Seldom Wrong, Never in Doubt

Enough with the Anti-Tebow Prooftexting

2012-01-21T16:22:00.001-05:00

SWNID hates biblical prooftexting. As if such needed to be said.

Lately, much of the prooftexting we encounter comes from those critical of conservative, evangelical or fundamentalist Christians.

And one of the latest objects of such prooftexting is St. Tim Tebow. His sin is Tebowing: kneeling in prayer on CBS and Fox.

As an egregious case in point, we quote from a recent letter to the editor in WSJ:

The problem for many, especially those having more deep understanding of Scripture, is that they see the public display of religious beliefs as both anti-Biblical and anti-Christian . . . Jesus was clear in his condemnation of public religiosity. For example, in Matthew 6:5, Jesus says (King James Version), "And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward." Does that not make clear the master's view of the public display of religiosity?

Um, actually sir, whom we will not name as you are a private citizen, though your name and city will be viewed by far more who haven't read this blog than by those who have, this verse does not make the master's view as clear as that.

For in the same discourse the master says,

You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven (Matthew 5:14-16 ESV).

So does Christ demand public or private religiosity? The paradoxical clash of these texts has been cited by no less than Sinclair Lewis in his celebrated anti-revivalist potboiler Elmer Gantry as an example of the Bible's self-contradiction. But it better demonstrates how approaching the Bible with an agenda different from the Bible's is a sure way to misunderstand it.

That is, our distinction between public and private as an issue of religiosity has more to do with Enlightenment views on the limits of religious truth claims than as part of Jesus' teaching. Was Jesus trying to keep people from offending others' religious sensibilities by confining devotional activity to the private sphere? Nothing suggests that such a question was close to his agenda, least of all the contents of the Sermon on the Mount in its entirety.

So what was up? Approximately summarized, Jesus' Sermon on the Mount insists that the righteousness of God's kingdom as he was inaugurating it was at once humble, sincere, mission focused, and offensive.

For the first two characteristics: righteousness is humble because it is based in one's own receipt of God's grace. Those who are blessed in God's kingdom are weak and lowly. So there's no point in trying to look better than others.

Likewise, the kingdom is God's kingdom, formed by his action and having him as sovereign. He sees what others don't. So there's no point in trying to look better than others in front of others. That's the natural outcome of acknowledging that God is king and I'm a weakling who needs mercy from God, so why would I care about looking better than other sinners?

So no acting like the righteousness-for-social-status folk. Real righteousness exceeds theirs. The hackneyed statement is that God is the only audience, though it wasn't hackneyed when Kierkegaard said it.

Yet Jesus says that righteousness is still mission-focused and so outward-looking. God is taking back his world, and the subjects of his kingdom are his means of doing that. They are salt. They are light. They will look different in public than other folk. Together they constitute a shining city on a hill, beckoning those around to join them. When their light shines, God gets glorified.

Which isn't automatic. They get persecuted, for the sake of the very righteousness that the Sermon refocuses, which is to say for Jesus' sake. There's no taking the offense out of the gospel, and it's no use to try to aim the offense to hit only the people we don't like, like rich folks or religious folks or secular-humanistic folks or "tolerant" folks.

And in all that, righteousness doesn't judge. It looks first to self, where the log in the eye must be self-removed by God's grace. But then righteousness helps remove the speck in the sibling's eye. It's about taking the world back, one eye at a time.

What does Jesus' Sermon say about St. Tim? Well, he could be shining a salty light, kneeling in humility, or he could be seeking the praise of men. Or both: people now and then admit to mixed motives. Some cry, "Lord, Lord," but don't do what the Lord says. The Lord, Tebow's judge, knows.

But Tebow didn't ipso facto break a dominical rule by taking a knee. Jesus didn't come simply to establish the definitive boundaries of religious observance. Like doing that would require a cross.

Note to all who want to discuss the Bible in public: don't start your discourse by claiming to have a "more deep" [sic] understanding of Scripture." But if you do, ask for mercy. Logs and specks: we've all got 'em.

Maybe the Only Post Needed for 2012

2012-01-21T15:32:00.001-05:00

The first Obama 2012 campaign ad has premiered. And if it's a harbinger of the rest of his campaign, we're in for a miserably long year.

What's wrong with this bad boy?

Ignoring the classically demagogic reference to "secretive oil billionaires," we let Investor's Business Daily tell the tale.

To wit:

The figure cited for "clean-energy jobs" is the number of existing jobs that can be so classified.
The number of such jobs has not been growing at the same rate as other jobs.
The number of such jobs has declined more rapidly than others in the recession.
Meanwhile, declines in energy imports relate to the drop in demand caused by the recession.

To which we merely add that oil imports are also declining as a percentage of oil usage because of growth in domestic production that has happened in spite of administration policies.

Then there's the claim about ethics. The lefty fact-checker cited has noted that the characterization of BHO's administration as highly ethical was withdrawn when BHO started issuing wholesale numbers waivers to ethics requirements.

Still, let's set aside the questionable assertions. These are, we must assume, the best that the Obamanoids have for 2012. Is a majority of the Electoral College prepared to cast votes in favor of clean energy and meticulous ethics, against considerations of jobs and fiscal sanity?

Most disturbing to any of the 80% of Democrats prepared to cast votes for Obama in November should be the utter congruence of the Case for Obama's 2012 Reelection with the Case for Carter's 1980 Reelection: "I'm Clean, I'm Green, and By Golly, People Like Me."

Krauthammer's Existential Dilemma, And an Ancient Alternative Hypothesis

2011-12-30T13:04:00.000-05:00

Charles Krauthammer ends his 2011 WaPo contribs with a departure from his usual: a meditation on whether humanity is alone in the universe, and what it might mean if we are.

We insist that gentle readers follow the link and read Dr. K's thoughtful article, and we recommend that they do so before reading our remarks further. But we have no way to monitor that, so here goes.

Krauthammer notes that astronomers are busy finding "exoplanets," which has become the aspect of astronomy in which the public seems most interested since manned space flight became mundane after the lunar-landing program. And finding planets around other starts they are, in impressive quantities.

But finding signs of intelligent life in the universe, they aren't, even though that search has been going on longer than the search for exoplanets.

Krauthammer's explanation is the so-called Fermi Paradox, which asks, Why do we seem to be alone? and after calculating some astronomical odds that intelligent life would arise on other spheres, reasoning that there ought to be such intelligent life in such quantities that some signs of its presence would be available to us, then concludes that the problem is with intelligent life itself: that it inevitably destroys itself.

Dr. K's conclusion is to highlight that the oft-benighted endeavor politics is therefore of utmost importance, as it is by politics that humans manage their propensity to destroy one another.

Reading Krauthammer's essay is like reading a classic presentation of the Christian gospel, minus God. It begins with the assumption that intelligence like humans' is quite special. It is driven to the conclusion that intelligence like humans' is quite dangerous. It seeks for a solution to the danger, a way of salvation. But it lacks everything it really needs to explain the origin of the intelligent creatures, the root of the paradox of their self-destructive tendencies, and a solution that gets to the heart of the problem. All that has to come from the outside.

Politics is not as bad an answer as it sounds, really. We Christians who tend to emphasize the limits of political solutions to human problems should also recognize that the gospel we believe transforms all aspects of human life for the one who believes it, including the way that the converted person relates to others and both exercises power and responds to the exercise of power. That means that the gospel transforms the politics of the people who believe it.

For Krauthammer a key unanswerable question is why I, as an individual, should care at all whether my form of intelligent life endures or not. One can answer that the despair of our fragile, temporal existence with the insistence that our rare (but apparently oft-repeated elsewhere) existence as sentient beings needs to be preserved at all costs. That's Krauthammer's implication, and it's thin gruel, to say the least. Certainly for Fermi, whose contribution to the invention of nuclear weapons was so crucial, it seems to have been the only straw to grasp as he saw his own exceptional intelligence as the genesis of our race's self-destruction.

But what if there's more--someone who transcends the universe, who created it, who did so for human habitation (and others? well, it remains an interesting question but is now less important, for now we are certainly not alone), who understands our paradoxical existence and who acted at the greatest personal cost to address it, and so who in all ways demonstrated that he loves us with a measure that surpasses what we observe in any of our fellows?

What if the answer to our paradox is not politics but love, and not love as some kind of cosmic abstraction that can somehow exist apart from a subject and an object, but specifically the love of the triune God, who gives and receives love eternally within the triunity of his being but who decisively chose to create us, to love us unconditionally, and by that love to rescue us by becoming one of us and taking on himself everything that we experience and, by our stubborn, self-destructive rebellion, even deserve?

Sounds more promising than politics alone.

Mitt Leads Barack by More Than Margin of Error

2011-12-29T14:46:00.000-05:00

Don't measure the curtains for the Lincoln Bedroom yet, but Our Man Mitt is beating BHO in the latest Rasmussen, 45% to 39%.

Given Mitt's steady hand on the tiller so far, we doubt very much that the incumbent will be able to reverse this early trend, though we do expect ups and downs from here.

Yes, Mitt is eerily like Thomas Dewey, so 1948 does come to mind. But Obama is about as far from Harry Truman as one can get.

Meanwhile, Mitt is demonstrating that no one will hold support in the GOP primaries other than Mitt. That includes especially Ron Paul, about whom WSJ's Daniel Henninger says the obvious today (as someone else will tomorrow): that Paul is a kook with no chance of responsible public office (being a Congressman who votes alone is not a responsible position, of course).

Brooks on Historical Analogies, SWNID on Echo Chambers

2011-12-27T13:10:00.001-05:00

David Brooks holds his ground today at the Gray Lady, nicely detailing reasons to insist that our era is like neither the Great Depression nor the Progressive Era, the two historical models used by the Obama White House as metanarratives for their anemic political agenda.

We find Brooks' analysis trenchant. Hence we note it here.

But we also find the comments from Times readers to be, well, depressing. Post after post repeats the hackneyed talking-points of leftist lemmings: the Rs wrecked government, "smaller government" means returning to social anarchy, Reagan did it, Bush did it, it's the 1% . . . all that. Some insist that Brooks is a toady of the right-wing propaganda machine.

Well, that's kinda funny, actually, as Brooks points to issues that aren't exactly being addressed thoughtfully by most Republican pols either. Right now the fight seems to be over who knows what Reagan's ghost would do. Conservatives' historical analogies are also suspect when employed simplistically, without attention to differences as well as similarities in different eras.

But the Times' readers, probably hailed by the paper's salesmen to prospective advertisers as the best educated newspaper readers in the world, can't engage such thoughts. For them, Brooks simply violates self-evident orthodoxies and so must be stupid, evil, credulous or all three.

It's been widely observed that as developed countries become more mobile, people's experiences of social difference become less frequent. Most people these days live, work and play with people of very similar backgrounds, economic conditions and opinions. That leads to the kind of bald ignorance of other points of view that one sees in most comments sections on most opinion pieces in most internet publications these days.

So why do we pick on the Times? Because the Times postures as the elite organ of news and analysis, the newspaper of the moral and intellectual 1%. As if thoughtful conservatives were unicorns.

Hitch 3:16

2011-12-16T19:18:00.001-05:00

Like his hero, Orwell, Christopher prized bravery above all other qualities--and in particular the bravery required for unflinching honesty. And as was true of the work of Orwell, the former colonial policeman, this devotion paradoxically lent a certain military coloring to Christopher's intellectual, literary, and political pursuits. This most intellectual of men valued intelligence, but valued courage far more--or rather, he believed that true intellect was inseparable from courage.

So writes Atlantic editor Benjamin Schwartz in his obituary for the celebrated essayist Christopher Hitchens.

We want to comment on what Schwartz observes in the quotation above, from the standpoint of Hitchens' celebrated-and-scorned atheism, and his "last word" on the subject of death in Vanity Fair, in which he stood down from much of the bravado about death that he had expressed in word and deed in former days.

We think that this contrast--between holding courage sacred and experiencing mortality as dissolution of oneself--contains the essence Hitchens' inability to find faith. It is this: weakness, not courage, is the basis on which one turns to God.

Hitchens sought, lived and revered courage. In the end he could not escape weakness. No one does.

But to act on weakness, one must abandon courage: "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!"

Another Voice Joins SWNID in the Interdisciplinary Wilderness

2011-12-16T11:44:00.000-05:00

SWNID famously champions the notion that good education is deliberately interdisciplinary.

And so does everyone else, until the subject of science education comes up. Then suddenly, the conversation takes a dark turn: the science classroom should teach nothing other than science.

Of course, that never happens. It's a means of excluding the larger metaphysical questions about origins, questions leading to discussion of God, from the conversation. So you can't follow the discussion of evolution with any of the three questions that evolution appears incapable of answering: (a) why is there something instead of nothing? (b) why is there life and not just non-life? (c) why are there self-conscious humans capable of pondering such questions?

Enter Ari Eisen of Emory University's Center for Ethics, on CNN's Belief Blog. His gravid voice asks whether there's ever been a significant conversation about science that didn't touch on issues that belong to other areas of inquiry, like ethics and religion. He wonders whether students are less attracted to science as a way of knowing precisely because it's presented as a body of facts independent of significance. He points to data suggesting that students learn science better when they are challenged to see its relationship to other considerations. He notes well that the neglect of larger questions does not make those questions go away in the minds of students and the public--that people persist in their belief that scientific data and religious ideas are somehow compatible.

We are pretty sure that Eisen would be given a very unscientific cold shoulder were he to present his views at any major conference of natural scientists. Too bad for everyone.

The 2012 Election in a Sentence

2011-12-10T12:43:00.000-05:00

The polls announce grim news for BHO and Democrats. Significant majorities reject the President's handling of the economy, saying that he doesn't deserve a second term. Included in the latter is one in five self-identified Democrats.

Therefore, listen well to this longish sequence from MSNBC's Morning Joe, ostensibly a daily pep-rally for the left. The mood is somber, not least when GOP solon Peggy Noonan agrees with remarks from her Democrat counter parts that many Democrats have vowed to vote for the Republican, regardless of who the Republican is.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

So, the election in a sentence:

Republicans win unless they blow it.

Fact Checking SWNIDishly

2011-12-07T19:17:00.000-05:00

SWNID is famous, among the dozens who read SWNID, for questioning the accuracy of the now-commonplace assertions that the gap between rich and poor is getting horribly, horribly wide.

SWNID is also famous, among the same dozens, for objecting to the bowdlerization of Jesus as a figure of politics.

Now we will use one column to do both.

In what may be the most important opinion column of the year, Cato Institute's Alan Reynolds lays out the problems in citing individual income levels from federal tax returns as a means of tracking the prosperity of the 1% against the penury of the 99%. Specifically, Reynolds notes how changes in tax rates and tax law have over a generation removed the incentives that the rich have to shelter their incomes--via corporations and tax-favored investments--from federal taxation. Hence, what was once corporate income is now personal income, what was once sheltered in tax-free bonds is now is dividend-earning stocks, and so forth.

In other words, all those scary graphs about how much the rich have now versus then have mostly to do with the way the rich report their incomes. When rates are high, they shelter them. When rates are low, they unshelter them. When incomes are unsheltered, they seem to go up. "Seem" is rather important in this matter.

Why should you or we care about this, inasmuch as you and we don't have the kind of income that would ever be sheltered? Well, when the rich shelter their incomes, the shelters tend to be favored for tax purposes but not in and of themselves beneficial for economic purposes. That is, the tax accountants decide where to put the money to avoid taxes rather than the venture capitalists deciding where to put the money to make a lot more money. When more money is made, value has been added to the economy, making most people more prosperous in the long run.

So high tax rates may seem to rob from the rich and give to the poor, but they really just make the rich hide their money where it won't do anyone much good.

Now to Jesus. The estimable Susan Brooks Thistlewaite, former prez of Chi Theo and now a fellow of the hard-left Center for American Progress, insists that Jesus Was an Occupier. Why? Because he raided the abusive temple and declared them robbers. And because from her seminary teachers she learned other interpretations of Jesus' parables that involve commerce, like the Parable of the Talents cited by some right-winger to say that Jesus is for the free market.

Honestly, people, do we still have to do this nonsense? "A plague on both your houses."

Dr. Thistlewaite, could you please acknowledge that Jesus' "robbers" statement is an obvious quotation of Jeremiah 7:11, that the word translated "robbers" means "rebels," that the combination of word and quotation shows that Jesus' indictment is about rejecting Israel's God, not about money as such (though abuse of money is always a consequence of rejecting Israel's God), that he goes on to elaborate in the Parable of the Tenants, which also has commerce in it but isn't at all about commerce, and that if Jesus was speaking about socialism versus capitalism here there or anywhere, he spoke with singular obscurity on the matter? Sheesh.

Theological conservatives, whether conservative or liberal politically, will you please stop abusing the Bible to prover your point about politics in the present? When you do, it only encourages the liberals to abuse the Bible too, something they're happy to do since they don't think much of it to begin with.

Still No to Gingrich

2011-12-03T13:03:00.000-05:00

It's down to two: Mitt and Newt. Were there ever two candidates with worse first names?

Since Mitt is a flip-flopper with a "Christian" religious heritage that is neither Protestant, Catholic, nor Orthodox (a polite way to say either Mormon, Christian Science or Jehovah's Witness, and in some cases Seventh-Day Adventist), most Republicans are looking for an alternative.

As the little car full of clowns empties itself in the center ring of the GOP circus, Newt is one of the few besides Romney who doesn't look clownish right now, at least, not in the ways that Romney looks clownish. So he's ahead in polls, and he'll add to his lead when Herman Cain bows out of the campaign to resume his full-time womanizing. Newt is about to go from red hot to white hot.

But the people who know Newt best loath him most.

So writes WaPo's Jonathan Bernstein, who insists that veterans of the Washington scene see Gingrich as fundamentally unsuited for an executive role. He may be smart, but he's utterly undisciplined. If there were ever a description that seemed to encompass all the available information about anyone, that's the prize-taker.

We'll therefore take flip-floppy Mitt, sacred garments and all (an irrelevancy to SWNID as far as politics is concerned), confident that his big-government, smart-solution conservatism is short of the dour fiscal sanity that we really need but is miles better than what we'll get from Obama or any emergency Dem substitute (i.e. Hillary). Mitt at least knows how to put together an organization and run things with a steady hand.

For those who say that the opinion of Washington insiders should be rejected precisely because those guys ran the car into the ditch in the first place, we say get real. Character matters, or at least it does until your candidate has a character deficit, in which case you condemn the people who indict your candidate's character.

Learn the lesson of recent history: our current system for selecting candidates, i.e. a four-year election cycle with endless fundraising and primaries and caucuses, may be flawed. But it does provide a proxy for the presidency: can this person organize a campaign and stay steady under pressure? If Newt is what his closest professional associates say he is, then we'll know soon enough that we need to hold our noses and vote for the chameleon.

Access to Sex as a Human Right

2011-11-30T10:29:00.000-05:00

Our culture readily accepts the outsourcing of all kinds of domestic services. We happily have our dogs walked, our lawns mowed, or shirts laundered all by people we don’t have breakfast with nor buy a card for on Valentine’s Day; our busy lives are readily propped up by the physical labour of others.

Sex has to be thought of in this way. No, maybe it’s not a romantic assertion, and perhaps not a politically correct one either, but pretending that sex is always about lovemaking and declarations of devotion is a naïve and discriminatory contention.

So "argues" Lauren Rosewarne, lecturer in Public Policy at the University of Melbourne. The quoted paragraphs close her ephemeral article asserting that sex ought to be viewed as a fundamental human right.

We comment briefly, as the times demand.

First, we aren't citing this to suggest that we're on a rapid slide down a slippery slope. Note well, gentle readers, the positive signs, small as they are, about chastity. To wit, teenage sexual activity is down per latest surveys. Sex has always been problematic, but the problems don't always go from bad to worse.

Second, Rosewarne's position obviously seeks legalization of prostitution. That's not a new position either, and it's often been argued from the notion that society should decouple sex and relationship, let alone sex and marriage. Nothing new there.

Most importantly, note well how closely allied Rosewarne's position is to the reasoning of same-sex marriage advocacy. "Sex is a fundamental human right" = "marrying the person one loves is a fundamental human right." Why? Can a free society not prefer some human relationships to others?

Note well the foundational problem in asserting positive rights (the right to food, shelter, medical care, sex) to negative ones (the right to practice religion freely, to speak freely, not to be searched without warrant), these latter essentially the right to be left alone with one's thoughts, words and property. Extending the notion of rights to the positive category has been a problem for a long time.

What to Preach on Black Friday

2011-11-25T10:45:00.000-05:00

Today, as the remains of the national Feast of Thanksgiving course through the alimentary canals of our Republic's ignoble citizens, said dyspeptic citizens have lined up in the darkness to buy stuff.

