From our Correspondent in Venezuela

The best news from the western hemisphere this year is doubtless the defeat of Hugo Chavez's proposed constitutional amendments in Venezuela. The prospect of Venezuela becoming a permanently socialist state is seriously diminished by this amazing event.

But times are still hard in Venezuela. We quote one of our correspondents who describes the present situation:

There is a real crisis regarding basic necessities. There is a lack of milk, sugar, oil, toilet paper, etc. Sometimes you have to wait for hours in line to be given simply one package per person. I believe this is contributing to an environment of hate and violence, which is affecting everyone, even Christians. For instance, last week a lady asked me to pray for her – specifically, for God to remove that hatred she felt for the president and his followers. She said that this hatred was totally consuming her. So we prayed with her and tried to exhort her, but just as she said, many brothers and sisters in the church are feeling the same way too.

Press Conference with the Hero

Knowing that some of our gentle readers have accepted the grim responsibility to protect the general welfare and safety of others with the threat of deadly force, we point out the impressive press conference with Jeanne Assam, the security guard who neutralized the shooter at New Life Church of Colorado Springs.

Feel free to proceed with discussion as to the awful necessity of law enforcement using deadly force, the somber wisdom of concealed carry, the solemn inescapability of just war, or related topics. We stand aloof, as the matter is by now self evident.

Very Local Artistic Expression

Many readers of this blog will appreciate the local culture reflected in this fine "music" video:

From Our Correspondent in Iraq

This message comes to us from a brother who serves in the United States Armed Forces in Iraq (emphasis SWNIDishly inserted):

Iraq is getting quite boring, er...I mean stable. The Iraqis are doing a good job in taking back their country. Their army and police force grows by the day, and IED attacks are going down quite a bit. The region is not yet stable, but with time, it will be. I only hope the American public can grow to realize that to do anything worthwhile takes time.

No need for us to to editorialize.

Romney's Religion Speech: Well Done, Not Enough, Amusing on One Point

Yesterday Mitt Romney finally delivered his much-needed speech on his Mormon religion, read with interest by our SWNIDish self. We believe that the speech was superbly conceived and well crafted, contained all that it should have contained, sounded themes crucial to the American pluralistic republic, and will not prove sufficient to overcome people's reluctance about Romney's religion.

What's right about the speech was this: it clearly articulated the notion that voters should consider a candidate on the basis of the values that the candidate shares with the voter. And Romney can make a very strong case that as a Mormon, he shares values that other religious Americans share.

What's to us interesting about the speech is this: Romney did what in our experience LDS folk generally do. He tried to articulate common ground with Christians by making what is ostensibly an orthodox Christological confession. Of course, the problem with that is that many Christians know that Mormons don't mean what other Christians have historically meant when they say "son of God" or "savior of the world." Someone in his camp should have warned that people are very aware that he doesn't mean what they mean by these words. And indeed, Romney did acknowledge as much. But it seems to be part of the LDS DNA to say this nevertheless.

What's politically true about the speech, from our SWNIDish POV, is this: Romney probably took some gas out of Mike Huckabee's tank by shaming some evangelical voters into reconsidering Romney despite his Mormonism. However, we expect that the general reluctance to vote for a Mormon will nevertheless fatally handicap Romney in the end. And we think that for two reasons.

One is particular. As a Campbellite whose ecclesiastical experience has always been avowedly apolitical, we are amazed that many evangelical pastors consider it their responsibility to tell their congregations which candidate to vote for.* And quite naturally, those pastors who undertaken this responsibility and who have spent their time telling folks that the LDS church is a cult are highly reluctant to endorse Romney. We have heard such folk say as much, and we are once again prompted to thankfulness not to be saddled with such a problem for ourselves. But we expect that a significant minority of evangelicals will never consider Romney, forgetting that they are voting for a chief executive and not a theologian, thereby depleting his potential base of support.

The other is a bigger issue, we believe. In Papa George Romney's time, Americans thought that religion was what a person did at church and on holidays, that it has little influence on their decision making. That notion was reflective of the era and articulated in John Kennedy's justly famous speech in which he declared that the bishops wouldn't tell him what to do as President (and indeed, Kennedy's personal life demonstrated just how true that declaration was). However, today people have returned to the idea that what a person believes about God has a lot to do with the decisions that person makes on a daily basis. And most people, not just evangelicals, think that Mormonism is goofy. They can't bring themselves to take seriously the ideas that Jesus came to North America, that Joseph Smith got temporary loan of golden tablets and special spectacles, that when the right people die they start populating their own universes, and other distinctive Mormon notions. And they have trouble trusting a man who believes such things, despite his impressive record as an executive in business and government.

