Sound theology

Via By Every Word:

The gospel according to St Jack

The current issue issue of National Review notes that "Santorum continued his sometime role of making perfectly defensible views seem ridiculous through overstatement." Another of this magazine's editorial paragraphs illustrates the point:

Having said that John F. Kennedy’s famous speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association made him want to “throw up,” Senator Rick Santorum was asked to defend his statement. “To say that people of faith have no role in the public square?” he replied. “You bet that makes you throw up.” Kennedy, he said, had argued that “only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case” and that “the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state,” and had promised not even to “consult with people of faith.” Santorum got Kennedy’s speech wrong; but Kennedy’s speech, however celebrated, got church-state relations wrong too. Kennedy suggested that Catholicism would, and should, have no influence on his public acts. (“I believe in a president whose religious views are his own private affair”—and, it turns out, whose religious views did not interfere with his private affairs.) Kennedy’s argument implies that religious people are welcome to participate in politics so long as they act as though they had no religion. It is an argument without much in the way of constitutional principle or historical American practice to recommend it, as indeed the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was contemporaneously proving. Santorum can justly be criticized for rhetorical inelegance and analytical imprecision, but his irreverence toward the Gospel according to Saint Jack is amply warranted.

National Review, March 19, 2012, p. 4.

The wisdom of Calvin and Hobbes

Edd McCracken gives us "Sixteen Things Calvin and Hobbes Said Better Than Anyone Else" (but I found the cartoon). For instance:

On expectations

Calvin: Everybody seeks happiness! Not me, though! That’s the difference between me and the rest of the world. Happiness isn’t good enough for me! I demand euphoria!

On the tragedy of hipsters
Calvin: The world bores you when you’re cool.

On looking yourself in the mirror
Hobbes: So the secret to good self-esteem is to lower your expectations to the point where they’re already met?

James Q. Wilson, who died today, in 1995 wrote "'Calvin and Hobbes' and the Moral Sense," from which:

Occasionally Calvin ponders what character may mean. As Christmas approaches, he knows he must be good for Santa Claus to deliver the countless presents (including a heat-seeking guided missile) that he covets. But, he wonders aloud, can he be thought truly good if he is good only to get the presents? "I mean, really, all I'm doing is saying that I can be bribed. Is that good enough, or do I have to be good in my heart and spirit?" But this brief insight quickly vanishes: "OK," he asks of Hobbes, "so exactly how good do you think I have to act?"

Sixteen Things Calvin and Hobbes Said Better Than Anyone Else | BOOK RIOT, 'CALVIN AND HOBBES' AND THE MORAL SENSE | The Weekly Standard

"Moved to heartier song...in the hands of a good organist"

Kevin DeYoung, in "Don’t Ditch the Organ," excerpts a couple of paragraphs by Harold Best, once Dean of the Conservatory of Music at Wheaton College, arguing that the proper use of the organ in Christian worship helps us to worship in song. An excerpt from the excerpt:

.... Without any doubt, the organ is the most naturally supportive instrument for singing that Western culture knows of. Its very design and its intelligent use in hymn singing are meant to accomplish one purpose: to support singing by the intelligent use of registers chosen to fill in the cracks–to provide both an underpinning and a blossom to the work of the congregational voices. The result is synergy: the whole greater than the sum of the parts. People are moved to heartier song without being overpowered or displaced, and their natural untrained voices are significantly validated and enhanced. True, there are those times when the organ soars above and beyond its normal collaborative task in the provision of free accompaniments and occasional iterations of brilliance and dash. But in the hands of a good organist, these should be reserved for those momentary or seasonal and festive times when clear hymnic water is turned into the polyphonies of rich wine. An organ does not have to be gargantuan to accomplish these tasks—not when it is well designed and properly played. (Exploring the Worship Spectrum: 6 Views, 73)

Don’t Ditch the Organ – Kevin DeYoung

"Be ye constant"

Today is St David's Day. It is the national day of Wales, the country from whence came some of my ancestors. Wikipedia explains who the man was:

