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  • Response to Tom Engelhardt and the Class of '66: Just Retire, Please

    Tom Engelhardt has obviously been reading this blog, as he too is composing graduation speeches he won’t deliver in person.  In his case, it isn’t just popularity lack: he addressed his own Class of 1966:

    The answer, class of 1966, is: just begin. Just believe that for every measure, there is still a potential countermeasure. That you matter. That we matter. That we’re not too old. That it’s not too late. That it truly isn’t right, even now, to leave all this to our children. That the future by definition isn’t and can never be known, which means it’s no more Rex Tillerson’s than it’s ours.

    So, class of 1966, potential graduates of life-thus-far, prepare yourselves. You may not move as fast as you once did, but that’s okay. When you’re ready, just head for the entrances, not the exits. It’s time to begin.

    I think the rest of us have had enough.

    Engelhardt, the slightly pre-Boomer (technically the first Boomer college class was ’67) is calling his classmates, brain cells reduced in number by recreational drugs, to “arms” once again to make the world a better place.  He’d like to think that they can solve the problems in the world; what he doesn’t realise is that they’ve largely created them.

    Let me make one clarification: when I speak of the Class of ’66 and those immediately following, in many ways I’m speaking of two classes.  I tend to lump Boomers into one group, and in some ways that’s justified, but in others it isn’t.  This generation is bifurcated in many ways; one went the William Ayers route, and the other went towards a more conventional, traditionally American way of life.  That bifurcation has defined just about everything this past half century; our politics, our culture, you name it.

    Engelhardt’s place in this fork in the road is obvious when he spent his last night before graduation (he’s an Ivy Leaguer, what else?) with his girlfriend and stuck his parents with the bill.  He tries to deflect the natural reaction by explaining that “Despite what you’ve heard about the 1960s, this wasn’t acceptable behavior.”  Acceptable to whom?  One of the things the 1960’s is “about” is that some behaviour that was not acceptable became such and vice versa, especially when you could stick someone else with the tab.  Without meaning to, his blasé act of pleasure is emblematic of what his generation really wanted to do with themselves and everyone else.

    Engelhardt’s prose is strange; he informs us that, unlike today’s planet with global warming and what not “we had one lucky thing going for us which you, the class of 2013, don’t and won’t have going for you: the illusion that we couldn’t and wouldn’t destroy our own planet.”  But then he reminds us that destruction of our own planet hung over us like the Sword of Damocles via the nuclear arms race and (I should add) the budding environmental movement.  So which is it?  In any case such an environment was the fuel for the apocalyptic thinking that dominates our national discourse to this day, and this in a country whose elites love to parade how “rational” they are.

    It didn’t take long for his class to start leading everyone else astray and ultimately making their life miserable, as I document in The Geniuses Commit Suicide.  Some plotted and marched and murdered to stop wars (Engelhardt’s favourite cause) and others simply peddled their unworkable ethos to captive audiences in classrooms around the country, brutally suppressing dissent with an absolutist view of life worthy of any totalitarian state, which is the genesis of the speech codes we see on college campuses today.

    Engelhardt would probably say that the wrong side of his generation won, with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan following.  But I think that, after breaking American society in profound ways during the 1960’s and 1970’s and having the largesse of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson behind them, if the left could not clinch the deal then, it was and is their own fault.  The core problem was that Americans were more aspirational economically and theistic in their world view to supinely accept what the left had to offer.  After all, there was an atheistic society out there with ostensibly egalitarian way and active in the world peace movement, and that was the Soviet Union.  The threat of extinction via nuclear weapons was the result of fending that off, but it’s too easy for Engelhardt to forget that, had the Soviets triumphed, his ability to speak his peace (which he has made a career out of) would have ended.