What is amusing to us is this: Romney equates the early persecution of the followers of Joseph Smith with the religious intolerance early in the history of the New England colonies. While there's probably much to dislike about the treatment of proto-Mormons, our take is that people thought that a polygamous religious group overtly trying to set up a theocracy was, well, socially threatening. In other words, it was precisely because they had rejected the theocratic intolerance of New England that they were hostile toward the Smith, Young & Co. This speech surely was not the place to admit that, but neither was it the place to raise the issue in a way that invited someone to point it out.

Finally, we declare again that we think Mitt Romney would make a fine President. With Our Man Rudy, he shares a characteristic not found among any of the other candidates of either party: significant and highly successful executive experience.

But Rudy remains Our Man. And here's why: we think that Romney might prove to be the Republicans' Michael Dukakis, that is, a demonstrably capable governor who proves too wonkish to woo a national electorate.

So we'll trade Romney's religious baggage for Rudy's personal baggage, admittedly an uneven trade, to get Rudy's passionate engagement.

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*Explanation of the obvious: yes, we know that we endorse candidates all the time here. But we do it not because it is some kind of pastoral responsibility but because we enjoy sharing our brilliant, Seldom-Wrong opinions. Further, we expect to persuade not because of our official status, whatever that is, but because of the impeccable reasoning that supports our views.

Editor's note: This posting exhausts our quota of colons for the 2007 blogging year. We will be forced to rely on other marks of punctuation until January.

Gospel of Judas Update

Scholarship takes time and the effort of many people. Making money on scholarship frequently undermines those necessities.

That's the lesson of today's NY Times op-ed by Rice University professor April DeConick, author of the new book, The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says. DeConick, one of the few people who reads Coptic, the language of the Gospel of Judas, has noted several ways in which the National Geographic's team of scholars obviously misread the manuscript.

The differences in content that she notes amount to this:

So what does the Gospel of Judas really say? It says that Judas is a specific demon called the “Thirteenth.” In certain Gnostic traditions, this is the given name of the king of demons — an entity known as Ialdabaoth who lives in the 13th realm above the earth. Judas is his human alter ego, his undercover agent in the world. These Gnostics equated Ialdabaoth with the Hebrew Yahweh, whom they saw as a jealous and wrathful deity and an opponent of the supreme God whom Jesus came to earth to reveal.

Whoever wrote the Gospel of Judas was a harsh critic of mainstream Christianity and its rituals. Because Judas is a demon working for Ialdabaoth, the author believed, when Judas sacrifices Jesus he does so to the demons, not to the supreme God. This mocks mainstream Christians’ belief in the atoning value of Jesus’ death and in the effectiveness of the Eucharist.

Not being among that small group of scholars who reads Coptic, we depend on DeConick's expertise, noting that the offering of a revisionist reading that ratchets down the public interest requires pretty solid evidence to be successful and so assuming that any rational scholar would have as much before going forward. If she proves right--and it will take time and collective effort to make that clear to us non-Coptic readers, another big story has gone bust.

The Easter-season historical blockbusters of the last two years, the Gospel of Judas and the so-called Jesus tomb, have now collapsed completely. Let's hope that publishers, and the scholars who work for them, think twice before trying to profit from the flash of religious interest that blooms and disappears like crocuses. And let's hope that the public decides it won't be fooled again.

Local Artists Do Nativity "Synoptically"

Cincinnati's delightful Rohs Street Cafe, hosted and operated by Cincinnati's delightful University Christian Church, announces a distinctive, collective art show for the nativity season. To us it sounds like an excellent way to enjoy advent/Christmas/the holiday.

We quote the blurb:

SceneTogether: an art nativity scene

We get the story of Jesus’ birth from the Synoptic Gospels. These documents are called “synoptic” because they can be “seen together.” They tell the same story with different voices, adding a richness to the narrative.

In the same way, here in “Scene Together,” eleven artists tell their own versions of the birth narrative, all the more colorful and multi-faceted for the many ways they tell it.