Dewi Sant – St. David was born towards the end of the fifth century. He was a scion of the royal house of Ceredigion, and founded a Celtic monastic community at Glyn Rhosin (The Vale of Roses) on the western headland of Sir Benfro, at the spot where St. David's Cathedral stands today. David's fame as a teacher and ascetic spread throughout the Celtic world. His foundation at Glyn Rhosin became an important Christian shrine, and the most important centre in Wales. The date of Dewi Sant's death is recorded as 1 March, but the year is uncertain – possibly 588. As his tearful monks prepared for his death St David uttered these words: "Brothers be ye constant. The yoke which with single mind ye have taken, bear ye to the end; and whatsoever ye have seen with me and heard, keep and fulfill."

For centuries the first of March has been a national festival. St David was recognised as a national patron saint at the height of Welsh resistance to the Normans. ....

More, from James M. Kushiner at Touchstone Magazine:

We don't know a great deal about David, and while you will find the usual skeptical opinion—"he is so shrouded in legend and overlaid with later hagiography that maybe he never existed"—there is enough historical evidence to believe that he existed, that he taught in Wales, and that he made a mark that lasted and spread. (The earliest surviving reference to him may well be an early 7th-century inscription on a gravestone: "Here lies Idnert, the son of Jacob, who was killed defending the church of holy David from pillage.") ....

We see someone who takes the Gospel seriously, gives his or her entire life to living it and spreading it, counting themselves as servants of Jesus Christ, and a previously pagan society some years or generations later has become populated with churches, monasteries, scriptural knowledge, increasing literacy, with a downturn in things such as human sacrifice and infanticide. .... [more]

Re-posted from 2010.

Saint David's Day - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments: David of Wales

The intolerance of tolerance

I believe certain pastors in our neighbor to the north have already gotten in trouble with their government for teaching frankly about sin. Now homeschooling parents may. Does our First Amendment protect us from this sort of thing? From Mere Comments:

.... Under the revised Education Act of Alberta, all children will be “banned” from disrespecting people’s differences. The legislation requires that all schools “reflect the diverse nature and heritage of society in Alberta, promote understanding and respect for others and honour and respect the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Alberta Human Rights Act.”

According to press reports, Donna McColl, an official speaking on behalf of Alberta’s Education Minister, Thomas Lukaszuk, said “Whatever the nature of schooling—home school, private school, Catholic school—we do not tolerate disrespect for differences. You can affirm the family’s ideology in your family life, you just can’t do it as part of your educational study and instruction.” I think that it can be difficult to differentiate between family life and home schooling, and to understand the precise application of the word “disrespecting.” Doesn’t the mere act of disagreeing, or making statements that disagree with someone suggest disrespect for their views or acts?

But what is clear is that now in Alberta, homeschooling families will be forbidden from teaching that homosexual sex (or fornication, adultery, greed, idolatry, male prostitution, drunkenness, slander and financial dishonesty, as examples from I Corinthians 6:9) are sinful as part of the children’s schooling. ....

What if a priest or minister, or even a Sunday school teacher, would deign to suggest that the wages of sin is death, as St. Paul wrote. Obviously, this might make sinners feel uncomfortable. But perhaps before the government of Alberta issues any new laws regarding sermons or other school lessons, an important first step might be to change the name of Canada’s Charter of Rights and “Freedoms” to something far less Orwellian.

A Cold Wind on Liberty Blows from Alberta - Mere Comments

Correcting the history books

Perhaps the period from 500 to 1500 AD was more civilized — in at least a few respects — than the Renaissance that followed. Jill Harness corrects "Five Common Misconceptions About the Middle Ages":

• Medieval Doctors Weren’t Completely In the Dark
• Bad Hygiene Wasn’t Actually Common
• Spices Weren’t Used to Hide the Flavor of Rotten Meat
• Most “Medieval” Torture Devices Were Anything But
• Chastity Belts Weren’t Even Invented Yet

From "Bad Hygiene Wasn’t Actually Common":

For years, stories have been circulating that the average person of the Dark Ages would only bathe once a year and that the reason brides carried bouquets was to help them ward off the gross smell of the guests at their wedding, but really, people of the time had pretty decent hygiene. ....

