Month: August 2010

by Chris Bodenner

A whole tumblr of hungover owls here.

by Zoe Pollock

Since he hasn't yet been ordered by his doctor to stop, Matt Blum revives the great bacon meme with his latest odyssey: bacon pancakes.

by Patrick Appel

Ron Replogle uses the abortion debate to explain political group formation:

Your ideological community is the class of people whose moral and political sensibility, their inventory of political principles and battery of moral reflexes, carry weight in your political deliberation. An ideologue is prepared to reject a favorite principle when enough of her ideological comrades have sufficiently powerful moral qualms about its applications. And she’ll swallow her own moral qualms about a principle when she and her comrades can’t think of a better one. This needn’t be a matter of peer pressure subverting one’s better judgment.

All other things being equal, a conviction’s being shared by a deliberative community large and culturally diverse enough not to be taken in by idiosyncratic or narrowly parochial prejudices, but sufficiently like-minded to unite behind a substantive political agenda, is a good reason for believing it. That makes the gravitational pull ideological communities exert on the content of their members’ beliefs an essential feature of political rationality. When such a community deliberates effectively, its members draw on the wisdom of the group to attain a measure of objectivity they can’t achieve on their own. When it deliberates less-than-rationally, its members’ views will be ill-considered.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

Based on the material you've been showcasing, "Can church be hip?" is not the question you're actually exploring. Those songs may make reference to Christian concepts or images, but they are lyrics; they display an intimate, personal, unique and emotionally charged state of mind, and are clearly intended for performance or for private listening as recordings.  They are manifestly not appropriate for "church" in any sense that I as a lifelong churchgoer would recognize.  They are not songs for worship – communal in nature and addressed to God or expressing the community's universal understanding of God or the faith story.

I could see these pieces in a "Christian coffeehouse."  But if the "hip" emergent church or the megachurches have begun using this sort of material for "worship," then they have departed even further than I realized from thousands of years of Judeo-Christian tradition for gathered celebration and supplication.  And in that case, the answer to your question would be, it may be hip, it may be Christian, but it's not church, because it's not worship, any more than listening to a reading of John Donne's or T.S. Eliot's lyrics – admirable Christian poetry – would be worship.

True, the thread has veered a bit from the original post, but Dish threads always have a life of their own. And without getting into a semantic debate about what constitutes "church" and "worship," I think the central theme of "religion and credible indie music are not mutually exclusive" holds. Plus, the thread is a good excuse to air great music. Another writes:

The conflation of Christian themed songs with a supposedly hip "Church" is ignorant of music history. In fact, it gives evidence that the Church struggles to be hip. Music has never had a problem being hip, and never shied from referencing religion, God, etc.  Nick Cave? Black Sabbath? Is that all people can come up with? For Christ's sake, classic Soul is mid-century black Gospel music with a couple of words changed. The white, European Church has the issue, not musicians and songwriters. (BTW, Ozzy didn't write "Beyond Forever," Tony Iommi did. Do your "hip" readers think the band is called Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones?)

I made the Ozzy reference regarding the lyrics because of his famously incomprehensible voice, not because he wrote them. Also, the dozen or so artists that have been featured so far are just a fraction of the submissions that I am still sorting through; expect many more, and more obscure ones. Another adds:

Sabbath guitar hero (and really, band leader) Tony Iommi is on record saying that he was worn a crucifix and had a large crucifix placed on stage for every concert Black Sabbath ever performed. He is Italian-Catholic and was taught by his superstitious grandma to be not play with dark forces without the vital protection.

Another:

The Velvet Underground song "Jesus" is one of my favorite Christian songs. And you can't get much hipper than the Velvet Underground.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

This reader underestimates the importance of gay visibility outside of urban America. In poorer and more rural parts of the country, being gay may have become more visible in the last several decades, but there are still major impediments to being out and proud. America is a huge, diverse country, and nowhere near uniform in any way. If Mehlman is going to have an impact, it'll be on people like the low-level staffers and wonks that are rising within Republican circles. Hardly the most powerful figures in D.C., but not a bunch of nobodies either.

by Patrick Appel

Drum provides one answer:

[W]here does the preoccupation with [raising the retirement age to] age 70 come from? That would represent a decrease in the expected number of years of retirement since 1970, during a period in which the United States has become nearly twice as wealthy. That doesn't even begin to make sense. Sure, life expectancy may increase in the future, but if it does then we have the option of increasing the retirement age when it happens. For now, we should make policy based on current reality, and the current reality is that life expectancy at age 65 has increased only 3.5 years since 1970. There's no reason the retirement age should increase five years in response.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

Dan Savage is awesome usually, but during this period in which he's been on a "roll" he also denounced a rather benign Toronto church group as "Christofascists" based on incorrect information provided by a YouTube poster who later admitted he had no evidence for what he was saying.  That was pretty bad.  Full story here.

by Zoe Pollock

This video, from students at the Vancouver Film School, visualizes a different sort of pseudovariety, this time within our natural food systems. Out of 80,000 edible plants we choose only 30 to supply 90% of the calories in our diet; 14 animal species make up 90% of our livestock. The scariest realizations are about 1:45 in.