Institutions Invulnerable to Annoying Controversies? And Then There Were None

In our profession, SWNID commonly deals with people who are upset over something that is happening at SWNID's place of wage slavery. Those upsets are caused by matters ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. But they generally fall under the category, Things That Are Endemic to the Human Condition.

Some of our conversation partners in such matters believe that the constant voicing of and responding to such concerns is a special characteristic of Christian organizations. They believe that other organizations, richer and more professionally operated, don't have such problems. Or they believe that Christian organizations, having ideals up to which to live, have them, while secular organizations, with nothing to pursue but self-interest, haven't them.

We note as a counter example to this parochial point of view the amazing controversy, local to Greater Cincinnati but now nationally and internationally famous, about the staging at Lakota East High School of Agatha Christie's classic and twice-renamed play And Then There Were None.

Said controversy has been resolved--at least partially and at least for now--as the play will now be un-canceled and performed under its most recent title, noted above.

We will not opine as to whether the staging of a play that once had a racist term in its title is sufficiently insensitive as to be unconscionable. We will instead empathize with school officials who have found themselves between the Scylla and Charibdis of aggrieved parents on both sides and note that they probably wish that they had used the most recent, least offensive title for the play as soon as it went into rehearsals.

We especially point out to our brothers and sisters the obvious point that such endless arguments are found all over, not just at church and related organizations where people do their arguing in the name of Jesus.

Now, we must end this post to keep an appointment with an aggrieved person. [Note to self: open ears, shut mouth.]

Impressive Speech on Hope for Inner Cities

We profusely thank gentle reader PS/SWNID for directing us to this video enjoining engagement in the lives of children and youths growing up in the impoverished inner city.



This speech is all the more impressive to SWNID because it is delivered by a subject of the UK--David Sharples, who founded Kidz Klub, a Christian mentoring program in the UK--at the Conservative Party Conference of 2007. One doesn't expect to hear about the aggressive engagement of Christians in the UK, let alone hear expect to hear discussion of such things at a major political event. And for those who are unaware, the UK Conservative Party has not had a relationship with the "religious right" (as if such a thing existed in the UK) as has the US Republican Party.

So we take this opportunity to express our profound respect and thanks to all those who read this blog who do the kind of thing that Sharples does. God is taking his world back, including the inner cities, and y'all are his Special Forces in that greatest of endeavors.

Stuck on the Bus with Dignified Humans

We thank gentle reader Dan for taking us "To the Source," that is, to a web site entitled "To the Source" for this wide-ranging essay on the development of human stem cells without the destruction of embryos and the larger issue of human dignity.

To say that the piece, by one Robert S. Paul, is wide-ranging is an understatement, but it isn't a ramble. We urge reading of its entirety, but for your enticement offer this quotation:

In the work where I'm involved with impoverished communities, LifeWind International, the principle of Equal Dignity is foundational. It is the coming issue, I believe, in the continuing campaign to find solutions to world poverty. Dignity forces the discussion of poverty beyond economic development, a discourse that too easily slides down the path of condescending pity and lurking superiority. In our secret hearts we are tempted to believe that poverty might be a sign of some intrinsic defect, while wealth is the confirmation of our superior abilities. Noblesse oblige. Here come the rich to rescue the poor. But those on the receiving side of our intended generosity see the truth of what we believe behind our stuffed pocketbooks. If we deny equal dignity, we sow the seeds of long-term resentment. Dignity for the poor and oppressed is not the prize we give them at the end, once we have won the battle, but the starting point for a new way of working together.

When Doing Bad Is Good

Here's a fundraising strategy that we fear more institutions of higher education may now employ:

1. Experience financial misdeeds on the part of senior administrators.
2. Then allow the scoundrel(s) to resign when the problem comes to light.
3. Then accept a big gift from a donor who wants to make everything right again.

That's the continuing saga at Oral Roberts University. After Friday's resignation of allegedly nefarious president Richard Roberts, ORU now announces that it will receive a $70 million gift from Hobby Lobby founder Mart Green.

The gift has strings attached: Green is demanding that the university reform its governance. Already, the boards of ORU and the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association are separating.

SWNID asks Mr. Green, who may or may not be a reader of this blog, please to consider a gift of similar size to Cincinnati Christian University. Or even one of reduced size.

Demography to Cities: Grow with Families

Today's WSJ has a most important opinion piece for those who care about the future of American cities, including people who live in them, like SWNID.

