A Guy in the Pew

Forty years ago today, I eagerly woke up and rushed to our kitchen to see who had won the California Democratic primary the day before. I was only nine years old, so I had gone to bed long before the results were known. Yes, I was a political junky even at age nine. But this was different--this was the first time that I cared about an election. For just one week earlier, my family had been vacationing in San Francisco, and while we were lunch on Fisherman's Wharf Robert Kennedy came on the wharf to shake some hands. My little nine year old hand was one of the hands he shook. That was it. I was hooked. Much to the puzzlement and amusement of my then Republican parents, I cared about nothing except the election. I disparately wanted Robert Kennedy to win. Of course, as you well know, on that morning of June 5, 1968, my parents had to give me the very sad news that Robert Kennedy had been shot and was not expected to live. I was devastated, but that day began a life long interest in p...

I have been meaning to blog about my friend Andrei Cherny's new book The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America's Finest Hour for some time. Now I have a great excuse. Talking Points Memo is doing its book blog about the book. You can find the posts here . Andrei starts off the conversation: The Candy Bombers was an attempt to write the kind of character-driven, narrative history that I enjoy reading but - more importantly from the standpoint of this discussion - it was also an attempt to excavate a "usable past" for progressives, something we talk a lot about but have not done enough of. About four years ago, I asked myself these questions: If, in this era of Abu Ghraib and a descending situation in Iraq, America is doing the wrong things in the world, when were we most clearly doing the right thing? If we are at a low ebb of our standing in the eyes of people in other nations, when were we most beloved and admired and trusted around t...

May 1 will be the 7th anniversary of the Catholic Worker's movement, and Marquette University Press has published "The Duty of Delight," a collection of Day's diaries, as well as a 2006 documentary, "Don't Call Me a Saint," is out on DVD. The Dallas Morning News Religion blog has further details: Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement , was a pacifist, a champion of the poor, a Communist (for a time), a writer, and a hell-raiser who took part in countless demonstrations in support of workers, women, the poor and the disenfranchised. She spoke her mind. Before embracing Catholicism, she led what was once colorfully called a "bohemian" lifestyle. She had affairs, a common-law marriage, and a back-alley abortion, about which she wrote in a novel, "The Eleventh Virgin." She died in 1980 at age 83. On May 1, the Catholic Worker Movement celebrates its 75th anniversary. Today, there are more than 185 Catholic Worker houses...

Steven Waldman, the editor-in-chief of Beliefnet has a very interesting book about the role of faith in our public life. His book challenges both liberal and conservative assumptions about what the founding fathers thought about the issue. He has a recent blog post that summarizes some of his conclusions: In writing my new book, Founding Faith, I was struck by two things of possible importance to today’s religious progressives. First, the 18th century evangelicals had a very different approach to religious freedom than many of their 21st century descendents. They were crucial advocates for separation of church and state. This ought to be a challenge to both modern liberal secularists who assume that evangelicals are awlays on the side of tyranny, and for religious conservatives who have disowned the arguments of their ancestors. If not for evangelicals, we wouldn’t have religious freedom. Second, the Founders mostly assess religion through the prism of one question: does it promote g...

We have a tradition at Trinity of having members of the congregation prepare Lenten mediations on the readings for the 40 days of Lent. Today was my day, and here was my contribution: Psalm 51: 1-10 Isaiah 58:1-9a Matthew 9:10-17 Is not this the fast I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Last year, the United Kingdom celebrated the 200th anniversary of the end to the slave trade. The story of the hard fought battle was also celebrated last year in the movie Amazing Grace, which focused on the long struggle of William Wilberforce, a committed Christian and member of Parliament who made ending the slave trade his life’s ambition. Given that I too am a former elected official, I have long found Wilberforce to be my inspiration. Aside from the fact that Wilberforce is one of the few (perhaps the only?) politician recognized in the Book of Common prayer with a day on the church calen...

Here is another cool map. The history of 5000 years of religion in 90 seconds. You can find lots of similar use of maps to show history here and here .

Andrew Sullivan thinks this is cool. I agree. A history of the civil war in four minutes.

Tobias Haller has a wonderfully interesting post today about what Richard Hook really said about the Anglican triad of scripture, reason and tradition: The stool or tripod of Scripture, Tradition and Reason, alleged to be Hooker’s, doesn’t stand upright. When one examines Hooker’s actual argument — which extends over many pages — with care, it is plain that his attitude towards these three elements is uneven. First comes Reason, both historically (in time) and naturally (for without Reason we could not understand anything, including the Scripture). Unto the word of God… we do not add reason as a supplement of any maim or defect therein, but as a necessary instrument, without which we could not reap by the Scripture’s perfection that fruit and benefit which it yieldeth… If knowledge were possible without discourse of natural reason, why should none be found capable thereof but only men; nor men till such time as they come unto ripe and full ability to work by reasonable understanding? —...