Indeed, in the greatest assault to our national traditions since the Beatles' musical celebration of hand-holding, some retailers opened during the Feast of Thanksgiving itself. The horror! The horror!

Our Republic's clergypersons, both conservative and progressive, are united in their homiletical scorn for this activity. It is materialism, pure and simple. While the Manichean progressives insist that the fault lies with the dark forces that propel "corporations," "corporate greed" on its way to becoming a compound noun in their vocabulary, Calvinist conservatives insist it's a matter of the depravity that infests every human heart. Progs say that the problem is on the supply side, so corporations ought to be forced to close their rapacious, big-box retail outlets for the holiday. Conservatives say that the problem is on the demand side, so people ought simply to stay home.

In this regard, the conservatives, despite our labeling them as we did, happen to be more right than the progs. As if that needed to be said. Progs live on the notion that they're more noble than their deprived fellows, victims all, and so aim to restrain the narrowly limited population of evil folk (the 1%) to protect the hapless mass of ignorant but good folk. Conservatives hold to the hoary notion that there's such a thing as human nature and the human experience, and the thing is universal.

But we delight to refine the discussion, with some insights from behavioral sciences and biblical theology.

What we witness on Black Friday is not materialism but what many behavioral scientists label "seeking," that is, the behavior of animals, including human ones, to investigate their environment to find new and better things to eat, places to sleep, and opportunities to procreate. Neuroscience shows that seeking is the main source of pleasure in the brain, that the anticipation of reward provides more pleasure than the reward itself.

What Black Friday shoppers are doing is activating their "seeking" mechanism to overcome challenges in the investigation of their environment, deriving pleasure from the anticipation of finding something that they register as a reward. It's the thrill of the chase that they seek, and the purchase is more a trophy to memorialize the thrill than a source of pleasure on its intrinsic merits.

Now, let's get theological in a biblical way.

What's wrong with "materialism" is not the materiality of the stuff people possess. It takes a profoundly unbiblical notion of spirit/matter dualism--spirit is inherently good, while matter is inherently evil--to get to that. The God of Israel makes material stuff and calls it "very good."

No, what's wrong with "materialism" is the seeking of something other than God as a source of security and satisfaction. Jesus' famous story about the man with a great harvest who plans his security via bigger barns points out the futility of such confidence. The man's planned economic expansion can't add to his life a single cubit, as his life is required of him the very night he forms his plans.

The problem with stuff is that we hope it will make our lives right, and stuff can't do that. But we love to seek things--that's how we're wired to work. So we go seeking stuff.

And what we need to seek is God.

We submit that God designed creatures to be seekers so that humans would seek Him.

This gets us closer to the real notion of materialism as idolatry, a common and legitimate connection, though one usually made imprecisely. It's not that people "worship" their possessions in a sense that any of them might recognize as religious fervor. It's that they pursue possessions as a source of security, buying into the ancient, false notion that possessions provide self-sufficiency (eat it and you'll become gods). Thereby, they fail to seek God, to listen to God, to rest in God, to reckon with the failure of their possessions and ultimately of the failure of their mortal bodies. And so they fail to trust in God in any sense beyond verbal assent to a religious dogma.

We could provide biblical references, but we prefer that readers seek them for themselves. Make that an alternative activity of seeking on Black Friday.

Gingrich is Right, But SWNID Still Won't Support Him

2011-11-25T10:14:00.000-05:00

Newt Gingrich is right about immigration. Namely, policies that would repatriate undocumented (or "illegal," if you must) immigrants who work, pay taxes, raise families and obey the law are unspeakably stupid.

SWNID has long insisted that economic law is more important than civil law regarding immigration, and the latter ought to cede to the former. Economic law says that available supply will somehow reach to meet demand. Hence, if one country has a demand for labor and its neighbor country has a supply, the supply will aim to meet the demand. If the United States has jobs that go unfilled and Mexico has laborers who want opportunity, the enterprising laborers will find a way to get to the jobs.

Meanwhile, Republican activists who dominate the early nominating process are utterly dominated by anti-immigration fervor that borders on the absurd--this despite their most recent political heroes' (Reagan's, Dubya's--also their most recent political goat's [McCain's]) championing of pro-immigration policies and their insistence on free-market principles economic salvation.

Gingrich has the audacity to state as much publicly, though he's clever enough to do so only after gaining some traction in the polls. We heartily affirm his bold move, one that Romney will also make, but not until September 2012.

But we will not support Mr. Gingrich, despite our warm feelings for his policy position on this and many other matters.

We will not support Mr. Gingrich because a President's fundamental role is not as a policy advocate but as an executive. And Mr. Gingrich is proved to be an inept leader who alienates associates, burns bridges, and overreaches in his supreme confidence in his own judgment.

Policy positions are easily changed relative to temperament. Gingrich lacks the foundational temperament of an effective political leader.

Mr. Romney demonstrates as much. He can change policy positions more easily than he can change his sacred underwear. And while he too has obvious flaws of temperament (i.e. too much confidence not in himself but in collective leadership of experts: witness RomneyCare), they are least among those currently running.

Hence, we metaphorically hold our nose, as we do every four years, not so much to throw him our support but gently to allow our support to creep in Romney's general direction.

Americans Prefer Class Warfare to Math

2011-11-25T09:59:00.000-05:00

As we slog through middle age, we become convinced that most mortals can't do math and like it that way.

Dr. Krauthammer is an exception, as his column this week demonstrates.

In it he lays bare several myths that the Party of Jackson is presently employing to get its hapless President re-elected. They are:

That Republicans refused to raise taxes in the failed supercommittee negotiations.
That Republicans act as they do because they are in the mystical thrall of Evil Geniuses, the latest being Grover Norquist.
That the Republic's salvation lies is robbing from the rich and giving to the middle class through higher tax rates on the rich, particularly through repealing the "Bush Tax Cuts" that have caused every evil thing in the last decade.

Dr. K ably points out that the significant Rs in negotiations proffered various plans to increase tax revenues, all rejected by the Ds (with the excuse, not mentioned by Dr. K, that they were "too small"), while the Ds have a consistent record of never even introducing a budget in the Senate, except for BHO's February 2011 offer that was rejected 97-0.

The problem, ably noted by Dr. K, is that Ds are obsessed with raising tax rates on the "wealthy." This, of course, is the outcome of their decade-long anti-rich, faux populist rhetoric. Like Roman Catholic dogma, the Democrats' policy platform must somehow remain consistent with everything they've ever said before.

Ds desperately hope that Americans are as bad at math as they appear to be. To wit: they hope that Americans confuse tax rates with tax revenues, just as they seem to confuse wealth distribution with wealth creation.

[We were going to explain these distinctions in a few sentences, but then we decided not to. Anyone who doesn't understand should either search this blog for earlier posts that provide such explanations, refer to any responsible textbook on economics, merely contemplate the difference between numbers that express percentages and numbers that express quantities, or stop reading this blog as one unworthy.]

As a check on this matter, and as a check on all nonsensical statements made by Democrats about what "the vast majority of economists" say, we refer to the remarkable IGM Forum, which now routinely asks leading academic economists their views of key public-policy issues. Recent polling shows that such solons agree that (a) while a small increase in the highest income tax rate would put negligible drag on the economy; (b) such an increase would also have negligible impact on the federal deficit; and (c) the more promising opportunity both to address the deficit and economic growth would be to reduce tax rates while also eliminating deductions that prefer one kind of economic activity over another.

In other words, what Rs on the supercommittee were proposing.

Reality Check for Movement Conservatives--Again

2011-11-23T17:52:00.000-05:00

McCain lost because he's a RINO.

If the Republican Establishment forces us to accept another nominee who isn't a true conservative, Obama will win a second term.*

Reagan showed how to do it: never give an inch on true-blue conservatism, and you'll win every time.

Well, except the facts prove otherwise.

Michael Medved, a true conservative who has long excoriated the conservative passion for rigidity that rejects coalitions and compromise, lays out the electoral facts in today's WSJ. When Reagan won, which he didn't in 1968 or 1976, he won by capturing middle-of-the-road votes. McCain lost because he didn't do as well as Dubya with moderates, though he actually did better than GOP House candidates, indubitably a predominantly right-wing bunch. Goldwater was as true blue as they come, and as articulate about principles as they come, and the election went to the guy whose operatives made stick the parody of Goldwater's slogan, "In your guts, you know he's nuts."

Here's the summation:

In short, the electoral experience of the last 50 years does nothing to undermine the common-sense notion that most political battles are won by seizing and holding the ideological center. In the last two presidential elections, more than 44% of voters described themselves as "moderate," and no conservative candidate could possibly prevail without coming close to winning half of them (as George W. Bush did in his re-election).

We offer this for all those whose frustration leaves them grasping for straws like Ron Paul (Islamists hate us because we have a base in Saudi Arabia? Really? In Pakistan they hate us for that? And you'd rather wait to be attacked than prevent an attack? Really? And this is not appeasement that you're advocating? Really?). There's a reason that only one voter out of twenty supports this charming little nutcase (we extrapolate his 10% in GOP polls at approximately half of the electorate, an estimate that generously overstates the Congressman's support). It's that he's just as nutty as Dennis Kucinich.

__________________
*How exactly does the Republican establishment get its way when the nomination is decided with primaries and caucuses? By sending Stepford voters to the polls? By stealing elections? By ordering its brain-dead sheep to do as they're told? Is the length of memory of a conservative really less than four years?

Occupy Quinlivan's Computer!

2011-11-19T12:27:00.000-05:00

Combine the pointless performance art of OWS with the Democrats' sweep of the Cincinnati City Council election (Winburn as the lone non-Democrat is like have ten Democratic votes on the nine-member City Council), and what do you get?

A member of the Council majority suing the city because the restriction of her use of a city computer on a city internet connection for campaign purposes is, in the view of her lawyers, a violation of her free speech rights.

We are not making this up. The councilwoman in question is Laurie Quinlivan, ardent supporter of Mayor Mallory, shrill shill for the streetcar, and former TV reporter distinguished for a certain entitled pushiness in conducting investigative reporting (that last remark is based on a troubling encounter that we once had with her as she sought to attribute to us information that we thought we were giving on background, using the incentive, "My pastor told me that you could help me").

The story is here.

Attention, Councilwoman Quinlivan and OWS denizens: the right to free speech includes reasonable restrictions on time, place and manner. Citizens have the inalienable right to say anything they think, especially anything political. They don't have the right to do it any time, anywhere, by any means. This is so settled a matter of constitutional law that one wonders that anyone in government or with an eighth-grade education operates without the assumption.

Yet we are told that a city-owned, taxpayer funded computer should be free for use in a partisan political campaign, and that a public park with reasonable restrictions on access and use should be available for constant use without restriction for aggrieved citizens to express symbolically their grievances.

But individuals shouldn't be allowed to give a lot of money to a political campaign, and groups of individuals organized to do business (i.e. corporations) shouldn't be allowed to give any.

What's Next After SB5 and ObamaCare

2011-11-19T11:15:00.000-05:00

There's really not much reason to blog these days. All the interested person really needs to do is assemble a list of key words from current events, search this blog, and read prior posts. Plus ça change . . .

But we will deign to repeat ourself now and then.

One such occasion is today. WSJ's opinion page--the best proof of American exceptionalism--today notes the whirlwind sown by the defeat of Ohio Issue 2 and Ohio Senate Bill 5 that it represented. To wit: communities lacking the flexibility to pass on health insurance and pension costs to public employees will by necessity end up with fewer public employees.

This comes as no surprise to anyone who has looked past the pretty pictures of firefighters and teachers (why no police officers? because market research shows that a lot of voters don't trust police officers like they trust firefighters and teachers) and who has contemplated the lessons of Alegbra I. Specifically, if health insurance and pension costs are rising faster than tax revenues, then either the per-employee costs of health insurance and pensions must be reduced or the number of employees must be reduced.

SWNID, as is well know, is on the side of history regarding the place of organized labor in the postindustrial economy. With every passing year, a smaller number of workers are organized, except in the public sector. The politics are complex but the economics are simple: unionized labor works against its own long-term interest by stifling improvements in productivity.

Among our current federal executive's failings, one of his three greatest is his fealty to organized labor, especially organized public employees. Economic stimulus was all about keeping state and local employees on the payroll. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was all about mandating that health insurance come from an employer or from the government--to assure that such benefits could be a prize won by unions desperate to appear to create value for their members.

That point has been lost in all the hullabaloo about the federal mandate. Had BHO wanted an efficient means of getting healthy people to buy health insurance, he would've done what John McCain (gasp!) had proposed and what Wyden-Bennett proposed: tax individuals at a rate roughly equal to the cost of a moderate health insurance policy and provide a tax credit up to that amount for premiums paid for health insurance. Et voila! Individuals and families can then shop for insurance that fits their situation, and if they don't, Uncle Sugar has money in the coffers to cover their indigent care. And there's no power-grabbing invocation of the Commerce Clause to justify an erosion of liberty.

But why not? Just about the first thing out of Obama's mouth when he began the quixotic quest for Eleanor Roosevelt's mantle of liberal sainthood was that Americans like their system of employer-provided health insurance. This, of course, is a conventional political lie. Americans don't like getting insurance from their boss, because the boss has to buy insurance for everyone, and one size doesn't fit all. And they don't like being tied to a job that they dislike out of fear of losing health insurance. But they'd rather get insurance from a bad boss than from any government agency, no matter how nice the President of that government is.

But unions depend on the employer-provided "system" (an accident of price controls in WWII, as alert readers with decent memories will recall: note how one economic sin begets several more). They need to negotiate for benefits to preserve the illusion that without their intervention, workers would be paid in gruel and rags.

And so we have ObamaCare, and a Supreme Court case, and a system which, if implemented, will lead employers to drop plans and individuals with decent health to go without insurance, paying an annual fine that is much lower than the cost of insurance, until they get sick, when guaranteed coverage at average rates, they'll jump into a system that can't possibly stay afloat economically. Such are the exigencies of life in a Republic in which 12.5% of workers are unionized but unions dictate public policy to the Executive.

Incidentally, the primary list of Obama's political failings are as follows, in order by which he applies them: (1) support for government investment in favored, private industries (Solyndra!); (2) support for pointless "green" initiatives and "green" objections to economically productive initiatives (Keystone Pipeline!): (3) support for unions, especially public-employee unions (see above!). We could go on to praise him for adhering to a Bush-like foreign policy or to excoriate him for punting on issues where he has the influence to do something positive, like immigration reform or tax refom. But you get the picture.

Harvard Fundamentalism

2011-11-10T21:16:00.000-05:00

One of SWNID's all-time favorite jokes goes as follows.

Two men are in a restroom. One is washing his hands as the other makes a move to leave without washing. The man at the wash basin says, "At Harvard University, we learned to wash our hands after relieving ourselves.

The other man replied, "At the City College of New York, we learned not to pee on our hands."

The Boston Globe recounts some Harvard students' hijinks at another of the endless "Occupy" events, including the following:

Harvard University Police briefly detained one demonstrator, Jeff Bridges, who yelled, ‘‘I’m a student!’’ Bridges, a third-year divinity student, said he had pushed his way in, waving his ID. ‘‘I think what they’re doing is wrong and immoral, and as a divinity student I should know,’’ he said.

What do we call people who are assured that their religious views are unimpeachably right because they come from an unimpeachable authority? The answer is either "fundamentalists" or "students at Harvard Divinity School."

Quick 'n' Dirty SWNIDish Voter Guide

2011-11-07T23:11:00.000-05:00

In response to the myriads of gentle readers asking for guidance on tomorrow's off-off year election choices, we break our blogging fast to supply the handy, dandy SWNIDish Voter Guide for 2011.

First up, Cincinnati City Council

Committed to the notion that free markets are the way to general prosperity, SWNID leans Republican. But in City Council elections, we are a decidedly choosey Republican. So from the GOP slate we endorse the following:

Amy Murray: super smart, super sensible
Wayne Lippert: from the impressive Portman stable, a financial advisor with the sense to help the city sort out public-employee pension messes
Catherine Smith Mills: also a veteran of the Portman staff, representing the best of GOP sensibility

And we reject the following who besmirch the legacy of Lincoln:

Leslie Ghiz: loud, inconsistent, a publicity hog, clearly trying to establish a public persona to run for mayor but without a political philosophy from which to govern
Charlie Winburn: on his second set of term-limited terms, Winburn still has no achievements on his record save the ability to sustain his own voice for long stretches without pausing to inhale

We fill out our slate with the following, still not voting the maximum nine so that our votes have a smidgeon more impact:

Kevin Flynn: attorney, dad, board chair of Drake Center, courageous overcomer of devastating injuries, sensible guy who knows how to make the city better, resident of Mt. Airy, our city's most pleasant neighborhood
Wendel Young: a work horse, not a show horse--shows up and supports good decisions and consensus
Cecil Thomas: retired cop who loves the city and views things sensibly, though apparently he needs to clean up some of the rental property that he owns
Chris Bortz: development-minded, pro-business, the kind who might actually bring jobs to the city, maybe a decent mayor in a couple of years

Meanwhile, we urge any and all not to vote for any or all of the following:

Mike Allen: publicity-hungry former county prosecutor who lost his old job through extramarital activity on a county-owned desk. We don't need to enable this guy's ego that is already enormous even by the standards of politics.
Chris Smitherman: the only person with more ego than Mike Allen in this race. Smitherman will use anything for self-promotion, and we don't say that lightly.
Roxanne Qualls: a nice lady who's been around for a long time with a lot of weak ideas that never get stronger. If you like the last twenty years of council governance, keep voting for Qualls. Props, Rox, for telling the Prez that the only way to pay for an Infrastructre-Bank-financed rebuild of the Brent Spence was with tolls, but we need to hear two sensible ideas before you'll get the SWNIDish vote.
Chris Seelbach: a protege of David Crowley, representing all the elements of the Democratic Party coalition that make it hard to vote for Democrats these days--organized labor, sexual orientation as protected class, etc. We can only be grateful that the Irish question has settled down to the point that he doesn't advocate his mentor's despicable position on that too, at least not publicly.

Then there's Cincinnati Public School Board. In a tremendous show of the political indifference that comes from frustration and contentment (yes, those exist together: many are frustrated with public education to the point of indifference; others see the district as well enough managed by its administration that the board is of no importance), four candidates are running for three seats. That makes this race a question of whom to vote against. And the answer is incumbent Eve Bolton, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers. If you can read, thank someone other than Eve Bolton.

Votes go to Chris Nelms, civic-minded man of faith; Mary Welsh Schlueter, highly informed mom with a powerful educational philosophy; and Alexander Poccia Kuhns, associate of Nelms who isn't Eve Bolton.

Now to the referenda:

Vote YES on Issue 1, to modernize the Ohio constitution regarding the state supreme court.
It's an emphatic, if pointless, YES on Issue 2. Public-employee unions are wrong for their members, not just wrong for taxpayers. Time to trim their power to a proportion where they'd have to deliver value to their members to stay in business. This will fail, but don't let it fail by much, or nothing will change for a long time.
We're voting NO on Issue 3. No, we haven't been away for a month learning to like ObamaCare. We just think it's kinda pointless to vote for a law that will have no constitutionality if it's passed. Well, you can make an argument that the law's success would make a strong political point that might offset labor's win on Issue 2 a little. So vote your conscience on this one. A YES on Issue 3 is OK.
We urge a YES on Issue 32, Cincinnati Public Schools levy. While we excoriate the district for explaining the case for the levy so vaguely, the district has exercised exceptional stewardship in the last five years, attaining an exceptional record for a large-city district with less expenditure than the current norm. While we think that public-school education is still too expensive, CPS will not waste much, and their current path is leading to good outcomes for several thousand kids who need to learn. It's expensive but worth it.
YES on Issue 37 will continue to fund indigent care in University Hospital and Cincinnati Children's Hospital, both valuable in light of Uncle Sugar's failure to liberate the healthcare system.
Issue 38 is for renewal of the children's services levy, and who wants less of that? It's a YES for all but the most reptilian of small-government conservatives, and even SWNID has warmer blood than that.
Issue 44 is a NO. This referendum empowers the City of Cincinnati to negotiate reduced electricity rates for its citizens. What's wrong with lower rates? Well, you can do this yourself, dear citizen. And you might get a better deal by choosing your own plan. And this bill requires citizens to opt out of the deal rather than to opt in. How'd we all do with that cable television deal in the 1980s? Happy with TimeWarner's monopoly? Glad for Dish and Direct for a little competition at long last? Don't make the same mistake twice!
Issue 45 is also NO. It's about gas aggregation. Same as above, especially as gas prices are falling through the floor thanks to humankind's latest technological advance, fracking. Trust the city to make a deal that misses the next price drop.
Issue 46 straightens out some filing deadlines for elections. Vote YES so we won't have to keep voting this.
Issue 48 forbids spendthrift politicians from investing in fabulously expensive streetcars to transport bar-hopping UC students to The Banks and back safely. If you think that inefficient, expensive, inflexible, limited public transportation is economically stimulating, you don't read this blog. VOTE NO!

