Avdat

Mapping stereotypes

Europe through American eyes:

This is pretty accurate, except for Austria, which everybody on this side of the Atlantic knows as Sound of Music Land.

You can see Europe as seen by Europeans here. It would appear that Scandinavia can be stereotyped in wonderfully imaginative ways.

HT.

Coach Obama and America's long rebuilding season

The other day I saw President Obama telling someone that while some are thinking about the next election, he's been thinking about the next generation. That's about right. Obama's legislative achievements are not only breathtaking in scope, but their full impact won't be felt for years, nor will a proper assessment be possible before then.

Consider:

1. The Affordable Care Act. A bunch of popular reforms went into effect last week, but the real deal, the mandate to buy private insurance and subsidies for those who can't afford it, won't take effect until 2014. It'll be a decade before we can compare the physical and financial health of the country under universal coverage to the status quo.
2. The Stimulus. A Time magazine cover story last month fairly glowed with praise for what the Stimulus will do for medical research, education and curbing global warming. But it was advertised as a jobs bill, and while better than nothing, it's impact will be felt in the next decades, not in next month's unemployment numbers.
3. Sentencing reform. Congress brought penalties for crack cocaine (which African Americans tend to use) down to the levels of powder cocaine (which white Americans tend to use). I think that not locking up another generation of black men and throwing away the key can't help but be a good thing.
4. Student loan reform. Congress cut out the middle man (the evil banks). The feds will loan money to students directly. This will save a ton of money, and make a college education more accessible to more people. That won't create jobs today, tomorrow or next year. But in a decade?
5. The Wars. Obama said he was going to shift the focus to Afghanistan, and get us out of Iraq. He's kept his word. And I imagine that he'll keep his word about getting out of Afghanistan after this one last offensive. This is the big question mark in Obama's legacy, I think. If the Taliban return to power and Al Qaida re-open their little shop of horrors, Obama's strategy will be judged a failure. Then again, given the emergence of home-grown Islamic extremists, defeating the Taliban over there won't necessarily eliminate the threat here. In the long run, the Israeli-Palesinian peace talks may be more important than the war. That situation is a boil. Lance it, in the form of a lasting peace, and you'll drain the Middle East of the resentment against the West that feeds terrorism.
6. Financial reform. Good thing. But it's not the kind of thing that gets you any glory today. If there are no financial panics over the next 25 years as a result, historians will praise you. But there's no electoral payoff.

It's football season. We can think about this in sports terms. Teams in a death spiral usually choose one of two options. They can jury-rig one last playoff appearance by paying through the nose for some 34-year-old former All-Pro free agent, or they can trade away all their high-priced but aging talent for draft picks. It'll mean a couple of dreadful seasons, but if you draft well, today's pain means tomorrow's gain.

The President has chosen the second strategy. Watch this and tell me that Jimmy Johnson doesn't sound like Barack Obama. You can even think of Herschell Walker as the enormous reservoir of good will that Obama entered the White House with, which he traded away for the above legislation. Now, whether Health Care Reform and the Stimulus turn out to be Russell Maryland and Alvin Harper or JaMarcus Russell and Ryan Leaf, only time will tell. But sure, I'm a Democrat; I think it'll work out.

What I don't like is how they sold the Stimulus as a jobs bill, a long term fix as a short term fix. That's like drafting Jimmy Clausen or Tim TeBow, and promising that he's going to lead the team to the playoffs this year.

The question is, Will voters give Obama time? Rebuilding tests fans' patience; a recession as long and as deep as this one tests voters' patience in much more tangible way.

Why you shouldn't take your IPod to the gym

So I was at the Y the other day, and on the treadmill was this guy running pretty hard. And every so often he'd look up and off into the air and kinda shake his hands out and punch the air. All I could figure was that he was a little too deep into the music he was listening to on his IPod, and in his head he was gallivanting around the stage saluting his adoring fans in the sold-out stadium. I assume he was the lead singer because he never broke out the air guitar.

Dude, this is what Guitar Hero is for. In the privacy of your own home. I don't wanna see it. Learn to be alone with your thoughts in the gym.

Nickelback - New Music - More Music Videos

Humiliation

An Und Fuer Sich makes reference to David Lodge's novel Changing Places and a parlor game therein titled Humiliation, in which academics confess to a crucial work in their field they've never read. "The winner, of course, is the one with the most cringe-worthy confession." The winner in the novel is an English lit prof who admits to never having read Hamlet, which gets him fired. You get to play in the comment thread.