Allan A. Tulchin of Shippensburg University has a very interesting study in the Journal of Modern History that reviews historical evidence, including documents and gravesites, suggesting that homosexual civil unions may have existed six centuries ago in France. The article is the latest from the ongoing “Contemporary Issues in Historical Perspective” series, which explores the intersection between historical knowledge and current affairs. The Journal press release gives some details: Opponents of gay marriage in the United States today have tended to assume that nuclear families have always been the standard household form. However, as Tulchin writes, “Western family structures have been much more varied than many people today seem to realize, and Western legal systems have in the past made provisions for a variety of household structures.” For example, in late medieval France, the term affrèrement – roughly translated as brotherment – was used to refer to a certain type of legal ...

I had previously posted about Steve Pinker's fascinating article about how the world today is far less violent and far less cruel than in the past. According to Pinker, the "leading edge [of the decline in violence and cruelty] has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century." The New York Times published a very interesting article this week about Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, who believes that the Industrial Revolution — the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 — occurred because of a change in the nature of the human population. I may blog about Clark's work in a separate post, but what I found most fascinating in the article was the graph above that confirms Pinker's assertion--that there was a sharp drop in violence beginning in the sixteenth century. Not...

A few weeks ago there was much excitement in the media about the discovery of wter under the Darfur region of Sudan. Many commentators opined that this would cause a decline in the Darfur genocide since the genocide was Caused" by climate change in the region. As Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic notes, the notion that climate change "caused" the Darfur genocide is fraught with moral danger and philisophical error: If I were a Janjaweed, and could read as well as rape, I would be quite heartened by reports of the latest brilliant idea about the suffering in Darfur. The idea to which I refer is that the cause of the atrocity is climate change. This grandiose hypothesis has been popularized by Ban Ki-moon, who wrote last month that "[t]here is a very strong link between land degradation, desertification, and conflict in Darfur. Northern Darfur--where exponential population growth and related environmental stress have created the conditions for conflict to be trig...

Yesterday was the 62nd anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Novelist Nora Gallagher has an interesting reflection about this anniversary based on her recent novel about Los Alamos and the building of the atomic bomb. She begins by noting the "scandal of the particular"--the scandal that we believe in a creator God that cares about each individual: While I was writing the novel, I came across a phrase from theology: the scandal of the particular. The idea is that God, this enormous creative force that “hung the stars” and created “that great leviathan just for the sport of it” would care about one of us. That the God of Creation–Aristotle's Prime Mover or Plato's Divine Source– would stoop to join us in the mundane details of every day human life, would care even if a single sparrow fell to the ground. This "Yahweh" was completely low-brow to the Greeks, a scandal: from Greek skandalon ‘snare, stumbling block.’ And yet, it is a beautiful scandal, isn’t it...

This year, we all too quietly celebrate the 200 year anniversary of the end of slavery in the British Empire. On March 25, 1998, the British Parliament voted to outlaw slavery. So why do I post on this today? Because in the Anglican Communion, today is the feast day for William Wilberforce, the member of Parliament who pushed so hard and long for the end of slavery. It is not every day that an elected politician is recognized as a saint by a religious body, and this recognition is well deserved. To celebrate, there will several services in Westminster Abbey: Monday night in London's Westminster Abbey, Atlanta's St. Philip's Episcopal Cathedral will help celebrate one of the landmark events in history: 200 years ago, or nearly six decades before the United States settled the Civil War and ended slavery, the British Parliament voted to outlaw human bondage. For the Britons, it was the culmination of a contentious debate, as much about human rights and justice as about the eco...

The Guardian 's blog "Comment is Free" has an interesting deabte today about the issue of whether religion is a force for good or evil. Taking the view that it is a force for evil is A.C. Grayling, professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. Here are highlights of his argument: Everything human has its lunatic fringe, and we could dismiss those who kill for their superstitions as such if they were such. But the truth is that religion itself is the lunatic fringe of human thought, and that is why we see scores or hundreds murdered daily for sectarian reasons, infantile mobs yelling in the streets of Pakistan over a book they have not read, religious organisations tearing themselves apart because of their ancient prejudices against homosexuals (as if there were not genuine problems in the world to be exercised about), and much, much more besides that is puerile, nauseating or plain dangerous. Religion's apologists in the formerly Christian western...

