It has begun! Today I got out to the county course for nine holes. Five very good holes, where I just relaxed and focused on a smooth, fluid swing; four not so good holes, where I hit a few real clunkers, which I’ll attribute mostly to rustiness and getting a little uptight. There’s nothing like those holes where you bomb it down the middle off the tee, pop it onto the green, and finish off a couple of good putts. And the serendipity of heading out to the county course alone is fun, too. Today I was paired up with a guy who teaches at Julliard Music School and tours the country singing cabaret tunes. He’s opened in Atlantic City and Vegas for people like Don Rickles and Ray Romano, and sings at restaurants that might be fit right into a Sopranos episode. Our foursome also included a Japanese guy who spoke hardly any English and was impeccably dressed in proper golf attire. Only at a NYC metro area public course!
Month: March 2007
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Phil Keaggy and His Olson
Phil Keaggy is a phenomenal guitarist. When I was a kid, seeing him in concert inspired me to want to be a Christian rock star. That never quite happened, but hey, I do get to play in front of people sometimes on Sundays. It is very hard for me not to covet the Olson guitar Phil is playing here. (BTW, in case you haven’t already realized this, a friend send me a bunch of YouTube links, and I finally figured out how to embed them into the blog!).
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Mom My Ride
A hilarious spoof using “Pimp My Ride” to bust us suburban minivan drivers:
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How Not to Be Seen
This is a classic mash-up of Monty Python and Halo:
Today’s e-mail update from the Family Research Council urges Christians to sign a petition against a proposal to amend the federal hate crimes laws to include hate crimes against homosexuals. The FRC has set up a website reflecting a major initiative to oppose what it is calling “thought crimes” laws. The FRC suggests that Christian pastors could be imprisioned under this law for preaching sermons about traditional sexual morality.
I understand some of the FRC’s concerns here, but I have to say that this initiative deeply disturbs me. Before I mention what disturbs me, here are the points with which I agree. There are places in the world, some of them purportedly liberal democracies, in which speech, by itself, can be considered a hate crime. I agree with FRC and other Christian organizations that laws of that sort are abominable and a threat to religious liberty. Religions by definition “discriminate” in the sense that all religions in some way divide the ethical and moral from the unethical and immoral. Christianity is about grace and love, but we affirm that we need grace and love because we are all sinners. Christians don’t, and can’t, hesitate to identify sin for what it is, including in the area of sexual morality (though I would say that there is no reason to single out homosexual practice in this regard in contrast to other issues of sexual morality, and that we could do much better in acting pastorally and missionally towards people who are homosexual). There is no question about the fact that we need to remain vigilant about preserving freedom of religious speech and association.
Having said that, this concern has nothing whatsoever to do with the hate crime law currently being targed by the FRC and other religious right groups. The bill under consideration concerns violent crime. The amendment would increase the penalities for violent crimes motivated by animus against homosexuals. Here is what is covered by this bill: the willfull causing of “bodily injury to any person or, through the use of fire, a firearm, or an explosive device, attempts to cause bodily injury to any person,” including “kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill.”
Perhaps I missed it, but I didn’t see any reference there to preaching a sermon. This bill has nothing whatsover to do with preaching or speaking about traditional morality. There is no realistic likelihood that such protected first amendment activity would ever be criminalized in the United States, and even if it were, the “activist judges” would surely overturn such plainly unconstitutional legislation.
In addition, I’m very disturbed by the effort to paint this legislation as a “thought control” bill. The “thought control” meme has been picked up by various conservative organizations (see, e.g., Concerned Women for America’s webpage on the issue). I think this is extremely misleading. The truth is that it is not at all unusual or for the law to impose different penalties depending on a person’s state of mind. In fact, state of mind is an element of many crimes. Murder, for example, as every first-year law student learns, traditionally is defined as “the intentional killing a human being with malice aforethought.” “Intent” and “malice aforethought” are states of mind. This doesn’t make the prohibition of murder some kind of black helicopter “thought control” law.