    Today we live in a country which has turned civil rights upside down for the benefit of economically prosperous groups who are useful to those at the top of society; which keeps promising to end wars but drags it out while sons and daughters, who have little in common with their ultimate superiors, die and are wounded; which keeps telling people to achieve and yet rigs the system in innumerable ways not to make it worth the bother; whose debt will eventually sink the benefits (good and bad) of dollar hegemony; and which has now created a security apparatus for a populace scared of its own shadow which would make “Uncle Joe” Stalin proud, this in the “land of the free and the home of the brave”.

    Much of this is the result of a generation whose lack of introspection is only matched by their hypermoralism, moralism proven unjustified by acts like Engelhardt himself did before he took the Ivy League sheepskin.  The rest of us have had enough.  Social Security isn’t what I would call a “golden parachute” but it’s the best we can afford, and it isn’t our fault if thrift wasn’t your strong suit.  I agree it isn’t much to “tell our children and grandchildren, you, the graduates of 2013, that we failed you, that we left the world in worse shape, and that now — thank you very much — we’re dumping it into your laps to deal with”.  But it beats more of the same from Engelhardt’s colleagues.  Please retire before it’s too late for everyone, you’ve done enough damage and then some for one lifetime.

  • Barack Obama: Finding His Inner Lenin, Finding His Inner Dzerzhinskii

    I’ve run a good number of “I told you so” pieces on this blog.  This time, however, it’s more like “It used to be this way, but…” and the subject is national security.  Barack Obama has, at least, cut the left’s Gordian Knot on the issue.

    Let me go back to 2006 with this pre-election bloviation:

    So the Democrats are stuck. They simply cannot bring themselves to allow our military and intelligence services to do what they have to do. So the vote to keep them weak in the face of public opinion to the contrary. The Democrat Party and the American left is trapped in Dzershinskii’s Dilemma, where if they neglect national security we lose and if they beef it up they get wiped out. They never will find a way out. We vote for such people at our own peril.

    Well, as we see these days, they’ve found their (or more accurately Obama has found his) way out of the conundrum that has buffaloed them from Vietnam on.  They’ve done this in three steps:

    1. They’ve “sanitised” the “war on terror” using technology such as drone strikes.  The one exception to this was the killing of Osama bin Laden, and that was because they needed serious proof of the deed.  (By the time we got around to doing that, bin Laden was no longer really leading al-Qaeda, as we learned the hard way in Benghazi).
    2. They redefined the real enemy.  Although they’re content with picking off Islāmic careerists, their real enemy is their domestic political opposition, whom they’ve pursued via the IRS and other national security and police agencies.  This has worked because…
    3. …the left sees its political opposition as an existential threat.  As such they are ready, to varying degrees, to abrogate constitutional protections to insure their own survival and prosperity.  This is buttressed electorally by the immense patronage via various programs handed out by the government.  This isn’t new–FDR and his successors benefited from Social Security in this way–but the scale is unprecedented.

    The upshot of all of this is that the left (or at least part of it) is ready to move the revolution forward in the way most revolutions move “forward”, i.e., towards an absolute state.  This is a major shift and should be noted.  Conservatives can appeal to principles all they want, but until we get people–and especially people who don’t agree with them–to understand that they’re next in this process, success will elude them.

    There are signs, even before the present scandals broke, that some are starting to figure it out.  But we need to see more.  In the meanwhile we need to get out of the “Pickett’s Charge” mentality and realise this is a long-haul process.

  • Series on the Catechetical Lectures of St. Cyril of Jerusalem

    Every now and then I will do a series about a theological topic or work.  One of those series was on the Catechetical Lectures of St. Cyril of Jerusalem.  It turned into an interesting exploration of Patristic doctrine and practice as opposed to what we have today in all parts of Christianity.  Following are the topics and links to them:

    1. Is It Proper to Refer to Christians as Enlightened?
    2. Catechises and Baptismal Regeneration
    3. Catechises, the Preparation for Baptism and Discipleship
    4. Confirmation or Chrismation?
    5. Touch not God’s Anointed
    6. The Difference Between Image and Likeness in Genesis
    7. Every King is Proclaimed by Soldiers
    8. Is God’s Omnipotence Dependent Upon the Existence of His Creation?
    9. The Holy Spirit and Miracles, Then and Now
    10. The End Times Without Revelation
    11. Mystagogy, Sacramental Theology and the Poker Playing Dog
    12. Some Closing Thoughts on Cyril of Jerusalem’s Catechetical Lectures

    Although not a formal part of the series, the article The Gift of Faith: Cyril of Jerusalem relates to the same work.

