Your predictions

November 5, 2012 by 154 Comments

I made my prediction for the election a long time ago, back when Obama was approaching his lowest point in popularity and when the economy was seeming to sink all incumbents.  I predicted that Obama would win re-election.  Later, I predicted further that he would win handily.   I also said that I hope I was wrong, although I almost never am.  I don’t think that prediction sounds as silly as it did back then, so I’m sticking to it.   I’ll say, with a heavy heart, that Obama will win re-election with at least 20 electoral votes to spare.  It takes 271 to elect, so I’m predicting he’ll get 291.

Now it’s your turn to go out on a limb, with everybody being able to find out if you are right or wrong in the next day or so.  Who do you think will win?  What will be the total electoral vote?

The winner will receive our accolades and admiration.   (What should be the consequences if I win or if I lose?)

 

 

 

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: 154 Comments

The final word on the election

November 2, 2012 by 36 Comments

From Abigael Evans, age 4, on behalf of the entire nation:

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: 36 Comments

Comparing the platforms

November 2, 2012 by 18 Comments

Back during the Democratic National Convention, we did a post on the Democratic platform, promising that we would do the same for the Republican platform.  I never quite got around to that at the time, and we just have a few days before the election, so I realize I had better get that done.  I know that people say party platforms don’t really matter, but I do think they show us something about the parties and their ideology, as well as what tenets the wide range of party members can agree to.

So here is the  Republican Platform, entitled We Believe in America.  It defies excerpting, but here are the major headings, which you can read via the links.

The Democratic Platform is entitled Moving America Forward.  It has the following headings:

I present both of these platforms as a public service to aid in your voting decisions.

How would you characterize the underlying assumptions of each document?  What does each platform tell us about the ideology and the preoccupations of each party?

I would just like to observe that, whatever the merits of each governing philosophy, both platforms are depressingly utopian.  Whether government will solve all of our problems or whether the free market will solve all of our problems, both assertions are way too optimistic.  I wish a party would put forward more modest promises and agendas (e.g., No one in our administration will go to jail for misuse of public funds.  We will follow the law.  We will acknowledge our limitations.)  Both platforms are just different variations on Pedro’s platform for student body president in Napoleon Dynamite:  “Vote for me, and all your wildest dreams will come true.”

 

Filed Under: Government, Politics Tagged With: , , 18 Comments

Good quotations

November 2, 2012 by 52 Comments

George Will is among the most learned of today’s pundits, and he has the habit of lacing his columns with big words, arcane references, and scholarly quotations.  I urge you to read his latest column, a trenchant criticism of President Barack Obama, linked below.  But what I’d like to draw your attention to are some really good, widely-applicable quotations that the column contains.  I will cherry pick them for your edification:

“It is a great advantage to a president, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know he is not a great man.”— Calvin Coolidge

“To remain silent is the most useful service that a mediocre speaker can render to the public good.”–Alexis de Tocqueville:

’Tis said two things not worth running after are a bus or an economic panacea, because another will come along soon.

“For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back — that’s an earthquake.”–Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman  [Actually, this was a character commenting about Willy Loman, not Willy Loman himself, but we’ll give Mr. Will a pass out of gratitude for the Calvin Coolidge quote.]

via George Will: Obama’s empty, strident campaign – The Washington Post.

 

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: 52 Comments

Why Lutherans can’t take Catholic Communion

November 1, 2012 by 62 Comments

Russell E. Saltzman, a pastor in the North American Lutheran Church (the relatively conservative off shoot of ELCA), wrote a post at the First Things blog plaintively asking, “Why Can’t Lutherans Take Catholic Communion?”  After all, he says, Lutherans and Catholics are agreed on justification–as of that Joint Declaration on the subject–and we are pretty much OK about other things, properly conceived.

Rev. Saltzman exhibits the annoying quality of speaking for “Lutherans” while ignoring those millions of us in that tradition who are conservative theologically and don’t go along with the Joint Declaration and other ecumenical overtures.   The mostly Catholic commenters tried to explain why he can’t commune at a Catholic altar, and in this case we conservative Lutherans do agree with conservative Catholics that this would be highly inappropriate.

