Month: December 2006

A YouTube tribute:

A lovely reflection on its meaning from someone facing death. Money quote:

If ever there were an occasion to contemplate a single possibility, the deathbed would be it. And yet, at least right now, I am of two minds: I have (in the language of computers) a split screen. Because of the religious worlds I’ve traveled in, I foresee angels, archangels and all the company of heaven. Here are the saints in light, including (who knows?) a Grandma, a mother, a father and a Luis. There are flashes of lightning and peals of thunder. Ten thousand times ten thousand gather before the divine throne. I think of the most solemn of Baroque high masses, with clouds of incense and all my favorite music.

But because I am a child of our age, with a deep suspicion of fantasy’s smokescreen, the other portion of my afterlife screen is a complete blank. Whether all black or all white doesn’t matter: there is absolutely nothing to behold. Lights out. It is finished.

All or nothing? Right now it is a toss up, but at my end I am sure to make some version of Pascal’s wager. In this essay, moreover, I want to go for broke and opt for a single scenario. It won’t be some amalgam of John’s Revelation and Dante’s Paradiso; nor will it be nothing. I’ll refrain from anticipating anything that can be seen whatsoever, except with the eyes of the heart. Instead, I’ll put my life and my death into a single spoken line, which is, in fact, as close as I can come to preparing for the great adventure.

For my part, I am absolutely convinced that there is a heaven. And I am just as convinced that I have no idea whatever what it will be like, and deep doubt that I will be worthy of it.

Prague, Czech Republic, 2 pm.

A new global survey sparks a new Becker-Posner debate.

A reader writes:

"Christianist" is a strictly neutral term – it describes a specific political position about the relationship between Christian faith and the state. If I actually believed that Christianity is the one true religion, and that the US government should be based on my understanding of the dictates of Christianity, I’d think that Christianist would correctly describe me, and I wouldn’t take offense. If you had said something like "evil Christianists," then I’d take offense.

The real reason that the current political leaders who can be rightly called Christianists take offense is not, as you suggest, because you are equating Christianity with Islam, but because, for political purposes, they wish to deny the truth about the radical nature of their claim on the state. They wish to keep claiming that their agenda is not radically at odds with the Constitution.  It is the way Communists often took power by claiming that they are merely agrarian reformers. Christianists are mad because the term tears off their mask. Or, to be more charitable, they don’t want to admit to themselves the radical unconstitutional nature of their claim. Agreeing to be called Christianists will force them to be as honest as Islamists are about their political claim.  They can’t do that and stay in business.

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost …
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died

Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows

From Leonard Cohen’s "Everybody Knows." Merry Christmas.

(Photo: Brooks Kraft/Corbis for Time.)

It’s … John Edwards. Joe Klein elaborates.

The man exposing Mitt Romney’s aggressively pro-gay past has appeared on the Daily Show. Let’s put it this way: he’s no liberal. Here he is being interviewed by Ed Helms.

A soldier’s stick-figure guide.

"It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view. The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, It is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that can be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection, No pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the church’s mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. That enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results. But that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are the workers, not the master builders, ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own. Amen."

By the martyred archbishop, Oscar Romero.