OK, I'll play. I'm a PhD student in Church History, late antiquity, and I've never read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

They can't fire me because I don't have a job. All they can do is put a dunce cap on me and sit me in a corner of the library until I read it. Which, in fact, I am happy to do.

Give me liberty or give me death (from a pre-existing condition)

That email from my insurance company only scratched the surface. This New York Times article lists all the changes that became effective yesterday, thanks to Obamacare. Read it and weep, my fellow Americans:

Starting now, insurance companies will no longer be permitted to exclude children because of pre-existing health conditions, which the White House said could enable 72,000 uninsured to gain coverage. Insurers also will be prohibited from imposing lifetime limits on benefits.

The law will now forbid insurers to drop sick and costly customers after discovering technical mistakes on applications. It requires that they offer coverage to children under 26 on their parents’ policies.

It establishes a menu of preventive procedures, like colonoscopies, mammograms and immunizations, that must be covered without co-payments. And it allows consumers who join a new plan to keep their own doctors and to appeal insurance company reimbursement decisions to a third party.

Tyranny! Perfidy! To the barricades, b-----s! Glory awaits you! Schoolchildren will sing your praises!

Establishing the right priorities

So, about that Republican Pledge to America. Where's the pledge to impeach the President? I just assumed that'd be at the top of the list. Maybe they're still trying to decide what their strongest case is: whether for forging his birth certificate or for plotting to abolish the Constitution and replace it with Sharia law. And then there's the fact that he's probably a cactus. That's just like Democrats, to mess with the natural order of things. Boys kissing boys; girls kissing girls; cats and dogs marrying, and African fauna crossed with New World flora.

Should be good times after the election. Pass the popcorn...

Soul winning back in the day

So, more fun in my carrel: reading two books back to back with similar titles on the same subject which come to wildly different conclusions.

Glenn Hinson's The Evangelization of the Roman Empire argues that after the close of the New Testament period, Christianity spread by planting churches, not by charismatic preachers. Hinson shows how the ecclesiastical machinery of sacraments, clergy and church discipline were deployed for missionary ends. Moreover, the early church was sociologically inclusive but theologically exclusive, and this drove the church to conquer the world, rather than settle for being one credible option among many.

So if you were a thoughtful, moderate Southern Baptist--not ashamed of the gospel but ashamed of the casual racism in the pews, a bit more ecclesiastically minded than your brethren, deploring the "I'm spiritual but not religious" Zeitgeist, and maybe even the individualism of your own revivalistic tradition, you'd be happy to learn that your ideal Church was the primitive Church! And sure enough, Hinson taught at Southern Baptist Seminary for years until he retired--just before the fundamentalist takeover. Why, he even taught across the street from my carrel at BTSR.

I'm not saying that Hinson necessarily looked down the well of history and saw his own reflection. It may well be that moderate Baptists do embody the primitive Church they and the whole Anabaptist tradition they aspire to. Still...

On the other hand, Ramsay MacMullen's Christianzing the Roman Empire argues that Christians carried the day because they were awesome exorcists.

November can't come soon enough!

On Friday I received this helpful little missive from my health insurance provider:

"In compliance with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), the Board of Pensions will be extending medical coverage to plan members’ qualified adult children up to age 26. All primary plan members enrolled in medical coverage will receive a letter from the Board of Pensions explaining how to enroll adult children up to age 26 in Medical Plan coverage effective January 1, 2011. To qualify, the adult children must not be eligible for coverage under their own employer’s health plan. The explanatory letter will be sent in four mailings from August 23, 2010 through September 28, 2010, based upon your plan enrollment type (Traditional Plan or Affiliated Benefits Program) and last name. The enrollment period will run through October 30, 2010. If you have not received the letter by October 4, 2010, you may call the Board to request a copy." 

Our children are 10 and 13, so this doesn't immediately apply to us. And who knows what the health care situation will be a decade from now? Still, it's nice to know, given our older son's autism, that we'll be able to carry him into his mid-20s. It postpones the time when he'll have to switch providers, and his current provider has been very good to him. That fact brings good peace of mind given his extensive medical history.

And then this morning I hear that the Republicans have pledged to repeal health care reform should they retake Congress.

Yes, yes, throws the bums out. I am so with you.

Salvation is from the Jews

It's always a good experience for a grad student when you read something that makes you sit bolt upright. I'm the TA in Theology I this fall, and this week's assigned reading from Schleiermacher's The Christian Faith had me ramrod straight in my chair Monday.

After situating Christianity within the spectrum of world religions, Schleiermacher notes that Christianity naturally shares a historical connection with Judaism. The Redeemer couldn't appear anywhere else but among a monotheistic people, Schleiermacher maintains.