.... In fact, bathing didn’t fall out of fashion until the Renaissance, when it was believed that water could carry disease. So there’s a good chance that a peasant from the thirteenth century actually smelled a lot better than Leonardo da Vinci.

Their clothes didn’t smell horribly either, laundry soap was introduced from the Orient in the early Middle Ages and while clothing did go unwashed in the freezing winters, as soon as spring hit, laundresses went out in droves washing clothes on the local river banks. .... [more]

Five Common Misconceptions About the Middle Ages

After-birth abortion

"[O]nce we discard the Christian principle of inherent dignity of humans, anything we decide to do to an infant becomes 'ethically permissible'" writes Joe Carter in this summary of an article I noted the other day. "After-birth abortion" is what has, up till now, been called infanticide, i.e. murder. Carter:

The Article: After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?

The Source: Journal of Medical Ethics

The Authors: Australian philosophers Alberto Giubilini and Francesa Minerva

The Gist: Since it is currently permissible to kill prenatal children because they are only potential persons and do not have full moral status, then we should be able to kill postnatal children for the same reason. ....

The Bottom Line: As the authors note, an examination of 18 European registries found that between 2005 and 2009 only 64% of Down's syndrome cases were diagnosed through prenatal testing, leaving about 1,700 infants to be born with the condition. Since the mothers would have likely killed the child in utero, why should we not permit them to kill the child after the birth?

Sadly, this is not a reductio ad absurdum intended to show the illogic of abortion but a serious philosophical argument made in defense of infanticide: ". . . we claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be." ....

More, from The Telegraph

.... They argued: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”

Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”. They explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’.

“We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.”

As such they argued it was “not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her from developing the potentiality to become a person in the morally relevant sense”. ....

"...a person in the morally relevant sense."!
60 Second Summary: After-birth abortion: why should the baby live? – The Gospel Coalition Blog, Killing babies no different from abortion, experts say - Telegraph

To keep it holy

Jonathan Tobin calls our attention to a story of particular interest to Sabbatarians:

.... The Robert M. Beren Academy had won a chance to play in the state’s parochial school basketball championships semi-finals this weekend. But since their game is scheduled for Friday night during the observance of the Sabbath, the team will not compete. ....

...Beren’s win in the state quarterfinals was made possible because their opponent, Our Lady of the Hills, which is a Catholic school, were willing to move the starting time up last Friday to the afternoon before the Sabbath started. But because the private and parochial school group is a voluntary rather than a state-run outfit, the Jewish school cannot legally demand a reasonable accommodation. The association’s decision seems hard-hearted. But if they choose not to budge, it must be acknowledged that sometimes there is a price to be paid for loyalty to faith and principle. That’s disappointing for the kids at Beren, but it’s also something for them to be proud of. ....[more]

Tobin spoils the ending of his otherwise admirable post with an entirely unnecessary swipe at Tebow.

A few years ago I posted a link to a similar story about a Scottish school that stood on principle about the Sabbath [although they had a different day of the week in mind].

Sabbath Observing Texas High School Does More for Faith Than Tebow « Commentary Magazine

Thought crimes

Christopher Caldwell, reviewing God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World by Cullen Murphy, observes that modern inquisitors use different methods but their goals are similar — confession and recantation:

The Spanish Inquisition was not run by a bunch of blockheads. It sought to root out heresy, which was a 'crime of the intellect'. Inquisitors were not interested in the blurtings of drunks or in what we would call Freudian slips. Testimony gathered under duress was admissible only if it was repeated freely on a later occasion. Nonetheless holy interrogators did feel the need, once in a while, to haul out the Pear of Anguish, Saint Elmo's Belt, the Heretic's Fork and the Spanish Tickler. These were all instruments of torture, although, as Cullen Murphy notes, 'they could just as easily be the names of pubs, or brands of condoms, or points of ascent on a climber's map'. ....

