Month: April 2009

Catherine Rampell summarizes a new study [pdf]:

The authors present a case study of the consequences of closing a newspaper — in this situation, The Cincinnati Post, which published its last edition on Dec. 31, 2007. They argue that the closing of The Post — which left the Cincinnati Enquirer as the area’s only daily — has led to lower voter turnout, fewer candidates running for municipal office in the suburbs most reliant on The Post, and greater re-election chances for incumbents.

The Post only had a readership of 27,000 when it closed. A caveat from the study's authors:

We caution that although our preferred point estimates tell a compelling story, the  results are statistically imprecise and sometimes sensitive to the treatment of very small municipalities. Further, our results cover only the Kentucky suburbs, because Ohio has not held regular municipal elections since the Post closed, and represent only the short-run consequences of the paper’s closing. Future research could investigate whether political engagement and competition return to their pre-closure level in the long run.

Miracles – where and when you don’t expect them.

Today, more than any day: know hope.

"…Suddenly, things weren't as simple as the division between secular and sacred. I started to wonder if the Christian battle lines drawn against culture were really lines at all, but fear of letting God be God, fear of taking him out of his packaging. Maybe there was more to faith than the subculture Christians have created. After all, I had just learned more about God sitting on a shadowy street talking to a destitute drug addict than I had in some 20 or so years in church …" – Justin McLachlan.

A social drinker gives up booze for a month:

So what else did I learn after a month of stone-cold sobriety? That it's over-rated. There is a reason why people drink proportionally more the less they like themselves: alcohol takes you, as so much slang for drunkenness has it, out of your head. I’m no self-loathing Hemingway or Parker, but a month is a long time in your own uninterrupted company. Nobody wants to spend that much time with me–not even me. This is despite the fact that I found abstinence to be good for my self-esteem, not the other way round. People keep asking me if I feel healthier. I don't, particularly. But I do feel smug.

An art project:

I collect lost luggage, photograph it, and then try to find the owners. It's a little odd but not as odd as stamp collecting, just a little harder to find storage space.

Jon Meacham responds to critics:

Some have read the piece (or, I suspect, the cover line) as an attack on Christianity, which it is not and which would, in any case, be an act of self-loathing, since I am a Christian, albeit a poor one. Note that we did not say we were discussing the decline and fall of Christianity, or even the decline and fall of Christianity in America. But “Christian America” is something else again. It is the vision of a nation whose public life is governed by explicitly articulated and adopted Christian principles in the hope, I think, that God will bless and protect the country and its people in the spirit of II Chron. 7:14. To see how well that is going from the perspective of the religious right, take a look at the news from Iowa and Vermont. I do not think, as some evangelicals do, that we are entering a “post-Christian” phase, but I do believe we are growing rather more secular than I would have anticipated even five years ago. The cumulative effect of a somewhat declining Christian population and a weakening Christian force in partisan politics is likely, I think, to lead to a more secular politics. Not wholly secular, to be sure, but more secular than we have been accustomed to in our Jesus-Winthrop-Reagan “city on a hill.”

Seven Stanzas at Easter by John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.

Continued here. Analyzed by David Anderson here.

Linker responds to Jon Meacham:

Viewed in broader terms, a nation in which a majority embraced something like moralistic therapeutic deism would still be Christian in all kinds of important ways. Its moral and civic outlook, for example, would be a distillation of the Christian ethic of loving one's neighbor. Meanwhile, the millions of Christians who crave more from religion than New Age comfort food would be perfectly free to take advantage of their religious liberty to worship in more orthodox parishes. Hell, they might even stop talking endlessly about taking the "Benedict Option" and actually join or start a monastery. An America in which all of this is happening would still be Christian is significant senses. It just wouldn't be the kind of Christian nation that makes a theocon feel all warm and fuzzy. And that's a very good thing indeed.

Tinamaste, Costa Rica, 10 am

John Culhane reflects:

I came across a short poem that seems especially weighty right now. In the latest New Yorker, Spencer Reese’s “The Long-Term Marriage” describes an older couple (”[t]he dash between their dates is nearly done”) engaging in the most intimate kind of caring for each other (wife rubs cream on husband’s head to chase away “squamous-cell carcinomas”); but the creams are “FedExed from their adopted son’s boyfriend’s home, a relationship that remains, to them, unknown.”

The poem draws a striking contrast between the two relationships.

The older couple at the center of this evanescent universe are portrayed in loving detail, while the son (likely “adopted” to suggest, somehow, the importance of the biological link for understanding between generations)  and his “boyfriend” are left undescribed at the other end of the FedEx transmission. Despite the physical and emotional distance, the son expresses his love by sending what his parents most need, and by the quickest means possible.

Equal dignity is both furnished and taught by law. I wonder if “The Long-Term Marriage” is a poem that could be written fifty years from now, after this struggle has been won. Will there still be straight couples this unaware of their children’s most important relationships? I doubt it.