See you next November, if not before!

The Episcopal Church's Ecclesial Scorched-Earth Policy

2011-10-07T10:21:00.000-04:00

Most gentle readers are probably churchy enough to be familiar with the sorry state of the Anglican Communion's fellowship in the United States. While the American Episcopal Church's hierarchy has gone all-in for same-sex sex since the ordination of an openly practicing homosexual in 2002, individuals and congregations belonging to the denomination have been leaving in wholesale numbers, with no sign that the trend will abate.

Today's WSJ offers a snapshot of the internal workings. Episcopalians live in a system where property is deeded to the denomination, not the congregation. So if the congregation decides to leave the denomination (it is, after all, still a free country), the property remains with the denomination, who can try to start another congregation or sell the property to whomever.

So what might you do if you are a dissenting congregation leaving the denomination? Offer to buy the building from the denomination, of course!

Which is exactly what the Episcopalian hierarchy refuses to do.

Author Mollie Ziegler Hemingway quotes:

"We can't sell to an organization that wants to put us out of business," said Bishop Jefferts Schori, who added that her job is to ensure that "no competing branch of the Anglican Communion impose on the mission strategy" of the Episcopal Church.

So no sales to anyone will use the name "Episcopal" or "Anglican" in any way, shape or form. "Baptist," "Muslim" and "Urban Outfitters" are copacetic. Thoughts of a dog in a manger come to mind.

So congregations are either leaving their facilities while the denomination takes a haircut on the real estate, or they're agreeing to a five-year gag order on anything that lays claim to the Anglican tradition. In the battle of wills, the dissenters are agreeing to the cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face strategy of their former spiritual superiors. But the policy continues.

SWNID, an admirer of the Anglican liturgical tradition who would start a believers-baptism-only, non-bishop-appointing wing of Anglicanism were we of an organizing ilk, finds this battle instructive. When churches lose their grip on the gospel, they lose their grip on any sense of mission or even identity. As a result, they become more sectarian, not less.

We are connected to a wise fellow who is a member of the national governing board of a well-known mainline Protestant denomination, despite the fact that he does not hold membership in the denomination and is deeply antithetical to the current beliefs (or non-beliefs) and aims of the denomination. That is in itself indicative of the sorry state of mainline Protestantism. But he reports to us that within the board itself, if not among the denomination's adherents, the explicit goal is for the denomination no longer to exist in twenty to thirty years.

Certainly the Episcopal Church is on a trajectory to realize a similar goal.

C. Peter Wagner: Embarrassment, But Should We Care?

2011-10-04T15:58:00.000-04:00

SWNID fondly remembers reading provocative, thoughtful articles on church growth by Fuller Theological Seminary professor C. Peter Wagner.

That was then.

Through circumstances that to us are opaque and probably uninteresting, the once erudite Wagner turned a corner awhile back. He became demon-obsessed.

And Terry Gross can prove it.

Wagner appeared on Gross's celebrated Fresh Air yesterday (full interview and text highlights here). We gather that Gross got interested because Wagner is a leader among those who allegedly advocate the Christian "dominion" that creeps out the secular left.

Really, the dominion thing is probably not much for anyone to be concerned about. Wagner and company want Christians in positions to influence cultural influencers--media, government and the like. This is a well-known, widely pursued strategy that lies at the heart of many recent Christian organizations' foci. We figure that if the secular left is confident enough in the strength of its ideas, it won't mind people trying to compete with inferior ideas.

But what most Christian folk will find embarrassing and disturbing about Wagner and the interview is his fabulously, extravagantly extra-biblical theology of demons. Wagner really does believe that demons infest places, that they're connected to world events as people have demonized nations, and that he and other "apostles and prophets" know the spiritual technology to overcome them. N.B. that Wagner's wife has actually written a "how to" book on casting out demons.

We expect that gentle readers will resist the urge to label SWNID a closet antisupernaturalist who discounts the influence of the demonic. Far from it. We believe that our world is plenty, plenty influenced by Satan and his infernal minions. Evil is not an abstraction alone: it is the issue of a spiritual person.

But we think it nonsense to construe that as does Wagner: nonsense from the perspective of the Bible, historical Christian theology, and actual human experience. While we allow for the possibility of demon possession as such, we nevertheless insist that the demonic thrives in (im)moral decision-making and behavior.

That's why the New Testament is so straightforward in its anti-demon "technique," really no technique at all. "Resist the devil, and he will flee from you." Is there a book in that? If so, we doubt that it's Mrs. Wagner's book.

Accompanying Wagner's demon obsession is a heartily unhealthy obsession with personal authority. His group labels its leaders "apostles and prophets." That's gravely serious stuff, and their qualifications are thin, to put it mildly. But how else can one speak with authority about matters that have no grounding in the church's authoritative witness in Scripture? For more on the authority jag, we recommend Timothy Darlymple's meditation Christian celebrity.

Of course, we're embarrassed because we don't want folk thinking that all Christians are nutjobs like Wagner has become. And we imagine that Wagner and such are the main reason that normal Christians like you and us have such limited success in persuading other folk to join us on the Jesus journey. Well, it's no help for sure, but we'll venture a guess that it's also of only minor importance in the hindrance category. For every self-importantly nutjobbish Christian in America, there have to be a least ten somnolently nominal Christians. We'll trace most of the static to them.

There's Still Wit in Politics

2011-09-28T21:45:00.002-04:00

As the historically named Roger Williams demonstrates:

Anti-Apocalyptic Apocalyptism

2011-09-27T15:07:00.000-04:00

The Gray Lady gives space to one Matthew Avery Sutton, associate professor of history at Washington State University and author of Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America to suggest that Christian apocalyptic expectation may fuel the rise of a seriously libertarian candidate who could receive the GOP nomination for POTUS and actually win the election.

SWNID responds, "Hmm!"

Sutton offers a history of American apocalyptism that's in the SWNIDish view just fair enough to be noted and just imprecise enough to leave the impression that super-strong end-time speculation is a serious part of many evangelicals' daily lives and decision-making. As an example, Sutton offers:

Conservative preachers, evangelists and media personalities of the 20th century, like Billy Sunday, Aimee Semple McPherson, Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell, shared these beliefs.

Graham? Really? Yes, Graham believes in the return of Christ and has often stated that it could be imminent. But we defy Sutton to offer any repeated example of Graham indulging in speculation that this or that move might presage the end. More specifically, we defy him to show that Graham held to the notion that the return of Christ is connected to the rise of one-world government. One must observe the differences before drawing conclusions on the similarities.

We emphasize that point because it appears to us that Sutton routinely assumes that all expectation of Christ's return among evangelicals is somehow subject to the concomitant belief that one-world government will arise and that all moves toward the same must be opposed. This is, of course, nonsense.

It's especially nonsense because even those who profess to believe as much don't believe it enough to act on the belief in a serious, panicky kind of way. SWNID asserts that most evangelical Christians who take seriously the idea that a one-world government will arise near the end, and who even wonder whether this or that political development is the prelude to such, nevertheless are unwilling to stake a significant decision on that outcome. To wit: few liquidate their assets and households to acquire gold, rural land and firearms. To wit: few act differently about financial and career planning than do others in their social group. To wit: few in the end decide to back a political candidate because that political candidate seems least likely to cooperate with a one-world government.

An example: Years ago, we were at one of those academic meetings that we are blessed to attend, this one populated entirely by leaders of Christian IHEs. A person leading a session was talking about changes in federal regulations for IHEs, mostly stuff about steps of compliance for continued good standing to receive Title IV student-aid funds, the lifeblood of American higher ed. In the Q&A, someone asked this gentleman where he thought everything was headed. He replied, "Well my answer is determined by my eschatology. I believe that we're headed toward a one-world government." So he said, things will get more stringent, and eventually all of us Christian IHEs will be made illegal. The remark garnered the kinds of grunts that signify grudging assent to an inconvenient truth.

SWNID guarantees that not a single officer of a single IHE at that meeting went home to develop a contingency plan for keeping some kind of leadership training operation going through the tribulation, and that includes those who don't believe in a pre-tribulational rapture. And these folks are about as hard-core as they come.

Granted some folks do have their decisions dictated by specifics of apocalyptic speculation, and maybe a few more will in 2012, thanks to the miserable state of the economy. But last we checked, Mitt Romney still had a lot of political support, more than Michelle Bachmann and Ron Paul put together. And Rick Perry's sudden rise (and fall?) can hardly be explained as the apocalyptic libertarian vote finally having found a voice.

In other words, this stuff plays virtually no role in political decision-making.

The end of Professor Sutton's essay is, we believe, the best explanation for the anxiety that it presents:

Barring the rapture, Mrs. Bachmann or Mr. Perry could well ride the apocalyptic anti-statism of conservative Christians into the Oval Office. Indeed, the tribulation may be upon us.

There it is! The rise of a libertarian-minded conservative would be The End of the World as We Know It. There's the secular, liberal version of Armaggedon: a world in which Bible-thumpers are in charge and the welfare state is systematically dismantled. The main prop of their smaller-government message is a bunch of hooey about a one-world government and the rise of the antichrist. How quaint, but how pernicious and ignorant! Pray to the God who isn't there that this doesn't happen!

OK, here we go on the SWNIDish big picture.

First, why do so many Christians listen to and seem to take seriously the warnings that this or that political thingie means that the end is near? Well, largely because such announcements are presented by people who seem knowledgeable, who appeal to deeply held respect for God and fear of his judgment, and who prey on the average American Christian's ignorance of the Bible and unease about her or his relative comfort. Folks want to believe these talented preachers, don't want to be unprepared for judgment, don't really know much about the Bible, and don't feel that they are entitled to the prosperity that they enjoy, though they can't really contemplate life without it.

Second, why do so few Christian act on these warnings? First, because they're at least unconsciously hedging their bets to preserve their prosperity in the present. Second, because acting on the hard things that belief demands is, well, hard. But thirdly, and here we're going out on a limb, in their heart of hearts they know there's something fishy about what they're being told. They realize that per the typical dispensational-premillennial description of the "rapture" and the "tribulation," the God who is Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is going to do weird, inexplicable stuff before he brings his world to his intended goal. So they're holding out some unconscious skepticism about the conclusion.

Which brings us to another conclusion: most Christians, whatever they claim, functionally are "pan-millennialists," including our apocalyptically minded colleagues at the aforementioned academic conference. That is, they trust God to take care of the future and don't worry much about the details (except their personal details, about which they worry as most people worry, as in "will I keep my health and wealth?"). Apocalyptic hucksters may sell books and gain a following in the media, but they don't influence the substantial decisions of more than a handful of tragically misled people.

Which is why the Republicans, evangelicals and all, will nominate a relatively mainstream conservative, who will be able to govern only as conservatively as Congress and the judiciary and the body politic allow him to govern. And why people like Dr. Sutton should be ignored by their prospective audience of lefty seculars, who shouldn't be taken in by his prophecy that somehow the weirdos are taking over.

Without realizing it, though, Sutton has indirectly raised a point of theology that does impinge on political decision-making for thoughtful Christians. The Bible's apocalyptic imagery portrays the fall of the autocratic human empire to the reign of God. Along the way and especially in the end, God, not overweening humans who build kingdoms and empires and towers to make a name for themselves and become like God, will rule all. Humans, when they try to rule all, always fail in the end. Utopian claims are inherently and fatally flawed.

That observation cautions Christians against the hope that their government can do bunches of stuff for them. They look for incremental progress in human affairs that's grounded in the transformation of the human character. They don't look for geniuses to take over and make things better.

That means that they don't expect a utopia to emerge by means of smaller government, either. They just don't want a government that makes things worse by trying to do what government inherently can't do because of the inherent weakness of all people who govern and who are governed.

So chill, Dr. Sutton. Wild-eyed masses of people who read Left Behind for instructions on voting--they're just not out there. And the world won't collapse if the Bismarkian experiment with welfare statism happens to gently be reversed to a more appropriate point of deployment.

Mishap at the Brent Spence Bridge

2011-09-23T10:31:00.001-04:00

The President visited Cincinnati yesterday, as we expect he and everyone else running for POTUS will do a lot for the next thirteen months or so.

His visit was to tell John Boehner and Mitch McConnell to fund the replacement of the Brent Spence Bridge, a famously sturdy but obsolete span that carries I-75 and I-71 from the Queen City to the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

The double-decker bridge is famous for being narrow and without breakdown lanes, though it is perhaps most famous for this slightly lame joke:

Q: Why is the northbound lane of the Brent Spence Bridge below the southbound lane?

A: So that Kentuckians returning home can drop their shoes to Kentuckians leaving home.

But really, why show up at this spot to call for more infrastructure spending to replace crumbling stuff and get the unemployed to work? As a local-government web site innocuously points out, planning for the bridge's replacement has been going on since 2002, and no one in Cincinnati thinks that anything will be done before 2015. There's not even a consensus on a plan for replacement, let alone a plan for what to do during construction. And since much of the regions critical infrastructure and many of its most expensive buildings are close to the span, there are good reasons to plan carefully and well.

So even the left is admitting that this is far from a "shovel-ready" project, "shovel-ready" having joined such political phrases as "Middle-East peace plan" in the lexicon of the politically oxymoronic.

Of course the bridge will be replaced. Certainly it won't be replaced absent a workable plan for replacement. The only significant question is whether it will be replaced with dollars borrowed, collected in still higher taxes, or collected at present or lower rates of taxation with concomitant reductions in other, lower-priority spending.

So why did the President make the trip? For the very reason that he sarcastically denied: to stir up his base in the home turf of two leading Capitol Hill Republicans. It's all part of his pitch for what James Taranto dubs "Stimulus, Jr.," the half a trillion (or roughly $1500 per American) that BHO proposes to subsidize unionized public employees and unionized highway workers at the expense of nonunionized taxpayers and all Americans' children.

Postscript: We note the Bushism in the President's speech: claiming that America built the "Intercontinental Railroad." Now that's a bridge!

How to Make Money in a Recession

2011-09-23T08:55:00.000-04:00

One way is to appeal to people's anxious sense of paranoia, and call it patriotism.

Like the guy running this money-spinner, a super-secret survival kit for the coming apocalypse.

You may not have enough health or life or house or car insurance. You may not have a retirement account. You may not be prepared for things that often or always happen. But you need to be prepared for the imminent return of the Stone Age.

When this guy's ads come up on Facebook, click them. It'll cost him money.

A Voice in the Wilderness on Standardized Testing

2011-09-23T08:07:00.000-04:00

Standardized tests are what's wrong with American public schools, right?

Well, maybe not so much.

We give a SWNIDish salute to the high school English teacher Ama Nyamenkye, who offers a thoughtful, positive assessment of the power of the standardized test, originally in Education Week and more widely disseminated by the potent National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NIOLA, a.k.a. SWNID's favorite higher-ed organization). Here's a little quote that epitomizes her take on taking standardized tests:

The 2010 Scholastic-Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation survey of 40,000 educators nationwide found that only 27 percent felt state standardized tests were essential or very important in measuring student performance. I'm now convinced that these sentiments are the product of a testing movement that has become more about fear and politics than pedagogy. Teachers, I believe, are pumping their fists for the wrong reasons. . . .

Sadly, the actual merits and shortcomings of standardized testing often get lost in this stalemated debate that positions the test as either a scourge on teachers or a panacea for reform. In truth, the test is nothing more than a tool. It will not singlehandedly turn around swaths of failing classrooms or be the death of public education.

Only policies, leaders, and, most importantly, teachers wield that kind of power over school performance. Like any assessment tool—including the ones teachers regularly generate and assign—standardized testing has strengths and limitations.

When I "depoliticized" the test, I found a useful and flawed ally. The exam excelled where I struggled, offering comprehensive and standards-based assessments. I thrived where the test fell short, designing creative, performance-based projects. Together, we were strategic partners. I designed and graded innovative projects—my students participated in court trials for Shakespearean characters—and the test provided a rubric that guided my evaluation of student learning.

You betcha, says SWNID. The truth is that even the most personally invested of teachers at any level is naturally reticent to allow someone else to measure her or his students' learning, precisely, in fact, because the teacher is so personally invested. "These are my children," we all think, "and no one will say they're ugly except for me. Sure, standardized tests can be stupid. Sure it's hard to measure everything that students know or ought to know.

But isn't it better to measure something rather than nothing? And isn't it better that there be some level of objectivity in the measurements?

Nyamenkye's essay represents the work of someone who is less afraid of being evaluated than of neglecting something that her students need to learn from her. She's admirably externally focused, student-centered, outcomes-oriented.

May her noble tribe increase.

Not a Good Sign for BHO or the Republic

2011-09-17T22:54:00.000-04:00

It appears that the Obama 2012 campaign is down to about one tactic: scaring people from voting for Evil Republicans.

Witness AttackWatch.com, an Obama campaign site devoted to "fact checking" and "debunking" Republicans' lying attacks on the Greatest President of Our Lifetimes. Sporting severe black-and-red graphics, distorting already unflattering pictures of conservative pundits and candidates, employing panicky language, AttackWatch contrasts rather sharply with such successful presidential re-election themes as "Morning in America":

though perhaps it is inspired by this successful classic:

At any rate, we don't have a lot of SWNIDish optimism about where all of this is going, not least because the Rs don't seem to have a candidate of sufficient stature to command Presidential respect.

Killing Us Softly

2011-09-17T11:53:00.000-04:00

The SWNIDish political philosophy is negatively epitomized in the twin aphorisms, "Pacifism kills," and "Socialism impoverishes."

Today we approve of an exposition, only slightly longer, of the first aphorism.

At the indispensable First Things, Michael Cantarino offers "The Painful Naivete of Pacifism."

Indeed! Call it "deadly naivete" if you care to be direct.

Cantarino briefly and provocatively lays out the best reasons not to regard pacifist cant as a thoughtful application of Christian principles.

We wish things were different in this regard, but they aren't.

A Curmudgeonly Look at Higher Ed

2011-09-07T10:57:00.000-04:00

Prolific author James Schall offers what would be merely a typical rant against the current state of higher ed, were not the rant so eloquent. We will refrain from quoting, and nearly every sentence is quotable.

Reading Schall, we believe that much of our present confusion in higher ed stems precisely from what Schall rants about mostly in the beginning of his rantification: that we expect everyone to go to college, not just those with the abilities and preparation. Don Peck in Atlantic Monthly has what seems to be the proper answer: according greater emphasis, dignity and encouragement to educational ventures that put people in skilled trades.

Want to waste a human being's time? Send a marginally literate high school grad with no specific ambition to a community college for remedial coursework. Want to redeem a human being's time? Provide dignity, encouragement and support to adolescents and young adults who show potential as plumbers, HVAC technicians, machine-tool operators, and tool-and-die makers.

Celebrity Christian Food-Fight, Round 2

2011-09-03T14:45:00.001-04:00

It's Mohler versus McLaren again, in a Battle Royale!

Now the subject is Adam. Mohler insists that anyone who denies a single, identifiable Adam in history as the beginning of the gospel "metanarrative" (point loss for using that banal neologism) has destroyed the gospel. McLaren says that's goofy, and Mohler should be ashamed of himself for being so narrowly sectarian.

Details here, at Associated Baptist Press.

Now the SWNIDish view.

First, let's note that Mohler's assertion that the gospel depends on a singular, historical Adam is a consequence of his commitment to the Reformed notion that universal human guilt flows from a singular, historical Adam's first sin. That is, all us humans are sinners because we inherited guilt from Adam, plus a tendency to sin to boot.

But if you don't think that Romans 5:12 means what Mohler says, you've got much less at stake theologically in a historical Adam.

So, say our skeptical but still gentle readers, is SWNID indifferent to the theology of Genesis? Hardly! However, note well how the narrative of the first parents works in context. Both "Adam" and "Eve" are names that strongly suggest more than just individuals but archetypes (of course, something can be both at the same time). Their place is at a junction of four rivers of which only two are identifiable, suggesting a lost, greater place than that which is home to a Great Empire. They encounter a creature reminiscent of the pagan, theriomorphic gods of chaos, a snake who speaks, enticing them to an experience that by its very name, eating fruit of knowledge of good and evil, suggests loss of innocence, with an enticement that is nothing short of self-centered rebellion against the Creator. The consequence of their action is that they are responsible for their alienation and suffering in a world which ought to be "very good" for their habitation.

And thereafter in the sacred canon, their story is referred to as the archetype of all such rebellion. So Hosea says that Israel is like Adam in its disobedience to covenant. And, as we noted above, Paul says that death spread to all people because all sinned--as Adam sinned. The point is not that there must be a single human whose sin explains all of our lostness, but that all of us have done what Adam did and so share Adam's guilt and sentence. We don't need guilt plus depravity to be passed along through Adam's line of descent to explain universal human sinfulness. We just need to look around to say, death spread to all people because all sinned--like Adam.

