Avdat

Specter

Like everybody else, I'm struck that he didn't bother to place a fig leaf over his crass opportunism. He said, "I looked at the polls and I couldn't win as a Republican, so I'm going to run as a Democrat."

OK. Fine.

But dude, you're 79 years old and you've had cancer. Twice. There is another alternative. It's called retirement.

I take it for granted that I'm going to have to work until I'm dead. But Arlen Specter doesn't have to. What is it about these DC jobs that keep people hanging on so that you literally have to pry their cold, dead hands off of them? Robert Byrd, Strom Thurmond, John Paul Stevens. Don't you guys have grandkids? Aren't there some golf courses out there you're dying to tee off on? I know power is great, but guys, get a life!

Post-Easter blues

Did I mention how going to work Easter Sunday afternoon sucked every ounce of resurrection joy out of my soul?

It was a good morning. Coolish, but sunny and beautiful. Clear blue sky. Redbuds blooming. I got the boys ready for Church while Mrs. Avdat went ahead for handbell practice. (I am still thoroughly enjoying sleeping in on Sundays and worshiping with my family for the first time since... well, ever).

We sang Jesus Christ Is Risen Today, which brings tears to my eyes. I always react to that hymn the way that I ought to react to The Strife Is O'er, a sense of the weight of the world lifted from my shoulders, from the world's shoulders. Pastor Janet's sermon (with an acknowledged assist from Barbara Brown Taylor) was a slam dunk. "They were looking for the past but stumbled upon the future." Fair words of warning and promise to a budding Church Historian.

We went home, ate lunch, rested, and then I went in to wait tables at That Casual Dining Chain You've Probably Eaten At Before.

Nothing bad happened. No rude customers. No co-worker cattiness.

But the very absence of novelty is what was so spiritually crushing about it. The same musical soundtrack of current pop hits and classic rock standards. The same menu, same smell of french fries. No ham biscuits like there were at every Easter family reunion we attended as children. The dark interior which dilates your pupils and makes it impossible to see outside. Not that there's anything to see outside. A strip mall parking lot. There is a Bradford Pear, the ubiquitous and sterile suburban organic yard decoration that provides the barest hint of nature if you look at it out from under the awning: brown in winter, white in early spring, brown again as its blooms wilt in the face of the inevitable late frost, then green.

Shortly, it wasn't Easter anymore. It wasn't spring anymore. It wasn't anything anymore. By the soundtrack and the landscape you could place my serving gig somewhere in America on either side of the century's turn, but otherwise the venue is as unplottable as Number 12 Grimmauld Place. Suburban wasteland.

I should be tougher. Dietrich Bonhoeffer managed to cultivate a rich spiritual life in a concentration camp, for goodness sake. I ought to be able to find God in a restaurant.

When Jesus returned to his hometown, they took umbrage because they knew the back story on this hot-shot prophet. He was just the carpenter's son; who did he think he was? Mark reports, "He could do no deed of power there because of their unbelief." I'm struck by the word "there," as opposed to say, "for them." It raises a interesting possibility, that there are spiritual dead zones in the topography of creation.

Are they all due to unbelief? Or can inspid art and culture do the same?

Pseudo-Freudian torture analysis

Mrs. Avdat can't help but notice that the preferred media euphemism for torture, "enhanced interrogation techniques," reminds her a lot of another media staple, ads for "male enhancement." And isn't that what the last eight years were about? A bunch of jingoistic, militaristic bozos who'd nevertheless managed to avoid combat when they were younger overcompensating in the winter of their discontent, banishing all doubts about their masculine potency?

We're watching Battlestar Galactica on Netflix DVDs (please, no spoiler comments). Last night's episode was Fragged, in which, as you may recall, Baltar shoots and kills Lt. Crashdown. "Now you're a man," intones Six.

Maybe what's wrong with the Republicans is they're having too much Cylon sex.

Pinch me!

I tuned into the Presidential press conference tonight and BARACK OBAMA IS STILL PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!

Saint Pelagius

Lee heard J. Philip Newell talk on Celtic Christianity the other night and was less than impressed.

Since I'm not above quoting myself, I blogged about the current marketing of Celtic Christianity a couple of months ago.

I find the idea that Pelagius is some sort of standard bearer for the goodness of human nature laughable in the extreme. All you have to do is read his "On the Christian Life" in Oliver Davies Celtic Spirituality to see how hard he is on sin and sinners.

The difference between Augustine and Pelagius is that the former's understanding of sin was more comprehensive. For Augustine, more so than Pelagius, sin is not just an act of wrongdoing; it is a sickness of the human will. Which, ironically, leads Augustine to be much easier on sinners than Pelagius. He thought it was cruel to exhort people to do right when their wills were broken.

Augustine's doctrines of original sin and predestination were formed on the ground, as a result of dealing with seemingly unreformable sinners. He concluded that we ought to let in as many people as possible in the Church, and let grace work on as many as it could. Who knows? Maybe the worst sinner is in fact elected to salvation. This is what historian Robert Markus calls "a theology of mediocrity." Whether it was the cause or the effect of the Church's turn from persecuted sect to imperial religion is a matter of great debate, but the two did go hand in hand.

Pelagius, on the other hand, was a purist. "Every Christian a monk," as Peter Brown puts it. It's ironic that peace and justice types who want a more inclusive Church, flock to Pelagius when, on grounds of their adjusted gross income alone, he wouldn't want to be in the same room with any of them.

The problem with Augustine, of course, is that, since we inherit a defective will, and since the medicine of grace that heals the defective will is available only in the Church, and since Baptism makes one a member of the Church, then unbaptized babies are going to hell, and all that Augustine could say about this unhappy logical conclusion is that he hoped that their hell would be not as bad as the hell for adults.