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  • An Insane Rant Gets to the Bottom of Gun Control

    I think we’ve finally pulled one liberal’s chain hard enough so he screams:

    Here it is. The NRA advocates armed rebellion against the duly elected government of the United States of America. That’s treason, and it’s worthy of the firing squad. The B.S. needs a serious gut check. We are not a tin pot banana republic where machine gun toting rebel groups storm the palace and depose the dictator.

    We put the president in the White House. To support the new NRA president’s agenda of arming the populace for confrontation with the government is bloody treason. And many invite it gladly as if the African-American president we voted for is somehow infringing on their Constitutional rights.

    Americans hate more than anything to get to the bottom of an issue.  I think that this is an insane rant, but sometimes insanity results when one gets to the truth, and in his irrational way he’s done just that.

    Getting past issues such as self-defence and hunting, the bottom line issue for the left is that having widespread firearms ownership makes it possible (in principle at least) for the populace to resist the actions of their government in an effective way.  The inchoate fear of the left has been that, sooner or later, they will get an armed pushback that will stick.  (Kinda like we did in 1776…)

    I addressed this issue in a (hopefully) more reasoned manner at the first of the year:

    That, in a sense, leads to the second problem: how do we know that, at some point, our military, police, or whatever is in between would not fire on us in peaceful protest?  That’s an act that, in many countries, is unthinkable.  It’s the act that generally pushes how a regime is perceived from good to bad.  But what happens when that country is ours?  Who will come to our rescue?  Who will defend our human rights?  And is the moral climate in this country such that, if something like that happened (think Kent State) there would be an outcry, given the antipathy of much of our media towards such a large part of our population?  (There’s that “selective enforcement” again, in another form).

    I’m not one of those people who think that widespread gun ownership will lead to the overthrow of the Republic.  To do that takes not only weaponry but organisation and effective leadership, and both are lacking in this country.  What will bring down the Republic will be a) its bankruptcy, b) a government “inside job” and/or c) external assistance (think that “sealed train” which Lenin took from Germany to Russia during World War I).

    I should add that Dr. Swindell (I guess he has his PhD) doesn’t see much threat of an overthrew either.  But that hinges on the willingness of our military to kill its own citizens.  In addition to drone technology (which “sanitises” the process) it depends upon the willingness of a decidedly “red state” military to act against people with whom they have more in common than those who lead them.  That problem, in turn, leads to Mikey Weinstein’s insane rant on Evangelicals in the military, where he too calls people traitors for their convictions.  (My response to that is here.)

    Here, then, is the leitmotif in this opera: in the opinion of those on the left who are willing to be honest about it, anyone who isn’t “all in” with the secularist idea and the expansive government that goes with it is a traitor and should be dealt with accordingly.  The left has come a long way from Vietnam days, when patriotism was a dirty word, to today, when they define agreement with themselves as true patriotism.  If that’s true, then this country isn’t worth defending, because we have, in fact, turned into the “banana republic” that Swindell denies that we are.

    With all due respect to my Central American readers–whose countries have come a long way–the only reason we aren’t a banana republic is because we don’t grow bananas.  But wait: back in Palm Beach Public School we had bananas growing in the inner courtyard…sigh.

    HT StandFirm.

