Poll: Next year’s Dinner at the Square
Add comment January 31st, 2009
Archive for January, 2009
Craig Detweiler: Embracing Dissent
Essay by one of our April 21st Purple State of Mind guests. Read the whole kickin’ piece HERE.
I embarked on the Purple State project because I need a voice of dissent in my life. The doubts of John Marks make me a better believer. He keeps me honest, keeps me questioning, keeps from getting comfortable. Can we continue to make room for the loyal opposition, even when it causes complications?
I join John Marks in a call for more than a new found cooperation. We don’t expect people to abandon their principles, to set aside significant differences. But the gravity of our current crisis surely forces us to subsume our agendas for the sake of the greater good. There will be plenty of time to argue after we’ve gotten out of this mess. Until then, I desperately need to come alongside those who want to forge a future for America. We can no longer afford to be entertained by surface distances or ideological divides. It is time to be adults–to work with skeptical neighbors, faithful friends, and disbelieving college roommates.
Add comment January 31st, 2009
Could we puleeze have grown-up conversations?
Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker wrote about the hubbub around Rush Limbaugh this week. She thinks we should have been talking about something else, like – oh – how the heck you fix what’s broken:
Conservatives of both parties justly fear that too much of the stimulus package is aimed at non-stimulus programs. There’s plenty to criticize, but shouting socialism in a crowded panic room is laughable under the circumstances…
Add comment January 30th, 2009
John Stewart: We’re in bad shape fellas
A provocative – sometimes brilliant, sometimes uncomfortable and sometimes potty-mouthed – screed by John Stewart delivered way back in 2006, targeting the partisan talking-head yapfest that has hurt our important national conversation. To be fair to the talking heads, isn’t it – in fact – the viewers who keep them employed (uh, that would be us)? If we actually watched the most in-depth, civil and factual programs on TV, wouldn’t the networks be clambering to bring more of them to us?
Add comment January 30th, 2009
The Senility Prayer
Grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway,
The good fortune to run into the ones I do, and the eyesight to tell the difference.
—Anonymous
Add comment January 29th, 2009
John Marks: Let them eat purple cake
Below is a clip of John’s essay on what, exactly, a “Purple State of Mind” means. It doesn’t begin to do the entirety of “Let them eat purple cake” justice, so do yourself a favor and skip my version and read the whole thing HERE. John and his friend Craig of Purple State of Mind will join us in April for dinner. It might be one of your worst mistakes if you miss it.
… It’s about taking ourselves and our concerns seriously enough to demand the utmost of ourselves and our political and cultural opponents, the utmost in moral and intellectual rigor, the utmost in compassion and decency. Part of the problem for the last two decades has been a curious tendency to treat our great national debates as a cross between a game and a comedy routine. Oh, we insisted that our issues were matters of life and death, whether abortion or gay marriage, whether freedom of speech or the right to bear arms, but we hired huge numbers of professionals to fight those battles for us, our proxies, our mercenaries, our lobbyists, our activists, and their handiwork often enough turned the entire public discourse into a freak show fueled by the rage virus.
Our national conversation became a version of American Idol, the emphasis on empty gestures of cruelty, vapid sentiment and specious notions of achievement. We allowed ourselves to see this massively complex and mysteriousness country in the broadest of show biz clichés. Whether gay or straight, Christian or skeptic, black or white, we were either going to Hollywood or going home. As we now know, there is a price to be paid for triviality in bitterness, frustration and self-disgust.
Our sham dialogues on cable news network, the Hannity and Colmes effect, were as deceptive in their own way as Wall Street practices that hid the truth about the markets. Now that our eyes are open, it is time to walk away from the game. It is time to despise the trivialization of those who have different worldviews, time to stop believing that reality has anything to do with television, and time to entertain the possibility that our divisions can take us to some very dark places, even Gaza and Mumbai, if we don’t wake up.
Add comment January 26th, 2009
The parable of the lost horse
In this story a farmer’s horse runs away. The farmer’s neighbors come to sympathize with him over his loss and bad luck. “This is a great misfortune!” they exclaim. The farmer calmly responds, “We will see.” The next day the farmer’s horse comes back and brings with it six wild horses. The neighbors come to visit again and gleefully observe, “What good fortune has befallen you”. The farmer calmly responds, “We will see.” The following day the farmer’s son starts to train the horses for riding, but is thrown and breaks his leg. Once again the neighbors come over, this time to offer their sympathy for the farmer’s bad luck. And once again his reply is “We will see.” The next day army officers come and take all the young men as recruits to the war, but because the farmer’s son has a broken leg, they don’t take him. So the neighbors come over to rejoice how well everything has turned out. The farmer smiles, considers his fortunes, and once again replies, “As always – we can only wait and see.”
Add comment January 25th, 2009
“Edgier and less restrained”
This week, Bill Moyers cited a passage from Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, a passage I suspect we’d find agreement with across the partisan divide:
Upon my return to Chicago, I would find the signs of decay accelerated throughout the South Side. The neighborhood shabbier, the children edgier and less restrained, more middle class families heading out to the suburbs, the jails bursting with flowering youth, my brothers without prospects. All too rarely, do I hear people asking just what it is that we’ve done to make so many children’s hearts so hard or what collectively we might do to right their moral compass, what values to live by. Instead I see us doing what we have always done, pretending that these children are somehow not our own.
Moyers likened this to a metaphor for our whole country. Whether you agree, or think it only valuable as a description of challenges in specific communities, if we’re honest with ourselves it is true at some level. Conservatives have been concerned with cultural coarsening and moral compasses in a way that rings hollow to liberals, yet I suspect Obama’s words hit a chord. Conservatives differ from liberals in how they’d solve the problem, but can we agree this is not what we want for our children?
Add comment January 24th, 2009
The founders on religious symbolism
From Noah Feldman in Divided by God:
The framers are invoked on both sides of the debate about religious symbolism… [but] they were not especially concerned with public religious symbolism one way or the other. They were supremely untroubled by norms like the opening of legislative sessions with symbolic prayers.
This institutional experiment had little to say about religious symbolism. It was concerned with avoiding actual coercion and with disentangling church and state, which had been historically intertwined in the Christian West. So secularists do not really get the better of the argument about symbolism when they point out that the Constitution does not mention God or Jesus. The reason the Constitution does not mention Christianity is that the framers were creating government institutions that had no authority to pronounce on matters of religion, not because the framers themselves were secularists.
… They did not think that the state needed to be protected from the dangers of religious influence, nor were they particularly concerned with keeping religious symbolism out of the public sphere. For that matter, American religion, too, was very different than it is today. Church attendance was low, at least by today’s standards. There was no national movement devoted to promoting the role of religion in public life.
Add comment January 23rd, 2009