Dare we say it, then? Loath to declare ourselves in a battle between two theological publicity hounds, we grudgingly say that in this round, McLaren is right this time.

But . . .

Presently the whole "historical Adam" controversy largely hangs on a single observation of genetics and paleoanthropology: that the present state of human genetic diversity had to arise from an original population of "modern humans" of about 10,000. Hence, no singular Adam.

However, where did the 10k community come from? Well, they came from earlier homonids of the quasi-human variety, of course.

Take the Neanderthal, so maligned in the human imagination. Seems likely that "modern humans," obviously slumming, mated and procreated with Neanderthals. And the issue of such unions were themselves fertile, not like mules and other animal hybrids.

Meanwhile, our paleoanthropological friends tell us that there's still singular human ancestry in the background. It's just prior to "modern humans."

See the problem, gentle readers? It's the boundary of the category "human." Is that handsome person with his high foreheard, inconspicuous eyebrow ridge, slender chest and lithe limbs someone like me? Of course! What about that brute with the sloping forehead, prominent eyebrow ridge, barrel chest and awkwardly powerful limbs? Ugh. Clearly not a part of my family.

As long as we understand the problem of taxonomy, there's every possibility that behind a larger community of modern humans who comprise our common ancestors, there's an earlier homonid pair, self-conscious in the same way that you and we are, who are our first ancestors.

Which, then, is the SWNIDish view? Either.

What's important is that we see ourselves and our situation--for all of us--as described in the Adam story, whether it is both a story of one person and an archetype or is an archetype alone. It is a true and factual story, describing the factuality and truth of human rebellion against God and its consequences, either way.

Anticipated response plus rejoinder: If Adam is not historical, what about the second Adam? And if the second is historical, isn't the first also? Answer: Maybe, maybe not. The narrative of Christ is different in its nature of historical position and witness. Further, the singular, historical incarnation is vital to everything about the gospel in ways that a singular Adam is not, as we've noted above. There's no reason why the one who comes in space and time to reverse human sinfulness cannot be compared to one who might be an archetype but not a singular, historical individual. Unless he was.

Additional anticipated response plus rejoinder: Adam: historical or not? Direct answer please! Answer: Yes, either historical or not. We refuse to take sides on issues for which we have insufficient warrant to take sides. One ought to know what one doesn't know.

Yet another anticipated response plus a rejoinder: You and your Adam-denying ilk are just pandering to modern, secular views, watering down the biblical message to make it acceptable to people who are sinners and need their minds and hearts changed. Answer: We disagree only with a couple of words. Change "just pandering" to "deliberately addressing," and "watering down" to "trying to focus on" and "acceptable" to "clear and without unnecessary obstacles of our own making" and we're good with all of that. Just a little revision, that's all.

Final anticipated response plus rejoinder: If we don't know, why bother discussing it? Shut up, please! Answer: Making sure that we don't insist on certain beliefs as part of the faith if they aren't really part of the faith is a means of being sure we do believe what is part of the faith--and concentrate on it.

On Food and Our Future

2011-09-03T12:44:00.000-04:00

WSJ's "Weekend Interview" is always a must read. Today's is especially so.

Nestle's chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe holds forth on global macroeconomics regarding food, agriculture, fuel, and the food industry. Too, too many insights abound in his discourse to summarize here, but we'll summarize a few:

Food and fuel are linked by the calorie. Because we always use many more calories for fuel than for food, we can never replace our use of fossil fuels with biofuels.
Using biofuels always drives food prices upward. That has little impact on the West, but lots on the South.
Certainly we can feed the number of people projected to live in the world in 2050, but not without the ongoing "Green Revolution" propelled by advances in agricultural production. Those are now propelled by genetically engineered crops, for which the powerful Europeans have such an irrational hatred that they are stifling the growth of agriculture in the developing world.
Organic farming is unproductive and so a burden on the world's poor imposed by the world's rich who imagine falsely that organic means healthy.
Putting a cost on water may be the best way to ensure that it's used efficiently, so as to boost global food production over time.
Without a food industry, we'd all either starve or become subsistence farmers, meaning we'd mostly starve.

Compassionate folk, including those of Christian faith but not only such folk, often imagine that the world is hungry because of a shortage of compassion. Indeed, if we all shared more, people would be better off.

But perhaps the most potent solution is to make use of the agricultural and marcoeconomic forces that lie ready to hand, that don't depend on ideally selfless donors, that allow more people to pursue their aspirations for physical health and economic self-sufficiency, including having some healthy meat proteins in their diets now and then.

Give for sure, gentle readers. But back policies that really boost the production of food globally and so deliver more people from hunger and toward dignity.

A Little Perspective on the Present Versus the Past

2011-09-03T12:31:00.000-04:00

Recently as SWNIDish friend became engaged in an unfortunate social-media argument about the merits of the present versus the past. Baited by the whining rants of self-absorbed twentysomethings, he vainly attempted to persuade the young and clueless that multiple, significant facts refute their narcissistic fixation that they live in the Worst Situation Ever.

Readers can imagine our friend's inability to persuade in such a situation. Facts are useless among those who make their own facts.

Into the same breach now enters National Journal's Ronald Brownstein. Obviously, he says, the decades containing the Civil War and the Great Depression were worse, and so were those framed by Kennedy's assassination and Watergate and by Kent State and the failed rescue of hostages in Iran.

And why not mention such decades as those containing World War II or World War I plus the Spanish Influenza? Fun times erecting public monuments with the names of your friends and relatives in wholesale lots!

Brownstein doesn't gloss over the travails of the decade since 9/11/01, of course. Things have been rough of late, though not as rough as we once imagined they'd be (we have water stored in the SWNIDish basement as a hedge against terrorist-induced disaster, now a decade in its plastic containers and doubtless unsafe to drink, but a potent reminder of what we haven't experienced).

But by just about any significant measure of human misery, for Americans and much of the rest of the world, it's still been better of late than at many times in recent history.

Of course, Brownstein offers that if things don't improve, the next decade will be as bad as or worse than the one just concluded. We hold these truths to be self evident: that if things don't get better, they'll be worse, or at least about the same.

So herein and hereby we offer the SWNIDish Declaration that the decade of 9/11/11 to 9/11/21 will be a No Whining Zone for all of our Republic's citizens. Quiet down and boost productivity, pampered Americans!

You Saw It Here First

2011-08-30T15:24:00.000-04:00

As a question, that is.

Has anyone in the world of televangelism connected the devastation of Hurricane Irene in New York, Massachusetts and Vermont to same-sex marriage? How long will it take for that to happen?

SWNIDish Answers to Keller's Questions

2011-08-28T23:36:00.000-04:00

NY Times staffer (and retired point guard for the ABA Indiana Pacers?) Bill Keller has made a splash recently for his list of questions about religion to be posed to (Republican) presidential candidates.

As a service to the candidates, we here supply answers of the SWNIDish variety. So the questions are Keller's, the answers are ours.

Q: Is it fair to question presidential candidates about details of their faith?

A: You betcha! It's a free country, we're running for office, the content of faith shapes the consciousness of the individual, always influencing and often determining choices. It's silly even to ask that question, isn't it, since it is itself a question about the details of one's faith?

Q: Is it fair to question candidates about controversial remarks made by their pastors, mentors, close associates or thinkers whose books they recommend?

A: Again, yes it is. People have a right to know whether I agree with this or that thing said by someone who has influenced me. But please believe me when I say that something hasn't had influence. Everyone knows that one can be influenced without arriving at rote agreement.

Q: (a) Do you agree with those religious leaders who say that America is a “Christian nation” or “Judeo-Christian nation?” (b) What does that mean in practice?

I agree if by that they mean that the nation was founded on and continues to be influenced by principles that have their origin in Christian thought or are consistent with it. I agree if by that they mean that the predominant religion in the nation has always been Christianity. Unlike some Christians, I expect that to be the reality for some time to come.

I disagree if by that one means that our nation's founders were all orthodox, practicing Christians, or that Christian theology ought to have an explicit, deliberate, protected role in shaping public policy. While I will always be influenced by my faith in my thinking, I won't say that any policy is right because it is Christian. I'll make my case to the public on the basis of values on which people widely agree.

In practice, that means that I will be honest about being influenced by my faith but never appeal to it as the reason the public should support my policy decisions. I will explain policies on their public merits.

Q: If you encounter a conflict between your faith and the Constitution and laws of the United States, how would you resolve it? Has that happened, in your experience?

A: In such a case, I will work to change the law or the Constitution, whatever is in conflict. But I will do so on the merits of the position, not simply asserting authority for a faith-based decision.

Of course, this has happened in the experience of most Christians, who find abortion to be immoral. While I believe that the Supreme Court erred in Roe v. Wade in finding a constitutional right to privacy that demands abortion's legality, I will continue to work within our constitutional system to change that outcome, as have countless Christian citizens and elected officials in the past.

Q: (a) Would you have any hesitation about appointing a Muslim to the federal bench? (b) What about an atheist?

A: I will appoint anyone with outstanding qualifications and a judicial philosophy congruent with my own view of the Constitution and the judiciary's role. That is, I have no hesitation appointing a Muslim or atheist who understands that the law and the Constitution must be interpreted according to the sense of the text as it was written at the time it was written. I would regard judges like Justice Roberts, Justice Alito, Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas to fit this criterion very well, and I would not hesitate to appoint Muslims or atheists with their views. The fact that they are all Roman Catholics has nothing to do with it.

Q: Are Mormons Christians, in your view? Should the fact that Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are Mormons influence how we think of them as candidates?

A: Mormons are Christians in the sense that their faith derives from Christian roots and continues to employ language and characters from Christianity. Most Christians, however, do not regard Mormonism as a legitimate form of Christian belief because Mormonism denies the eternal deity of Christ and the tri-unity of God. Mr. Romney and Mr. Huntsman are honorable men with outstanding records of public service, and they should be respected and taken seriously by all other candidates and all voters. If America does not elect me, the country would be well served by either of them.

Q: What do you think of the evangelical Christian movement known as Dominionism and the idea that Christians, and only Christians, should hold dominion over the secular institutions of the earth?

A: Dude, this question is either part of a flaky conspiracy theory or is a dumb joke. I've been in high-end Christian circles all my adult life, and I have never once heard anyone talk about "Dominionism" until someone accused Michelle Bachman of being an adherent. If there are people out there who say what you say they say, they have no influence over anyone that I know of. There's no "movement" out there.

But maybe there are some web sites and self-published books and the like. OK, so evangelicals have to answer for every kook in their neighborhood. We're used to that.

So here goes: "Dominionism" is not good Christianity and it's not good governance. I reject it categorically. I condemn it. I pass gas in its general direction.

Q: (a) What is your attitude toward the theory of evolution? (b) Do you believe it should be taught in public schools?

A: As a Christian, I find no essential conflict between what we know about evolution from science and what the Bible teaches about creation. I know that many Christians do, and while I disagree with them strongly, I respect the convictions that lead them to their disagreement.

I believe that evolution should be taught in schools, and I do not believe that it needs to be taught alongside other "theories." However, I believe it should be taught in a context that considers the larger questions of existence raised by questions of origins. That can include both that a god like the Christian God may have deliberately caused the very process that we observe for the very outcome that we see, and that evolution by itself is powerless to explain why something exists instead of nothing, why life exists and not just non-life, and why self-conscious, purpose-seeking humans exist, not just creatures that reproduce without the disadvantage for survival of self-consciousness.

Q: Do you believe it is proper for teachers to lead students in prayer in public schools?

A: I do not. As a Christian, I will find almost all such prayers to be inadequate to the point of embarrassment. I also object as a Christian to people who aren't Christians being coerced into religious observance. While I do not think that the first amendment is necessarily violated by teacher-led prayer in schools, such a thing is unnecessarily divisive and offensive to far too many people to be embraced. That having been said, I encourage schools to permit and encourage student-led faith activities, to welcome faith groups to rent their facilities and provide services to their students like after-school tutoring, and to study issues of faith as they arise in the study of history, literature, behavioral science, and, as I discussed above, natural science.

Why Paul Isn't SWNIDish

2011-08-28T17:37:00.000-04:00

Ron Paul is often right. Like when he says that the country is out of money and the federal government should do less, not more.

As he reportedly said today on Fox News.

Why, then, can't SWNID imagine supporting the elderly Congressperson from Texas?

Three huge reasons.

One is Paul's common insistence that the things he opposes are unconsititutional. He'd be rather wiser to insist that they appear to him to be unconsititutional, or that they are questionable constitutionally. His rhetoric doesn't acknowledge the differences of opinion that have always existed about the boundaries of constitutionality.

Take Jefferson's war with the Barbary pirates, for instance. Paul says that United States involvement in the Libyan civil war has been unconstitutional, much as Jefferson's opponents said the same about his little conflict in North Africa.

Paul's tendentious appeals to the constitution tend to appeal most to people who are understandably upset about the status quo but are inclined to accept the simplistic solution that says, Just follow the dang Constitution!

Which brings us to our second objection. On foreign policy, Mr. Paul is an isolationist. Always asserting unconstitutionality, he doesn't want any military action unless the American homeland is attacked, and maybe not much then.

Like it or not, the United States has most of the military power in the world, and China notwithstanding, the US will continue to have it for at least a generation. Whether that potential gets used to promote human well being, when and where such can be done ("the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference"), will have a lot to do with whether more or fewer people get to live in relative peace and prosperity. Paul is indifferent to such considerations.

That indifference appeals too, to those who see the awful cost of war, and its common mismanagement. Paul invites them to imagine a world in which that's someone else's problem, as they live in peaceful apathy about other people's suffering. SWNID just can't do that. And neither can most people.

Which brings us to our third objection. Paul has only one of the political abilities that a President must have. His lonely skill is maintaining the loyalty and interest of his political base. His followers are as rabid as Lyndon LaRouche's once were, and markedly more sane and stable for all that.

But he has no record of having formed a coalition, sponsored a successful bill, championed a cause that won the day, or anything else that suggests he could maintain the kind of consensus necessary for any political action, especially the negative kind--cutting back on nearly everything--that he seeks and that is arguably needed. The fact that he often votes alone or with Dennis Kucinich is proof of what we assert.

Ironically enough, a Paul presidency would leave the Republic further from its fiscal salvation, not closer. How could he expect to unite those whom he has ignored throughout his political life?

So if it's Paul v. Obama, our vote is with the current President, and all our potent political activity will be for a Republican Senate and House to force the more moderate of the two to moderate our excessive government before it's too late.

It's a symptom of how little BHO understands of the present distress that he polls so closely to Paul presently. Likewise, it's a symptom of how unknown Paul is to an electorate that will take anyone who will cut government spending over the current spendthrift. But there's extreme doubt that Paul could do what he wants, much more than there is that Obama could triangulate to a moderate position of austerity in his second term.

SWNIDish Stimulus? Be Contrarian!

2011-08-28T15:10:00.000-04:00

As an utterly amateur economist, we wonder whether it's past time for a very different kind of monetary policy to effect stimulus of our moribund economy.

Specifically, we wonder whether higher interest rates are in order.

"What?" responds a public drunk on elixir of Keynes. "Higher rates will suffocate what economic activity there is! Are you mad, SWNID?"

Yes, on the demand side, it might be a little tougher. But consider first that lower rates are not making for more borrowing and the economic activity connected to it. Banks are loathe to lend, and businesses are loathe to borrow. Cash is being hoarded in record amounts these days.

But what if the Fed began gradually raising rates.

First off, the dollar would strengthen considerably. That, in turn, would reduce inflation for producer prices, specifically for petroleum and other raw materials that the American economy needs to make products to sell to the world. Conventional wisdom says that a weaker dollar will make exports cheaper and so stimulate export industries. But when about half of our domestic economy's imports are petroleum and other raw materials, the difference is at best negligible. People buying with higher valued currencies currently have an advantage over Americans, an advantage that would go away if rates were raised and the dollar appreciated. That says nothing about the additional dollars in the pockets of consumers if oil prices drop with dollar appreciation, as they historically have.

Second, savers would have a better reward for their savings, and all would have more of an incentive to save. Not only would America's retirees have some money to spend, America's workers would have a better growing sense of prosperity as their net worth creeps up. The difference is that interest, not appreciation of assets like homes or stock-based mutual funds, would be fueling the renewed confidence. So for the long term, we get a stronger consumer base, but even in the short term, we get a more confident cadre of consumers, at least those who save instead of borrowing.

Now, who would suffer in all this? For one, banks would no longer be able to make money on the fact that they can borrow from the Fed essentially for free. Some might fold as a result. But might others be forced into more aggressive lending that would in turn offer some prospect of economic growth? What good is a bank that simply makes money on the Fed's zero-interest dole?

Of course, Uncle Sugar would have to pay higher rates too. That outcome, however, depends on the world finding something other than Treasurys as a parking place for its fear; otherwise, the rate at which the government can borrow will remain historically low. But if rates on Treasurys do rise, there's all the more of an imperative for the government to reverse the pattern of the last 2.5 years, in which "stimulus" has been used as the Trojan horse for increasing the federal baseline on the way to making more of the economy dependent on federal patronage and so more firmly capital-D "Democratic." So this too may be, at worst, painless in the short run but still highly beneficial in the medium and long run.

We are attracted to this idea by all the wrong reasons, namely, our contrarian tendency to assume that if a huge majority believes something, it is probably false. But at this stage, who can realistically say that more of the same will yield something better than it already has?

A SWNIDish Almanac of Higher Education

2011-08-25T21:18:00.000-04:00

Actually, this is our selection of facts from the annual almanac issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. The principle of selection is what interests SWNID.

Here goes:

The average tuition discount rate for first-time, full-time freshmen is 42.4%. For all undergraduates, it's 37.1%
Average cost of attendance as an in-state, residential student at a 4-year public is $20,339. At a 4-year private it's $40,476. At a 2-year public as a commuter it's $14,637.
Professors in theology and religious vocations are paid the least on average. Here are the averages:

Professor: $74,267
Associate Professor: $59,593
Assistant Professor: $52,241
New Assistant Professor: $50,620

For private master's-granting institutions in Ohio, average professorial pay for all disciplines is as follows:

Professor: $69,261
Associate professor: $57,170
Assistant professor: $60,553

Average compensation for faculty members has over the last five years and the last ten years gone up faster than inflation. Not so for other recipients of graduate degrees or people ages 25 and older. But presidents' salaries have risen even faster.
IHEs show more diversity in their staffs than in their faculties.
College presidents are sharply divided when asked whether the purpose of higher ed is to promote intellectual and personal growth or to provide knowledge and training for the working world. Overall, it's about half either way, but for four-year institutions, more than 70%, public and private, name intellectual and personal growth as the main aim.
20% of college presidents are older than 65.
41% of 18- to 24-year-olds are enrolled at degree-granting institutions. A larger percentage of women are enrolled than men. Hispanics lag other groups in enrollment at 28%. Blacks are enrolled at 38%; Whites at 45%.
Less than 1/3 of Americans have at least a bachelor's degree.
In the next 10 years, the number of students graduating from high school in Ohio is projected to decline by 6%. It is projected to rise in Indiana and Kentucky by 4%. Highest rates of decline will be in the northeast. Highest rates of increase will be in Florida, Georgia, Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, and the Rocky Mountain and Intermountain regions.
In the last decade, undergraduate enrollment grew 38%. It grew 21% in private nonprofit colleges.
Liberty University is by far the largest private, nonprofit, master's level institution in the country, with 46,312 students in 2009. That makes it the largest private institution in the country: NYU has 43k. We infer that most of this is online enrollment, not that there's anything wrong with that. Eight public universities and three for-profits have higher enrollment than Liberty. Liberty grew 342% from 2004 to 2009.
U of Phoenix had 380k students in 2009 fall.
Four freshmen out of 1000 name the MDiv degree as their eventual goal.
Fifty-one freshmen out of a thousand name "Church of Christ" as their religious preference. That's less than Roman Catholic, Baptist, Other Christian or None, but more than any other. Really.
In 2008-09, 8940 bachelor's degrees were awarded nationwide in theology and religious vocations, almost 2/3 to men. At the master's level there were 12,836, with a somewhat less pronounced lean to men. Nearly 1600 doctoral degrees were awarded, and we believe that every one of them asked us for a job.
There were 347k bachelor's degrees given in business.
In the decade ending in 2009, the number of degrees in theology and religious vocations rose 43%. On average, growth was 33%.
19% of college students in Ohio are minorities.
Blacks and Hispanics had the biggest increase in percentage increase of students receiving degrees in the decade ending 2009.
For-profit institutions enroll a disproportionate number of black students.
Per ACT, only 25% of college students are ready for all areas of college study (English, math, reading, science). Only half are ready for the reading.
Nearly 60% of bachelor's recipients from private 4-years graduate with less than $20k in debt. 28% graduate with no debt. 15% owe over $40k.
Median debt at 4-year privates doesn't vary much according to the family's income. It hovers a little above $20k. It's over $30k at for-profits.
College costs have been increasing steadily as a percentage of family income.
The wealthier a student's family, the more likely the student is to receive a degree.
On average, grants and loans are roughly equal as sources of financial aid.
Adults with bachelor's degrees in Ohio = 24%. Indiana =23%. Kentucky = 21%.
From highest to lowest percentages of students who report using such digital things, here are the digital technologies most used by students:

library web site
presentation software
text messages
social networking web sites
course- or learning-management systems (like Moodle)
spreadsheets
instant messaging
graphics software
internet from a handheld device
voice over internet protocol from computer (like Skype)
microblogging (like Twitter)
contributing to video web sites (like YouTube)
contributing to wikis
video-creation software
contributing to blogs
audio-creation software
online multiuser computer games (like HALO)
social bookmark/tagging
online virtual worlds

Nearly 50% of students are on the internet more than 15 hours a week. 9.1% are on 40 hours a week or more.
Over half of Ohioans are between the ages of 25 and 64.