I could give hundreds of other examples in which state of mind is relevant either to the elements of a crime or civil claim or to the penalty or damages to be imposed. Indeed, it’s fair to say that both the criminal and civil law routinely address a party’s mental state. To suggest that hate crimes legislation is unique in this regard is false.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I think the religious right’s crusade against hate crimes laws, from a missional perspective, is misguided and selfish. What does this communicate to a homosexual person about the love of Jesus? Will this do anything to move any person involved in homosexual behavior to turn towards Jesus and the community of faith, where hope and healing could be found? Is the Christian community speaking the truth in love (Eph. 4:15) here, or are we just demanding our “rights?” I think the FRC might be right in identifying the homosexual activist movement in Western countries as a key area in which the Church will face a post-Christian culture in coming decades. The question is, do we confront that culture with a sort of jihad, or do we take up the way of the cross and face it with sacrificial love?
Appendix: here is the full text of the bill currently being considered by Congress. I think it is abundantly clear that this has nothing to do with so-called “thought crimes” and everything to do with the kind of violence that all followers of Jesus should deplore, whether against homosexuals or anyone else:
HR 254 IH
110th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. R. 254
To enhance Federal enforcement of hate crimes, and for other purposes.IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
January 5, 2007
Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary——————————————————————————–
A BILL
To enhance Federal enforcement of hate crimes, and for other purposes.Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the `David Ray Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007′ or `David’s Law’.
SEC. 2. FINDINGS.
Congress finds that–
(1) the incidence of violence motivated by the actual or perceived race, color, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, or disability of the victim poses a serious national problem;
(2) such violence disrupts the tranquility and safety of communities and is deeply divisive;
(3) existing Federal law is inadequate to address this problem;
(4) such violence affects interstate commerce in many ways, including–
(A) by impeding the movement of members of targeted groups and forcing such members to move across State lines to escape the incidence or risk of such violence; and
(B) by preventing members of targeted groups from purchasing goods and services, obtaining or sustaining employment or participating in other commercial activity;
(5) perpetrators cross State lines to commit such violence;
(6) instrumentalities of interstate commerce are used to facilitate the commission of such violence;
(7) such violence is committed using articles that have traveled in interstate commerce;
(8) violence motivated by bias that is a relic of slavery can constitute badges and incidents of slavery;
(9) although many local jurisdictions have attempted to respond to the challenges posed by such violence, the problem is sufficiently serious, widespread, and interstate in scope to warrant Federal intervention to assist such jurisdictions; and
(10) many States have no laws addressing violence based on the actual or perceived race, color, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, or disability, of the victim, while other States have laws that provide only limited protection.
SEC. 3. DEFINITION OF HATE CRIME.
In this Act, the term `hate crime’ has the same meaning as in section 280003(a) of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (28 U.S.C. 994 note).
SEC. 4. PROHIBITION OF CERTAIN ACTS OF VIOLENCE.
Section 245 of title 18, United States Code, is amended–
(1) by redesignating subsections (c) and (d) as subsections (d) and (e), respectively; and
(2) by inserting after subsection (b) the following:
`(c)(1) Whoever, whether or not acting under color of law, willfully causes bodily injury to any person or, through the use of fire, a firearm, or an explosive device, attempts to cause bodily injury to any person, because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, or national origin of any person–
`(A) shall be imprisoned not more than 10 years, or fined in accordance with this title, or both; and
`(B) shall be imprisoned for any term of years or for life, or fined in accordance with this title, or both if–
`(i) death results from the acts committed in violation of this paragraph; or
`(ii) the acts committed in violation of this paragraph include kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill.
`(2)(A) Whoever, whether or not acting under color of law, in any circumstance described in subparagraph (B), willfully causes bodily injury to any person or, through the use of fire, a firearm, or an explosive device, attempts to cause bodily injury to any person, because of the actual or perceived religion, gender, sexual orientation, or disability of any person–
`(i) shall be imprisoned not more than 10 years, or fined in accordance with this title, or both; and
`(ii) shall be imprisoned for any term of years or for life, or fined in accordance with this title, or both, if–
`(I) death results from the acts committed in violation of this paragraph; or
`(II) the acts committed in violation of this paragraph include kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill.
