Since you have a platform to ask interesting questions (and get back interesting answers), I have one I'd like to have asked, dealing with the way Americans of differing ideologies frame their debates.
My own camp is generally "not conservative", so I often feel I'm among the targets of conservative denouncements of liberal "tyranny." And some of what they say makes sense. While I'll admit to being in the liberal camp, I'm pretty centrist (e.g. I actually feel like Obama is delivering what I heard him promise during his campaign), so conservative calls for smaller government and greater personal freedom do resonate with me.
Still, I'm never actually convinced it's anything beyond rhetoric, mostly because of a single, gigantic exception – conservatives give the military (and really anything security-related) a huge bye. I can understand the argument, for instance, that if taxes are too high then personal freedom is to some degree eroded, but that seems very metaphorical compared to government's power to physically lock you up. For all their talk about freedom and liberty, the enthusiastic embrace of the military and security culture by many conservatives pretty makes that seem like a lot of empty rhetoric to me.
I don't mean it as a critique so much as a question – why does the military-security culture get such a huge pass? I honestly don't understand how you can cast yourself as a defender of liberty on one hand, while be fully in support of expanding the government's ability to physically remove your liberty on the other. (To be clear, I don't expect conservatives to be pacifist – I'm thinking of specific examples like denouncing any criticism of the Iraq war as unpatriotic and casting skeptics of the Patriot Act as loony leftists – and of course, all the torture, er, enhanced interrogations).
I have no beef with evangelical Christians who support full civil equality for gays and lesbians despite believing that gay sex is a sin. Heck, I'll personally mow the lawns of evangelical Christians who are willing to refrain from actively persecuting gays and lesbians. I've said that it's a mistake to get into arguments about theology with people, and that people have a right to their own beliefs. I don't care if someone thinks I'm going to hell when I die and I'm not going to argue with him for the same reason I'm not going to argue with someone who believes that I'm going to the lost continent of Atlantis when I go on vacation.
All gays and lesbians want from evangelical Christians is the same deal the Jews and the yoga instructors and the atheists and the divorced and the adulterers and the rich all get: full civil equality despite the going-to-hell business. (And isn't hell punishment enough? Do we have to be persecuted here on earth too? It's almost as if they don't trust God to persecute us after we die. Have a little faith, people!)
Scores of readers wrote in with similar sentiments, and I wish I could post them all, but Dan really does say it best.
A lesser-known band, but one that's easily as inventive and respected in certain circles as Starflyer 59 and David Bazan, is mewithoutYou. They formed out of the Philadelphia hardcore scene in the late '90s, have been on Tooth and Nail – the same label Starflyer and Pedro the Lion got their start on – since their first album in 2002, and have toured with David Bazan a couple times. The first album was pretty hard stuff, with singer Aaron Weiss doing more speaking/shouting than singing, but each successive album has gotten a little softer, with Weiss singing more and more.
Their fourth and most recent album, "It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All a Dream! It's Alright!" finds Weiss given over to singing every song and the band playing stuff that is a kind of gypsy/folk sound. It's also the first album ever on a Christian label and sold in Christian stores that's a largely Muslim work. Weiss and his brother were raised by parents who were into the Sufi faith, and this album has that kind of thing all over it. In fact, the album title is a quote from Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, an important Sufi mystic, and some of the songs are his parables [see video above].
For my money, it might be the best Christian album ever. It's got talking animals and food, songs about King David and a baby Jesus, themes of environmental responsibility (the band drives around in an old bus converted to cooking oil), and one-ness with everyone else. It even closes with a song repeatedly using the name "Allah" for God. Musically it's outstanding too, and their live performances are as energetic and engaging as any band I've ever seen.
I read that a few years ago, Christianity was just "business" to you and that you wanted to "just make out with chicks" (at one point). It wasn't until you spent a time in a communal living situation that things changed for you. What made you join that commune? I suppose it was a longing for something real, something different than what I'd known. The Christianity I'd been exposed to was primarily concerned with the afterlife, little concern for people's tangible, immediate needs. We pray, of course, "your kingdom come … on earth as it is in heaven," and I found myself wondering what the world would look like if the kingdom did come, if it were a paradise, right here, today. And it seemed like communal living was a step in that direction.
Have you received direct criticism to your way of life from other Christians? What was it, and how did you deal with it? Not as much as I'd hope. When criticism does come, I usually think, "Finally, I must be doing something right!"
What were your friends' and family's reactions to your life change? Was it immediate, or did the Aaron Weiss we see today emerge slowly? For a while there was a gradual turning, with one single experience bringing about a sudden and dramatic change almost three years ago. I think people worried about me. I was feverish, couldn't sleep much, woke up trembling. I would ramble on, trying to communicate what was inside, to share what had been given to me. It didn't work—I've had to learn to be quiet, to listen, to show it instead.
