Blog Archive
for March, 2007
Suffer the Little Children, Warm-Hearted Liberal Says
— Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 —
This morning’s USA Today features an article about Mississippi native David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values in New York, and author of the new book, The Future of Marriage (Encounter Books).Blankenhorn, the article notes, is sounding a warning about current redefinitions of marriage, precisely because fatherless “marriages,” regardless of their makeup, are damaging to children and, ultimately, to societies.
Blankenhorn tells the newspaper: “We’re either going to go in the direction of viewing marriage as a purely private relationship between two people that’s defined by those people, or we’re going to try to strengthen and maintain marriage as our society’s most pro-child institution.”
This may sound like conservative Christian boilerplate, USA Today observes, except that Blankenhorn is a liberal Democrat.
Keep Reading...Where’s the Growth?
— Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 —
On his Bible Belt Blogger site, religion editor Frank Lockwood of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette looks at the findings of the recently-released 2007 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches with some interesting insights on growth patterns among North American religious groups.
Lockwood writes:
Keep Reading...The book contains good news for the bishop of Rome, the prophet-seer-revelator of Salt Lake and the General Superintendent of Springfield, Missouri (where the Assemblies of God is based). The news is bad for almost everybody else. Mainline Protestant congregations are shrinking. Southern Baptists are treading water, with growth of 0.02 percent.
New Wine in Blue Suede Shoes
— Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 —
The audio link is up for the latest Henry Institute symposium, this time on the issue of the interplay between Christian witness and pop culture. Joining me on the panel were Ken Myers, producer and host of Mars Hill Audio and author of All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture, Albert Mohler, and Mark Coppenger.
The discussion took up how churches and Christians are influenced by pop culture, and how best to cultivate the “renewing of minds” through the Gospel in a culture fueled by an anti-authority edge. As one might expect, Drs. Mohler and Myers were more focused on highbrow culture; Drs. Coppenger and Moore delved more into the lowbrow stuff.
Keep Reading...Merle Haggard Endorses Hillary Clinton
— Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 —
In an update to yesterday’s post on Hillary Clinton and the changing American gender landscape, here’s some news.
Merle Haggard, whose counter-counter-culture anthem “Okie from Muskogee” earned him White House audiences in the Nixon era, has a new candidate for President of the United States: Hillary Rodham Clinton. According to the New York Times, Haggard is trying out a new song on audiences around the country, “Hillary.”
Here are some of the lyrics:
Eight years in the White HouseWith the know-how we needWhen you walk with a leaderYou learn how to leadThis country needs to be honestChanges need to be largeSomething like a big switch of genderLet’s put a woman in charge
Keep Reading...Bloom on Books, Bibles, and Harry Potter
— Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 —
If you had five books, and only five books, that you could take on a desert island for the rest of your life, what would they be? Yale University literary critic Harold Bloom is interviewed about his picks for five most important books in this week’s Newsweek magazine. What’s not on the list: the Holy Bible and Harry Potter.
It is little surprise that Bloom was willing to give up the Bible, since the unbelieving scholar has been an advocate for a resurgent Gnosticism (a Gnosticism he sees, interestingly, in contemporary Mormonism and in the “soul competency” beliefs of Southern Baptist moderates). Bloom tells Newsweek the Bible has “gotten all mixed up with questions of belief” in this “insanely religious” nation. Shakespeare, on the other hand, Bloom says, is “the beginning, the middle and the end.”
Bloom’s list includes, in order, the complete works of Shakespeare, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and Homer’s Iliad.
Keep Reading...Hillary Clinton and the Gender Wars
— Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 —
Hillary Rodham Clinton assured us fifteen years ago that she is no Tammy Wynette. Nonetheless, her presidential campaign strategy reveals that she and the late country music diva agree on at least one thing: “Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman.”
Today’s New York Times looks at perhaps the most interesting aspect of New York Sen. Hillary Clinton’s race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination: American culture’s conflicted views on sex roles. Sen. Clinton is not the first woman to run for President (Democratic Rep. Shirley Chisholm in 1972, Republican Elizabeth Dole in 2000, and Democratic ex-Ambassador and ex-Senator Carol Mosley Braun in 2004), but she’s the first female candidate with a conceivable chance of actually making it to the Oval Office.
The Times examines today not just Sen. Clinton’s political profile and prospects, but how being a woman affects this campaign. It’s a balancing act, the newspaper reports, between the feminism of Hillary Rodham, popular with activist groups within the Party, and the feminine familiarity of Mrs. Clinton, non-threatening to men and women who may be more uncomfortable than they think with some aspects of the feminist revolution. Sen. Clinton seeks to measure out this, the Times notes, by reverting back and forth from quoting Sojourner Truth on the one hand to telling warm anecdotes about “my husband Bill” and his heart surgery, love for Dunkin’ Donuts, and so forth. She takes a softer tone with “Let the conversation begin” and yet a more decisive tone with “I’m in it to win it.” She wants to be seen as an assertive leader (thus, she won’t apologize for her Iraq war resolution vote), but not too assertive.
What’s interesting about all of this is the unique challenges of a female candidate for President really shouldn’t exist, given the rapid waves of feminist “revolution” the country has experienced.
Keep Reading...
