Christianity, Culture, Vocation
The Boy Scouts of America voted to accept gay members. The ban against homosexual scout masters and other adult leaders remains in place. According to gay ideology, sexual identity is innate, not formed, so it makes sense to speak of homosexual children. [Read more...]
Rod Dreher, a Christian writer of the Orthodox persuasion, has written a provocative article for the American Conservative that is getting a lot of attention entitled Sex after Christianity. He raises the question of whether Christianity can even survive once its assumptions about sexual morality are jettisoned. The short answer is, of course Christianity will survive. The gates of hell cannot prevail against it, let alone sexual transgressions. Missing in this discussion is that Christianity is about Christ, the Gospel, and the forgiveness of sins, not establishing a particular kind of cultural influence. Nevertheless, Dreher documents a “cosmological” shift that may well diminish the cultural presence of Christianity. Still, read this article. We’ve got to talk about it. Read the whole article, but I’ll post excerpts after the jump. (And see my thoughts at the end.) [Read more...]
Thanks to Bob Miller for showing me this quotation from John Chrysostom (c. 347-407) from his Homily 5 on Titus:
“Woman was not made for this, O man, to be prostituted as common. O you subverters of all decency, who use men, as if they were women, and lead out women to war, as if they were men! This is the work of the devil, to subvert and confound all things, to overleap the boundaries that have been appointed from the beginning, and remove those which God has set to nature.”
This early Church Father is not just ranting and raving; rather, he suggests a whole approach to issues like these: What are we made for? What are the “boundaries,” or do you really think we can do without any boundaries at all?
Economist Steven Pearlstein has published an article in the Washington Post entitled “Is capitalism moral?“ It’s balanced and nuanced, giving the views of both conservative apologists for capitalism and its liberal critics. I’ll give you a sampling after the jump and then raise some additional issues of my own. [Read more...]
John Cornwell, a recognized Catholic journalist, says that the real reason the pope is resigning is because in doing so the whole Curia–the Vatican bureaucracy that is reportedly rife with financial and sexual corruption–must step down when he does. Thus, the pope is sacrificing himself to clean up the Vatican. [Read more...]
Not too long ago, both liberals and conservatives were oriented to some kind of common social good. Liberals pushed for what they considered to be “social justice.” Conservatives emphasized patriotism and worked for cultural stability. Today, both sides frame their arguments in terms of personal liberty and individual rights (gay rights, abortion rights, reproductive freedom, etc., vs. parental rights, religious liberty, gun rights, free markets, etc.).
Is that an advance? Perhaps it is. But did you notice that when we recently discussed Iceland’s attempt to battle pornography, hardly any of us–social conservatives mostly, me included–were able to come up with any way to oppose it legally. Even as we were decrying pornography and admitting how socially harmful it is, we could only conceive of the issue in terms of first amendment rights. On another blog that discussed Iceland’s policies, someone defended pornography on the grounds that we must not interfere with free market economics, that the demand must call forth a supply.
Then I was part of a discussion of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s graduation address at Harvard University in 1978. In that talk, the exiled Russian author who spent nearly a decade in the Soviet gulag and whose dissident writings helped bring about the fall of Communism, said why he would not recommend that his country, once free, emulate the modern West. One reason he gave is that western societies have become “legalistic”; that is, our societies have replaced morality with laws. And societies cannot protect themselves with laws alone. [Read more...]
Charles Lane of the Washington Post comments on the electric car fiasco, discussing the multiple failures of government investments and the disappointing performance and sales of the vehicles. The occasion is the disastrous roadtrip in a Tesla described by John M. Broder in the New York Times. What interests me is not electric cars but the category of error that Lane identifies:
I accept the president’s good intentions. He didn’t set out to rip off the public. Nor was the electric-car dream a Democrats-only delusion. Several Republican pols shared it, too.
Rather, the debacle is a case study in unchecked righteousness. The administration assumed the worthiness and urgency of its goals. Americans should want electric cars, and therefore they would, apparently. [Read more...]
Conservative intellectual and Princeton Professor Robert George points out that liberals are not relativists at all. Rather, they are moralistic dogmatists:
Contemporary left liberals are hardly relativists! I often wish they were. They are moralists—moralists on a mission. The mission is to shape political and social life, and, to the extent possible, individual belief, in line with their passionately held moral convictions. [Read more...]
The Boy Scouts are caught between Scylla and Charybdis–or, as more of them might put it less classically, a rock and a hard place. The organization has had to deal with scandals involving gay scoutmasters and some incidents of child sexual abuse. So it tightened its standards and its scrutiny. Now the organization is under fire for being anti-gay. The organization has announced that it is reconsidering its policies banning openly gay leaders and scouts. Barton Gingerich (a former student of mine) has some inside information about what is going on. [Read more...]
A Harvard geneticist is seeking a woman to be the surrogate mother of a Neanderthal baby. From the London Daily Mail:
They’re usually thought of as a brutish, primitive species.
So what woman would want to give birth to a Neanderthal baby?
Yet this incredible scenario is the plan of one of the world’s leading geneticists, who is seeking a volunteer to help bring man’s long-extinct close relative back to life.
Professor George Church of Harvard Medical School believes he can reconstruct Neanderthal DNA and resurrect the species which became extinct 33,000 years ago. [Read more...]
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