntyre's Not Voting Either - I still am

So another of my former professors, Alasdair MacIntyre (I had him for 1 class, we weren't particularly close, but he gave me a grade with which I was quite pleased), has written that he isn't voting in this election. His basic complaint is with a widening income gap (about which I don't know enough about, though I have a question about it - isn't purchasing power the more important number and what exactly accounts for the increase in executive compensation - Bainbridge would know) which ends up (surprisingly, in my opinion) putting him on the side of Milton Friedman in endorsing a negative income tax. I wonder for whom Friedman will be voting - wait a minute, I think I can figure that one out.

That said, I'm still voting Republican. One other related thought, its been surprising to me to see the reliance of humanities scholars on economics in their endorsement of either Kerry or not voting. This particularly has surprised me regarding the Roche editorial and the people over at Mirror of Justice (regarding abortion especially). It isn't hypocritical of them, its just interesting that scholars of words (law, theology, literature) emphasized arguments laced with economic determinism to the neglect of the importance of rhetorical and moral forces on current issues. Odd.

Another Football Metric

Another tough weekend for the Fighting Irish, which brings me to another possible football metric -

When you consistently (4 of the last 5 years) lose to teams with HIGHER GRADUATION RATES than your own (BC was listed at 100%, I don't have the heart to research it), you may indeed be in trouble. At that point you are, as the Calvinists would say, without excuse.

I'm still in Willingham's corner, but this is getting harder and the season isn't getting any easier. Perhaps I'll feel bettter in a few days.

New Money, New Time

Frankly, the amount of resources (both time and money) that elections mobilize astounds me. Each of the two major parties will spend several hundred million dollars each on this election cycle. But what will we do afterward - win or lose?

Evangelicals (particularly those that are also Republicans) get a bad rap during election season, partly deserved and partly undeserved - and this include the call that we don't do enough for the poor (on the whole they are more generous than their peers, but it can easily be said that we are not generous enough) and oppressed. Do we take as serioulsy as we should the call from Isaiah in verse 17 -

"Learn to do right! Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow."

or the Psalmist in Psalm 146:9 - "The LORD watches over the alien and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked."

So while I sometimes get tired of the constant petition writers/critics (no names, that would be a bit unfair), let me offer up this initial proposition -

That after the election (whoever wins) conservative and politically mobilized evangelicals commit to mobilizing additional resources for the poor and oppressed in new ways with new time and new money (above and beyond what we have been giving) and that this momentum comes from within the movement, not from those that love to criticize it. How much? What is the expected numbers of evangelical voters voting for Bush - 50 million? What type of multiplier is a good goal? Let's start small - 1 for 1 - 1 new dollar and 1 new hour of volunteer work for every vote cast for Bush by a conservative Christian. And not to culture war groups, but only to those that minister to the "fatherless and the widow" both here and abroad. That's my modest proposal.

Crouch on the Emerging Church

Andy Crouch has a good article over at CT about the Emerging Church (movement). Perhaps I liked the article because it features a friend of mine - Rob Bell - who preaches at Mars Hill Bible Church near Grand Rapids, Michigan. I've known Rob for over 15 years, but I was never more impressed with him after seeing him pastor a couple shortly after he had graduated from seminary. I'm much more impressed with good pastoring than I am good preaching. So when Ed Dobson (of Calvary Church in Grand Rapids) described Rob in a separate article as "driven by a passion to teach the Bible, shaped by understanding the Bible in its context, then applying the Bible to where people live. At the core, he's about the Bible" - I believed him as I've seen it.

That said, I thought Brian McLaren's book - A New Kind of Christian - was kind of lame. Essentially I agree with Mark Talbot's complaint that Crouch discussed - "the great irony is that by giving us these sharp categories of 'modern' and 'postmodern' ways of thinking, McLaren is doing the very sort of categorization he describes, and implicitly condemns, as modern." It isn't quibbling, if you don't understand the problem, you end up committing many of the same mistakes. An aside, my eyes glaze over whenever I read the term - Postmodern - I just don't think that 98% of the people who use it have any idea what it means. In addition, it seems like the evangelicalism of the book was a straw man - it seemed largely unrecognizable to me - except as a common straw man. My other major complaint was the utter lack of theological grounding in the McLaren's book. Once one cuts away from the shores of modernity, what do you have? You end up being tossed about by the winds of contemporary culture unless you can ground yourself theologically, historically, and philosophically. Being against modernity simply isn't enough and the claim to start over, well, that isn't the way history works. As Robert Webber comments - "They claim to be rejecting the last 30 years of evangelicalism—and they're repeating the last 30 years of evangelicalism." That is the way I felt when I read the book, though Webber's quote related to a recent convention.

But tapping Newbiggin and Willard (as Crouch indicates McLaren wants to do) gives me more hope. As did the Crouch article as a whole.

The Presbyterians Dig Deeper

I'm so disgusted. Several colleagues at work sent me links expressing outrage over a meeting between the Presbyterian Church (USA)'s "Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy" and Hezbollah. Yes, you read that right - Hezbollah - actively competing to be the world's worst terrorist organization (most notoriously, they blew up the Marine barracks in Beirut in the 1980's, but they've been active since, they aren't exactly retired from the terrorism business). They were then off to Syria next. Good grief. Then it gets worse, evidently:

Rev. Ronald Stone, a retired social ethics professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, was quoted on Hezbollah's satellite TV network as saying "relations and conversations with Islamic leaders are a lot easier than dealings and dialogue with Jewish leaders," and that "we treasure the precious words of Hezbollah and your expression of good will towards the American people."

WTF???? Let's hope he was misquoted, though somehow I doubt it. As the members of the committee are elected by the General Assembly, they can't be fired (and who knows what slow-moving elected/bureaucratic body can discipline them and when?) - though I think that the paid staff (there are three) that set up the trip should be fired. Official PC(USA) leadership issued a statement calling the meeting reprehensible. At least, but not enough.

Evidently, this Sunday is United Nations Day in the denomination - since we're on a theme of feckless anti-semitism. My research has taught me that the denomination has a United Nations office whose catch phrase is "Discover the Vision, Discover the World" - how many different levels of mockery do you really need with that prattle.

ARGH.

Tech Central Columns

Bainbridge points to a couple of good TechCentralStation columns. One by himself, regarding the Efficient Capital Markets Hypothesis, which discusses the convergence of ECMH and Behaviorist market theory with a little hint at the end of what to do for the average investor. A colleague pointed out that he rests his investment decisions too heavily on ECMH and could also support them with an argument from transaction costs (both for mutual funds or if you are doing the investing yourself). If your eyes glaze over, buy index funds for your retirement fund, Bainbridge does (though that's not investment advice).

The other article is a piece by William Stuntz, at Harvard Law, regarding Kerry's comparison of terrorism to organized crime. Stuntz is a reasonable, careful and honest guy, so it is worth a read. His conclusion:

Kerry thinks America's seventy-year-long battle against the Mafia was a success story. He is wrong. Tolerating Mob bosses (which is what we did for most of those seventy years) was very costly. Tolerating terrorism -- or leaving it to police and prosecutors, which amounts to the same thing -- would be a disaster.

Stuntz is also the author of a short article published in the Harvard Law Review entitled - Christian Legal Theory, which is definitely worth the read for anyone who hasn't come across it.