If we look not at methods but at dogmas, a more apt contemporary comparison to the medieval Inquisition is political correctness. The way Galileo was bullied by the Inquisition into a 'pragmatic accommodation' with the Church's teaching on the solar system does not have much in common with, say, the interrogation of alleged terrorist mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The interrogators who waterboarded Mohammed presumably wanted information about contacts and plans. They would have been wholly indifferent to his beliefs. Galileo has more in common with the hapless executive who, denounced for saying 'darkie' or 'broad' around the office water cooler, is offered the choice of attending sensitivity training or seeing his career destroyed. That man's persecutors really do want to extirpate his sinful thoughts, and really do require a public recantation from him. .... [more]

Literary Review - Christopher Caldwell on 'God's Jury' by Cullen Murphy

Dad

This would have been my father's 100th birthday. From the day after his funeral:

Dad’s funeral was yesterday, Monday, December 29, at the Milton Seventh Day Baptist Church, and he was buried in the Milton Cemetery, near the highway in the oldest part of the cemetery in a plot the folks purchased from members of the Goodrich family. Pastor George Calhoun of the Milton Church had the service and did a beautiful job describing Dad’s faith and life of integrity and service. Justin Camenga spoke for the family – apart from Mom he was the only one present who, as a child of six, had attended the folks’ wedding in 1942. He had also consulted with Dad’s older sister, Justin’s mother Evalyn, and conveyed information about Dad’s childhood none of us had heard before. A men’s chorus from the Milton church sang the old Milton College song “Song of the Bell” and “It is Well with My Soul.” Mom chose the hymn “When We All Get to Heaven” and we also sang the Brother James setting of “The Lord’s My Shepherd” and the hymn that was always sung at Milton College events, the great Isaac Watts hymn “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.” There was a reception after the service with the sharing of good memories. ....

This is from the obituary [with a couple of minor corrections] which appeared in the Janesville Gazette that Sabbath and Sunday.

Skaggs, Prof. J. Leland
February 27, 1912 - December 25, 2003

MILTON—Prof. J. Leland Skaggs died peacefully early Christmas morning at his home in the Milton Senior Living retirement home. Leland Skaggs was born in Shiloh, NJ on February 27, 1912, the son of Rev. James L. and Hettie Skaggs. Rev. Skaggs was a Seventh Day Baptist pastor, and the family moved several times before moving to Milton, WI, while Leland was in grade school. He attended and graduated from Milton Union High School and then went on to study at Milton College. J. Leland Skaggs graduated from Milton College in 1933. He also attended Columbia University. During the Depression he taught in New York City at CCNY and for the WPA. He served in the Army during World War II, teaching radio for the Signal Corps on the boardwalk at Asbury Park, NJ. After the war he became a mathematics professor at Milton College, Milton, WI. Apart from the Korean War period, when he was recalled to duty with the Army, serving as a Lieutenant and commanding a basic training company at Camp Gordon, GA, he continued to work at Milton College until retirement. He taught math, served as registrar for many years, and was appointed interim acting president. Leland was an active member and deacon of the Milton Seventh Day Baptist Church. He married Mary Elizabeth Bond in Salem, WV in 1942.

True faith transforms

What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects — with their Christianity latent. (C.S. Lewis)

Jeffrey Overstreet is "Against the deliberate 'integration' of faith and art," and he's right.

.... Reading a recent blog entry about how to develop a “Christian imagination,” and another about “the Christian consumer,” I started choking. I don’t want to be a “Christian consumer.” I don’t want “Christian culture.”

Don’t our behaviors follow from our convictions? If we strengthen our faith, then our faith is carried out in what we do. It’s not as if we can stock up on faith, put it in a measuring cup, and sprinkle it into our stew.

The nature of the fruit that tree branches bear is determined by the seed from which that tree developed, the sunlight and rain which it receives, and the soil in which its roots are planted. An apple tree planted in good soil doesn’t say to itself, “Now… how can I make sure I bear a fruit that’s really, you know, apple-y?”

The more we add the adjective “Christian” to things – “Christian writing,” “Christian business,” “Christian consumption,” the more we are needlessly complicating matters. If we have faith in Christ, everything changes. If our roots are in the soil of the Gospel, we don’t have to stop and think about how to make something “Christian.” If you are a Christian, and your art does not reflect that, the problem is not primarily with your art but with your faith — because true faith transforms what we are and do. .... (more)

Via Brandywine Books

Looking Closer » Blog Archive » Against the deliberate “integration” of faith and art, Looking Closer » Blog Archive » C.S. Lewis explains.