And I suppose that, if all you know about Augustine is that he thought babies were burning, and that he didn't like Pelagianism, then that's enough for J. Philip Newell and more than a few others to go to the phone book looking for the First Church of Pelagius.

My own ticking time bomb scenario

if torturing a terrorist's unborn child could produce actionable intelligence, would Sean Hannity be down with that?

Good preachin'

In light of today's extraordinarily politicized sermon in chapel, I thought I'd copy and paste Brevard Childs' criteria for a good Bible commentary which I stumbled across at Inhabitatio Dei:

1. Does the commentator do justice to the coercion of the biblical text, or does the author’s private agenda overshadow the text itself?
2. Does the creative imagination of the commentator lead the reader back to the biblical text or away from it?
3. Does the interpretation reflect the needed patience and empathy to wrestle with the elements of the Bible that at first seem strange, distant, and even offensive to modern sensibilities?
4. Has the commentator learned enough from the history of interpretation to retain a sense of modesty regarding his or her efforts and a critical respect for those who have illuminated the way in the past?

What makes for a good commentary makes also for a good sermon.

Mind you, I disagreed with nothing that the preacher said. But if I'd wanted to hear/read a manifesto for a New Eco-friendly World Order, I could have stayed holed up in my carrel and read some blogs. More Jesus in chapel, please.

Forunately there was the Lord's Supper--which I trust Jesus showed up for.

Torture

A few scattershot comments about the release of the torture memos:

• I heard David Gergen say that, Yes, the acts described in these memos are horrible, but we must keep in mind that the architects of this policy literally had to run for their lives on September 11. Well, we can all agree that fear makes us act irrationally at times, but what Gergen is really saying is, These people massively failed to defend the country and therefore, they get a free pass to resort to great evil as a way to compensate for their incompetence. Does that make any sense?
• If these people were waterboarded dozens of times in a month, that puts to rest the ticking time bomb scenario, doesn't it?
• The memos acknowledge that what agents of the U.S. government were doing to detainees in the War on Terror is routinely condemned by the U.S. government when done by agents of foreign powers to detainees in their custody. In other words, It's not torture if we do it. I think the word for people who believe that there are rules but that they aren't obliged to follow them is "sociopath."
• It seems like I heard some torture apologist somewhere say that we ought not be talking about what we do or don't do to prisoners in order that the imaginations of would-be terrorists might run wild and thus be deterred from launching attacks. This is the Pretend to Be Crazy Strategythat Ed Kilgore described a couple of months ago applied to foreign affairs. In other words, these people think that the way to ensure our security is to "carefully (cultivate) a reputation for barely contained psychotic anger and utterly reckless disregard for consequences," i.e. the U.S.A. is that guy at the end of the bar who'd just as soon break a bottle of beer over your head as look at you.

We've been ruled by people who were part nuts and a whole lotta evil.

When Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, the latter already been chased from the White House in disgrace. But nothing of consequence has happened to the people who made torture an instrument of U.S. policy, in violation of U.S. and international law and human decency. One of them is serving on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. It is not sufficient to let history render a verdict on these people. A U.S. criminal court needs to as well.

The only constant is change

The East Carolina Pirates have updated their mascot for the 21st century.

Heh.

Incoherence

The Tea Party people do have legitimate cause for concern. A trillion dollar deficit is a frightful sum. Trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see is really troubling. One ought to be concerned about excessive debt on both moral and practical grounds.

That said, the Tea Party people don't seem to understand why we're in this mess or what we must do to address it. In the short term, a large deficit is a necessary evil, given the severity of the recession. As Obama helpfully explained in his speech the other day, in a recession, everyone tightens his/her belt in the event that unemployment strikes in the near future. This is prudent and right, but if everyone's cutting back, then no one is spending, and everyone's job becomes increasingly vulnerable. So, to break this vicious circle, the government steps in and spends. Hence, the stimulus package.

It's classic Keynesian economics, and I'm a rather orthodox Keynesian. Now, in two years, if the economy has recovered, then we can work on reducing the deficit. And indeed, we'll have to because at that point, excessive government spending combined with increased consumer spending makes the economy susceptible to inflation.

Now, back to the Tea Party people. Bush's second round of tax cuts in 2003 are why we're in this mess. He cut taxes at precisely the wrong time, as the economy was well on its way out of a minor recession. All that money flowing into the economy no doubt goosed the housing bubble, and all that money flowing out of the Treasury inflated the deficit, leaving the government with much less room to maneuver when the next downturn eventually came--which is now. So we're looking at trillion dollar deficits now, rather than $500 billion deficits.

Moreover, the Tea Party's Republican allies in Congress haven't a clue about how to move forward. A lot of the Republican economic proposals call for slashing income and capital gains tax rates. Unlike the stimulus plan, these proposals will take much longer to work their effects into the economy. And, unlike the stimulus plan, they amount to permanent reductions in federal revenue, which locks in the deficit problem long term.

There's also the funny fact that a number of right wing activists have advocated ballooning debt as a strategy to destroy the welfare state at some point in the future.

What it boils down to is not a fear of debt but a hatred of taxation, of the overclass' wealth mingling with the unwashed masses. When the economy is in the toilet, cut taxes to boost the economy! When the economy is a runaway freight train, cut taxes lest the economy run off the rails! When the deficit is high, cut taxes, because it'll actually generate more revenue, except when you want reduce income to drown the welfare state in a sea of red ink, in which case you... cut taxes! Because when Republicans are in the White House, "deficits don't matter," to quote our former VP, but when a Democrat is in office, deficits are a sign of creeping socialism. Or fascism.

No doubt all protest movements suffer from a lack of coherence, but this is ridiculous.