Jacobs’s effort is thoughtful and well worth engaging. But I am not sure we have a shortage of Christian intellectuals (although I may be biased because some of my best friends might be counted as part of this group). Rather, we live in a world where (1) religion has been subsumed by politics; (2) many liberals have accepted the view that religion now lives almost entirely on the right end of politics; (3) the popular media tend to focus on the most extreme and outlandish examples of religion rather than the more thoughtful kind; which means that (4) the quieter forms of religious expression — left, right and center — rarely win notice on the covers of magazines or anywhere else. Put another way: Even Reinhold Niebuhr could not be Reinhold Niebuhr in 2016.
E. J. Dionne. Which was one of the chief points of my essay: “At some point in the past sixty years or so a perverse and destructive feedback loop engaged, and I cannot see how to disengage it.” Also, I never say in the essay that there is “a shortage of Christian intellectuals”: I say that we don’t currently have “serious Christian intellectuals who [occupy] a prominent place on the national stage.”
I don’t know how to account for it, but in all my years of writing I have never published anything that has received as many misunderstandings as this essay. Every day I hear from people complaining “Your essay would have been better if you had said X” when I did in fact say X, or “I think you’re wrong about Z” when Z is something I neither said nor think.
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Ivan Chermayeff, poster for American Museum of Natural History, 1984. For Mobil Corp. Via Aiga Design Archives
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Finely engraved frontispiece to William Morris’s ‘News from nowhere’ (the Kelmscott Press edition), a work which combined his socialist utopian ideals with science fiction.William Morris,
News from nowhere, or, An epoch of rest : being some chapters from a Utopian romance.
Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1892, Alexander Turnbull Library, RPr KELM MORR 1892
a question for David Gushee
My favorite moment in this column by David Gushee comes when he says, “I have been a participant in the effort to encourage Protestant religious conservatives, generally known as fundamentalists and evangelicals, to reconsider their position voluntarily.” Voluntarily, or ...? He sounds like a sheriff in an old Western: Are you gonna come along nice and quiet, or am I gonna hafta rough ya up?
But let’s assume that, contrary to certain appearances, Gushee doesn’t think of himself as an enforcer dispatched by the Powers That Be to bring recalcitrant bigots into line. Let’s set aside his insistence that none of the people on the wrong side of history are honest when they say they genuinely hold theological positions he himself held just a few years ago. (“They are organizing legal defense efforts under the guise of religious liberty.”) Let’s assume that he’s just quite neutrally letting us know what’s coming.
It turns out that you are either for full and unequivocal social and legal equality for LGBT people, or you are against it, and your answer will at some point be revealed. This is true both for individuals and for institutions.
Neutrality is not an option. Neither is polite half-acceptance. Nor is avoiding the subject. Hide as you might, the issue will come and find you. And, in case we didn’t get the point the first time around, he returns to it later:
Openly discriminatory religious schools and parachurch organizations will feel the pinch first. Any entity that requires government accreditation or touches government dollars will be in the immediate line of fire. Some organizations will face the choice either to abandon discriminatory policies or risk potential closure. Others will simply face increasing social marginalization.
A vast host of neutralist, avoidist or de facto discriminatory institutions and individuals will also find that they can no longer finesse the LGBT issue. Space for neutrality or “mild” discrimination will close up as well. So in light of these warnings about what is to come, I have one question for David Gushee: So what?
That is: What, in his view, follows from this state of affairs — for Christians, that is? Odd that he doesn't say. It has been my understanding that Christians consider it a virtue to hold to their convictions in the face of unpopularity and even persecution. ("Then they will hand you over to be tortured and will put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of my name. Then many will fall away, and they will betray one another and hate one another.... But the one who endures to the end will be saved.")
Of course, you can also be persecuted for holding false views; being persecuted doesn't confer legitimacy. But it certainly isn't a sign of error, or those who have "endured to the end" are of all people most to be pitied. So how is it relevant, in Christian terms, that those who hold certain views will suffer for holding them — that those who hold the view that Gushee has publicly held for around twenty months are powerful enough to punish those who haven't quite caught up with him?
Italy’s Fragile Beauty
Italy’s Fragile Beauty - The New York Times. Earthquakes are not the only threat to Italian beauty. Floods and landslides have become more frequent and destructive, since small farmers stopped tending the hillsides and unscrupulous real estate developers replaced them. Small, winding mountain roads — the umbilical cords of little communities across the country — are expensive to maintain, and some local authorities don’t even try. Depopulation has done the rest. Amatrice had already lost three-quarters of its inhabitants in a century — going from 10,000 to just 2,500. They emigrated, they went to Rome and other cities to find work.
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Welfare Palace Hotel, Rem Koolhaas & Madelon Vriesendorp, 1975
The Hugh Hewitt argument
Vote for Trump because
IF he nominates to the Supreme Court one of the judges that he has put on his shortlist and
IF that judge is confirmed and
IF certain cases happen to come before the Court and
IF the the specific issues that the Court is asked to pass judgment on are the specific issues that conservatives care about and
IF that justice votes in the the way Hewitt expects and
IF at least four other justices agree
THEN certain unpleasantly liberal policies will be averted.
And it is on the grounds of his complete and unshakable faith in the stability of this astonishingly fragile house of cards that he ignores, and wants us all to ignore, everything we know about Trump’s ignorant and belligerent narcissism.