  • Keeping the Riff-Raff Out by Keeping Churches Out

    New concept?  Hardly, New York City allowed it in the late 1940’s:

    Many objected to the rich subsidies offered Metropolitan Life, then the largest private corporation in the nation, as well as the firm’s refusal to rent to minorities. Others criticized the complex’s design and layout. Metropolitan Life wouldn’t allow schools, churches, libraries, or other public facilities within the project’s boundaries out of concern that they might attract undesirable elements. Urbanist Lewis Mumford discerned “the architecture of the Police State” in Stuyvesant Town’s dozens of featureless redbrick buildings, arrayed in rows across 80 acres.

    Today Christian churches, and especially Evangelical ones, do two things: tout the social values of church and the ethic that goes with it, and contend that, until recent times, everyone else acknowledged it.  The former is certainly so, but the latter has never been a given, and certainly was not in the last century.  Obviously MetLife was more worried about keeping the riff-raff out than edifying the (presumably all-white) residents.

    As a Palm Beacher, however, such problems have a solution.  Had MetLife had the likes of Bethesda’s vestry at the time, they certainly could have found a way to have a church within the complex and keep the riff-raff out.  Whether the church would have had much of a Biblical basis is another problem altogether; the vestry showed its ability to mishandle the Word when the situation called for it.

    Sigh…

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  • What Anglicans Should Call Their Gatherings

    One thing I have discovered in being both a follower and a participant of the church world is that there are many meetings.  This isn’t to say that the church world has a corner on meetings (yes, I’m aware of Hebrews 10:25) but I’m specifically thinking on those gatherings beyond the parish setting.  I’m coming to realise that a) there are many ways to name such meetings and b) most of them really don’t work for the Anglican/Episcopal world.  So let’s get started.

    In this country the Episcopal Church has its General Convention. We have our nifty system of numbering this too, thus the last one in 2012 was “GC 77” (the seventy-seventh time this event has taken place). The last one sorely tested the ability of the orthodox to observe Our Lord’s injunction to Peter:

    Then Peter came up, and said to Jesus: “Master, how often am I to forgive my Brother when he wrongs me? As many as seven times?” But Jesus answered: “Not seven times, but ‘seventy times seven.’  (Matthew 18:21-22)

    A more fundamental problem with the term “convention” is that it comes from the Latin “to come together”.  The blunt truth is that Anglicans haven’t come together on much of anything in a long time; attempting to paper this over with the designation “convention” hasn’t helped.

    One serious question is whether the Episcopalians need to even hold such a gathering, what with the Presiding Bishop’s autocratic method.  Why bother to call for a vote when you have the show in your back pocket, especially since you’ve inhibited, deposed and excommunicated your opposition?  (My late father-in-law, badly wounded at Normandy, referred to the last as “dismembered”, and that’s pretty much what she’s done).

    Thinking about the Presiding Bishop and the egg she recently laid in the West Indies about the evils of Paul casting out demons leads to an alternative: the pandemonium.  We normally don’t consider this a meeting, but the word means “all the demons” or the general assembly of Satan’s minions.  (Fans of Gounoud’s Faust will recognise this).  The original pandemonium took place on or around 1 May, but the trade union she recently broke at 815 might have a different opinion of the date.  (That leads to another question: are demons organised?  When things go well, could it be because they’re taking an industrial action?)

    Across the pond we have the Synod, that venerable body of the Church of England now under attack by another gathering, namely Parliament.  (I tried to warn you…)  For some reason, “synod” has always struck me as an odd term for gatherings of anyone outside of the Orthodox.  (Yes, I’m aware of the Synod of Dort/Dork, but…)  More seriously, however, the word “synod” has the same root as the word Sanhedrin (yes, that venerable Jewish word has Greek origins) so I’m not sure whether we want our gatherings to be seen in that light or not.

    Bringing the Brits into the discussion brings back memories of the time when Rowan Williams was Archbishop of Canterbury, and of his introduction of the “indaba” at Lambeth 2008.  Probably no attempt at designating Anglican gatherings has fallen flatter.  It represents Williams’ attempt to bring in an African concept to a Western spirituality, but had one major snag: most of the Africans in the Anglican Communion didn’t send representation because of decidedly “Western” concepts of doctrinal and moral orthodoxy, which the Africans had a better grasp of than Williams.