`(B) For purposes of subparagraph (A), the circumstances described in this subparagraph are that–
`(i) in connection with the offense, the defendant or the victim travels in interstate or foreign commerce, uses a facility or instrumentality of interstate or foreign commerce, or engages in any activity affecting interstate or foreign commerce; or
`(ii) the offense is in or affects interstate or foreign commerce.’.
SEC. 5. DUTIES OF FEDERAL SENTENCING COMMISSION.
(a) Amendment of Federal Sentencing Guidelines- Pursuant to its authority under section 994 of title 28, United States Code, the United States Sentencing Commission shall study the issue of adult recruitment of juveniles to commit hate crimes and shall, if appropriate, amend the Federal sentencing guidelines to provide sentencing enhancements (in addition to the sentencing enhancement provided for the use of a minor during the commission of an offense) for adult defendants who recruit juveniles to assist in the commission of hate crimes.
(b) Consistency With Other Guidelines- In carrying out this section, the United States Sentencing Commission shall–
(1) ensure that there is reasonable consistency with other Federal sentencing guidelines; and
(2) avoid duplicative punishments for substantially the same offense.
SEC. 6. GRANT PROGRAM.
(a) Authority To Make Grants- The Administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention of the Department of Justice shall make grants, in accordance with such regulations as the Attorney General may prescribe, to State and local programs designed to combat hate crimes committed by juveniles.
(b) Authorization of Appropriations- There are authorized to be appropriated such sums as may be necessary to carry out this section.
SEC. 7. AUTHORIZATION FOR ADDITIONAL PERSONNEL TO ASSIST STATE AND LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT.
There are authorized to be appropriated to the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Justice, including the Community Relations Service, for fiscal years 2007, 2008, and 2009 such sums as are necessary to increase the number of personnel to prevent and respond to alleged violations of section 245 of title 18, United States Code (as amended by this Act).
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Contending for the Truth
This little gem is one of the readings in my Isaac of Syria reader. I’m not sure I can take Isaac completely literally here. It’s interesting that Isaac is contending that we shouldn’t “contend” for truth. He therefore certainly can’t mean that persuasive, reasoned argument is never appropriate. However, what he is saying is wonderfully countercultural, I think, in the context of our present “culture wars.”
Someone who has actually tasted truth is not contentious for truth.
Someone who is considered among men to be zealous for truth has not yet learnt what truth is really like; once he has truly learnt it, he will cease from zealousness on its behalf.
The gift of God and of knowledge of him is not a cause for turmoil and clamour; rather this gift is entirely filled with a peace in which the Spirit, love and humility reside.
The following is a sign of the coming of the Spirit: the person whom the Spirit has overshadowed is made perfect in these very virtues.
God is reality. The person whose mind has become aware of God does not even possess a toungue with which to speak, but God resides in his heart in great serenity. He experiences no stirring of zeal or argumentatitiveness, nor is he stirred by anger. He cannot even be aroused concerning the faith.
I’m sure that many Christians reading the headline of this post would respond positively to it. The culture wars have conditioned us to become excited by battle cries about truth. In our zeal, however, I think we often lose a deeper perspective about what Truth really is, and about what our relationship to Truth must be.
The foundation of Truth is the triune God, and the triune God’s ultimate revelation of Truth to us is the divine logos, God incarnate in Jesus. Our relationship with Jesus is based on his sacrificial death on the cross, made effective to us only by God’s grace. Our aspect concerning Truth must therefore be one of humble gratitude, never one of angry zeal. I think this is what Isaac means when he says “Someone who has actually tasted truth is never contentious for truth.” Like the Apostle Peter cutting off Malchus’ ear (John 18:10), we think we have to defend Jesus with violent words. Nothing could be further from the Truth.