News Flash: Americans Start to Get It

2011-08-24T08:15:00.000-04:00

Recent Rasmussen polling shows:

Most (59%) think it is better to have lower corporate tax rates and very few deductions than to have higher tax rates and lots of deductions. Seventy-nine percent (79%) recognize that corporations generally pass higher taxes along to their customers in the form of higher prices.

So the truth is taking hold. From a SWNIDish perspective, this is a very optimistic sign in an indicator that leads Leading Economic Indicators.

Has Barone Been Cribbing SWNID?

2011-08-23T20:51:00.000-04:00

Michael Barone, distinctly distinguished in the punditsphere for his logical and empirical rigor, today writes what SWNID has been writing for years. Namely, about how buses of the private sector smoke so-called high-speed rail of the public sector as well as buses of the crony sector.

We quote:

Bus travel used to be decidedly downscale, with a clientele that scared off middle-class travelers. That's because, back in the days of heavily regulated transportation, bus lines followed the passenger railroad model, with stations in central cities, routes with multiple stops, fares propped up by monopolies, and operators with no economic incentive to provide comfortable or pleasant service.

Chinatown and Megabus operators ditched this model for one that works for travelers for whom money is scarce and time plentiful. Who needs a station? Intercity buses can occupy curb space briefly just as city buses do. Who needs multiple stops? You can make money on people who want to go from one specific location to another.

Needless to say, the cost to the taxpaying public is minimal. City streets and interstate highways already exist, and maintenance gets financing from gas taxes. And the system has enormous flexibility. If fewer passengers want to line up in Chinatown and more on the Upper West Side, the bus can change stops.

Rock on, Mr. Barone. And he does:

Compare high-speed rail. It is tethered to enormous stations that must be built or refurbished and limited to particular routes that, once the rails are laid down, cannot be changed except at prohibitive expense.

And it is enormously costly. In just two years the estimated cost of the Obama administration's pet project, California high-speed rail, in the "flatter than Kansas" Central Valley, has risen from $7.1 billion to $13.9 billion. Oxford economist Bent Flyvbjerg has found that high-speed rail projects always end up costing more, usually far more, than estimates.

In addition, operating costs almost always end up higher than fares. And fares always turn out to be expensive, comparable to airfare if you book a popular flight the day before your trip.
So high-speed rail is a form of transportation on which government subsidizes business travelers. You don't see backpackers any more on the Acela or Amtrak trains from Washington to New York. They're taking the Chinatown bus or one of its competitors.

And so to conclude:

So the private sector provides cheap intercity transportation while government struggles to waste $53 billion. Please remind me which is the wave of the future.

Remember where you heard it first.

On the F-Word

2011-08-08T10:14:00.000-04:00

GetReligion, a blog on press coverage of religion, offers a short rant against the LA Times characterization of Rick Perry's weekend prayer rally as a gathering of "fundamentalists."

We cite the post for one trenchant rhetorical question:

Have we reached the point where any Christian believer whose doctrine of scripture and church tradition is high enough to believe that sex outside of marriage is a sin will now be called a “fundamentalist”?

We figure that the obvious answer is "yes." There's probably no definition of the f-word today that better captures that word's usage. We intend to point this out to everyone from now on.

End of Week Economic and Political Potpourri

2011-08-06T12:21:00.001-04:00

We offer some links and observations that converge on SWNIDish themes.

In WSJ, Eric Cantor is featured in the weekend-edition's profile that leads the opinion page. The brief interview and analysis emphasize what SWNID has been posting lately: that our body politic is riven by two distinct notions of what the country ought to be. If you haven't been paying attention, those two notions are (a) a republic of equal and abundant opportunity, relatively unfettered by government interference; (b) a European-style welfare state pursuing equality of outcome. Cantor is quoted on the subject:

The assumption . . . is that there is some kind of perpetual engine of economic prosperity in America that is going to just continue. And therefore they are able to take from those who create and give to those who don't. We just have a fundamentally different view.

Meanwhile, others in WSJ are noting a corollary: that in the present debate, as progressives get the worst of it, they retreat to more overt expressions of elitism. So writes Stanford's Peter Berkowitz. Cataloging some of the recent examples of egregious name-calling from lefty Congresspersons and pundits, Berkowitz observes a fundamental contradiction in the progressive political mindset:

The evident panic of the progressive mind stems from a paradox as old as progressivism in America. Progressives see themselves as the only legitimate representatives of ordinary people. Yet their vision of what democracy requires frequently conflects with what majorities believe and how they choose to live.

Add to this the progressive belief that human beings can be perfected through the rule of experts, and you have a recipe--when the people make choices contrary to progressive dictates--for generating contempt among the experts for the people whose interests they claim alone to represent. And not just contempt, but even disgust at diversity of opinion, which from the progressive's perspective distracts the people from the policies demanded by impartial reason.

The progressive mind is on a collision course with itself. The clash between its democratic pretensions and its authoritarian predilections has generated within its ranks seething resentment for, and rage at, conservatives. Unless progressives cultivate the enlightened virtues they publicly profess and free themselves from the dogmatic beliefs that undergird their political ambitions, we can expect even more harrowing outbursts to come.

Meanwhile, S&P has downgraded US Treasurys to AA+ with a negative outlook. Of course, they did it despite having to acknowledge a $2 trillion mistake in their analysis. We see this change as more symbolic than substantial, as there is no real alternative for cash in the global economy to replace Treasurys. So we expect little change in interest rates, even though a rise in interest rates is perhaps in the interests of longer-term prosperity. Markets are more important in determining prices than are market-watchers.

And meanwhile, Ohio's bonds have been upgraded. Ohio Governor, shameless self-promoter and former Lehman Brothers partner John Kasich explains how he has accomplished this fiscal feat by doing the Coolidge thing in balancing the state budget and reducing taxes:

What to say in conclusion? That we dearly hope that the decade-long flirtation with spending and borrowing our way to prosperity is at an end, and that this time the lesson will last longer than the 20 years it takes for another generation to arise, hold its parents in contempt, imagine that we suffer from a deficit of civic-minded virtue that they intend to fill, and concoct yet another failed experiment in patron-client relations between a government and its citizens.

CPS Continues Incremental Improvements

2011-08-05T10:26:00.000-04:00

We welcome the usual rejoinders that all public schools are awful and that Cincinnati Public Schools are especially awful. But the numbers are in again, and despite working with a massively disproportionate number of poor kids, Cincinnati Public Schools continues to improve its outcomes.

Where this goes next will largely be determined in the upcoming board meeting and then in November. The CPS school board will decide whether to seek a tax levy and how much to seek if seek they do. Then voters will decide.

COAST, the perennial opponents of all local taxes, already says that CPS doesn't need more money because (a) more money doesn't improve education; and (b) private (Catholic) schools operate on a lot less.

CPS will say that a failure to invest that leads to layoffs will stymie improvements.

We will SWNIDishly offer some observations.

First, both COAST and CPS are at this stage of discussion offering generalizations that only offer possibilities and may not apply directly to the present situation.

To COAST, granted that spending more money has not been shown in itself to improve educational outcomes, we ask whether CPS has shown itself to be a better than average steward of fiscal resources as compared to other urban school districts teaching a disproportionate number of poor children. If so, might they be able to spend a few more dollars wisely? Is it time to move beyond your knee-jerk rationalizations for opposing taxes and consider the merits of particular levies with regard to their particularity?

To CPS, we ask for more than the generalization that layoffs will hurt. Granted that you're doing well, granted that the comparison to parochial schools is not apples to apples, if your ambition is to be the best urban district in the country, you're going to have to move beyond the level of trite generalizations that appeal to public sympathy for hard-up kids and dedicated "public servants."

What's the plan CPS? What's wrong with the plan, COAST?

To voters, we say this. The business environment in Our Fair City is extremely affected by what's at stake here. On the one hand, lower taxes are attractive to businesses. On the other hand, effective schools are attractive to businesses. "Strike the balance" is a truism that can be articulated here and then set aside. The real question is whether there's a better plan to improve public education with some specific, targeted spending or to improve it without that spending.

So when the plan is offered and critiqued, listen well and think hard, OK?

Assessing Christian Taxonomy Thru the Lens of a Life Well Lived

2011-08-05T09:00:00.000-04:00

CT's Mark Galli offers what is for us both the best appreciation of the late John Stott and the best assessment of evangelicalism's sense of frustration over the excesses of its fringe family members. Galli shows Stott as a sample of the best of evangelicalism, suggesting that when one compares subgroups of Christianity--Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, emergent/emerging--one ought to compare the best to the best, not the worst to the ideal.

Some quotes:

So for a few decades now, we've witnessed many evangelicals grow weary of arm wrestling about dispensationalism or egalitarianism or annihilationism or atonement or a host of other issues. They look longingly to Rome and that glorious magisterium, where supposedly one fiat ends all debate.

Or we compare our trivial services that pass for worship and become infatuated with the bells and smells of Orthodoxy.

Or we grow tired of rationalism and all things modern, so drift into emergent and postmodern Christianity.

Or we are frustrated with privatistic pietism and long for a faith that engages the world on its own terms.

. . .

What many don't see is that every Christian movement and tradition—Catholic, Orthodox, emergent, liberal, and so forth—has their crazy uncles (Episcopal Jack Spong), scandalous behavior (priestly abuses), and boorish attitudes (Orthodox ethnocentrism). It's called sin, and no movement escapes it.

. . .

One could hardly do better than by first rereading the works of John Stott, and reflecting on his life.

Why? Because Stott articulated a biblical faith in ways that are true and faithful to the text of the Bible. No postmodern experiments with deconstructing. No theological flights of fancy. No sermons that overwhelmed the biblical narrative with his own cute stories. No pandering after the crowds. No studied attempt to be authentic, no pacing up and down the stage, no working the crowd for a laugh. Just simple and clear exegesis, with the appropriate illustration or classic quote.

Why? Because he lived a life that was true and faithful to the Bible. He spoke with conviction and humility. He worked hard but did not burn out. He played hard—if you call his fascination with bird-watching play—but was never tempted to let leisure define his lifestyle. He listened to his critics without being cowed by them. He wore his fame lightly, and used it not to promote himself or the sale of his books, but to further the ministries he had given himself to. He continued to grow and learn his whole life, expanding God's calling on his life until his last breath. He put love into action, bringing into near perfect biblical balance the call for evangelism and social justice.

Why? Because he preached and lived a life that was an apology for the oldest and strongest pillars of evangelicalism: the complete trustworthiness and authority of Scripture; the primacy of the substitutionary atonement of Christ; Jesus as Savior and Lord; and a life of activism, characterized by both evangelism and social justice.

Nice Fornicators

2011-08-04T09:18:00.000-04:00

Superb beginning to a discussion of contemporary sexual behavior!

Fun Fact!

2011-08-03T22:16:00.000-04:00

Did you know . . .

That Otto von Bismark, the architect of German unification in the 19th century, is credited with the origin of the European welfare state? And that he promoted a social-welfare system to try to establish a competitive differentiator with the United States, to which Germans were immigrating in massive numbers to find better opportunities for economic advancement, as well as to blunt the popularity of socialism?

Bismark's approach was, like everything that he did, an expression of the history of Germany and of Europe, in which patronage was the means by which the more powerful ensured the loyalty of the less powerful.

We simply mention this Fun Fact as a means of framing the ongoing conflict between two visions of the state's role in the economy: to provide common opportunity or to provide common benefits. Yes, it's about balance, but the determination of the "right" balance will be decided on the larger vision of what constitutes the best kind of society.

SWNID thinks that since there will always be a Europe, there also should always be an America.

It Pays to Be Smarter Than Jesus

2011-08-03T20:19:00.000-04:00

Bloomberg has a timely and significant article on the measure of boodle available to those who pander to expectations of the Rapture. We leave it to gentle readers to scan the article for details.

Various points can be discussed from all this, but there's one that we'd stress above all. It is the underappreciated but obvious fact that the expectation of a secret rapture of the church before a period of tribulation that precedes Jesus' return is of very recent theological origin (19th century), does not represent the historic view of Christians and is not the view of most people today who believe the Bible and study it professionally. To put it more succinctly: you can be a Christian, affirm that Jesus will return, and have no belief whatsoever in the secret rapture.

Christianity is not as dumb as some of its adherents make it appear, and as many of its opponents wish it to be.

The Adults

2011-07-31T08:22:00.000-04:00

They happen to be Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan.

Ryan months ago proposed a plan that initiated the honest discussion that is now leading to the fiscal pact about to be enacted. And what he proposed is still better than anything proposed since.

Rubio yesterday on the Senate floor offered the most cogent analysis of the situation that we've heard:

Too bad they're still too inexperienced to lead a national ticket. In the best case, they can do so in 2020. In the worst, in 2016.

Outlines of Debt Compromise Emerge - Major Garrett - NationalJournal.com

2011-07-31T08:11:00.000-04:00

If conservatives can't live with a deal like the one hastily outlined and hastily linked below, they are divorced from political reality. To wit: no new taxes.

Same for lefties. You got clobbered in 2010, and you only won in 2008 because your guy was cool.

Hey, Chicken Little! Revise your celestial estimate! The Chinese will still buy Treasurys on Wednesday.

Outlines of Debt Compromise Emerge - Major Garrett - NationalJournal.com

Al Franken: Still Wrong, Not Funny, Except by Accident

2011-07-29T19:43:00.000-04:00

At least as a senator, he's not supposed to be funny.

Al Franken is advertising on Facebook to get people to sign a petition against the Defense of Marriage Act. Such internet petitions, of course, are really trolling for the email addresses of likeminded people to hound them for donations to the upcoming Battle Royale that will determine whether future Americans will live in a place like America or one like Greece. But we enjoy Franken's unsubtle attempt at such subterfuge because the former comedian, forced into politics by his inability to be amusing, manages now to be unintentionally funny. Note the opening paragraph of his marketing-ploy-disguised-as-a-cause:

There’s no good argument against marriage equality. There’s no good argument in support of the Defense of Marriage Act. And there’s no reason we should wait one more day to repeal it.

Wrong, wrong and wrong. The arguments/reasons (why the shift from "argument" to "reason" in the third sentence? the lack of commitment to the rhetoric is an additional irritant) are good enough to convince a lot of people more thoughtful than the failed founder of AirAmerica.

In keeping with the gravity of the web posting, we registered Messrs. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, always suspected of seeking an unconventional marriage to each other, as supporters of Franken's campaign. Really, for those who maintain a secondary email account for receiving rubbish, it's kinda fun to sign up for these things, knowing that you will then receive endless emails inviting you to send $10, $100 or $1000 to slay the barbarians and usher in Utopia. They're fun too, that is, at least as fun as this was:

Dr. K: It's About Two Views of Our Republic

2011-07-29T19:29:00.000-04:00

We’re in the midst of a great four-year national debate on the size and reach of government, the future of the welfare state, indeed, the nature of the social contract between citizen and state. The distinctive visions of the two parties — social-democratic vs. limited-government — have underlain every debate on every issue since Barack Obama’s inauguration: the stimulus, the auto bailouts, health-care reform, financial regulation, deficit spending. Everything. The debt ceiling is but the latest focus of this fundamental divide.

Yep. Opinionist Charles Krauthammer and journalistic analyst Gerald Seib see things exactly the same way. The current debate is about different notions of how economic and political life ought to be lived. And the issue can only be settled by an election.

To everything else they and we have said about this, we'll add one more element. Much depends on whether Americans will own up to their individual double-mindedness about such matters. To wit: most citizens are insistent that the government both (a) get off their back; and (b) give them increasing entitlements. Hence, both (a) Tea Party conservatives who want the budget balanced yesterday without touching Social Security and Medicare; (b) Subaru socialists who want the price to be paid by the rich, who happen to be just beyond the economic ambitions that they have for their offspring.

In our mind, we imagine a political Don Corleone who will do to Our Republic what that celebrated character did to Johnny Fontane:

John Stott Showed Us How It's Done

2011-07-28T17:23:00.000-04:00

In tribute to the late John Stott, we link not one of the many articles of tribute that has appeared since his death yesterday but an article from 2004 by David Brooks of the New York Times. Brooks captured Stott's contribution to Christianity in SWNID's generation as well as we've ever seen it done.

As a sometime visitor to All Souls Langham Place, where Stott preached next door to the BBC's studios, and as an admirer of every aspect of his ministry, we add this tribute. In our view, Stott was one of the first to realize that Great Britain, Europe, and North America had entered a post-Christian cultural condition. He led first his church and influenced many others to articulate the Christian gospel in ways that were clear, accessible and appealing to a post-Christian audience, and without sacrificing any aspect of historic orthodoxy. We believe that when the history of Christianity in our lifetime is written centuries from now, Stott will be noted as crucial to the church's survival and revival in lands where once it had been predominant but then had become marginalized.

Wallis's Fundies Prooftext Budget Debate

2011-07-27T09:18:00.000-04:00

Sojourners is buying radio time to hector the budget debate with prooftexts.

As CNN reports:

The minute-long spot attacking Boehner's plan says the book of Proverbs "teaches that where there is not leadership a nation falls and the poor are shunned while the rich have many friends."

"Sadly Congress has failed to heed these Biblical warnings, and our own Rep. Boehner is risking the health of our economy if America defaults on its debts," the ad says.

Wow, that settles it, doesn't it? Why bother with marcroeconomic considerations when you've got Wallis and his ilk to make it all so very simple?

Jim, we won't ask how things like means-testing Social Security benefits or cutting off government money for NPR would hurt the poor. We'll just take your word for it, and take spiritual comfort in our shared indignation. And write you a check so that you can continue to articulate biblical principles for the sake of those who have no voice in the debate.

Truth Behind the Pay Wall: Seib Describes Rival American Political Philosophies

2011-07-26T13:56:00.000-04:00

WSJ's Gerald Seib, always as mild and moderate as lowfat vanilla yogurt, today offers as apt a description as one can imagine of the contrasting fiscal philosophies of Our Republic's only two political parties. As it's behind the pay wall, we quote from our privileged position as a Kindle subscriber:

Democrats see the governments' [sic] role edging up as the nation ages and its economy matures. Moreover, they see that as the inevitable and desirable evolution of a nation making good on its social compact with a graying population and competing in a global economy where state-directed economies such as China's use the power of government to prevail.

Republicans watch those same trends and recoil from what they see as a nation drifting away from its traditional economic moorings and toward the inherently flawed models of a socialist Europe and a mercantilist China. They see a social compact that needs to be trimmed as the economy matures and a government role in the economy that shouldn't grow to compete with China but rather be curtailed to differentiate the American model from the Chinese one.

Indeed! And, we add to the last sentence, to continue on the path that historically and universally has produced more prosperity for more people than its competitors, both in the United States and elsewhere.

Seib is as evenhanded as he can be with this, really a model of journalistic neutrality (and note well that he continues to work for WSJ long after Evil Genius Rupert Murdoch's sinister takeover). Some with weak constitutions may respond by saying, "Well, both sides have good things to say. Who can determine who's right in this? I'll just vote for the best candidate."

Wrong. Given that politics and economics is as much art as science, one is compelled to say that the obvious bet is to bet on oneself and people like oneself. Citizenship, not client-patron relations, makes us happier, healthier, wealthier, and wiser. Vote for the people who affirm your adulthood. Blame the people who infantilize you.

And so one party says that we much tax the rich more so that we can include the rich amongst the clients of government patronage, never means-testing entitlements or stifling crony-capitalistic ventures that we label "investments in our future." The other plans to not so much to starve the middle man as put him on a diet.

2012 Is Why We Don't Have a Deal Yet

2011-07-25T08:31:00.000-04:00

WaPo's Jennifer Rubin reports what John Boehner and Eric Cantor said to their caucus yesterday about the dissolution of talks on a debt-ceiling deal. We take two points away.