Joel Kotkin of Chapman University notes that while many cities, including the one where we reside, have sought economic growth by appealing to the "creative class" of young singles, cities that have actually experienced economic and numerical growth in recent years have been those that are appealing to married people with children.

We simply say that we wouldn't mind in the least of Our City Fathers took this message to heart. To appeal to companies looking to bring jobs, Cincinnati doesn't need more nightclubs (unless they are jazz venues like the Blue Wisp, whose survival seems relatively secure now). It needs good schools, affordable housing, and social networks that nurture parents and children.

Where to Give Year-End Gifts

SWNID's gentle readers, largely being members of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, tend to be extremely wealthy. In this holiday season, they are generally concerned to find ways to shelter their ill-gotten gains from payment of their already-smaller-than-fair share of taxes. (Note: this paragraph contains sarcasm.)

This year, we recommend generous donations and longer-term pledges to Cincinnati Christian University's "Beyond the Walls" campaign, detailed nicely in this piece from Friday's Enquirer.

Signature sarcasm aside, and with due caution for the obvious self-interest* in our mentioning this, we are hard pressed to think of a way that one can use one's dollars, euros, pounds sterling, yen, yuan, pesos, bolivars, rubles or other units of currency more strategically than through gifts that will secure the future ministry of CCU and other institutions that develop the talents and interests of Christians who will lead the church in its global mission to subvert the kingdoms of this world to become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ.

Other projects may be more trendy or deliver a warmer, fuzzier feeling. But when one scratches and sniffs the people who lead the big stuff that gets done, one discovers a significant number of such folk were shaped by their experiences at CCU and similar institutions of biblical higher education. Investments in such joints are significantly leveraged in their influence.

We hasten to add that we always expect a degree of skepticism about such appeals. We therefore invite gentle readers who want to ask questions or express such skepticism to do so in the comments on this posting, where we will answer as much as this busy season allows, and with as much honesty as our calloused heart can muster.

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*SWNID has a rather large personal commitment to the ministry of CCU. We will not receive any financial emolument from donations to the campaign.

Rosin Chronicles Golden Compass Transformation

As Christians across the USA gear up for a campaign against the atheism of The Golden Compass, SWNID urges gentle readers first to read the backgrounder on the movie's production by the esteemed journalist of American religion Hannah Rosin in this month's Atlantic (full access requires subscription, well worth the money in our SWNIDish opinion).

Rosin notes that market concerns motivated the movie's producers from the beginning to reduce, modulate and even obliterate the overt anti-theistic themes of the blockbuster fantasy books. Author Philip Pullman, who is unrepentant about his aggressive atheism, cooperated in the corruption in order to get the books to the silver screen (and presumably to get his royalty checks deposited).

The result, says Rosin, is the usual Hollywood religious mish-mosh: a bland, quasi-Buddhism akin to Star Wars that will probably offend few. In fact, Rosin judges that the movie that will mostly anger only those who liked the books' original message but will probably flummox wider audiences who try to understand it beyond its flashy special effects.

More broadly, we scold our Christian siblings for their obsession, positively and negatively, with media messages. For years, we've protested the messages that the media gives our impressionable minds, imagining a better world in which movies and television reinforced positive values and even the Christian good news.

Then we got The Passion of the Christ and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

And massive revival broke out.

No, wait: it didn't.

We therefore opine that media messages, with us or against us, have relatively less impact than we sometimes hope or fear. Not to deny the effect that worldviews embedded in entertainment and news reporting have on the consciousness of many, we nevertheless conclude that the media largely gives people what they insist they want and help them think what they think already.

In the case of The Golden Compass, what many people want is spectacular fantasy, but what only about 14% wants is anti-theism. So Hollywood is giving the former while minimizing the latter. And we expect a religious impact about equivalent to what we got from Lord of the Rings.

For Thanksgiving: Less Violence in Iraq

Sometimes we ignore the obvious on this blog. Today we draw attention to it.

Finally the MSM has caught up with our repeated statement that the surge is working.

We like the Financial Times's (motto: the pink newspaper for people rich enough not to worry about their appearance while reading a pink newspaper) headline that includes the term "phenomenal."