The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education
By Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmerman
Baker Academic (2006)
ISBN 0-8010-2734-9
This book is explores the themes of whether, and how, Christians can develop a rich and passionate life of the mind. Although it is written for Christian students bound for university, it is useful for any Christian who is serious about the intellectual life.
One of the authors’ goals is to defuse the “warfare” mentality concerning faith and “secular” learning that some Christians, particularly those who are not very mature in the faith, often seem to develop. They propose to do this through the model of “Incarnational Humanism.”
“Incarnational Humanism” takes the incarnation of Christ as a starting point for a Christian approach to learning. “In Christ,” the authors state, “all fragmentation ends and a new humanity begins, a new creation in which all knowledge is united (or taken captive, as Paul puts it) under the lordship of Christ because in him the divine and the human are firmly joined forever.” The pattern of the incarnation suggests that we should expect to find that truth is not “an abstract, timeless concept,” but rather is mediated through human language, culture, and tradition. Therefore, Christians should not be afraid of truth located outside the hermetically sealed world of our particular religious subcultures.
In short, the authors place a Kuyperian notion of “common grace,” as mediated for generations of Christian college students by Arthur Holmes’ famous dictum that “All Truth is God’s Truth,” into the postmodern context. While the authors thus acknowledge the postmodern turn, they firmly deny the destructive Nietzschean postmodernism, evident in figures such as Michael Foucault, that rejects any notion of classical humanism in favor of a heuristic of power relationships.
The answer the authors suggest to Nietzsche and Foucault, however, is not a resurgent Christian rationalism dusted off from the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. Rather, they hearken back to the sort of humanism that is evident in many of the Church’s great minds, such as Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin, prior to the Enlightenment. In this classical Christian humanism, truth is more than power – indeed, truth in many ways is the antithesis of power – because the divine Truth became man and gave himself for us.
There are many riches in this book. The phrase “Incarnational Humanism” is a beautiful one that deserves broad attention, and it is high time that “All Truth is God’s Truth” be given a postmodern reading. There is also, however, a glaring weakness in the authors’ arguments: they do not deal adequately with the effects of sin. A model of truth that hearkens back to Augustine, but that glides over any reading of Augustine’s thoughts on sin, will not present a thoroughly Christian humanism.
I wish the authors had acknowledged the tension between the incarnation and human sinfulness, and had contextualized it, as scripture and the Christian humanist tradition do, within the “already / not yet” of the Kingdom of God. Nevertheless, this is a valuable addition to the literature on the intellectual life as a Christian vocation. Let us hope that a holistic, incarnational understanding of faith and learning once again infuses the Church, rather than the rationalist, atomistic, confrontational approaches that so often seem to dominate our thinking.
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"If Only" and the Iraq War
An excellent article in this month’s Economist surveys the many problems with the Iraq war. The concluding paragraph is true and poignant:
It is not enough to say with the neocons that this was a good idea executed badly. Their own ideas are partly to blame. Too many people in Washington were fixated on proving an ideological point: that America’s values were universal and would be digested effortlessly by people a world away. But plonking an American army in the heart of the Arab world was always a gamble. It demanded the highest seriousness and careful planning. Messrs Bush and Rumsfeld chose instead to send less than half the needed soldiers and gave no proper thought to the aftermath.
What a waste. Most Iraqis rejoiced in the toppling of Saddam. They trooped in their millions to vote. What would Iraq be like now if America had approached its perilous, monumentally controversial undertaking with humility, honesty and courage? Thanks to the almost criminal negligence of Mr Bush’s administration nobody, now, will ever know.
There is an interesting article in this month’s Economist that illustrates, I think, some of the problems with social Darwinism, particularly when it is linked to a particular political outlook, as seemingly inevitably is the case. The article reports on a study of six people who have suffered damage to a part of the brain (the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC)) that is involved with social emotion. The study showed that these people were more likely than a control group to provide a “utilitarian” answer to the “runaway train paradox.”