One is that there will be something passed in time to avoid the train wreck, though a slip in the bond rating is probably inevitable anyway.

The other is that the problem is 2012, and it's more a problem for the Ds than the Rs. Ds know that they were decimated in 2010 and face the same in 2012 without a game changer. Getting hung with a fresh "tax-and-spend" label would make matters worse, but pulling Bill Clinton's trick of blaming the Rs for a government-shutdown-type experience could be just enough to get BHO a term to follow his warmup.

Meanwhile, you've got to listen awfully, awfully closely to hear that spending at 24% of GDP is fundamentally higher under Obama than ever before in the post-WWII era, that no matter what we do with tax rates, we've never managed to collect much more than about 20% of GDP in taxes, and so the problem is not that Richie Rich pays too little but that we all, through the patrons we elect every two years, spend too much.

Once Again, What the Real Problem Is

2011-07-24T18:08:00.000-04:00

From columnist Jack Kelly:

Another way to indicate the problem is spending -- specifically, Mr. Obama's spending -- if federal spending were held to what it was during President Bush's last year in office, deficits likely would be eliminated in four years.

Can we all please agree to the math and get on with the decision?

Just Where You'd Least Expect It: "Born That Way" Doesn't Cut It

2011-07-24T17:02:00.000-04:00

Before today, we would've nominated Mother Jones as one of the top five places where we'd least expect to find a serious journalistic piece challenging the orthodoxy that gays are born that way.

Which is reason alone to recommend Gary Greenberg's "Gay By Choice: The Science of Sexual Identity."

The article is worthwhile for multiple reasons, really: as a summary of the history of thought on homosexuality, as a review of the present state of the research on the origins and causes of the same, as a thoughtful report on people who dissent practically from the established position that the only thing for people to do who experience same-sex attraction is to accept and embrace it as of their essence, as a challenge to dogmas of all kinds on the issue.

We won't even try to summarize, except to say that Greenberg shows that with people, things are not as simple as we try to make them. And if folks who debate the politics of this were simply as thoughtful as Greenberg, the discussion would certainly be more edifying to all.

Revising Monogamy, or the Prophet Homer Simpson

2011-07-22T11:23:00.001-04:00

In 2003, when the Supremes ruled that states can't criminalize same-sex sex acts, Justice Scalia dissented that this reasoning demands that any so-called "private" behavior be legal, including polygamy. Of course, he wasn't the first to see a slippery slope in the derivation of a "right to privacy" in the American Constitutional tradition.

Since then, those who object to same-sex marriage have commonly repeated Scalia's notion, to the cacophonous catcalls of the cause's champions.

Lately, of course, the champions of the cause seem to be carrying the day, as the enlightened legislators elected by the enlightened citizens of New York have voted to equate same-sex relationships with opposite-sex relationships by legalizing same-sex marriage.

Meanwhile, in the deserts of Utah, a small, unconventional "family" is suing for what they call same right, the right to be left alone. And their intrepid attorney makes their case in--you guessed it--the Gray Lady.

Jonathan Turley, Esquire, pillories Scalia, of course. One can't mention Scalia in the Manichean Times without damning him. Taken as a whole, however, his piece affirms that Scalia was right in his pronouncement, as Turley rejoins with the journalistic equivalent of, Who cares? It's none of your [obscene participle deleted] business! Here's a telling quotation:

Justice Scalia is right in one respect, though not intentionally. Homosexuals and polygamists do have a common interest: the right to be left alone as consenting adults. Otherwise he’s dead wrong. There is no spectrum of private consensual relations — there is just a right of privacy that protects all people so long as they do not harm others.

In other words, there's no slippery slope: the "right to privacy" is an elevator straight to the bottom. There's no spectrum because the right of privacy trumps any perception held by the public that a "private" behavior is wrong. So stop trying to scare the public with nasty-sounding terms for esoteric, allegedly "perverse" behaviors. It's all just "privacy." Turley's objection to Scalia is not his reasoning about what privacy entails but his disapproval of any of the behaviors deemed private.

Concerning plural marriage, we urge Mr. Turley to do the math and the history on the way to deciding what deserves disapproval. Men and women exist in approximately equal numbers. If they pair off exclusively, all have more or less the same chance for forming a family. If some men take multiple wives (essentially it never works the other way, of course), some men are deprived the chance. Thus arise power plays: rich men enticing multiple wives, progressively younger, while poor men are strategically marginalized (note the polite understatement). Stories of teenage males being pushed out of polygamous communities in Our Republic's still lawless Intermountain Region are but one example (the Münster rebellion is another) of the inevitability that arises from human arithmetic. It's not for nothing that some describe the development of monogamy as the most powerful social equalizer in human history. Monogamy, dare we say it, is the foundational institution of social justice.

By the way, this is the genius of the biblical standard of monogamy: that in a culture that had never questioned polygamy, the Bible begins with the articulation of the monogamous ideal, proceeds to narrate polygamy as an inevitably disastrous adventure, and climaxes with a story that forever makes all human relationships--including permanent, faithful, heterosexual marriage--about serving others rather than self. "Privacy" gets crucified, if you will.

But back to the politics in a democratic republic. In many areas we consider it the state's business to regulate otherwise private behaviors for the public good. SWNID can't shoot deer or burn trash in his back yard, for example, even though there are private benefits to both and little, if any, direct public detriment (a few rounds from a single rifle or a little smoke from a single trash fire are statistically no risk to anyone). But the reasoning for prohibiting such things is Kantian: what if everybody did it, or at least a lot of folk? We don't want the city's atmosphere filled with bullets and smoke, so we forbid even one act that, when replicated, gives rise to disastrous social outcomes.

The state has at least as much an interest in regulating what constitutes "marriage" as it has enforcing zoning laws, minimum wages, or a host of other matters that are essentially "private" (like, no joke, how big the SWNIDish compost pile grows in our urban landscape). Let's generously include the ObamaCare health-insurance mandate (tread carefully here, conservatives: your opportunism in attacking what might be ephemerally the political weakness of the Affordable Care Act may come back to bite you). That's why historically our laws have shown a sharp preference for opposite-sex monogamy as marriage's standard: isolated polygamy may be "mostly harmless" to everyone else, but what if it weren't isolated?

Truth is, we use laws all the time to encourage otherwise private behaviors that we deem preferable. "You can't legislate morality" simply means that law doesn't change people on the inside or attain 100% compliance with any law. Law influences behaviors away from what is illegal, as the slowdown on the highway near the state trooper's roadside hiding place persistently demonstrates.

Advocate-for-hire Turley does SWNID's work for us by tacitly acknowledging that "marriage" in our culture is already on life support. He notes the obvious: "In olden days . . . Now, heaven knows, anything goes" [not Turley's words, but for sure Cole Porter knew what he was talking about]. Specifically, Turley's piece would have no significance were it not for the fact that Western culture decided a generation ago that marriage is "just a piece of paper," not the socially preferred means of acting sexually and forming families. In that respect, his legal reasoning is almost immaculate.

We say "almost" because such reasoning sooner or later runs into the problem of social effect. That is, after people get on the privacy elevator and it swiftly descends to the behavioral bottom and opens its doors, they have to look around.

In 2005, Homer Simpson opened a same-sex marriage chapel in his protean garage. Challenged by the ever-insightful Kent Brockman that his practice meant that anything could be married to anything, Homer explored whether any limits remained: "It has to exist! . . . Or does it?" Those prophetic words now echo down the corridors of history.

Sauce for the Goose: Why True Conservatives Should Swap Lower Marginal Rates for an End to Charitable Deductions

2011-07-20T16:09:00.000-04:00

Just now we overheard an overheated radio host say that reducing or ending the tax deduction for charitable donations would make people more dependent on government.

A couple of weeks ago, at what purported to be a roundtable discussion of influential local conservatives, we heard nothing but fear and loathing for any reduction in the charitable deduction.

Conservatives should not think this way. Or maybe they just aren't thinking.

Is this heresy? No, it's free-market gospel. Not for profits would be better off without the charitable deduction. Follow our immaculate reasoning, gentle readers!

First, nobody who can do math gives charitably simply for a deduction. Even if you're taxed to the max, the deduction is always worth less than what you gave away (deduction's value = gift x marginal tax rate [which is well less than 100%]). People give because they want to. The deduction makes it cheaper, doubtless creating more giving, but the deduction doesn't motivate giving as such. Givers would still give without the deduction. Maybe not all givers, but certainly most; maybe not as much, but certainly still a lot. Just ask them.

Second, if people have more to begin with, they'll generally give more. Reducing marginal tax rates would put more money in people's pockets. If marginal tax rates are reduced while charitable deductions are reduced on a more or less dollar-for-dollar (revenue-neutral) basis, the reduction in gifts because of the deduction's phase-out could be offset by the effect of growing take-home income on generosity. And since reducing marginal rates historically has fueled economic growth, the extra-income dividend to charities may even be greater than otherwise.

Third, deciding and tracking what's deductible and what isn't is a big problem and a big expense. Charities engage in all kinds of subterfuge to stay legal while adhering to donor interests (e.g., gifts received for an individual's support are generally received with a weird work-around on the restriction that deductible gifts can't be given directly to benefit an individual). The charitable deduction is the primary problem in drawing the line between political and religious or other tax-deductible activity in many organizations. It's the primary problem for NPOs incorporating, as the IRS regulates such organizations with a view to protecting the integrity of the charitable deduction. It has led to the formation of bogus "churches" to which some dopes contribute their income so that they can collect (tax-deductible) housing allowances as clergy in their self-formed congregation of self-worship. Everyone would save dough if this were eliminated, legitimate charities most of all. Plus, everyone would save some integrity. Say farewell to the tax-shelter charity, America!

Fourth, there's every likelihood that the charitable deduction keeps alive some marginal NPOs that would otherwise disappear. We think that's not such a bad outcome. Who wants to justify every 501 (c) 3 organization's existence? Many need to merge, be taken over, or liquidate.

Fifth, it's hardly consistent with robust conservatism, opposed as it is to dependency on government patronage, to consider the charitable deduction necessary for the sustenance of those who do good through the gifts of those who do well.

OK, everybody. Let's show that thoughtful, charitable conservatives can buck the trend and lead the way on renouncing special-interest politics. Write your congressman today and insist that the charitable deduction be eliminated in what we hope is the impending round of tax reform.

"We have nothing to fear but fear itself!"

A Juxtaposition of Economic Notions

2011-07-19T12:00:00.001-04:00

Today's Cincinnati Enquirer, by design or accident, brings together two opinion pieces that couldn't contrast more.

At the top of the opinion page is "community voice" (translation: unpaid, one-time columnist) Robert W. Thurston, a history prof at Miami U. The upshot of Thurston's column is that we need for the government to tax the rich because (a) they're presently not spending their money; (b) except on wasteful luxuries; so (c) we need to take their money to employ more people in government.

Thurston thankfully concedes that making and selling tasteless toys for the rich does employ people. But he doesn't bother to ask whether, on balance, people spend their own money better than the government spends other people's money. We'll stipulate all the Philistine geegaws that Thurston cites and throw in the various bridges to nowhere and $3000 toilet seats and such, bought on our behalf by the best and brightest in DC. Comparing the best "investments" of Uncle Sugar to the worst waste of Uncle Pennybags only prolongs our getting the point so aptly made by Adam Smith and updated by Milton Friedman.

At the bottom of the page is the sublime Amity Shlaes, herself also an historian, but an historian of economics, and one who has found gainful employment outside academe. She reminds the impatient that the economic roar of the Roaring Twenties was fueled by the assiduous efforts of the Harding (!) and Coolidge (♥) administrations to control public expenditures, wait out economic adjustment and thereby answer the distressed call for more public benefits with more private prosperity.

But, our friend Dr. Thurston might rejoin, what are we to do about the two trillions on which America's (evil, stupid, tasteless) rich corporations are sitting on? The answer includes: (a) understand how a recent crisis of liquidity encourages businesses to hold cash; (b) wait for the malinvestment of the previous boom, especially in real estate, to dissipate; (c) in the meantime improve the business climate by assuring reasonable tax rates (unburdened by policies that politically favor this or that kind of business activity), sound currency, and reasonably limited government activity; so that (d) when promising investment opportunities arise, as they always do, businesses will be ready to risk their capital on them; (e) thereby raising productivity and producing real economic growth from which all will benefit.

By the way, did anyone happen to notice that the austere balancing of Ohio's budget has already improved its bond rating, without the concomitant falling of the sky?

Looking for God? Blame Your Brain!

2011-07-18T11:30:00.000-04:00

Science Daily today abstracts some behavioral research indicating that the human brain naturally posits such religious thoughts as the existence of gods with superhuman abilities and the survival of the person after death or its existence before birth.

As one researcher put it:

This project suggests that religion is not just something for a peculiar few to do on Sundays instead of playing golf.

What does this "prove"?

One side would say that there's something dysfunctional about our neurology that makes us believe things that aren't empirically verifiable. For example, the fact that children give up thinking that their mothers can see everything but persist in believing that someone whom they can't see can see everything can be taken as evidence that we simply need to give up belief in what isn't empirical. It's childish, maybe rooted in an evolutionary cul-de-sac.

Meanwhile, the other side says that we seem to be designed to entertain such thoughts, perhaps by the one who wants us thereby to respond to his overtures.

How to choose? Well, this is but one of many factors to consider, isn't it? We think that it's rather hard to keep looking for the means to explain the persistence of human thought about god as dysfunction. Call that epistemological surrender. We've run out of excuses, so we concede to God.

Panetta Goes Off Message, Speaks Truth

2011-07-12T12:48:00.000-04:00

We're in Iraq because of 9/11.

We didn't say that. Leon Panetta, the most productive member of the Obama Administration, said that.

And, of course, it's true. No, the Taliban and Al Qaida weren't based in Iraq. But Saddam was part of the Middle Eastern nastiness that gives rise to such groups, and everyone in the neighborhood was glad to have him gone as part of the American response to the war coming to the homeland.

The Daily Beast article linked above is worth reading for its larger analysis as well, because it comes from the sublime Fouad Ajami, who makes more sense of the Middle East than anyone alive. We extensively quote:

Perhaps the rift over Iraq can never be healed. But in the presidency of Barack Obama, and the stewardship of Leon Panetta, we might yet come to a reckoning with Iraq’s place in the broader scheme of the Pax Americana. We have gains in Iraq, and they are worth protecting. We have not remade Iraq—it continues to test our patience, its leaders are given to the obligatory expressions of anti-Americanism typical of that Arab-Islamic landscape. The Iraqis need the American presence, and the American training and air cover, but are too proud and timid to admit it. We have not hatched a perfect democracy on the Tigris, and this we know. But the center holds in that country, and in proximity to the brutal regimes in Iran and Syria, Iraq appears to be a place where America had not labored in vain.

In this time of great turmoil in the Arab world, Iraq had not come apart, its army has not turned against its people. Panetta’s predecessor, Robert Gates, himself no friend of the Iraq War, conceded this truth about Iraq in his final days in office. In a tone of wonder, he said that Iraq has emerged as “the most advanced Arab democracy in the region.” Iraqis weren’t “in the streets shooting each other, the government wasn’t in the streets shooting its people,” he added. The scenarios of Iraq’s fragmentation along ethnic and sectarian lines—once so dear to Vice President Joe Biden—have not materialized. The Iraqi example hadn’t launched that Arab Spring, but there can be no denying the inspiration given Arabs beyond Iraq by the spectacle of Saddam Hussein being flushed out of his spider hole. He had been a proud rooster, and Arabs in Tunis and Cairo and Benghazi could henceforth imagine a similar fate for the roosters in their midst.

We needn’t trumpet in public that a residual American presence in Iraq would help monitor Iran next door. This would be no help to the Iraqis. In the nature of things, Iraq’s leaders will have to reiterate that they are neutral in the standoff between Iran and the United States, and that their country will not serve as a base for American military operations in Iraq’s neighborhood. Still, the American presence in Iraq will have a deterrent value in our dealings with Iran.

Let the erstwhile critics of the Iraq War now see, and defend, its gains. It would be too much to ask of them to own up to the errors of years past. Suffice it that they do the right thing, and that they nurture what their predecessors had secured.

More on the Marriage Watershed

2011-07-12T09:20:00.001-04:00

The NY gay marriage vote continues to resound. Because it represents the first legislative victory for same-sex marriage, and because it is coincident with polling that indicates a majority of Our Republic's citizens don't see gender as a significant issue in marriage, one can say with some justification that we are at a cultural watershed.

So what should Christians do without cultural support for the Christian ideal of faithful monogamy that they have enjoyed for centuries? Columnist Rod Dreher doesn't know exactly, but he states well the broad outline:

What church leaders need now is to have a frank conversation among themselves, and to come up with a strategy for survival in the age to come. No, I'm not talking about surviving a persecution (though that may yet come), but rather the survival of authentic Christianity in a culture that is growing increasingly alien, even hostile, to what, from a sociological point of view, could be its core teaching.

We urge careful reading of Dreher's column for its sober assessment of the miserable situation that the present presents. This is a jeremiad, but a justified one.

Historic Cringe Moment Approaches

2011-07-11T22:54:00.000-04:00

The inimitable and irrepressible James Taranto today articulates the First Rule of Liberalism: "government failure always justifies more government."

And it appears to be grimly so.

Having already passed an epic tax increase in the Orwellian-titled Affordable Care Act, BHO now holds out on necessary spending cuts for the sake of still more tax increases in the name of fairness. That's a trillion dollars of fairness, by the way. With a t. Apparently, fairness is taking as much of the public's money as possible in order to give it back to those favored by those who tax. And if half the populace already pays no federal income tax and 50% of the same is paid by 10% of the populace, it's merely proof that millionaires and billionaires aren't paying their fair share.

What are Republicans to do? Barter for as many spending cuts as they can manage, especially modifying the CPI adjustments to entitlement payments, tell the public that they gave in on taxes because the Dems were holding a loaded gun to the public's head, and then run the next campaign on tax relief.

We'll say it again: if it's been possible to run the federal government on less than 20% of GDP since WWII, why can't it be done now?

Westboro to Picket NACC: SWNID Advises Conventioneers

2011-07-07T00:06:00.000-04:00

The extended-family/publicity-stunt/mind-control-cult known as Westboro Baptist Church will be in Cincinnati on July 7 to picket the North American Christian Convention.

This will cause conventioneers much dismay. Some will attempt to argue. Others will attempt to break through with Random Acts of Kindness.

We recommend a third alternative. Really, we'd like to insist, but we might as well just recommend.

It's what we've recommended before:

Ignore them.

Don't argue. They like that, and they don't listen.

Don't do the kindness thing. It's still attention, which is what these folk crave.

Just ignore them. Really. It won't give you much heroic stature, but it will do less to fuel the Westboro fire than any alternative that presents itself.

Passenger Rail: Now By Definition a Boondoggle

2011-07-05T13:33:00.000-04:00

Michael Barone calls Our Republic's attention to Hawaii's bid to build a multi-billion-dollar heavy-rail passenger system in Oahu, most of it built through agricultural land or lightly populated suburbs.

N.B. that Oahu has a smaller population than any city with heavy-rail transit.

Why make such plans? For the opportunity to score "investment" dollars from a rail-happy Federal Chief Executive.

We could probably transport Oahu's commuters more cheaply by corporate jet.

Roast the Wild Goose

2011-07-05T10:29:00.000-04:00

It's worse than first described.

The Economist, believe it or not, offers a retrospective on Wild Goose. We doubt that the correspondent was trying to mischaracterize the event, so let's say that a thoughtful reader of the article would probably write "syncretism" in its margin.

Oh, and dumb Christian theology also. Note well that in all the church's historical disputes about the rite of baptism, a self-administered bath has never been countenanced, inasmuch as the act is supposed to signify something done to the helpless sinner. Not so at Wild Goose.

Note well, gentle readers, that said correspondent aptly describes the "emergent" folk as disaffected evangelicals, implying that many are disaffected because of personal problems with Dad and Mom. Emergent/emerging Christianity is like rock and roll, which has been aptly defined as "music that adolescents like because their parents hate it."

BHO Attempts Dynasty Building

2011-07-05T10:05:00.000-04:00

Joe Biden is out. Andy Cuomo is in. So sayeth the NY Post.

Given all factors there can be in a veep choice (balancing a ticket ideologically or regionally are the other issues, and Cuomo offers nothing for either), BHO's reasons are clear. Biden will not succeed to the throne after two BHO terms. Cuomo has presumptively presidential political potency and is young enough to lead his party for eight years.

We bet on this happening and will not take a bet against it succeeding. With every passing day, the GOP thinks wistfully of 1996, when it had a candidate of decent stature to lose against an embattled Democratic incumbent.

