Mary E. Hunt, “Church Synod Recap: Micromanaging the Morals of Others”
As far as I know, no divorced and remarried people were on hand to speak from their experience, no same-sex families were part of the conversation, no folks who are open about their use of many forms of effective contraception, much less any who would receive a sympathetic listen to the story of their abortions were part of the mix. Many will say that expecting such is pie in the sky. But in 2014, I don’t think so. Not expecting what makes rational sense is to concede the terms of discussion before the conversation begins. Why waste the time?
… What about the much-vaunted changes in tone? Changes in tone are no substitute for changes in substance. It is as if instead of saying, “Go to hell,” one were to say “Have a lovely, safe trip to your eternal damnation.”
Elesha Coffman, “A Balm(er)ly Fall”
Evangelicals today who see themselves forced to choose between standing on principle regarding contraception and homosexuality, or acquiescing to the framing of these issues as civil rights matters, need to be reminded that many of their institutions and spokesmen claimed not so long ago to stand on principle against equality for African Americans. No wonder critics of evangelicalism perceive these institutions and spokesmen (yes, they’re still mostly men) to be repeating the old pattern. Evangelicals who wish to argue that this time, it’s different, have to acknowledge that the tale Balmer uncovers weighs against their words. Last time was ugly.
Monte Harrell Hampton, interview with Peter Enns about Storm of Words: Science, Religion, and Evolution in the Civil War Era
Against the rationalistic departures of their age, which they believed they saw in everything from antislavery to public education to higher criticism and evolutionism, they called their contemporaries back to the universal standard of the Bible.
But they hardly stood outside time and space as they read and deployed the scriptures. Ironically, their own social and cultural situatedness, particularized this universal standard of holy writ; in their hands the Bible became Southbound. They read the Bible through a particular lens, and that lens was shaped by their culture and history. Incessant affirmations of the Bible’s divine provenance and authority, which every Southern Presbyterian agreed with, could not stave off diversity in interpretation or in conceptions of orthodoxy.
So, I think their case reminds us that no human reader of scripture utterly escapes the influence of history and culture; perhaps denying their impact serves only to strengthen their grip. History and culture matter, not only in the ancient production of the scriptures but also in the modern appropriation of scripture.
Mark Binelli, “The Great Kansas Tea Party Disaster”
[Kansas Republican Wint] Winter acknowledges that Brownback might have simply been “trying to go for broke: ‘I’m going to experiment, and the beneficiary will be me being president.’ ” But he thinks there might be another explanation for the recklessness of Brownback’s budget: “This could be exactly what he wanted – to starve the beast. Maybe when he first said, ‘This is going to be an economic miracle,’ he knew it wasn’t true. And what he really wanted all along was to slash public education, shrink the size of government. And now he’s getting exactly that.”
There’s a perverse logic to Winter’s what-if. When curtailing government at all costs begins to feel like an existential mission, attacking the problem with a deficit bomb is probably not out of the question. Had the impact of Brownback’s budget not been quite so immediate and precipitous – which he likely failed to anticipate – he could have easily glided to a second term, foisting some of the blame for sluggish growth onto Obama.
That’s what has happened in Congress, where Tea Partiers have been able to take the most extreme positions with very few consequences, pleasing constituents in their gerrymandered districts without leaving fingerprints at the crime scenes. The mulish obstructionism of the congressional Republicans has arguably done far more damage to the lives of average Americans than Brownback’s folly has wreaked on Kansans, by forcing austerity rather than stimulus during a recession, by cutting science and education funding, by allowing our infrastructure to rot – we could go on – and yet, the complexity of macroeconomics and the infuriating, unfunny slapstick of our divided and broken government conspire to hand the primary culprits plenty of cover, as long as they don’t do anything impossible to ignore, like shut down the government.
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