You’ve got to read Anthony Sacramone’s discussion of this issue, which concludes with a vivid account of the differences between Rome and Lutherans, especially when it comes to the Gospel:

Let’s cut to the chase: would the Roman Catholic Church today accept as doctrinally true the Lutheran teaching of the alien righteousness of Christ, of the great exchange of His righteousness for our sin, of our sanctification as being in Him, even though we are called to good works — but for the sake of our neighbor and not in aid of increasing our justification? If not, again, who are these Lutherans Reverend Saltzman is talking about whose differences with Rome are now of little significance?

Do these Lutherans now accept the existence of a Treasury of Merits? Or has Rome admitted that this was a bankrupt medieval invention and is now, in the interest of ecumenicity, disposable? Have indulgences, the flashpoint of the Reformation, also become irrelevant?

I ask this honestly: what is the true nonnegotiable here?

Let’s discuss the papal office for a moment: Was Pope Urban II Infallible, “evangelically understood,” when he declared, in regard to the First Crusade:  “If anyone who sets out should lose his life either on the way, by land or by sea, or in battle against the infidels, his sins shall be pardoned from that moment. This I grant by right of the gift of God’s power to me.”

Did the bishop of Rome have this authority? Urban II is addressing men who are off, he hopes, to kill the enemies of the Faith and to retrieve stolen property. Is this the true nature of the power of the keys as described in the Gospel of Matthew? Does this notion of dying in a holy war and going straight to Paradise sound familiar?

Here’s another question: Does the pope have this same authority today—to proactively forgive the temporal punishment for sins that would otherwise send someone to Purgatory (or to a purgative state), thus promising them a straight ticket to heaven in the event they died trying to kill someone else? I’m not interested in whether or not it is likely to be exercised in this day and age, nor whether the Muslims in the 12th century invited this response for overrunning the “Holy Land.” I’m only interested in whether Benedict XVI, by virtue of his office, has this authority, given him from Christ.

Whether the pope is infallible in matters of faith and morals is inextricably tied to how justification is construed. The same can be said for the nature of the Eucharist, and the priesthood.

What is the wedding garment without which no one enters the wedding feast of the King? Is it something of our own, dry-cleaned, purified, and bleached? Or is it the gift of Someone else? Is it something we do to ourselves, by aid of grace? Something we endure, in the sense of suffer? Or is it something we receive, like the Eucharist, from Another?

For some, the alien, imputed righteousness of Christ is a legal fiction, and Luther’s image of the dunghill covered with snow is usually cited as evidence. And yet these same Christians have no problem with the transfer of the supererogatory merits of the saints to the accounts of the properly disposed.

The merits of Christ’s sacrifice transferred to the sinner, as a sinner, is a fiction, but the merits of Josemaria Escriva transferred by dint of papal proclamation — that’s real.

Really?

The issue remains the same today as on October 31, 1517.

via Reformation Day: Lutherans vs. Alien Righteousness « Strange Herring.

Filed Under: Bible, Christ, Church, Reformation, Theology Tagged With: , , , , 62 Comments

The new normal

November 1, 2012 by 24 Comments

In the sermon for last Sunday, Pastor Douthwaite employed an interesting turn of phrase:

There’s been a new phrased coined in our civil discourse of late, and that is folks talking about “the new normal.” Is the constant threat of terrorism the new normal? Are gas prices around $4 a gallon the new normal? Is our current partisan divide and the seeming inability for our political parties to work together the new normal? Or in other words, are these things here to stay and so you better get used to them as normal now, or are they just temporary glitches or passing events? Depending on who you talk to, you’ll get different answers to those questions.

But it seems to me that we can use that phrase when talking about the Christian life. That in Christ, there is a new normal for you and me. For in Christ, things change. In Christ, things are different. In Christ, we have been made new and so there is a new normal for Christians, which is truly a whole new way of life and of looking at life.

via St. Athanasius Lutheran Church: Reformation [observed] Sermon.

Read what Pastor Douthwaite does with this concept, showing how the perfection that was “normal” before the Fall turned into a “new normal” of sin, which, in turn, was changed by Christ into a “new normal” of grace, forgiveness, and joy.

That’s the main point of the sermon, so I don’t want to take away from that.  But I am curious about other kinds of things that used to be “out of the norm,” but are now considered “normal.”  What are some?  How does something go from beyond the pale to become accepted as “normal”?

Filed Under: Culture, Language Tagged With: 24 Comments

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