However...

First century Judaism wasn't some pure, undiluted Mosaic religion. It had imbibed from the Persians the idea of resurrection and final judgment. Moreover, within paganism there had developed a tendency toward monotheism among the Greek philosophers. And there's the strange circumstance that Gentiles found the Jewish Messiah more compelling than the Jews did. All these facts lead Schleiermacher to conclude

that the relations of Christianity to Judaism and Heathenism are the same, inasmuch as the transition from either of these to Christianity is a transition to another religion...

And

We shall certainly find quite as near and accordant echoes in the utterances of the nobler and purer Heathenism (as we find in the Jewish prophets); as indeed the older Apologists were no less glad to appeal to what they held to be Heathen Messianic prophecies, and thus recognized that there is a striving of human nature toward Christianity. (emphases mine)

I recall from Schleiermacher's biographer that one of his "ordination exams" was on Justin Martyr. Justin, you may recall, was bold enough to call Socrates a gentile Moses, and asserted that the philosopher must have encountered Judaism at some point; otherwise, where would he have got all that wisdom? Schleiermacher seems to have jettisoned Justin's dubious history but embraced his esteem for Greek philosophy with a vengeance.

I can't recall a religious endorsement of secular wisdom framed in quite these terms, and if I were Jack Aubrey, I might ask if he weren't "coming it a trifle high."

I'm back

I've been knee-deep in background reading for my dissertation, and I couldn't figure out how to turn any deep thoughts I had on, say, early medieval numismatics, into a pithy and enjoyable blog post. Did you know that once upon a time there was a pan-Mediterranean kerfuffle about a Frankish king who struck gold coins with his image on them? Gold, you see, was for Emperors. Mere kings should have to make do with silver.

But I went running this afternoon, and a dozen or so posts materialized in my head. So let's start with the lovely Christine O'Donnell, who, before she was the Tea Party darling of Delaware politics, was dancing with the devil in the pale moon light (the fun starts at the 55 second mark):

Now I saw this on CNN this morning, whose anchors didn't bother hiding their "She might be a Senator? WTF?!" thoughts behind a veil of impartiality. O'Donnell's my age, and what I was thinking while I watched this was, "God Almighty, I hope I didn't look, sound or act as childish as that chick did a decade ago."

What's even weirder than O'Donnell are the people for whom this video isn't a deal-breaker. I can imagine that for more than a few conservative evangelicals, this tape establishes her credibility as a candidate, rather than destroying it. To understand that, you have to get your head around their worldview:

For some of these people, evil is not just what you get as a result of bad parenting and less-than-optimal social conditions. Evil is personified in a being known as Satan, the devil, or Lucifer, and he is not one to be trifled with.

His minions are ubiquitous and too numerous to count. Customarily they do his bidding by stealth, for he is the Father of Lies, after all. Nevertheless you can count on them turning up in non-trivial numbers in the recording industry, in the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, the United Nations, in other religions and especially cults. Curiously, you don't run across many of his minions in the corporate world, with the major exception of Procter and Gamble, of course.

But there's one place where Satan's covert underlings go overt: and that is in the bizarre parody of Christian worship known as the occult. Witches and other bad guys and gals get together, get naked, have ritualized group sex, sacrifice animals and thousands of small children, and do other dirty deeds so improbable they've just gotta be true.

So along comes Christine O'Donnell who put her head in the lion's mouth, and then came to her senses and jerked it out. Evangelicals love a conversion story, and there's no going from sinner to saint like going from wearing pentagrams to wearing crosses. From dribbling blood on stones to the blood of Christ. Heck, Mary Magdalene herself couldn't have defeated O'Donnell in a GOP primary. She was just a hooker.

All this makes me sad because I, like conservative evangelicals, believe that Satan is a real and personal being. I believe that because, well, let's just say because I've met him. And he is not one to be trifled with.

Where we part ways is the fear and loathing of the occult. I think Milton got it right. Ol' Scratch would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. Satanism is the lust for power we see so nakedly on display in the ring into which O'Donnell has thrown her hat, and in the hearts of all the rest of us aspiring big fish in small ponds. But that kind of Satanism is oh-so-familiar to us, and familiarity breeds contempt. So we have to dream up some exotic and imaginary version of it to frighten us anew.

I don't know if O'Donnell will win the election or not, but I imagine that Christine O'Donnell will be around for a while. Like Maher says, she's nicer than Sarah Palin, and I think she's is equally intelligent and good-looking.