Avdat

An amazing blog post about a heretofore completely unexamined topic: the death of Constantinan Christianity

Yesterday's post got me thinking. When was the last time a Protestant theologian appeared on the cover of Time magazine? The answer is Martin Luther, on March 24, 1967. Heh.

There's been plenty of popes on the cover since then, but not all recent popes could be called intellectuals. And there have been plenty of Protestant religious leaders on the cover of Time since then, including Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart and Rick Warren, but I am going to go out on a limb and say that none of these men are intellectuals.

Now I suppose that the RO analysis of this long absence would be along the lines of, "Great! It's about time the Church's best and brightest quit whoring for secular accolades. Let's hope that the next generation of best and brightest Christians takes it to the next level and gets tortured to death at Gitmo. Like Origen and Irenaeus. Then we'll be cooking with gas!"

Like I said in yesterday's post, setting out to get your mug on Time magazine may entail a certain psychological imbalance that inevitably results in sexual or financial misconduct, or substance abuse. Maybe it's for their own good that today's Protestant intellectuals toil in obscurity.

There is, however, another consideration. Perhaps the fact that a dead German theologian appearing on the cover of Time less than a year after the infamous Death of God cover signals the death of top-shelf Protestant thought. Maybe our long absence is less due to disentangling ourselves from the world, and more due to the fact that our intellectual output isn't all that impressive. Into the vacuum has stepped religious leaders with ecclesiastical and political heft.

Put differently, "the death of Constantinianism" really means the death of high level Protestant intellectual engagement with the secular. In practical terms, it means that the face of public Christianity is not Niebuhr, Barth and Tillich, but Warren, Robertson and Swaggart. I can't see how this state of affairs is as full of wondrous opportunities as the RO luminaries say it is.

Baroque rhetoric

In the context of discussing Fox News' abandoning all pretense of journalistic objectivity, a Talking Points Memo reader asks, "[W]ould someone ask the Fox news spokesperson why Fox's news anchors continue to refer to suicide bombers by the Bush administration's favored term "homicide bomber?"

Good question, but for me, "homicide bomber" is a sign of another odious aspect of recent American history. In both words and deeds, the Bush administration set the volume at 10. Anything less was considered weakness. So we got terms like "homicide bombers" because--I'm assuming--that while the word "suicide" immediately poses the question "Why?" and a willingness to understand, "homicide" or "homicidal" signifies meanness, and while there is an interest in ascertaining motive in murder cases, there's no pity there like there is in some cases of suicide. In short, homicide is a meaner word than suicide.

But in fact, "homicide bomber" conceals more than it reveals. All people who plant bombs are homicidal; but not all bombers are suicidal. IRA operatives didn't strap explosives to their chests. Ku Klux Klansman didn't crash truck bombs into black churches. Timothy McVeigh parked his Ryder truck full of combustible fertilizer in front of the federal building, and walked away.

Calling somebody a suicide bomber doesn't betray feelings of sympathy that one might feel when one gets the news that a friend or loved one has killed themselves. But it does narrow down the form of violence to a particular MO that signals a particular context, set of grievances, aims, etc.

This particular right wing tic is a symptom of a broader cultural disease in turn-of-the-century America, it's, shall we say, baroque tendencies. Everything has to be larger than life. McMansions. Hummers. Supersized fries. And in the realm of public policy, we can't just dismantle an organization that's part religious cult, part paramilitary organization, and part organized crime racket with a variety of military and law enforcement means. We have to call it a "War on Terror" to signify our toughness. Even if "Terror" is a tactic, not a belligerent state whose officials we can drag onto the deck of the battleship Missouri to sign unconditional surrender papers.

Deep thought

Balloon Boy ain't got jack on Bat Boy.

Obama wins Nobel prize

As I told my wife this morning, I'd much rather be home with her watching Fox News anchors have a fit and fall in it, but duty calls...

Katha Pollitt is making sense...

when so many others aren't:

The widespread support for Polanski shows the liberal cultural elite at its preening, fatuous worst. They may make great movies, write great books, and design beautiful things, they may have lots of noble humanitarian ideas and care, in the abstract, about all the right principles: equality under the law, for example. But in this case, they're just the white culture-class counterpart of hip-hop fans who stood by R. Kelly and Chris Brown and of sports fans who automatically support their favorite athletes when they're accused of beating their wives and raping hotel workers.

No wonder Middle America hates them.

HT: Hugo Schwyzer, who links to other people who hold common-sensical notions about what ought to happen to convicted child rapists who are finally apprehended after jumping bail.

