Archive for May, 2009
While looking for a link to the below “Matthew 25″ post, I found an interesting blogsite, the Matthew 25 Network. This post was sitting right on top, about the overblown partisan rhetoric on Obama as the Antichrist. This, to my mind, falls into the category of politics masquerading as religion, not faith working in the public square.
When you’re doing everything in your power to cultivate a Manichaean worldview among your audience, they’ll be inclined to see the most small and normal things – like differences in opinion on tax policy, for example – as the surface elements of a deep and conspiratorial struggle between Good and Evil. If everything is viewed in the light of a dispensational eschatology, a battle between the divine conspiracy and the demonic conspiracy, then everything one disagrees with is a sign of the demonic conspiracy – it can be no other way. A charismatic figure who wants to enact progressive policies can’t just be someone with different opinions; he must be the Antichrist.
This idea severely poisons our politics, which rests on the idea that people with just and good intentions can and will disagree on public policy matters – in fact, the system is designed for them to disagree and come to reasonable compromises. If every matter of public policy is another battleground in the ultimate war between Good and Evil, then compromise anywhere, on any matter, is sin. This not only leads to… things like the decline of the moderate wing of the Republican Party (as evidenced by the recent departure of Arlen Specter from that caucus in the face of a radical right-wing primary challenge) – which leads to an inability to get things done in the halls of our state and federal legislatures. If politicians can’t compromise for fear of getting booted by their own party for being a [D/R]INO*, then they can’t be effective legislators – because our entire system is built on compromise.
May 31st, 2009
“Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” –Matthew 25:40
The Reverend Allison DeFoor, speaking at our January dinner “Faith in the Public Square” spoke softly, but carried a big stick. It wasn’t until after I got home and listened to the tape of the dinner that I realized how profound what he said was. Whether you’re a person of faith or no faith, whether you apply them to the Prison Ministries which he had dedicated his life to or to any other group of “the least of these,” it’s hard to argue with the truth of his words (emphasis added):
So it was a pretty big reorientation for my life and if you look at Matthew 25, it might be for yours as well. To the extent that there are divisions in our culture about these issues it’s because we’re not paying attention to the orders in Matthew 25 which come directly out of the Jewish tradition. If we would [take care of the prisoners, take care of the poor, take care of the sick] we might find that many of these divisions would disappear because the divisions, really – at the end of the day – aren’t anything compared to what we’re being told to do. Towards that end, I’ll tell you that at Wakulla Prison we have 1,000 volunteers coming in to a faith and character based institution, I have personally gone to the ACLU and dialoged with them… using volunteers and no state money passes constitutional muster. I’ll tell you that we’re sitting on an 8% recidivism rate, when the recidivism rate is 33% post-release in the general population. So if you would like to come and put away your divisions in the public square and devote the public square to actually doing things as opposed to talking, we’d love to have you. We could use another thousand volunteers.
May 31st, 2009
Purple State of Mind’s John Marks calls polarization “the most inscrutable American growth industry of them all.”
“…the industry that depends for its survival on your constant sense of outraged alienation from fellow citizens, neighbors and family members. It’s the industry that pits you in competition every waking hour of your day and in every walk of your life against complete strangers as a means to generate profits.
Never heard of the polarization business? That’s because the polarizers don’t want to be seen as a business. To continue to thrive, their domain has to be seen as a marketplace of ideas, a savvy, street-wise entertainment, a spirited debate. In fact, at its heart, it’s none of those things. To paraphrase Tony Soprano, and every other pop culture gangster who ever lived, when Newt Gingrich calls Judge Sonya Sotomayor a racist, it’s not personal. It’s not even politics. It’s business, plain and simple, and it has been for years.
But here’s the catch. It’s a business that depends for its success upon journalists, bloggers, and the general public buying and selling the product under the guise of politics. The price of entry is believing the lie. That’s the part that Tony Soprano would most appreciate, I think, the beauty of a perfect deception.
Once we’ve shifted our focus a bit, it’s easy enough to see how the polarization business works. Like anything large and complex in nature, it functions as an ecosystem.
Provocative, offensive, incendiary statements are best seen as rain. They must fall for the crops to grow. Without offending statements, the bloggers have no opinions, and the twenty-four-hour cable networks have no stories, unless a child is savagely murdered, a good-looking woman vanishes or a storm kicks the groin of a coast line…
Here’s the deal. We are being stimulated by a colossal, nerveless, anger machine that doesn’t care whether we whip ourselves into a frenzy or blow ourselves apart. It lives only to gorge itself on the proceeds of our rage, and yet we have begun to think of this machine as if it were somehow synonymous with our democracy.
One last time: It’s not. It’s mostly just big-ass business. Wake up, America, and smell the coffee–or is that the smell of your own manufactured fury making someone else rich?”
May 30th, 2009
If you haven’t been under a rock the last few days, you’ve heard the quote where Supreme Court nominee Justice Sonia Sotomayor seems to suggest that Latina women are likely to make better judicial decisions than Caucasian men (and the soundbytes of a handful of conservatives calling her a racist).
Not so fast. Whole quotes… The Village Square always comes down on the side of whole quotes. So here’s the whole enchilada. The speech was given at a symposium entitled “Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation.” The offending out-of-context quote is on page five.
It you’re not down for reading the whole text, then at least read page five… If you read page five and still think she’s a racist, you should express that opinion (with civility, of course). If you can’t bother to read page five in its entirety, perhaps you should sit this one out?