From here, expect three things:

• Democrats will continue to complain that "there's no political progress" and will consequently call for a timed withdrawal.
• Various media outlets will report any significant violent incidents and ask whether they indicate that the bad guys have recovered.
• Various pundits will speculate as to whether the bad guys are saving up for next autumn, when they'll let loose with enough explosions to scare the American electorate into voting for the Democrat.

And, to be frank, those are legitimate concerns. But they don't negate the potency of Petraeus's strategy. They simply urge patience with and further adaptation of a fundamentally sound strategy in a part of the world where it takes centuries to mark significant change. War, as always, is at least heck, and it takes tenacious guts to see it through to a decent conclusion.

This, of course, is not the strategy now endorsed by retired General Ricardo Sanchez, who says that political progress is insufficient to justify continued US progress and so now calls for a withdrawal. We note the obvious: Sanchez commanded in Iraq with a different strategy, one that surely didn't work, and now has a vested personal interest in advocating an outcome in which the current commander's strategy is not allowed to outshine his failure.

Note well that the Democrats are now in the unenviable position that they held during the Civil War: recruiting failed generals to speak for their party's position of abandoning the difficult war effort. With his upcoming radio speech on Saturday, Sanchez becomes the McClellan of our era.

Listening Past Bush Hatred

Rhetorically every Democratic presidential candidate, knowing that Bush hatred is the strongest impulse in the Party of Jefferson, is running against Dubya.

But substantively, two of the leaders are running on what has become known as the Bush Doctrine: that US interests are best served by the expansion of democracy in the Middle East, not just the preservation of "stability."

The NY Sun documents as much today, with statements from the Dem-bate out of the mouths of Senators Obama and Clinton.

If the unthinkable happens in November next, let's hope that this commitment can withstand the pressures of doctrinaire isolationism and pacifism that seem poised to overwhelm the party of Wilson, FDR and Truman.

Hagee: Jesus Didn't Come as Messiah

Gentle reader KevinK suggests to us that John Hagee may have surpassed Pat Robertson as World's Most Embarrassing Christian. This video clip may just prove that he has:




Well, we guess that Jesus' saying "I am" to the high priest's question, "Are you the Christ [Messiah]" isn't claiming to be Messiah after all.

Hagee's hyper-idiosyncratic dispensationalism is super-duper embarrassing. We just hope that no one notices.

Longmont's LifeBridge Takes Heat for Real Estate Development

Today's Denver Post contains an intriguing and disturbing article about a real estate venture of the LifeBridge Christian Church of Longmont, Colorado, where friend of SWNID is the well-known and widely respected senior pastor.

What's intriguing is that the church is using the acumen of many of its members to pursue a real-estate development that will, if successful, finance its construction of a new campus.

What's disturbing is that despite the fact that there is no evidence of impropriety, and despite the fact that the church has a superb reputation for its service to the community, plenty of skeptics assume that the church is up to no good. To get a feel for the hysteria, read the comments, not just the article.

Obviously there's recently been enough nefarious real-estate dealing by Christians and Clintons to nurture such suspicions. We just pray that Rusaw and crew can live in such a way as to demonstrate their critics mistaken.

'Nother News Flash: Cohabitation Dangerous for Kids

Ever notice how local news stories about abused children frequently involve the mother's live-in boyfriend as perpetrator? Well, today the AP noticed too.

The esteemed wire service today carries the story by David Crary that children living with unrelated adults are 50 times more likely to be victims of assault than children living with both biological parents.

So it seems that staying together for the children was a better idea than people thought.

News Flash: Executions Deter Murders

In a stunning piece of contrarian journalism, today's Gray Lady publicizes recent studies arguing that the death penalty does indeed deter murders. Statistical links are shaky, of course, since it's a big country and there aren't lots of executions. And cause-effect relationships can't be proved solely on the fact that event Y (fewer murders) happens after event X (an execution).

But at least a few brave economists, some not fans of the death penalty, have argued that statistics coupled with the economic postulate that people choose against things that are costly make the conclusion secure.

We'll anticipate an objection by some noble and gentle reader: so if executions deter murders, maybe we should execute people for other crimes, like auto theft. Well, let's recall that deterrence is only one issue in punishing crimes. Retribution is another, and it demands that the punishment fit the crime. A life for a car isn't just. A life for a life is another matter.

This debate isn't over. But we're still not exactly sure that the NY Times is still the paper we thought it was when it puts articles like this in its fabled Sunday edition.