A Tarantino free post about violence and hateful, spiteful onlookers

I want to briefly re-visit the horrible quadruple murder in Farmville, VA, and specifically this Richmond Times-Dispatch article about the victims to which I linked below. I'm sure more of the truth will come out later--truth which may undermine the following--but from what the article says, one can easily imagine the following scenario:

 A teenage girl decides to rebel against her minister father and her criminologist mother by dabbling in the horrorcore scene. What stronger statement could a teen make? Grinding music about cannibalism and murder is about as far away from Christianity and a commitment to prevent violence against women as you can get. Criminologist's mother makes a judgment call--rather than forbid any further exposure to these people or their music, which may inspire a backlash (running away, delinquent behavior) she will try to demystify this scene by chaperoning her daughter's trip to a horrorcore festival. But things went terribly wrong.

Now that may not be the way things went down. And that may or may not be the way you'd handle the situation. But whether it went down that way or not, and whether that scenario is at all understandable, there's no excuse for this reading of the situation buried in the comment thread:

I hate to blame the victim here, but, come on, taking your child to a concert featuring bands named “Stitch Mouth”,  “Dismembered Fetus”, and “BodyBagz”?  That is clearly irresponsible parenting if not child endangerment. How do you just expect a child to ‘grow out of it’ if you don’t steer them in the right direction? It sounds like the mother was probably a liberal (she was a college professor), and had that mentality that evil doesn’t exist and that she didn’t want to ‘interfere’ with her child… give me a break!

"I hate to blame the victim here," but truth be told I can't wait to get in my licks! This commenter knows a lot about the situation. (S)he knows how the victim votes; (s)he knows the victim is a laissez-faire parent, and (s)he knows that the victim was far too sentimental about human nature for her own good. Wow, that's a lot more than I know.

And this is par for the course for any newspaper's web site. Blogs are notorious for flame wars and trolls, but blogs are an episode of Barney compared to the general American public opining on hapless schmucks who wind up featured in their hometown daily.

I swear, there's a ton of people out there who enjoy the newspaper with their coffee because they could no more face the day without feeling smug than they could without caffeine. They don't read the newspaper to learn anything. They read it because they can. Reading the paper and not showing up in it is proof positive you aren't one of the stupids who's getting what's coming to you.

I'd love to live in a world like that. If the world were really like that, I'd drop my aspirations to work in higher education in a heartbeat. I'd buy a Sarah Palin 2012 pinup calendar. I'd lock my home-schooled kids in a basement, pop in a Jonas Brothers CD, hit "repeat all" and tell them to do their math while I cleaned my guns. And I'd sleep like a baby.

But we don't live in a world where everybody gets what's coming to them.

Marketing

 A bug-bitten and sunburned Jennifer is cranky about the new United Methodist ad campaign. "How does this distinguish the church from the Rotary Club or Amnesty International?" she asks.

It's a good question. A secular humanist obeys the second tablet of the law. A Christian obeys the first tablet too. Trouble is, we Christians have tended to kill each other over the interpretation of the first tablet, so the solution has been, "We aren't going to talk much about that stuff anymore. We're just going to join hands and do good works." But that doesn't work because that hour you're wasting in church could be better spent emailing your Congressman, right?

What would be a better ad campaign? It would have to be true to the mainline ethos, which does involve a lot of good works. Habitat for Humanity, Katrina relief, Mexico mission trips and the like. But it would also have to put Jesus front and center. Because we are a Church, after all, and not Rotary.

I can imagine something illustrating Christocentric practices. To make it Christocentric, you make Jesus the subject of every verb in every sentence. Something like "In the United Methodist Church (or Presbyterian Church, or whatever), Jesus is teaching us the mystery of gratitude and sharing." And you have images of gratitude and sharing that look like whatever mainliners do when they are being grateful and generous, like a soup kitchen ministry or whatever.

And I think I'd consciously us the word "mystery." We live in neo-gnostic times. People are into a privatized spirituality grounded in new insight. "Mystery" is a Biblical word that might appeal to gnostic seekers. It might be a way to co-opt those somewhat under the spell of the spirit of the age for the more communitarian and justice-oriented mainline Christianity. But, because we are more communitarian, the object of every verb would be "us," not "me."

My own ticking time bomb scenario

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

In which I hate on Dan Patrick

So I'm listening to the Dan Patrick show, and I'm really embarassed for him trying to sound like one of the guys. Dan Patrick talking about all the strip clubs in Tampa. Dan Patrick oogling a Starbucks employee in the drivethru. "Hotter than Starbucks!" Heh. Dan Patrick joking with Brady Quinn about tappng a keg with the Commissioner.

Adjectives that go with Dan Patrick include: ironic, urbane, understated, phlegmatic. "Party animal" does not.

Consider this question recently added to a reputable IQ test:

Which of the following words does not belong?

A. Keg Party

B. Lap Dance

C. Bong hit

D. Dan Patrick

Dan, be a family man. I'm a family man, and there's no shame in it.

Inauguration Day cont.

How can Wolf Blitzer be so narcissistic as to think that people would rather listen to him than Itzhak Perlman? When he started talking over the quartet I switched from CNN to C-SPAN and Never Looked Back, Baby!