Year: 2013

Justin Hawkins finds constructive Christian engagement with the world to be at the heart of Ronald H. Stone’s new intellectual biography of Reinhold Niehbur and Paul Tillich, who “were far from the bespectacled, portly library-dwellers one might suspect”:

[T]he fact that Christian theology has much to say to the practical affairs of the world is an unmistakable facet of Stone’s narrative.

And though one might reasonably disagree with the substance of either Niebuhr or Tillich’s theological systems, they knew quite acutely that the exigencies of their day required them to plumb the resources of the Christian faith in response. Even more impressively, they did not make religion subservient to previously-determined political convictions, a charge which might legitimately be leveled against many political activists today. As an example, Niebuhr, when convinced that the pacifism required by his Christian socialist party membership was neither wise nor Christian, resigned his membership and his prominent standing there.

Niebuhr and Tillich knew the Christian faith was more than merely a private affair; indeed, one might perhaps even say that they overemphasized the communal, social aspect of the faith (one anecdote hold that H. Richard Niebuhr once had to remind his brother that “Individuals are sinful too, Reinhold!”). But the notion that religion is what one does when alone in one’s room was beyond their comprehension, and that for good reason. If Christ is involved in “making all things new,” then good, faithful Christians might disagree about the substance of that revivification of creation (as Tillich and Niebuhr occasionally did), but they cannot hold that God’s redemption of the world necessarily excludes certain portions of society.

In a post earlier today, I quoted the eminently quotable Jon Chait with this question:

Is there an example in American history of a losing party issuing threats to force the majority party to implement its rejected agenda?

I answered no – at least not on this almighty scale. (Caveats here.) Readers beg to differ:

There is an obvious example: the election and subsequent secession crisis of 1860. The southern Democrats were quite clear with their threats to secede from the Union should Lincoln be elected.

Seeing the Obama presidency as a Cold Civil War of the South against a Northern president does help explain the splenetic rage, and the obvious belief in the illegitimacy of the elected president because of the policies he ran on and won with. Another reader elaborates:

The Southern Strategy, which began as a tactical gambit, now accounts for substantially all Republican rhetoric and policy. So the other party is just that — The Other. The point of making demands is making demands. The point of the resentment is the resentment. The point of not compromising is the emotion and the show of not compromising.

The demands over the debt ceiling don’t even involve debt.

More to the point, there didn’t appear to be all too much Republican anti-government resentment during the George W. Bush Bush presidency, as the GOP pushed for Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, the executive’s asserted power to wiretap and to detain & torture US citizens without charges or a warrant, surpluses turned into deficits, the right in Raich v Gonzales to imprison folks for activity legal under state law, and the invasion for bogus reasons & failed occupation of an arbitrarily selected Middle Eastern country.

But, President Bush was One of Us. The Kenyan anti-colonial secret Muslim? Less so. Hence, insane demands, in the service of taking Our country back from Them.

Ezra rattles off the demands the GOP is making if they are not to destroy the US and global economy:

In return for a one-year suspension of the debt ceiling, House Republicans are demanding a yearlong delay of Obamacare, Rep. Paul Ryan’s tax reform plan, the Keystone XL pipeline, more offshore oil drilling, more drilling on federally protected lands, rewriting of ash coal regulations, a suspension of the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to regulate carbon emissions, more power over the regulatory process in general, reform of the federal employee retirement program, an overhaul of the Dodd-Frank financial regulations, more power over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s budget, repeal of the Social Services Block Grant, more means-testing in Medicare, repeal of the Public Health trust fund, and more.

Why not demand president Obama’s resignation while they’re at it?

What the sheer gob-smacking scale of these demands means is that the GOP effectively wants to nullify the last election entirely (except of course for their gerry-mandered, no-popular vote House majority). The staggering thing about this party as it now exists is that it views the governance of the other party as always effectively illegitimate. Elections do not matter. Only their agenda matters. No compromise is possible, even when this kind of catastrophic default is hanging over our heads. In fact, the danger of catastrophic default is something they relish in order to undo the basic principles of democratic government.

This is not a bargaining position; they already voted for the budget that requires us to raise the debt ceiling. It is a bald attempt to reverse elections as the mark of a democracy and replace them with endless blackmail until they get their way. This isn’t conservatism. It’s pure constitutional vandalism. Derek Thompson’s jaw drops:

Give us everything we want or else we’ll destroy the country! is the sort of demand that only a broken party inside a broken system could possibly hope to make.

The debt ceiling should not exist and the rules of the Senate and House shouldn’t allow a minority to repeatedly extort the majority, but, well, you go to debtmageddon with the government you got. Republicans, inching away from shutdown, are all in on an apocalyptic strategy to trade the full faith and credit of the country for their agenda.

Barro chimes in:

America’s constitutional system only works if the divided branches of government are willing to work together to make consensual agreements about running the government. Republicans are showing themselves to be too irresponsible to make the American constitutional system work.

And Chait searches for a historical precedent:

The fact that a major party could even propose anything like this is a display of astonishing contempt for democratic norms. Republicans ran on this plan and lost by 5 million votes. They also lost the Senate and received a million fewer votes in the House but held control owing to favorable district lines. Is there an example in American history of a losing party issuing threats to force the majority party to implement its rejected agenda?

Not on this massive scale, no.

(Photo by Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty Images)

Will McDavid finds this passage from Andre Dubus’s short story, “A Father’s Story,” to get at the heart of liturgical worship:

Each morning [at Mass] I try, each morning I fail, and know that always I will be a creature who, looking at Father Paul and the altar, and uttering prayers, will be distracted by scrambled eggs, horses, the weather, and memories and daydreams that have nothing to do with the sacrament I am about to receive. I can receive, though: the Eucharist, and also, at Mass and at other times, moments and even minutes of contemplation. But I cannot achieve contemplation, as some can; and so, having to face and forgive my own failures, I have learned from them both the necessity and wonder of ritual. For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.

Frederica Mathewes-Green makes related points on behalf of un-trendy, liturgically-oriented worship:

[Worship] was aimed at God, in adoration and supplication, not at attracting non-believers, or even at giving fellow-worshippers a good worship experience. This focus on God was the case until very recently; now our immersion in a consumer economy has led us to think of everything in terms of appealing to potential customers. We are so mentally saturated in advertising that we have come to think of ourselves and our faith as products that need to be persuasively sold.

That’s how worship gets redirected from the Lord to outsiders, who have no ability yet to understand or respect Him. The church becomes an organization that is primarily occupied with planning a billboard, because the most important goal is to capture non-believers’ attention. When someone responds to a billboard and becomes a member of the community, he discovers that he has joined an organization that — is planning a billboard. The main goal of members of a church is to attract more members to the church. It’s like Ponzi scheme.

Dreher remembers his first experiences at Orthodox worship services – and appreciates that what he found there was strange to him:

When I first started attending an Orthodox church, I thought, OK, this is really beautiful, insanely beautiful, like no other Christian worship I’ve attended … but I don’t understand what’s going on. People were really friendly, but they didn’t try to dumb the worship down for my sake, or any seeker’s sake. They just did what they always do. The beauty and integrity of it drew me in.

(Photo by Flickr user bobosh_t)