At Aspen Bill Clinton epitomized the situation well. Obama has enough to run on and not much to run against. He'll likely win.

We think that's especially the case because as the campaign wears on, voters in swing states (PA, FL, OH) that will decide the election will opt for the safe choice as they are underwhelmed by the alternative.

Those who care about governance, not just politics, still have something to do in 2012: elect a Republican-led Senate and re-elect a Republican House and Republican statehouses and governors' mansions. Divided we stand!

Wish We Could Have Been There!

2011-07-04T17:13:00.002-04:00

Douthat on Marriage of All Kinds

2011-07-04T11:47:00.001-04:00

SWNID has been working on an essay on the impact of same-sex marriage on marriage in general. But now that essays is almost entirely redundant. Ross Douthat, the Gray Lady's estimable token conservative Catholic (which is to say, someone who attempts to think Christian-ly), has done it for us.

Douthat surveys the potential points of impact, variously, that same-sex marriage will (a) make same-sex relationships more conservative and faithful than they have been heretofore; (b) make all marriages less faithful; (c) provide the means by which the relative faithfulness of a marriage will be negotiated by the partners.

Fair enough: we don't see any other likely permutations. But then Douthat gets the the heart of the matter: America's prosperous classes experimented with swinging a generation ago (as Updike chronicled, by the way), and discovered increased misery. Hence, marriage among the better off has become more stable most recently.

So here's the lesson that ought to be learned, but won't be learned often enough or deeply enough:

Institutions tend to be strongest when they make significant moral demands, and weaker when they pre-emptively accommodate themselves to human nature.

The Fourteenth to the Rescue

2011-07-02T11:06:00.000-04:00

As political brinksmanship livens up the cool, damp summer, a constitutional battle between the executive and legislature is now unfolding.

Congress, divided between two polarized political parties, cannot agree on a budget that will give its members political cover to raise the so-called debt ceiling. Default looms, with the specter of interest rates going up like Roman candles and the economy exploding into ashes like the same. Both sides trade political barbs about the other, with one side having the politics of class warfare as its only tool to keep its atrophied patrons in organized labor and leftist netroots happy, while the other, no less shameless in its employment of inane political rhetoric, at least pursue virtues of macroeconomic common sense.

Will the political impasse lead to economic collapse? We doubt it, thanks to the genius of the US Constitution.

On its way to ending discussion of the Union honoring Confederate war debts or paying reparations to slave owners (and leaving the question of reparations to slaves wide open, by the way), the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution begins its fourth section by stating flatly, "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned."

This clause gives the Obama administration reason to consider whether the President's oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States authorizes him to order the Treasury to issue debt to cover the spending that a feckless and spendthrift Congress has authorized. SWNID is no constitutional scholar, though our academic discipline bears a closer resemblance to such than to just about any other. But we venture the opinion that this interpretation of the Constitution is probably sounder than what has been done over a generation to the "commerce clause."

Go for it, Mr. President. Sell those bonds! It's your duty. We mean it, without the least hint of sarcasm. When husband tells wife, "Spend more than we have, but don't use the credit cards," the wife is justified in doing one or the other, but not both. If the federal marriage is to work, the one who does the spending and borrowing needs to be able to decide whether to do both or neither when the legislative instructions conflict.

For those who think that Congress rulz on such matters, or that the Supremes ought to settle it, we draw attention to the long history of such conflict, anticipated and even designed by the Framers, in our Republic's glorious history. Start with Jefferson, who refused to spend funds that Congress appropriated for what he deemed unconstitutional activity, and who then acted without Congressional authorization or explicit constitutional mandate to take advantage of Napoleon's real-estate clearance sale of "Louisiana." Go to the War Powers Act, the constitutionality of which every POTUS of both parties until BHO has refused to acknowledge since its Congressional inception in Our Republic's dark ages, now a mere political side show in our generation's history of low-level American warfare.

This stuff is our government at its finest. Americans think that they like the idea of Congress getting along with each other and with the President, but the truth is that we should be a little suspicious when that's the case. It's decades of agreement about government patronage that have us in this mess, so maybe we ought to embrace the dispute that's on the way to getting us out.

Who arbitrates such disputes? Voters. Sharpen your pencils for bubbling in on 06 Nov 2012, citizens!

PS: We note in passing that the President's ordering the Treasury to issue the debt would have the salutary effect of ending the charade of Congress separately authorizing deficit spending and a limit on the Treasury's authorization for borrowing. The authorization to spend implies the authorization to borrow, n'est se qua?

To Keep in Mind as "Millionaires and Billionaires" Get Taxed

2011-06-30T19:48:00.000-04:00

As the debt ceiling starts to fall in and politicians scramble to make their final points, we urge gentle readers to remember these immutable truths:

That effective tax rates (how much tax gets collected as a percentage of GDP) matter more than published marginal tax rates (how much of a particular band of income is officially taxed before credits and deductions).
That as tax rates declined over the last generation, tax receipts went up and the effective tax rate remained essentially constant.
That the so-called "tax breaks for the rich" enacted a decade ago yielded a more progressive pattern of tax collection, as roughly 50% of Our Republic's citizens now pay no federal income tax while the top percentiles pay the largest share of federal taxes.
That the tax on corporate jets proposed by the President would yield revenue equal to some tiny decimal of a percent of the federal deficit.
That people with control of wealth inevitably alter their economic decisions to avoid taxes when taxes are high.
That taxes on oil companies simply make petroleum products more expensive in the future.
That, as Milton Friedman pointed out a generation ago, the fundamental problem is not government debt but government spending: whether the government taxes a dollar or borrows it, by so doing the government decides what will be done with that dollar, and over time, governments tend to make poorer decisions about how to invest money than do private citizens. (Why? Because governments make decisions for political reasons, and citizens who handle their own money care a lot about how it's handled. That is, no one takes better care of your stuff than you.)

So SWNID expects that in the end, our Public Servants will agree to a lot of spending cuts, the elimination of a couple of fiscally insignificant tax deductions or credits, both sides will claim credit for themselves, assign blame to the other, fire up the base by noting the threat that the other side poses, and appeal to the center with fear about the future (Dems) or impatience with the present (GOP).

If only we could agree also that:

The real problem is massive malinvestment from the real estate bubble fed by low interest rates and government-sponsored borrowing incentives.
The business climate still is awful; hence, cash is sitting around waiting to be invested.
Insofar as federal policy can affect the business climate, it could do so positively by phasing narrowly defined tax credits while also gradually lowering tax rates. Effect: decisions would be made on economic merits instead of for tax-avoidance purposes, improving the quality and prudence of investment and lessening the boom and bust that are fed by tax policies that aim at social engineering.

We won't get any decline in business tax rates in return for an end to energy subsidies, for example. And the resulting tax revenue will not make much difference, and not nearly as much as the long-term growth fueled by a less complex, less restrictive tax code.

Historic Footage Provides Trenchant Political Analysis

2011-06-30T19:23:00.000-04:00

Is it a coincidence that this 31-year-old video is again available? You decide!

What If Alexander Campbell Were a Cool Guy from Cali with a Shaved Head?

2011-06-27T11:31:00.000-04:00

That's the question raised by yet another video clip featuring the hyper-popular Francis Chan (a SWNIDish hat tip to gentle reader Matt for providing the link):

Next up, we hope to be directed to the stuff that's lambasting Chan for taking this stance. If it's not there, we'll know we've reached a new stage in the reconsideration of the ordo salutis by North American evangelicals.

More Incarational Bibliology

2011-06-27T11:17:00.002-04:00

Here's part two of the article on the history of the Christian Bible by the theological writer with whom SWNID most often agrees.

How Not to Resuscitate a Dead Movement

2011-06-27T11:08:00.000-04:00

Emergent churches need to "reach the young people!" They're "just a generation away from extinction!" They've "got to be more appealing and relevant to a younger generation!"

So they're holding a camp with cool stuff like sprinkling each other with water, smearing each other with mud, listening to oldsters like Campolo and McLaren and Claiborne, celebrating liberation from 80s televangelists with the Bakker's son, and appropriating hyper-popular Celtic Christian images by calling the affair "Wild Goose," reportedly a Celtic metaphor for the Holy Spirit.

Doubtless, this brilliantly conceived affair will lure away droves of suburban evangelical kids into the clutches of the neo-Gnostics who comprise the Emergent Conspiracy. Who could resist the appeal of an event like this one?

Hide your kids. Hide your wife. And hide your husband.

The surest sign that a movement is dead is when it makes lame moves to attract the young folk.

Become a Political Anthropologist!

2011-06-25T01:10:00.000-04:00

For a glimpse of the politically exotic, we recommend a trip to BoldProgressives.org. These dudes hold to every hardline left position there is, with a take-no-prisoners kind of vengeance that makes the breath come in short pants.

We especially recommend that one take the "candidates survey," by which the organization hopes to identify True-Blue Progressives to give Americans what they truly want.

Apparently our nation is a mess because Democrats are compromising wimps about everything.

On the Religious Identity of Religious Colleges

2011-06-24T10:39:00.000-04:00

Cardinal Newman Society president Patrick J. Reilly weighs in on the controversial NLRB decision that St. Xavier University isn't Catholic enough to claim an exemption from federal labor law that would otherwise allow the university to prevent the organization of adjunct faculty. His point, simply put, is that the NLRB has no business deciding how religious an institution is.

SWNID, of course, agrees with Reilly in excoriating the NLRB, recalling that a group that cites Boeing for building a plant in SC hardly shows the discernment to mark the boundaries of the world's largest religion's largest denomination.

But we note nevertheless the dilemma for organizations like St. Xavier, namely, how to thrive in the mainstream of higher education and maintain a robust religious/sectarian identity.

Most Christian groups have started institutions of higher education. They do so because of the obvious convergence of higher-ed aims and religious aims: to nurture (a particular kind of) knowledge and wisdom in people. It's always a both/and proposition: our IHE will provide what all the good IHEs provide, plus a vital faith perspective that aligns with and supports the mission of our religious group.

And thus is born a litter of conflicts and dilemmas. Education is about personnel, and a growing IHE needs a lot of them, specifically of rare folk who are experts. Finding enough who can pull off the both/and proposition, who know their academic discipline and their faith, is daunting. Living in a world that prizes debate while standing for an orthodoxy is paradoxical, to say the least. Adhering to the explicit and implicit standards of the educational "mainstream" and of the religious community, both of which suffer chronic identity crises, is well nigh impossible to do singly, let alone in tandem.

So we sympathize with those ardent Catholics who find themselves in grief-stricken agreement with the NLRB. It's rather tough to see what makes most Roman Catholic institutions Roman Catholic these days, at least if one focuses on the content of instruction and the faith outcomes of students rather than the identity of senior administrators and the architecture of the campus.

Of course, the same pressures affect non-Catholic, Christian IHEs. A historical narrative that dominates the consciousness of many evangelical Christians is that of the institution that is founded on solid faith principles but over a few generations moves from ardent faith to nominal faith to anti-faith. Harvard, Yale, Princeton: gentle readers know the roster.

So, sensing the pressures and knowing the narrative, many live in fear that every move made by their sect's IHEs is another step in the inevitable decline of the IHE into rampant secularism.

And so we turn to the issue of the hour for those in SWNID's sect of choice: the renaming of IHEs. Those that once announced "Bible" in their names now call themselves "Christian." The "college" is now the "university." And now one has made the latter move while dropping altogether any adjective that boldly claims a distinctive: Johnson Bible College is now Johnson University.

And they're the object of scorn for so doing. And once again, SWNID finds ourself compelled to defend our colleagues in Tennessee.

First, let's realize the situation: while Roman Catholic IHEs are barely Catholic these days, and while many prominent IHEs that once were proudly Protestant are so no more, presently evangelical Protestant IHEs remain visibly committed to faith distinctives in ways that are readily noted and measured. Recent publications demonstrate what is obvious enough: that in the main (we aren't interested in naming exceptions), evangelical colleges demand curriculum and behaviors that go against the grain of the higher-ed mainstream. Like same-sex dorms, strictures on sex and alcohol, required courses in the faith tradition and its authoritative documents (a.k.a. the Bible), required attendance in worship, and all that. The same studies show that the students, in the main, do think and behave differently than their peers at mainstream institutions, and they do so gladly. Exceptions abound, but Christians who read their Bible know that exceptions are nothing new.

So despite their fears, evangelicals can chill out in the knowledge that their IHEs are mostly doing what they're supposed to be doing.

At the same time, evangelicals want their IHEs to expand their influence. They want a wider and broader population to attend, including some people who are less committed to the faith or the sect than they are at least interested in it (the notion is that many such will be persuaded, given what believers believe about the potency of the message). They want more opportunities for employment and influence for graduates (the notion is that such opportunities expand the reach of the potent message). So it would help if the prestige of the institution were enhanced too, inasmuch as institutional prestige tends to drive admission to graduate and professional schools, employment opportunities, and other avenues of influence (a.k.a. wealth, but we won't talk about that).

At the same time, evangelicals want their IHEs to be what they've always been: homogeneous institutions that serve their supporting sect by keeping the sect's progeny safe from outside influences and ready to serve in the sect's institutions.

[Please forgive our repeated use of "sect": we employ it as a social descriptor, not as a disparagement.]

So, how can an institution be mainstream and sectarian simultaneously? It is, of course, a paradox.

But to the case of JBC/JU. What drove the decision to rename this storied IHE?

The institution has answered that question clearly, and at length. We summarize.

First, "college" doesn't signify "postsecondary education" in global English as it does in American English. "University" does. Johnson is an IHE with a global mission. 'Nuf said.

Second, any modifiers in an institution's name that indicate a distinctively Christian identity are problematic for people who come from or want to go to countries where religion is regulated, i.e. countries where a majority of the world's peoples reside. Take a big one, for example: China, where Johnson has developed significant ties. Johnson's Christian friends in the People's Republic quietly told Johnson's leaders that anything in the institution's name like "Bible" or "Christian" will create problems with the government. As to that once-popular placeholder for such terms, "International," Johnson's Chinese friends said, rightly, that this term has become associated with institutions of questionable quality and integrity (that is no reflection on Hope International University, gentle readers, and we mean that).

As to one expedient--operating under two names, one explicitly Christian for domestic consumption and the other a "DBA" that omits the Christian label--why do so? If someone wants to suspect the institution because it omits a Christian label, the suspicion is hardly put to rest if the institution does so with an assumed name.

So what is the result? Johnson University, obviously.

And you'd think that the devil went down to Kimberlin Heights. The internet is alight with "SMH" remarks about how a once proud Bible college is now ashamed, ashamed of the faith and its authoritative book.

Mind you, Johnson, as it always has, requires a major in biblical studies of every student. Mind you, students at Johnson who aren't aiming at a career in ministry deal every day, as do students at many similar IHEs, with a campus culture that barely acknowledges the presence of students who won't earn their living from the church.

But Johnson University has lost the faithful way on which Johnson Bible College once tread proudly.

Folks, get real. Take the measure of the moment. Make factual comparisons, not fanciful ones to a selectively remembered, idealized past and a counterfactual present. Realize what you've got, which is some of the leading institutions of higher ed that are deliberately pursuing a distinctive approach to higher ed, one that is intensely focused on biblical instruction, that is faith-active and not just faith-based, that has always graduated more than preachers but still graduates more, better preachers, in balance with demand, than most other contemporary institutions.

Remember that there are narratives besides "faithful college goes secular." Like "faithful college grows out of touch," "faithful college turns inward," or "slander assassinates character."

Rowling Performs Avada Kedavra on Publishing

2011-06-24T09:08:00.000-04:00

And speaking of survival of the fittest . . .

J. K. Rowling is allowing digital publishing of the Harry Potter franchise.

Well, sort of.

Rowling has announced that she will self-publish Potter ebooks. Welcome to the World of Pottermore.

We hope you sold your Scholastic stock yesterday.

Rowling's move provides all kinds of advantages to her, and probably to readers too. She now controls the price and presentation of her work in digital form. Of course, she also controls all the profits, which is exactly as it should be if she can also manage distribution.

And she can. The great advantage of ebooks is that they can be distributed without the massive manufacturing, warehousing, and shipping efforts of traditional publishers. Talented authors and talented editors can now partner up as individuals, then join themselves to talented marketers to get their stuff out to the world's billions more or less instantaneously. And, if the laws of economics have not been repealed, more cheaply too.

This raises a significant question for many authors, we believe, especially academic authors, especially Christian academic authors. Few such creatures make much money on their publications, and so few depend on that income for their survival. Most publish for the contribution that their ideas make to their academic/faith communities and the world at large. And of course, for the the prestige attached to publication. If they did it for the money, they'd be writing other stuff, like The Purpose-Driven, Left-Behind Prayer of Jabez That Provides Chicken Soup for the Left-Handed Bowler's Soul. With pictures of themselves on the cover, of course.

Getting a publisher to publish one's book is, in such circles, an endorsement of quality more than a necessity of publishing. Self-publishing ventures have existed for quite awhile, but because they were tied to paper publishing, they had paper-publishing costs, which had to be underwritten by authors. And their distribution stank. So at least to avoid out-of-pocket costs and to get the book in people's hands, authors in the faith/academic niche needed publishers, whose editorial decision then provided readers with an endorsement of quality.

But such is no longer necessary. Now it's possible to do exactly what Rowling has done, bypassing the middle man. Endorsements can come from the same people that the publishers have solicited for dust-jacket blurbs: already-established folk in the field (we won't digress into a discussion of the awful churning of clichés that such blurbs actually are, but if we did, what we wrote would be "destined to become a standard work that will be consulted by scholars and students in the field for the next generation").

So we expect in the coming months and years to see aggregations of scholars/leaders creating digital editing/promotional cooperatives to bypass established publishers, taking their wares directly to their publics. That'll drive down cost, expand offerings, make possible quicker translation and distribution of materials in languages other than English . . .

. . . and maybe provide a more effective means of circulating ideas. Why? Because the capital investment in production and distribution will have been reduced to the point where investors will not have a stake in keeping bad ideas alive, as they did when they were printed on expensively produced remains of majestic trees.

We'll see the emergence of operations rather like Project Gutenberg, which has made the public domain truly public.

Adieu, Eerdmans! Farewell, Baker! Adios, T. & T. Clarke! Your reluctance to embrace digital technology is regrettable, but in the end it will be inconsequential. Authors rule now.

Worthwhile Dip into Origins Controversy

2011-06-24T08:41:00.000-04:00

AOL/HuffPost blogger Jonathan Dudley has a decently thoughtful polemic piece on the problems of young-earth creationism for Christian believers. We find it most useful for its litany of unsolved problems in young-earth creationism, which, to borrow a paleontological phrase, merely scratches the surface. For those who are used to hearing polemical pieces that list problems with Darwinian evolution, the list should at least provide some measure of reflective concern. The reality is that the convergence of evidence for an old universe with an old earth on which living things developed over time is ginormous, while the reasons to think that evolution is antibiblical hinge on interpretations of "day" and "kind" in Genesis 1 that are at best debatable. And the biblical refrain, "Before the mountains were formed" suggests something rather more ancient than "a week ago last Tuesday."

We're not sure how Dudley links the ignoring of science in young-earthism to his closing remarks about mistakes regarding the etiology of homosexuality or the value of stem-cell research. We assume those are teasers to induce purchase of his book. We aren't teased enough to part with our hard-earned earnings, however. Call that "survival of the fittest."

Is New York City the Most Hostile-to-Christians City in North America?

2011-06-23T10:13:00.000-04:00

Maybe so.

The indispensable Terry Mattingly details the controversy (about to be a crisis for many churches in NYC) precipitated by the US Second Circuit Court's ruling that NYC public schools can rightfully exclude religious groups from renting facilities for worship, overturning the effect of a decade-old Supreme Court ruling that religious groups are entitled to the same access as nonreligious ones.

The argument is based on the notion that holding a worship service somehow transforms the space into something other than what that space is. Oddly enough, that seems to concede to religious groups a power not available to nonreligious peoples, the ability to do a kind of sacramental magic.

Of course, the religious groups renting NYC churches are almost without exception evangelicals who eschew sacramentalism in its more magical manifestations. So it's the opponents of these groups, not the groups themselves, with the overestimate of the religion's mystical powers, it seems.

Mattingly notes what's really at work here: a deep-seated fear of evangelicalism among NYC's prosperous, nervous hipsters. SWNID has seen that fear in our limited involvement in ministry in NYC, as dark rumors have circulated in chatrooms and bulletin boards about sinister evangelicals infiltrating NYC from the benighted "Midwest" and "South," having attended shadowy academies of brainwashing to become "church planters," luring people into a mind-control cult that oppresses women, gays and minorities by offering them coffee, casseroles and camaraderie. Light the torches! Gather the pitchforks! Throw them tarred and feathered into the Hudson!

