Author Archive for philPage 2 of 5

Retrofitted Christianity?

Published
by
phil
on 15 November 2006
in church, emerging church, faith and theology and philosophy
. 1 Comment

I’d like to introduce you to a couple of people you may not know.

One is Mark D. Roberts, a blogging presbyterian pastor, who is a seriously thoughtful guy.  (Remember, I’m the guy who was bashing mainline denominations recently.)  I have enormous respect for the man, and his writing.  His book on praying through the Psalms, “No Holds Barred”, is simply wonderful.   Don’t take that as meaning I agree with him on everything he writes…  Hey, it’s me!  But he’s someone to contend with.

The other is Andrew Sullivan, whose blog, The Daily Dish, is often interesting and provocative.  Sullivan is a frequent writer for Time and other “mainstream media” outlets.

Sullivan has written a book, “The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back” that is reviewed by Roberts here.

Here is how Roberts introduces Sullivan:

A skilled writer and creative thinker, Sullivan combines in one man several attributes that rarely share the same human body. He is a gay, Christian, Roman Catholic, conservative who voted for John Kerry. (He may be the only one of this species in existence today.) It’s no surprise that such a combination leads to unusual perspectives, many of which can be found on Sullivan’s blog,

This is a very thoughtful review, of a book on conservatism that will surprise you.

If you aren’t familiar with either author, this review of one by the other is a great place to start.

Here is Robert’s description of Sullivan’s reading contradictions into the gospels:

Once again, I fear Sullivan has bought into a bit of retrofitted Christian dogma, which exaggerates the differences among the gospels for the sake of discounting them. Ironically, the kind of literalistic reading that allows some scholars to find multiple contradictions among the gospels is exactly the sort of thing Sullivan despises among fundamentalists. I am not the first to point out that fundamentalist Christians and liberal scholars who reject biblical authority both tend to read the Bible in the same, overly literalistic way.

Is something like this also at issue re: the different ways emergent church(EC) folks and the “traditionalists” read scripture?  I have the feeling sometimes that the leftward tilt of much of the EC is defended by very literal readings of certain scriptures, and very post-modern interpretation of others….

Others have observed that the various religious traditions simply differ on which parts of scripture they take seriously.  You know: Nazarenes stress the “free will” parts, and Baptists stress the “elect” part.  :-)  Is that all that’s really going on in the EC?  Or is the EC something new?

Robert’s opinion is that Sullivan seems to embrace a “retrofitted Christianity”.

I find Sullivan’s thoughts about Christianity fascinating for several reasons. One is that he epitomizes something I’d call “Retrofitted Christianity.” What do I mean by this? If you look up “retrofit” in the dictionary, one definition reads: “To provide with parts, devices, or equipment not in existence or available at the time of original manufacture.” If you retrofit a classic car, for example, you might give it a new engine that wasn’t available when the car was first built. So retrofitted Christianity is a version of classic faith that includes new parts that weren’t there at first. Some people, like Andrew Sullivan, think this is a better or even more authentic version of the faith. Others, like me, for example, are concerned that the retrofitted version of Christianity exemplified by Sullivan lacks some essential parts, even though it gets some things right.

I think something like this is at the core of my concerns with the EC.  But I’m still reading.

Why “gender equity” and “racial equity” have a bad name… for some of us

Published
by
phil
on 15 November 2006
in current events and politics
. 11 Comments

This is a post about politics and how the media reports it.  If you hate the topic, move on.   I’m stuck at home today because my back hurts so much I can’t drive in to teach….  I’m in pain, and Darvocet, Vicodin, etc., aren’t making a dent.  I’m in a bad mood.
Here’s a recent article from a partisan columnist on the media reaction to our first female Speaker of the House.  Some of you will recoil in horror at the very mention of the columnist’s name, so I won’t mention it here.  You can click the link if you want to.  But if you do, I dare you to read the entire article, make it past the partisan perspective, and consider the point.

In the past week, there are 476 documents on Nexis heralding the magnificent achievement of Nancy Pelosi becoming the FIRST WOMAN speaker of the House.

I thought we had moved beyond such multicultural milestones.

The media yawned when Condoleezza Rice became the first black woman secretary of state (and when Lincoln Chaffee became the first developmentally disabled senator).

There were only 77 documents noting that Rice was the first black woman to be the secretary of state, and half of them were issues of Jet, Essence, Ebony or Black Entrepreneur magazine.

……….

But when Nancy Pelosi—another Democrat who married a multimillionaire—achieves the minor distinction of becoming the first female speaker of the House, The New York Times acts like she’s invented cold fusion.

There were two major articles breathlessly reporting Pelosi’s magnificent achievement as first female speaker and an op-ed by Bob Herbert, titled “Ms. Speaker and Other Trends.” Beatifying Pelosi as “the most powerful woman ever to sit in Congress,” Herbert began: “Sometimes you can actually feel the winds of history blowing.” There was a major Times profile of Pelosi, gushing that Pelosi was “on the brink of becoming the first female speaker.” (Isn’t she just the most independent little gal?)

