Category: The Dish

When you’re selling culture war and global conflict, the actual Jesus can be a little unsettling:

Driscoll put this bluntly in his sermon "Death by Love" at the 2006 Resurgence theology conference (available at TheResurgence.com). According to Driscoll, "real men" avoid the church because it projects a "Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ" that "is no one to live for [and] is no one to die for." Driscoll explains, "Jesus was not a long-haired … effeminate-looking dude"; rather, he had "callused hands and big biceps." This is the sort of Christ men are drawn to—what Driscoll calls "Ultimate Fighting Jesus."

A blog devoted to true stories, told in one sentence. Lynn Viehl’s thoughts on the concept here.

(Hat tip: Frank Wilson)

A way to possibly improve nuclear safety and store radioactive material indefinitely.

Will Clinton reject and denounce? The extreme praise that Rendell pours on the Nation of Islam is pretty impressive. But somehow, you know George Stephanopoulos is uninterested.

Who knows what these fluctuations mean? But he’s now back ahead nationally by seven points.

The subject has spawned a very engrossing debate online. Larison criticizes Rollins here. I was most taken with a commenter’s post, however:

The main feature of fundamentalism, I’d suggest, is exclusion – both in the realm of doctrinal logic and in human relations. The main feature of Jesus’ message is inclusion, both in doctrine and in human relations. Love, in other words. I don’t think reduction of a message to a few essential precepts is, in itself, fundamentalism. Obviously Jesus himself reduced the entire message of the Judaic tradition to a few precepts, such as “God is love”. The question is whether these precepts are treated as exclusive and hostile to the rest of the tradition, and intolerant of other traditions,, or inclusive and openly disposed towards the rest of the tradition, and tolerantly disposed towards other traditions… In other words, there are forms of religious fundamentalism which are indistinguishable from narcissism.

I don’t think opposing fundamentalism requires that orthodoxy itself vanish. What it requires is that small space between orthodoxy and doubt that allows faith to breathe. When all such space is extinguished, when faith is about submission to an external authority tout court, when conscience is abolished or redefined as obedience, then we have exaggerated what we can claim to know about God. This is as much an attitude as anything else.

Another way of looking at this is to see fundamentalism as a version of faith rooted in fear – of error, of choice, of doubt, of mystery. And yet Jesus’ constant instruction was not to be afraid. I see in Benedict’s cramped attempt to control all discourse within the church a function of fear. It does not sum up all that Benedict is and means – he has brought many good impulses to the fore as well. But in the end, he is of that scared generation – the generation of 1968. The Church is as much a captive of those debates and experiences as our political culture is.

Chris Crain defends a friend.

"…over the past two months, the actions and words of Hillary Clinton have gone from being merely disappointing to downright disgusting. I guess the debate last week was the final straw. I’ve watched Senator Clinton and her husband play this game of appealing to the worst side of white people, but last Wednesday, when she hurled the name “Farrakhan” out of nowhere, well that’s when the silly season came to an early end for me. She said the “F” word to scare white people, pure and simple…

[You sounded] like you were a bigot stoking the fires of stupidity. How sad that I would ever have to write those words about you. You have devoted your life to good causes and good deeds. And now to throw it all away for an office you can’t win unless you smear the black man so much that the superdelegates cry “Uncle (Tom)” and give it all to you," – Michael Moore.

You know a campaign has gone on too long when Michael Moore starts to make sense.

From a North Carolina Clinton event with Maya Angelou:

"I love you, Hillary. I always have, I always will," said a woman in the first row. That drew approving cheers. But then she brought up the most taboo of all taboos at Clinton campaign events. "I felt so sorry for you when Bill had his affair," the woman said. "I think the best way to overcome it is to become president."

Don’t tell Camille.

The predicament is not a new one, but it has a new intensity:

“Now we must look … not to the familiar, instinctive reaction of the Israeli way of fighting—that is, what doesn’t work with force will work with much more force,” [David Grossman] said. “Force, in this case, will fan the flames of hatred for Israel in the region and the entire world, and may even, heaven forbid, create the situation that will bring upon us the next war and push the Middle East to an all-out, regional war.”

If you haven’t read Jeffrey Goldberg’s raw essay on the dreadful choices the Jewish state has to make, check it out. Between Gaza and Lebanon, and the demographic math, Israel can no longer rely on the deployment of force to ensure its survival. And it is, of course, hard not to see some of the paradoxes of Israel’s quest for long-term survival with the West’s task in Iraq. How do you occupy without becoming a colonial power? How do you coerce the essentials of coexistence? And at what point is the pursuit of peace a chimera or the only possible option? Or both? It is hard to read Goldberg’s essay without wondering if our fate isn’t tied in some profound way to Israel’s – and that we haven’t been trapped into exactly the same mistake. Finding a way to combine the judicious use of force with the necessity to find some kind of dialogue and coexistence is difficult in most circumstances. In the Arab Middle East, I think it is safe to say that it is largely impossible. And yet what choice do we have?