All this comes despite the self-conscious, deliberate, consistent efforts of these churches to reach out with meaningful, sacrificial gestures of love and acceptance. No one said that this would be easy: quite the opposite, in fact. Seeds and soils and all that.

This is serious: we know of at least one established congregation with a decade of happy relations with the school from which it rents that now has about two weeks to find another locale for services unless something gets reversed.

An Incarnational Bibliology

2011-06-20T08:51:00.000-04:00

The theological writer with whom SWNID agrees most tried mightily to avoid the clichés attendant to the subject when asked to write an article on "how we got the Bible" as part of a year-long celebration of the 400th anniversary of the KJV. This is part one of the result.

Part two appears next week. The author overwrote.

The aim is to not just to answer the usual questions about how the Bible arose but to provide a practical theological context: though the Bible doesn't match what many people think a divinely inspired book ought to look like, those differences arise largely out of its being the product of history, reflecting the work of the God who works in history, especially by entering history in the person of Jesus.

Incarnational theology is messy, and so is the Bible. People who object to the mess are simply asking for another kind of god, one who doesn't address us in our untidy humanity, which we really don't want addressed because we'd prefer not to acknowledge it.

Not just a river in Egypt and all that.

SBC Condemns NIV. Sisters and Brothers Shrug.

2011-06-17T10:38:00.001-04:00

The increasingly inward looking, numerically declining and institutionally sclerotic Southern Baptist Convention has condemned the 2010 revision of the New International Version of the Bible for its use of gender-neutral language.

And no one cares.

SWNID won't review the silliness of the controversy about gender neutrality in the translation of the Bible, except to say that it is linguistically legitimate because the relationship between sense (a particular word's specific definition in a particular setting) and referent (the thing in the world to which the word refers in a particular setting) can vary from language to language and era to era (in Greek adelphoi has the sense "brothers" but readily refers to members of both sexes, not so the English "brothers" in much usage presently).

Well . . . and also to say that the NIV does not extend gender-neutrality to language about God, who remains "Father" and "Son." SWNID isn't down with those who ignore the historically countercultural stance of the Bible in eschewing the pervasive depiction of deities as women.

Rather, we observe that the SBC, once the "anchor of evangelicalism" as an SBC conventioneer described it still, has through its recent generation of internal squabbling, politicking and recriminating, become so inwardly focused that its once rapid rate of expansion has become a rate of slow decline. Christians with ties to the SBC who care about what the NIV translators cared about have or eventually will migrate out, to churches of other denominations and no denomination who do deliberately and well what SBC churches used to do deliberately and well: invite people to follow Jesus and nurture them in the subsequent following.

Those who prefer to find inconsequential issues on which to separate themselves as the "true church" from others who claim to follow Jesus will continue to find a big, big house in the SBC, one with "lots and lots of [empty] rooms."

Incidentally, we collate, if not correlate, the increasingly inward focus of the SBC with the triumph of Reformed dogma among its visible leadership. Once known for its commitment to evangelism, the SBC is now known for spokesmen like Albert Mohler, who can precisely split any hair, indifferent to the evangelistic consequences because it's all been preordained anyway.

There's an eerie similarity between the insistence that adelphoi not be translated "brothers and sisters" and the insistence that "because all sinned" means that Adam's sin made all humanity guilty and unable to respond to the gospel without a divine zap. It's a habit of reading Scripture to find what has always been found, a commendable commitment to historic orthodoxy if one recognizes the historic debates and the historical constraints on them but an excuse for reactionary self-absorption otherwise. Ironically enough, the Reformed shouldn't worry so much about their biblical translations, since for them the Spirit is mediating the message directly anyway, with the Word as a coincident element not strictly necessary to the process except by divine fiat. Really, aren't those who will be misled by "brothers and sisters" just proving by their being misled that they are predestined to perdition?

CUA Eliminates Co-Ed Dorms. Duh!

2011-06-17T09:34:00.000-04:00

To much publicity, Catholic University of America is phasing out co-ed housing. Why? To battle the epidemic of binge drinking and hooking up, which are integrally related, of course.

We offer two SWNIDish observations.

First, this is one of the few noticeable moves of late by a large Catholic university to do something Christian (as opposed to Catholic in a sectarian way, like de-certifying non-Catholic Christian groups on campus). Per recent research, Catholic universities, like IHEs with lingering ties to mainline Protestant denominations but unlike evangelical institutions, have students whose beliefs and behaviors are virtually indistinguishable from their counterparts at Big State U.

Second, this move exposes the hypocrisy of institutions that claim to be concerned about binging and hooking up (mostly the former, of course). Colleges make much of their efforts to promote safe drinking, given that parents don't want their youngsters self-poisoning while away at the prestige factory preparing for survival in the upper middle class). Some college presidents have of late advocated the contrarian position that a lower drinking age would lead to less binging, as underage undergrads would be liberated to drink in the open, where it's harder to overindulge. Never mind, of course, that European nations with lower legal drinking ages see parallel problems at younger ages: a lower legal drinking age makes the underage issue the high-school principal's problem.

Colleges have co-ed housing for one reason: it's easier to administer. If the number of students of either gender can flexibly be housed in any and every room on campus, the college doesn't need to sweat some of the particulars of shaping and managing their entering cohorts. The fact that even in our culture of lewdness many (most?) students would prefer to live in single-sex dorms is immaterial, as is the demonstrable fact that students behave more safely in same-sex housing.

So we think that CUA's move will not spark a trend. The interests of colleges are too entrenched to let a little thing like behavioral patterns interfere with policies of self-interest.

And as to current CUA students' complaints that they will be hindered in making leading-to-marriage friendships, we believe that nubile youngsters will still manage to find each other somehow.

Why Mormons Run Companies

2011-06-17T09:16:00.000-04:00

Because their church's work ethic, corporate structure, volunteer culture, and quasi-requirement of a two-year mission stint inculcate skills and habits that make for success in business.

For a peek, see this extensive article in Business Week.

SWNID Has Worked at This Place

2011-06-17T08:28:00.001-04:00

We have experienced this aggressive type of objectivity. Have you?

How to Obey the Golden Rule: Illness Unit

2011-06-15T09:41:00.000-04:00

Since mortality is endemic and serious sickness commonly precedes death, we think that everyone ought to listen to what seriously sick people and formerly seriously sick people say about what they need from other people when they're seriously sick. So this little article in Sunday's Gray Lady is required reading for humans who think that doing to others what you'd want them to do to you is the way to go. Cancer survivor and journalist Bruce Feiler lists dumb things that people say and helpful things that they say and especially do (summary on that point: just take up some practical task without asking what needs to be done).

So why do healthy human say so many stupid things to sick humans? The SWNIDish view is that we have an underdeveloped capacity for empathy because in our efforts to do right, we keep thinking about ourselves instead of the people we are supposed to be loving. Our interior question is, "How can I do the right thing?" instead of "What would it be like to be that person, and what would that person need from someone like me?" The first question is not bad, but the second is more direct, and more in keeping with that important story about the God who becomes human and lets himself be tortured and killed for undeserving rebels: it's focused on the object, not the subject, of love.

Sometimes the answer to the object-oriented question is, "I would want almost nothing except to know that I still matter in my weakened state and then to be left alone to rest." Which we hate, because we healthy friends want to end up the beloved hero in the drama. Hence our failure.

Francis Chan Is a Campbellite!

2011-06-14T22:19:00.001-04:00

Maybe better than a Campbellite:

The last time SWNID heard something this good on the subject, we were in a Baptist church in Scotland. It seems that the best sermons on the Campbellite theology are delivered by non-Campbellites.

In our non-blogging life, we've written about the growing consensus around what the Stone-Campbell Movement has historically said about baptism. Chan is now a notable example. Thanks, St. Francis! See you at the NACC!

The Satanic Verses of Ayn Rand

2011-06-09T07:06:00.000-04:00

We give a hearty SWNIDish recommendation to Joe Carter's First Things discourse on the connections between Anton LeVey's Satanic Bible and Ayn Rand's so-called Objectivist so-called philosophy.

There's no need to elaborate except to excommunicate from the SWNIDish community anyone who doesn't read the article, expect the die-hard members of Rand's fan club to express indignation, and provide a delectable morsel of quotation:

You can replace the pentagrams of LeVayian Satanism with the dollar sign of the Objectivists without changing much of the substance separating the two. The ideas are largely the same, though the movements’ aesthetics are different. One appeals to, we might say, the Young Libertarians, and the other attracts the Future Wiccans of America.

What is harder to understand is why both ideologies appeal to Christians and conservatives. My guess is that these groups are committing what I’d call the fallacy of personal compatibility. This fallacy occurs when a person thinks that because one subscribes to both “Belief X” and “Belief Y,” the two beliefs must therefore be compatible. For example, a person may claim that “life has meaning” and that “everything that exists is made of matter” even though the two claims are not compatible (unless “meaning” is made of matter). This take on the fallacy has long been committed by atheists. Now it appears to be growing in popularity among conservatives and Christians as well.

But to be a follower of both Rand and Christ is not possible. The original Objectivist was a type of self-professed anti-Christ who hated Christianity and the self-sacrificial love of its founder. She recognized that those Christians who claimed to share her views didn’t seem to understand what she was saying.

P.S.: Don't miss the delightful way that Carter opens his provocation of an essay.

If You Don't Have a Landline, You're Against High-Speed Rail

2011-06-05T20:42:00.000-04:00

Americans are shedding their landlines. Why? Because they're an expensive redundancy.

If Bell's wired telephone had not yet been invented but the mobile phone existed, would anyone bother to implement a plan to build a landline infrastructure? Of course not.

And this is no merely theoretical construct. In countries where landline infrastructure has been underdeveloped, mobile phone service is expanding at breakneck pace. It's a lot easier and cheaper to put up a cell tower than to run cable everyplace.

Which is why high-speed rail is silly. You can fly with massively less infrastructure investment. Airplanes, like mobile phone signals, don't need physical connections between origin and destination.

Michael Barone notes today how completely silly is our Department of Transportation's determination to build HSR in California, beginning with a link in an underpopulated area and with the eventual goal of allowing businesspeople to travel from LA to SF quickly, something they already do on airplanes. Everyone who has thought about the economics of telecommunication should understand how deeply silly this idea is.

Saying Well the Obvious About Osteen

2011-06-03T11:40:00.002-04:00

For those who rightly despise Joel Osteen, Baylor English prof Greg Garrett has a nicely turned-out "open letter" of rebuke at Patheos. There's no great insight here, just a nicely crafted statement of what all who understand the Gospel understand about Osteen. As in this:

You and other Prosperity Gospel preachers advance a vision of God that is transactional: if you do this, then God will do that. He has to, in fact. Because a verse here or there in the Bible says so, however little it reflects God's actual redemptive work in the world.

And I'm here to tell you, Sir, in the same language I use with anyone who imagines we can be in a transactional relationship with God, that this isn't what Christian faith is. Praying the right prayer often enough to get what you want, believing really hard in Jesus to get what you want are not true to the Christian story, or to logic. To imagine that you, or your followers, or the person out in the bookstore or TV land who is exposed to your message somehow influences the God of the Universe, the Creator of All That Is, by his or her personal actions is not belief in God.

It's belief in magic. Put your hands together, say a few faithful words, and the Universe will give you what you ask.

College, too easy for its own good

2011-06-02T07:40:00.000-04:00

College, too easy for its own good

Yes, it probably is in a lot of cases. Colleges have given in to the demands of their market for less engaged study and more of everything else. Mediocre students and mediocre colleges are complicit with one another in this regard.

We fully expect a bunch of sardonic affirmation, accompanied by finger pointing. So we gently point out that this situation need not materially affect any student at any college. If your courses don't demand much of you and your peers are fine with that, American college student, then go to the library and educate yourself. That's how it's always been done. The best students have never, at any institution, confined their education to the syllabus.

OK, let the rounds of self-righteous condemnation begin. Tell the world how you're so much better than those students and so superior to the place where you studied and got ripped off.

If You Dislike Being Called Sanctimonious, Don't Act Sanctimoniously

2011-06-01T09:00:00.000-04:00

The SWNIDish contempt for Jim Wallis is well known. His stentorian voice notwithstanding, Wallis is the epitome of the sixties relic who, as far as we can tell, has never questioned that the agenda of the political left is God's agenda. Feeding on the disillusionment and alienation of those who find the Religious Right repugnant (and who doesn't, really: those Philistines have no fashion sense whatsoever), Wallis asserts rather than argues, seduces rather than convinces. His persuasive appeal is moral superiority: we of the Christian Left really take the message of the Bible seriously, especially the canon within the canon that is Jesus and the Hebrew Prophets (which, by the way, would be a decent name for a rock band), as read by us in an anachronistic way that employs all the hermeneutical tricks that we decry when used by the Religious Right.

And he does all this sanctimoniously, we might add.

Recently our attention was drawn to the Rev. Wallis's collaborative blog. Its title is "God's Politics."

That's enough for us. Without a hint of irony, without the slightest note that the political implications of Christian faith have been a topic of lively debate for about two millennia, without the least acknowledgement that one might be earnestly mistaken, without self-depreciating humor, Wallis poses as a prophet.

It's been a generation since sixties radicals became self-parodies. Why isn't Wallis in on the joke yet?

Let bloggers everywhere imitate the lightly enlightened example of this blog: in the brashly narcissistic act of sharing your random thoughts with the world's billions, make self-depreciating fun of your pretensions via your blog title and other cute little acts of sarcasm. Don't admit directly that you're an arrogant idiot, or you'll seem sorry for yourself, in the dreadful manner of the passive-aggressive. Make your egotistical predicament the first joke, so that you get it out of the way early, clearing the ground for whatever provocation to thought that you can provide.

Maybe just add a question mark to the title of that blog, Rev. Wallis. It would imply something like, "We Report: You Decide."

More Tired Equating of Socialism with Christian Morality

2011-05-30T08:33:00.000-04:00

John Boehner was given an honorary doctorate by the Catholic University of America.

Some Roman Catholic bishops and theologians objected, saying that Boehner's budget policies oppress the poor in ways that violate the Magesterium of the Church.

No one paid attention.

E. J. Dionne said it's because the bishops and theologians were too civil.

We, with American Spectator's George Neumayr, disagree. We think that the public thinks and journalists quietly realize that the objectors were engaged in a worn out version of special pleading.

Here's Neumayr:

It is an old and crude attempt to identify left-wing politics with Catholic "Social Justice," a claim in a time of massive deficits that most people don't find terribly convincing anymore. The letter to Boehner is an obvious abuse of the concept of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church by academics who normally pride themselves on violating it. And these self-proclaimed champions of the poor aren't doing them any favors by trying to pressure Catholic lawmakers into clinging to policies that will eventually bankrupt government programs. As the poor in Spain are finding out, where welfare programs are being severely scaled back after years of prodigal spending, socialists take a knife to the safety net once they start to go bankrupt.

There's nothing more muddle-headed than equating leftism with compassion. Except that the left must love the poor, because their policies assure that we'll always have so many of them.

Ascension, Plato and the Bible

2011-05-30T08:26:00.000-04:00

One of the better pieces of biblical theology that we've read lately is Fr. Robert Barron's Ascension, Plato and the Bible, posted at RealClearReligion. It captures the essence of what puzzles many contemporary readers of the Bible--what is Jesus' ascension all about--and rightly corrects the nasty neo-Platonism that infects too much casual Christian thinking.

We add only that as narrated in Acts, Jesus' ascension did seem to involve his visibly going up into the sky, as a visible symbol of going to the ouranos, meaning either "sky" or "God's place." We're sure that Fr. Barron would agree.

How to Disable Fred Phelps

2011-05-29T18:25:00.000-04:00

The model Christians of Westboro Baptist are at it again, planning to make their characteristically cruel and false statements in Joplin, and just in time for the big public service of memorial. Current word is that bikers streamed to Joplin to block the Reverend Phelps and his klan.

We don't know whether any blocking actually happened, and we look forward to ignoring further reports. We have tired not just of Mr. Phelps but of the constant indignation that so many citizens, most especially Christian citizens, express against him.

We think that instead of organizing resistance to his protests, the only way to deal with such as Mr. Phelps is for all others to become utterly united . . . in ignoring him entirely.

Mr. Phelps thrives on other people's anger, the only form of attention he can get. So all 300 million of us need to stop paying any attention to him. Then he's finished for good.

Let him continue to make outrageous statements at sensitive public events. Let him spray-paint the Washington Monument with his signature slogan. Let him appear at half time at the Super Bowl and have his own wardrobe malfunction.

But if we all ignore him, he's powerless forever.

Of course, it won't happen. It's more fun to fight with idiots than to ignore them.

Which is why we blog.

On Energy Subsidies

2011-05-23T13:15:00.000-04:00

Barack Obama is presently waging faux populism on "Big Oil."

Let it be noted that SWNID favors ending special tax breaks and subsidies for Big and Little Oil.

But sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. SWNID also insists on an end to subsidies and tax breaks for Big Ethanol, Big Wind, Big Solar, Big Biomass, Big Coal, Big Gas, Big Hydro, and Big Nuclear.

Mr. President, set a five-year schedule for winding down all energy subsidies and most agricultural subsidies (which happen to push up food prices while stifling development in the parts of the world that need developing). Then let freedom ring Adam Smith's bell until we have a more rational distribution of economic resources that serves the common need for energy.

This isn't about who is getting rich and who isn't. We don't care if the rich get rich, as long as everyone can be better off. Exxon's profits don't make SWNID poorer, and confiscating them for some federal boondoggle won't improve the SWNIDish quality of life one bit.

This isn't about what's fair and what isn't, though that's closer. Fairness in the tax code is a tough concept to define, let alone attain, though there's no obvious answer as to why one business should have tax advantages over another. We refuse to engage in the game that argues whether this or that group deserves a special break for some high-minded reason that's usually thinly disguised self-interest.

This is about marcoeconomics, about efficiency as markets, over time, judge that better than does politics. Because in the end, it's always politics that decides who gets a break on their taxes. Always.

Which is why the populism is faux.

Circle closed.

Draft Mitch!

2011-05-22T07:59:00.000-04:00

Or vote Pawlenty.

Daniels says he won't run. Blah.

Guy We Know Says It's Not the End of the World

2011-05-20T23:46:00.000-04:00

There's an old-looking guy in this video who we think knows better than Harold Camping what is and isn't going to happen on May 21, 2011:

Why Religious Studies and Theology Are Not the Same

2011-05-20T11:02:00.000-04:00

Joseph Campbell is widely revered in the academy as the Father of Religious Studies, or at least he is so revered by Bill Moyers.

Today the SWNIDish interface with g-mail highlighted this quotation, attributed to Professor Campbell:

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

Ha ha.

This is why SWNID has learned so little through the years from scholars of religious studies. The discipline is largely controlled by people like Campbell who work with uselessly inaccurate generalizations.

We can't say as much about the various lower-case, plural gods of the Hebrew Bible, but we don't think that "rules" were what distinguished them. Animistic and fertility gods are less noted for their rules than for their capriciousness, as far as we know. Maybe that's another uselessly inaccurate generalization.

But we think that Campbell was really thinking of the upper-case, singular God of the Hebrew Bible and only used the plural to deflect the charge of anti-Jewish and anti-Christian offensiveness. That God is routinely labeled an unmerciful rule-maker. And nothing could be farther from the truth.

The God of the Hebrew Bible gives rules, to be sure. And he also routinely exercises patience with people who break them. Like every single character of the Hebrew biblical narrative. It's hard to believe that someone could know that the central story of the Hebrew Bible is the Exodus and could then claim that the God of the Hebrew Bible shows no mercy.

Campbell loved to talk about "myth," which he said is poetry, not untruth. Fair enough. But when one's description of the "myth's" content is not factual when compared to the texts that embed it, we have a meta-myth, which is a falsehood: the unfairly inaccurate characterization of the God of Israel as a legalistic meanie.

Boo.

Even Tim LaHaye Thinks Harold Camping Is Wrong

2011-05-19T05:51:00.000-04:00

"Save the Date" happens Saturday, May 21, 2011, when Christian radio owner and blasphemer Harold Camping says Jesus is coming back (secretly to snatch the true church out of the world and trigger the Great Tribulation, blah, blah, blah).

Even Tim LaHaye, multimillionaire owner of the Left Behind series, knows that this is bunk, as he manages to say on his "Left Behind" web site. The date may be the only significant detail of the future that Mr. LaHaye doesn't at least imply that he knows, but there you have it.

This Saturday, we expect some people to be disappointed, some to be scornful, Mr. Camping to release a statement revising his estimates, and few to be impressed with what ought to impress: that the promises of the Christian gospel cogently address the universal human longings both for justice and for mercy, making acute sense of our otherwise benighted lives. Over the longer term, we think that the few will become more, with no thanks to Mr. Camping's Christ-dishonoring, self-exalting efforts. The good news is strong enough to penetrate through this nonsense.