Learning virtue from Jane Austen

An anonymous philosopher — he assures us he is one (a philosopher) — believes Jane Austen is worth reading as a moral philosopher quite apart from any literary quality the books possess:

...Austen was a brilliant moral philosopher from whom we still have much to learn today. Austen's books are deeply serious morality plays underneath the veneer of romantic comedy that helped them sell. They are a moral education masquerading as entertainment. ....

Virtue ethics understands the good life in terms of personal moral character, of becoming the kind of person who does the right thing at the right time for the right reasons. It is therefore about the fundamental ethical question, How should I live my life? Answering that question involves identifying goals – what are the virtues you should develop – and the path to achieving them. ....

Success for Austen's women depends on developing a moral character whose central virtues are bourgeois: prudence (planning one's actions with respect to protecting and furthering one's interests), amiability (civility to family, friends, and strangers, according to their due), propriety (understanding and acting on a sense of what virtue requires), and dignity (considering oneself as an independent autonomous person deserving of respect). .... Austen presents these virtues as not merely a necessary accommodation to difficult circumstances, but as superior to the invidious vanity and pride of the rich and titled, which she often mocks. So Elizabeth Bennet rejects Darcy's haughty condescension out of hand; the happy ending must wait until Darcy comes to see beyond her lowly connections and unaristocratic manners and fully recognise her true (bourgeois) virtue.... That is a moral happy ending even more than it is a romantic one. ....

Like any good virtue ethicist, Austen proceeds by giving illustrative examples. ....

We should read Austen today because she is wise as well as clever, and because she teaches us how to live well not just how to love well. We should read beyond the delicious rituals of her romantic comedy plots to her deeper interests and purposes in creating her morally complex characters and setting them on display for us. We should read beyond her undisputed literary genius, and her place in the history of literary innovations and influences, to her unrecognised philosophical genius in elaborating and advancing a moral philosophy for our bourgeois times. (more)

Link found at The Browser

The Philosopher's Beard: Reading Jane Austen as a moral philosopher

Ben Hur

The "50th Anniversary Ultimate Collector's Edition" of Ben-Hur is available today only from Amazon at 55% off, $28.99. Not a bad film to watch during the Easter season. This is the restored Blu-ray version of the film and probably a better viewing experience than I had at the theater in Janesville in 1959 [I'm sure the sound is better]. If you ever considered owning the film, this is a bargain. A link is here [and if you buy through this link I profit, too].

Amazon's description:

High-definition Blu-ray hits greater heights with the arrival of the visual splendor, thundering action and towering drama of this record-setting winner of 11 Academy Awards® including Best Picture. Charlton Heston brings a muscular physical and moral presence to his Best Actor Oscar®-winning role of Judah Ben-Hur, a Jewish nobleman in Palestine whose heroic odyssey includes enslavement by the Romans, vengeance against his tormentors during a furious arena chariot race and fateful encounters with Jesus Christ. Best Director Oscar® winner William Wyler masterfully grips the reins of an enduring and spellbinding spectacular.

Why should the baby live?

Wesley J. Smith calls attention to this confusion about what is an "actual person" at the Journal of Medical Ethics:

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

Killing Baby “Non Persons”–All Grist for Bioethics Mill » Secondhand Smoke | A First Things Blog

But with tolerance and understanding

Wolfhart Pannenberg, a rather prominent Lutheran theologian, explains why the church takes the position it does with respect to homosexuality and why it can't depart from that position:

Can love ever be sinful? The entire tradition of Christian doctrine teaches that there is such a thing as inverted, perverted love. Human beings are created for love, as creatures of the God who is Love. And yet that divine appointment is corrupted whenever people turn away from God or love other things more than God.

Jesus said, "Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me..." (Matt. 10:37). Love for God must take precedence over love for our parents, even though love for parents is commanded by the fourth commandment.