One of the more obscure, but important, areas of the law that I had to master was the Law of War. I was General Counsel of the Army and taught National Security Law at Arizona State University. One of my biggest frustrations with the Bush Administration has been that it acts and talks as if the Geneva Conventions (and the other international law frameworks that govern law in wartime) were imposed on the United States by foreign powers. Wrong. These frameworks were largely created and pushed by us , and they have been strongly supported by every modern Administration--until this one. John Fabian Witt a professor of law and history at Columbia University, says it well in a Washington Post oped : The declaration [of independence] was the beginning of a remarkable but now little-remembered American tradition in the laws of war. In the 1780s, a treaty with Prussia committed the United States to follow European rules of warfare. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln published a code for...

USA Today has an interesting article about a recent article by cultural historian Mark Graham of Grove City (Pa.) College in the Journal of Religious History , which counters the view that Charles Darwin was hostile to Christianity. To the contrary, he supported missionary work his entire life, although he died an agnostic: More than a century after his death, people are still trying to understand Charles Darwin. And a new report says those who label him anti-religion are wrong. The 19th Century English biologist famous for his theory of evolution supported Christian missionary work his entire adult life, reports a cultural historian. "The march of improvement, consequent on the introduction of Christianity, through the South Seas, probably stands by itself on the records of the world," Darwin wrote in 1836, chronicling the sea voyage that opened his eyes to the development of species. "I don't think Darwin would recognize his defenders today and probably wouldn...

Mark Lilla, professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, has a review of a new biography of Alexis de Tocqueville, in The New Republic . The review is quite critical of the biography, but I was more taken with Lilla's brief description of the development of democratic multiculturalism in the United States. In short, Lilla argues that the United States developed democratic multiculturalism better than other countries because it was paradoxically initially quite homogeneous. We had to learn toleration and equality first within this homogeneous community before we could extend it to individuals from other groups: Tocqueville was neither a racist nor a chauvinist; Brogan tells us that he broke with his trusted aide Gobineau when the latter began publishing his bizarre theories about racial inequality. But Tocqueville did believe that every civilization begins at what he called a point de départ, out of which its prejudices, habits, and characteristic pass...

Benjamin Myers Faith and Theology blog has a guest post by Ray Anderson of the Fuller Theological Seminary about German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In just one post , Anderson manages to provide a great deal of thought-provoking information about this theologian and martyr. Here are some highlights: 1. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Christian theologian. Rather, one should say that he became a Christian theologian. Eberhard Bethge, his former student and biographer, notes the year 1933 as a “transition from theologian to Christian.” In 1936 Dietrich wrote to a girlfriend and confessed: “I plunged into work in a very unchristian way.… [T]hen something happened, something that has changed and transformed my life to the present day. For the first time I discovered the Bible…. I had often preached. I had seen a great deal of the church, spoken and preached about it, but I had not yet become a Christian” (Bethge 2000, 203-5). By his own admission, his two most scholarly writings, Sanctorum...

Christopher Hitchens' book God is Not Good has, as one of its focus, the undisputed history of evil done in the name of religion. As I wrote earlier, I think that this has more to do with human nature and not religion per se. British journalist Edward Pearce offers a further response in a commentary on the Guardian group blog: All the evidence taken together makes religion look dreadful. But religious faith, the prime mover of evil? The response to such a grand, archdeacon-annihilating sweep of the arm must be a prolonged, grown-up "Steady on." Rebuttal begins at personal goodness. Put in evidence San Carlo Borromeo and William Mompesson. Both, Catholic Archbishop and Anglican Vicar, discharged for puritan views, faced bubonic plague - in Milan 1576 and Derbyshire 1665/6, respectively. Borromeo refused to follow the great body of the well-to-do into the clean air of exile, but stayed, cared and expended his own fortune - something he had already done during a major fam...

One of the stronger arguments made by atheists such as Hitchens and Dawkins is the harm caused by humans in the name of religion over the course of history. Yes, I know, atheistic belief systems have their own examples of evil, but the atheists do have a point that atheists have not killed in the name of atheism per se. My response is that human beings, as fallible creatures, will use any justification available--religion, ideology, tribalism, etc.--to justify evil, and it is this nature of humans (and not religion) that is ultimately at fault. Paul O’Donnell, a former editor at Newsweek and Beliefnet.com, agrees with me in a recent review of Christopher Hitchens' book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything ,: One of Western civilization’s worst follies involves men in robes—women too—chanting and gesticulating like they're trying to lure the Great Kong—only what they're up to is even more bizarre: acting out myths bastardized from the pagans and Zoasterians an...