May 29th, 2009
If you’ve been hanging around with us for a couple of years thinking we might just be onto something, today’s Nicholas Kristof column in the New York Times, “Would You Slap Your Father, If So You’re a Liberal,” suggests you’re right. Plus the title is enough to make even our most conservative readers head straight for the Times’ website for a read…
So how do we discipline our brains to be more open-minded, more honest, more empirical? A start is to reach out to moderates on the other side — ideally eating meals with them, for that breaks down “us vs. them” battle lines that seem embedded in us. (In ancient times we divided into tribes; today, into political parties.) The Web site www.civilpolitics.org is an attempt to build this intuitive appreciation for the other side’s morality, even if it’s not our morality.
“Minds are very hard things to open, and the best way to open the mind is through the heart,” Professor Haidt says. “Our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games.”
Thus persuasion may be most effective when built on human interactions.
We thought so.
May 28th, 2009
I’m thinking we’ll start a series on interesting quotes from surprising people… people that one half or the other of you might refuse to listen to… because you just never know from whence wisdom might come and because we need all the wisdom we can get. Then you get to guess who said it. (OK, with Google, it’s not that hard to guess. But I like the sport of it anyway.) The speaker will always be a major public figure who is controversial. Here’s our first:
“I try always to mention in every speech I give now that when the human genome was sequenced, the most interesting finding to me was that all human beings are genetically more than 99.9 percent the same. Yet all of us spend over 90 percent of our lives thinking about that one-tenth of 1 percent. I’m older, I’m younger, I’m taller, I’m shorter, I’m smarter, I’m richer, I’m poorer, I’m this, I’m that or the other thing. You think about the way we organize our lives, it’s all about that one-tenth of 1 percent. All the common good is is a reaffirmation of the fact that in the end, in order for your one-tenth of 1 percent to flower, to amount to a hill of beans, you have to give others the same chance, that the 99.9 percent is ultimately more important. And without tending to that, you can’t possibly unleash the one-tenth of 1 percent.”
May 27th, 2009
Respect is defined as not trying directly or indirectly to change anyone.
~ Thomas Fogarty
May 26th, 2009
In the busy hubbub of modern life, today too often becomes about sleeping in, shopping, getting the lawn mowed. But forgetting the real meaning of Memorial Day is nearly impossible in my neighborhood because of a neighbor.
We’ll call her Jane.
Jane’s lawn is a memorial to the sacrifice made by our fellow Americans, people like you and me, until they put everything in their life on hold to do what their country asked. And in case you didn’t notice the front-yard-turned-monument spread out right before you when you drive past Jane’s house, her sign downright insists that we STOP.
So, stop I will… to honor the memory of our neighbors killed in service to our country since this American experiment began. Those killed in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Vietnam, in WWII and WWI and those killed more quietly away from the headlines in smaller conflicts that have exacted the same big price.
To my father-in-law who died in Vietnam, and to my mother-in-law who had to raise four children without him, I remember.
In the name of my family members who served and are serving: My grandfather who left a thriving pediatric practice to join the Army in WWII, my father who spent his career in service to the Navy (first as a pilot, later as a civilian), my brother and sister-in-law and cousin who still serve today… I remember.
The Village Square has always been about finding what we agree on in the midst of so much disagreement, and this is it.
Today, as our country remembers, President Obama laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. I’m a D.C. native who’s had many an opportunity in my life to take in the breathtaking awe of Arlington. You simply can’t leave there unaffected.
For every rich and beloved life lost in the sea of crosses on the hills of Arlington, we remember.
Sure, it’s a different scale, but if you really pause to take it in, you won’t be quite the same when you leave Jane’s lawn either.
May 25th, 2009
Professor Robert Thurman, Department of Religion, Columbia University, in the film Beyond Our Differences:
Hatred will never put an end to hatred. Violence will never put an end to violence. Only love can put an end to hatred. And only non-violence and gentleness can prevent violence. If you give in to anger and hatred and commit violence, the one who is most violated is yourself. By surrendering to anger and hatred, you are allowing it to violate you.
May 24th, 2009
There’s some wisdom (and yes, some bad language) in this commentary delivered by Bill Maher last night:
Stop believing you can solve your problems by electing a superhero… Here in California, we experimented with making an action hero our leader. He was going to build roads and schools, cut taxes and balance the budget. How? Simple because he was a hulking man monster who could bend lampposts… Is it Arnold Schwarzenegger’s fault that California now has a worse credit rating than Louisiana, a state that’s half underwater and half in the bag? Not really. This is a man who came to America with nothing but a jar of protient powder and a nice jar of 36D’s and became a Hollywood action star despite never learning how to speak English.
No one can govern this state because it’s illegal to do it. We govern by ballot initiative and we only write two kinds of those: Spend money on things I like and don’t raise my taxes. We vote “yes” on gain, “no” on pain. This is why America’s founders wanted a representative democracy, because they knew if you gave the average guy a change, he’d vote for a fantasyland with no taxes, free beer and [rated R].
And California used to be like the rest of America, following the instructions in the constitution and everything. But then we chucked that and now our state is governed by special interest people standing in front of the supermarket with clipboards asking “will you sign this petition to make earthquakes illegal?” They’re really starting to bother me. And Proposition 14C which mandates 2 weeks paid leave for hangovers. And universal teeth whitening paid for by farts. So California, which I’m sad to tell you is usually ahead of the rest of America, will probably go bankrupt. We’ll probably be closing the schools, but you’ll want to keep your kids at home anyway because we’ll also be closing the prisons and letting all the rapists out.
Truth is, Even a real superhero couldn’t get us out the mess we’re in now. Superman could stop bullets and crush coal to make diamonds between the cheeks of his ass, but he can’t help us. He works for a newspaper, he needs a job. Batman can’t help us because he can’t get parts for his big stupid American car. And Wonder Woman can’t help us because, well, we don’t allow gays in uniform.
May 23rd, 2009
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