The problem is obvious: the real enthusiasm of many for gender and racial equity is actually just enthusiasm for the left in general.  Some of us have said this for a long time, and been called racists, bigots, and this-and-that-phobes, it being a popular pastime of the left to hurl epithets when no other response comes to mind.  I’m sure that many readers will believe themselves free of this partisan taint in their pure love of egalitarianism.  I even hope it’s true.
But it’s safe to say a couple of things:

1)  No lefty columnist will report the same facts about the coverage and opinion on the new Speaker.  It’s going to be pretty hard to spin them counterclockwise…  so they’ll just ignore it.

2)   The left (as ably represented by the main stream media) seems unable to give credit when its political bête noire achieves significant things (in the eyes of the left), like a more gender/racial balanced governing team.

Why does this matter?  Because if you get most of your information from the self-appointed mouthpieces of the left, you may not have considered just how little recongnition the left gives when people acheive the very things the left claims to want.  The left won’t be pointing this out to you.

So, here’s a new standard to consider: whenever the left stops yelling about something, and the right is in a position of relative power, it probably means that the goals of the left have been achieved, and they just don’t want to give credit.  Instead, they’ll wait till the left is in a position of relative power again…  and then give themselves the credit.

Prediction:  we are NOW in a period of essentially full employment, in the midst of a very healthy economy, by virtually any indicator.   That is, unemployment is the lowest it has been for a long time, and virtually any semi-presentable person who wants a job can find one.  The media had very little to say about that fact during this election cycle.  It would appear that sometimes “it’s not the economy, stupid”.   Look for the media to be giving credit for low unemployment to the policies of the new Democratic congress in about, oh, a year or two.  Unless, of course, unemployment goes UP in reaction to the proposed national minimum wage legislation (for which there is historical precedent)…  in which case, of course, it will be Bush’s fault… even though he’s signaled a willingness to sign a minimum wage bill (proving once again that he is not actually a “conservative”).
None of this is to defend race or gender bigotry in any way.  So don’t go there.  I would like to know if anyone has a different explanation for the imbalance in media reportage (a little French for the folks) than the one offered here…..

Sleeping on the job

Published
by
phil
on 14 November 2006
in art and culture, asides and laugh!
. 2 Comments

This isn’t exactly a lullaby. But it seems it put Paul Gonzalves to sleep in the front row… I have some trouble staying awake in faculty meetings… but this guy puts me to shame.

The Return of the Living Dead (or maybe just sleeping)

Published
by
phil
on 13 November 2006
in church and faith and theology
. 2 Comments

If you read most of this article in USA today, you’d think that the mainline churches are having a resurgence. That’s because most of the article is a puff-piece about how well those “liberal churches” (that’s the article’s term, not mine) are doing, and how great they are.

But the telling paragraphs, buried in the body of the article, are these:

By comparison, total membership in the seven largest mainline Protestant denominations — United Methodist, Evangelical Lutheran, Episcopal, Presbyterian Church (USA), Disciples of Christ, United Church of Christ and American Baptist Churches — fell a total of 7.4% from 1995 to 2004, based on tallies reported to the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches.

Meanwhile, the total membership count for Roman Catholics, the ultra-conservative Southern Baptist Convention, Pentecostal Assemblies of God and proselytizing Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) reported to the Yearbook is up nearly 11.4% for the same period.

While I’m not quite sure how the LDS got put in with Roman Catholics, Baptists and Assemblies (the only “conservatism” they share is political… not theological in the slightest), these are revealing stats that basically undermine the rest of the article. So while the author of the article found some “vibrant, growing churches” from the “mainline protestants”, they are emphatically not the trend.

Sociologist Barry Kosmin, a lead researcher for the American Religious Identification Survey, done in 1990 and 2001, says, “The mainline is never going to be the dominant cultural group again.

……..

In 2001, 17.2 million people named a mainline denomination [as their church], down from 18.7 million in 1990…………

Still, the experts say hold off on playing taps for the mainline. “Numbers aren’t the only story,” Lindner says. “We still have to talk about what really counts — cultural hegemony.”

Here’s what’s not in the USA Today article, because it would further undermine the perspective of the author: There are about 163 million “protestants” in the USA. Since it seems doubtful that most of those are unitarians, one assumes they must mostly be the more conservative denominations. So who’s mainline now?

An important point: the shift that’s still happening between former mainline and more conservative affiliations seems to be speeding up, not slowing down, and it isn’t just a sort of “market adjustment”.

Which naturally leads to the question: why? What is causing such hemorrhaging (true confessions… I looked it up in the spell check) in the “mainline denominations”? DO they still have “cultural hegemony”? If they do, will they keep it?

Does anyone know of any studies on the typical affiliation (or former affiliation) of members of the “emergent church” ?

Fascinating questions, to me…. and I’m not too sure I have ready answers… just some wild guesses.

How about you?

HOWARD DEAN demands a recount

Published
by
phil
on 9 November 2006
in asides and politics
. 15 Comments

In the wake of obvious election fraud, the Chairman of the Democratic Party demands a recount.