How does your view of Christianity affect your desire to, or lack of desire, to be married? Jesus said that it's better for a man not to marry. Paul wrote the same thing. I see it as a sort of a concession I'll have to make if I don't have the faith to find contentment in my God alone. That I may need such a compromise seems likely, as I've always had a passion for that sort of union, and I get lonely. I don't so much mean sexually, but mostly I long for companionship and a deep friendship. If God is willing though, maybe I could find that in the Holy Ghost.
Another reader corrects me on previous entry:
There a small error in your post regarding Neutral Milk Hotel. Mangum did NOT talk about his faith to Pitchfork in 2008. Rather, in 2008, Pitchfork posted an interview from all the way back in December 1997. Big deal, you might say. I bring this up only because Mangum retreated from public life shortly after In The Aeroplane Over the Sea was released and, at least as far as I know, hasn't done an interview in many years so the suggestion he gave an interview in 2008 might surprise a few people.
Mangum's retreat from public life is itself a pretty interesting story. Since about 2001, he has only played at a couple of benefit shows for friends.
"I don't think being mayor is about qualifications. It's really about the people liking you and believing in you," – Levi Johnston, on his intent to fill Palin's old seat in Wasilla.
Michael Moynihan takes aim at the overheated language on the cover of that new book by Markos Moulitsas, "American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right." And he rightly dings progressives who gave it cover blurbs, despite lamenting similarly idiotic language when it was used by blowhards on the right.
I understand the financial incentives that cause authors and publishing houses to choose these kinds of titles. But I don't know why anyone thinking strategically about political impact cheers them. It's a marketing strategy that basically guarantees a book will never be read by anyone who disagrees with it. The emotional satisfaction some people get from extreme vitriol is an astonishingly powerful driver of counterproductive political behavior.
Despite my reputation for calling out vituperation, I really don't think my standards are particularly exacting. Don't compare ideological adversaries to murderous totalitarians. Refrain from rudely interrupting emotionally troubled black women if your planned interjection is the n-word. Don't tell callers to your show that they're so annoying their spouse should put a gun to their head. (Note to skeptical Web historians: yes, those are all actual examples!) It's getting to the point where publishing houses are going to start re-issuing classics from their catalog under new polemical titles.
This ever-so-slightly homoerotic spot promoting twist-off Coca Cola bottle caps wouldn’t be worth more than a passing glace if it wasn’t produced in Egypt, where homosexuality is pretty much illegal.
Exum Londonstani sounds less worried about the political clout of Pakistan's military than Rashid:
The military in Pakistan is hugely influential but doesn't define the state – possibly because it wasn't instrumental in its inception. The idea of Islam defines the state, but at the same time it remains a vague concept that the people who call the shots don't agree on. That's a problem but also an opportunity for Pakistan. Those who say Islam is all about fighting Kafirs can't completely silence those that say its about raising living standards and providing medical relief.
The question about engagement in Pakistan isn't about whether or not potential partners exist.
Will is one of the best, most trenchant libertarian critics of U.S. conservatives and conservatism. He's the kind of thinker who keeps you on your toes by identifying and dismantling muddled thinking. I happen to think there's something to be said for incompletely theorized agreements and muddling through, which is why we don't always see eye to eye. But I know that engaging with Will's work has made me sharper. With enemies like Will, who needs friends?
It's all true. And that kind of attitude toward political discourse helps to explain why Mr. Salam is one of my favorite writers, though I'd go even father, and say that if ideological allies permit you to persist in muddled thinking too readily or regularly, who needs enemies?
As Mr. Wilkinson leaves The Cato Institute, along with Brink Lindsey, another sharp liberaltarian critic of the right, the libertarian think tank remains staffed with a lot of first-rate thinkers doing exceptional work; but it's lost two exceptional in-house safeguards against group think. That important role is among the most undervalued in Washington DC.
This week BBC reported that, according to a new police-department probe, in 1972 “the police, the Catholic Church and the state conspired to cover up a priest’s suspected role” in an IRA bombing that killed nine people, including an 8 year old girl. Connecting it to the continuing controversy over the Cordoba mosque, Commonweal's Mollie Wilson O'Reillyasks:
On one level, it’s the same dynamic we’ve seen revealed in the sex-abuse scandal applied to a different crime. But it’s also the real-life illustration we didn’t know we were looking for on the question of how much responsibility ordinary believers ought to take for the worst atrocities committed in the name of their religion. After all, the Catholic church wouldn’t tolerate, let alone harbor, terrorists. Certainly not terrorists implicated in the death of eight-year-old girls. Would it?
The Dish 