The will of God [is to] be the guiding star of our identity and self-determination. What this means for sexual behavior can be seen in Jesus' teaching about divorce. In order to answer the Pharisees' question about the admissibility of divorce, Jesus refers to the creation of human beings. Here he sees God expressing his purpose for his creatures: Creation confirms that God has created human beings as male and female. Thus, a man leaves his father and mother to be united with his wife, and the two become one flesh.

Jesus concludes from this that the unbreakable permanence of fellowship between husband and wife is the Creator's will for human beings. The indissoluble fellowship of marriage, therefore, is the goal of our creation as sexual beings (Mark 10:2-9). Since on this principle the Bible is not time bound, Jesus' word is the foundation and criterion for all Christian pronouncement on sexuality, not just marriage in particular, but our entire creaturely identities as sexual beings. According to Jesus' teaching, human sexuality as male and as female is intended for the indissoluble fellowship of marriage. This standard informs Christian teaching about the entire domain of sexual behavior. ....

.... The reality of homophile inclinations...need not be denied and must not be condemned. The question, however, is how to handle such inclinations within the human task of responsibly directing our behavior. This is the real problem; and it is here that we must deal with the conclusion that homosexual activity is a departure from the norm for sexual behavior that has been given to men and women as creatures of God. For the church this is the case not only for homosexual, but for any sexual activity that does not intend the goal of marriage between man and wife, [in] particular, adultery.

The church has to live with the fact that, in this area of life as in others, departures from the norm are not exceptional but rather common and widespread. The church must encounter all those concerned with tolerance and understanding but also call them to repentance. It cannot surrender the distinction between the norm and behavior that departs from that norm.

Here lies the boundary of a Christian church that knows itself to be bound by the authority of Scripture. Those who urge the church to change the norm of its teaching on this matter must know that they are promoting schism. If a church were to let itself be pushed to the point where it ceased to treat homosexual activity as a departure from the biblical norm, and recognized homosexual unions as a personal partnership of love equivalent to marriage, such a church would stand no longer on biblical ground but against the unequivocal witness of Scripture. A church that took this step would cease to be the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.

Who is Wolfhart Pannenberg? From Michael Root, in "The Achievement of Wolfhart Pannenberg," a new article at First Things:

Some theologians are mirrors of their time. .... Other theologians have a more conflicted relation with their age: engaged, but cutting against the grain; in their time, but not quite of it. Wolfhart Pannenberg, one of the most gifted Protestant theologians of his generation, has never seemed quite to fit his surroundings, which may say more about his surroundings than about him. The German theological world has been far less shaken than the English-speaking world by the changes in academic culture of the last decades: feminism, the hermeneutics of suspicion, the dismissal of truth-claims as disguised assertions of power. Even by German standards, however, Pannenberg’s theology has an oddly old-fashioned air.

Pannenberg is not a man who follows fads. .... (much more)

Should We Support Gay Marriage? by Wolfhart Pannenberg, First Things: The Achievement of Wolfhart Pannenberg

Yet I will rejoice

Though the fig tree should not blossom,
    nor fruit be on the vines,
  the produce of the olive fail
    and the fields yield no food,
  the flock be cut off from the fold
    and there be no herd in the stalls,

    yet I will rejoice in the LORD;
    I will take joy in the God of my salvation.

Habakkuk 3:17-18

What is truth?

From an article at Smithsonian Magazine about Errol Morris:

.... If there is one subtext to all of Morris’ subsequent films and writings, it is the private eye’s creed, the anti-postmodernist belief that “the truth is out there.” Truth may be elusive, it may even be unknowable, but that doesn’t mean, as postmodernists aver, that reality is just a matter of subjective perspectives, that one way of seeing things is just as good as another.

“I’m amazed,” Morris said when we spoke recently, “that you still see this nonsense all over the place, that truth is relative, that truth is subjective. People still cling to it.” He calls these ideas “repulsive, repugnant. And what’s the other word? False.” ....

