It's way too hot out for sustained thoughts, so here are a handful of unsustained ones …
Russell Moore is dean of the School of Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.
For now, he is, anyway. Southern's president, Al Mohler, has a history of purging professors who stray from his conservative party line — particularly when their supposed trespasses are theologically sound and therefore immune to suppression under the pretense of defending doctrine.
I doubt Mohler would much like what Russell Moore had to say on NPR last week, speaking about the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico:
"There's really nothing conservative — and certainly nothing evangelical — about a laissez-faire view of a lack of government regulation, because we, as Christians, believe in sin," Moore said.
"That means if people are sinful, if all of us are sinful, then all of us have to have accountability — and that includes corporations." Moore said. "Simply trusting corporations to go about their business without polluting the water streams and without destroying ecosystems is really a naive and utopian view of human nature. It's not a Christian view of human nature."
"God cares about the Creation," Moore said. "He displays himself in nature, and so the more that people are distanced from the Creation itself and the more people become accustomed to treating the Creation as something that is disposable, the more distanced they are from understanding who God is."
"People are designed to be dependent on Creation and upon the natural resources around us," he continued. "In order to love future generations, in order to love cultures, we have to love the ecosystems that support those things."
"What's happening is that you have entire cultures and communities of people now imperiled," he said. "That's an issue of love of neighbor."
I hope someone steps up to hire Moore quickly after Mohler reads that.
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The big bomb drops down over this quiet Edison sky …
It seems that Time columnist Joel Stein grew up in Edison, N.J., around the same time that I did. (I went to school in Piscataway, actually, but the township line ran across our baseball field. So I played high school ball in Edison.)
Stein visits the old neighborhood and is surprised to find out there are a lot of immigrants in Central Jersey — which is a surprising thing to be surprised at, since that's pretty much always been true of Central Jersey.
Stein translates his surprise into a bunch of ethnic jokes about Indians. It doesn't go over well.
In particular, Anna from Sepia Mutiny is not amused. (Read the whole thing — it's an epic take-down, Jersey-style.)
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Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-Minn., opposed the G20 meeting because she's afraid of Nicolae Carpathia:
If you look at the G20, what they’re trying to do is bind together the world’s economies. … President Obama is trying to bind the United States into a global economy where all of our nations come together in a global economy. I don’t want the United States to be in a global economy … it is one short step to joining political unity and then you would have literally, a one world government. … I don’t want to cede United States authority to a transnational organization.
Here's the thing about Michelle Bachmann: She's perpetually indignant, deliberately ignorant and pridefully stupid.
And the 6th District in Minnesota has elected her twice.
Once was forgivable. Twice less so. A third time not at all. There's no excuse for that.
So if you're from St. Cloud, or Sauk Rapids or Albany, Minn., this is on you. Stop honoring prideful stupidity and the destruction that comes with it. Willful ignorance is bad for America. Voting for Michelle Bachmann is right up there with flag-burning as a display of contempt for your country, and unlike flag-burning it also produces tangible harm. Don't let this happen again.
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