The “runaway train paradox” involves two dilemmas — in one, you must decide whether to push a person in front of an oncoming train in order to slow the train before it hits five other people further down the line; in the other, you must decide whether to switch the track so that that train will hit only one person further down the line rather than hitting five people. Most people will hesistate to push a person in front of the train to save five lives, but will not hesistate to switch the track so that the train hits one person further down the line instead of five. The six subjects with damaged VMPC’s felt the same about both possibilities — they would not hesitate in either case to sacrifice one person in order to save five.
The article explains that “In these cases it seems that the decision on how to act is not a single, rational calculation of the sort that moral philosophers have generally assumed is going on, but a conflict between two processes, with one (the emotional) sometimes able to override the other (the utilitarian, the location of which this study does not address).” This yin-and-yang of emotional and rational responses, the article says, “fits with one of the tenets of evolutionary psychology…. This is that minds are composed of modules evolved for given purposes…. The VMPC may be the site of a ‘moral-decision’ module, linked to the social emotions, that either regulates or is regulated by an as-yet-unlocated utilitarian module. “
So far, perhaps, so good. All of this seems very speculative, and a sample size of six people with brain damage hardly seems adequate, but nevertheless, it wouldn’t be surprising that the emotional and rational aspects of moral reasoning relate to different parts of the brain, and it doesn’t problematic per se if those parts of the brain developed over time through evolutionary processes. The kicker is in the article’s concluding paragraph: “This does not answer the question of what this module (what philosophers woudl call ‘moral sense’) is actually for. But it does suggest the question should be addressed functionally, rather than in the abstract. Time, perhaps, for philosophers to put away their copies of Kant and pull a dusty tome of Darwin off the bookshelf.”
It seems to me that in this paragraph the article crosses from descriptive to prescriptive; from science to metaphysics. This is particularly so in that, as a devoted reader of the Economist, I’m well aware of that magazine’s pragmatist / libertarian political philosophy and its slant towards materialist metaphysics. In a very subtle way, this is an example of the materialist / pragmatist saying: “See there … all that ‘moral sense’ and whot is in your head. We shall move beyond this and learn to develop our utilitarian modules.”
In a prior post about Dostoevsky, I mentioned Isaac the Syrian, a Christian mystic and ascetic who lived in Seventh Century. I picked up a lovely little book called Daily Readings With St. Isaac of Syria. It’s part of a “Daily Readings” series published by Templegate Publishers, a small independent publisher of classics in Christian spirituality. I definitely plan to pick up more of the volumes in this series.
As evangelicals, we’re tempted to shy away from ascetics like Isaac. Weren’t they trying to earn God’s favor? Wasn’t their abuse of the body more Gnostic than Christian? I think it’s helpful, though, to think of them on their own terms as people of their times. We think the world is chaotic, difficult and uncertain today — imagine what it was like to live in the 600’s! Surely there are aspects of the theology and practices of the ascetics that we would consider out of balance, but surely Christians living 1400 years from now will say the same about us (if the Lord doesn’t return before then). At the same time, there are beautiful themes in many of their writings that can inform and deepen our faith. In their writings, we often see that, within their own contexts, they were trying to understand faith, grace, repentance and the Christian life, just as we are today.
So, here is a selection from Isaac, on weakness:
Blessed is the person who knows his own weakness, because awareness of this becomes for him the foundation and beginning of all that is good and beautiful.
For whenever someone realizes and perceives that he is truly and indeed weak, then he draws in his soul from the diffuseness which dissipates knowledge, and he becomes all the more watchful of his soul.
But no one can perceive his own weakness unless he has been remiss a little, has neglected some small thing, has been surrounded by trials, either in the matter of things which cause the body suffering, or in that of ways in which the soul is subject to the passions. only then, by comparing his own weakness, will he realize how great is the assistance which comes from God.
When someone is aware that he is in need of divine help, he makes many prayers. And once he has made much supplication, his heart is humbled, for there is no one who is in need and asks who is not humbled. ‘A broken and humbled heart, God will not despise.’
As long as the heart is not humbled it cannot cease from wandering; for humility concentrates the heart.