Errol Morris: The Thinking Man's Detective | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian Magazine

It isn't about contraception

It is about freedom of conscience. Peter Berger:

....[L]et me offer a disclosure: I find the Catholic position on contraception thunderously unpersuasive. As to the two major religious communities involved, I am neither Catholic nor Evangelical—thus, as we say in Texas, I have no dog in this fight. (As I have avowed on this blog before, I am incurably Lutheran.) But I do agree very much with the protesters’ view that the Obama administration was about to violate constitutionally guaranteed religious freedom in a serious way. That is the issue here, and not women’s health—contraceptive devices are easily and inexpensively available in places other than Catholic hospitals. I also agree (though I am not a lawyer) that the administration’s action goes against a long tradition in American law of solicitude for the demands of conscience (religious or non-religious). The courts have protected the right of Quakers not to go to war, of Jehovah’s Witnesses not to take the oath of allegiance, of anyone who has reasons of conscience for affirming rather than swearing as a witness—or, for that matter, even burning the American flag. It seems to me that the same protection should cover a hospital run by Franciscans who don’t want to hand out condoms (never mind whether one agrees with their rather tortured reasoning on this matter).

What is to be learned from this episode? A number of things: The large expansion of federal power hidden in the innumerable pages of the legislation which established “Obamacare”. Obama’s captivity to his much-vaunted “base”, with its strongly secularist contingent (I have called it an American version of the Turkish ideology of Kemalism—religion is a virus to be kept out of public space, quarantined in religious reservations). The continuing political clout of religion in the United States (Kemalists are always surprised when they come across this—perhaps because they mostly talk to each other). And, contrary to a widespread opinion, the fact that the “culture war” between conservatives and progressives is by no means over—and continues to be politically significant. .... [more]

Contraception and the Culture War | Religion and Other Curiosities

If the leaders are the center of attention, it isn't worship

James K.A. Smith, a philosophy prof at Calvin College, writes "An Open Letter to Praise Bands." Read him carefully. He isn't arguing for a traditional style of worship, nor for a return to hymns. He is arguing that worship teams need to reflect on why we do what we do. He elaborates in the full article.

.... [M]y concern is that we, the church, have unwittingly encouraged you to simply import musical practices into Christian worship that—while they might be appropriate elsewhere—are detrimental to congregational worship. .... Without us realizing it, the dominant practices of performance train us to relate to music (and musicians) in a certain way: as something for our pleasure, as entertainment, as a largely passive experience. The function and goal of music in these "secular liturgies" is quite different from the function and goal of music in Christian worship.

So let me offer just a few brief axioms with the hope of encouraging new reflection on the practice of "leading worship":

1. If we, the congregation, can't hear ourselves, it's not worship. Christian worship is not a concert. .... And there's nothing wrong with concerts! It's just that Christian worship is not a concert. Christian worship is a collective, communal, congregational practice—and the gathered sound and harmony of a congregation singing as one is integral to the practice of worship. .... When the amped sound of the praise band overwhelms congregational voices, we can't hear ourselves sing—so we lose that communal aspect of the congregation and are encouraged to effectively become "private," passive worshipers.
2. If we, the congregation, can't sing along, it's not worship. In other forms of musical performance, musicians and bands will want to improvise and "be creative,".... And so your virtuosity gives rise to our passivity; your creativity simply encourages our silence. ....
3. If you, the praise band, are the center of attention, it's not worship. I know it's generally not your fault that we've put you at the front of the church. And I know you want to model worship for us to imitate. But because we've encouraged you to basically import forms of performance from the concert venue into the sanctuary, we might not realize that we've also unwittingly encouraged a sense that you are the center of attention. ....

Please consider these points carefully and recognize what I am not saying. This isn't just some plea for "traditional" worship and a critique of "contemporary" worship. Don't mistake this as a defense of pipe organs and a critique of guitars and drums (or banjos and mandolins). My concern isn't with style, but with form: What are we trying to do when we "lead worship?" If we are intentional about worship as a communal, congregational practice that brings us into a dialogical encounter with the living God—that worship is not merely expressive but also formative—then we can do that with cellos or steel guitars, pipe organs or African drums. .... [more]

Fors Clavigera: An Open Letter to Praise Bands