    On a more personal note, the idea of the Africans preferring meetings as “indaba” strikes me as odd.  As I’ve said before, most of the Civil Engineering faculty where I teach is African, and our Kenyan department head isn’t much about having meetings of any kind.  Yes, Africans hold a very high value on being a team player, but our leader is aware of the fact that the state isn’t paying us to meet but to teach and do research.

    It was in that backdrop that we were called to a rare faculty meeting last year.  It was during a time when our institution was being harassed by a rash of bomb threats, which continued until the Feds were called in and the threat of punishment had teeth.  We had just started our meeting when the fire alarm went off.  We began to rouse ourselves when we saw real smoke in the hallway, which added a lilt to our steps.  (It turned out to be a toilet paper fire set in the stairwell).

    But our department head, having thought it important enough to have the meeting, wasn’t going to have such an interruption end it.  So we, with our administrative assistant taking minutes, reconvened in the parking lot, where we completed our business around the trunk of our superior’s car.

    That commitment to action would transform much of what we do in the church world, and not just with meetings.  The current occupant of the See of Canterbury would do well to emulate that and to do so in an effective Christian way, otherwise a car park will be more than enough for the next Lambeth gathering.

    The proliferation of Anglican bodies has produced a similar proliferation of meeting designations.  PEAR had a “sacred assembly” which strikes an Old Testament note of repentance (and we all know that someone needs to repent in this fiasco).  We’ve also had the usual conferences, summits, and the like.  But none of these has a distinctively Anglican flavour.

    However, there is one term, IMHO, that captures the Anglican way (at least as it’s been practised up until now): the symposium.

    The word “symposium” means to drink together. I wasn’t aware of this until I attended, of all things, a seminar on hydraulic systems (like you see in cranes, excavators and the brake system in your car).  The presenter, a leading expert in the field, explained the meaning of the word and illustrated it by imitating Archimedes, three sheets to the wind and staggering, raising his cup and proclaiming, “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth!”  (Hydraulic systems often use a fulcrum principle to do their work, the topic wasn’t incidental).

    Especially in North America, Episcopal churches have long been known for their penchant for the hard stuff.  Particularly in the South, one of the Episcopal Church’s appeals was that it was not only the Church Where You Could Drink, but the Church Where You Should Drink, as opposed to the Churches Where You Couldn’t Drink.  (My analysis of this situation, albeit controversial, is here).  I have no doubt that this helped people to convert, but has anyone given any thought to the quality of the converts on this basis?

    Once in, no one was under any illusions about the situation.  My second year Latin teacher, a fine Episcopal minister named Raymond O’Brien, was the first to tell me what I already know: that when four Wiskeypalians get together, you always have a fifth.  Not even the Knights of Columbus can rival the spiritual sons and daughters of Albion in this regard.

    So Episcopalians and Anglicans can call their gatherings symposiums and be confident that there’s at least one thing they can agree on.  But be careful: as my old Russian representative told me a long time ago, in Russia there is a saying: “Without vodka, there is no agreement”.  He paused for a second and then added, “And that’s why there are some really stupid agreements”.

    Which may, in fact, explain why some of the stuff in the Anglican Communion is enough to drive anyone to drink.

  • A Long Way From "A Pig a Rig"

    That’s an understatement, as China’s Shuanghui acquires Smithfield Foods:

    Shuanghui International Holdings Ltd., China’s biggest pork producer, agreed to acquire Smithfield Foods Inc. (SFD) for about $4.72 billion to boost supplies for the nation that’s the biggest consumer of the meat.

    Closely held Shuanghui, parent of Henan Shuanghui Investment & Development Co. (000895), will pay $34 a share for the Smithfield, Virginia-based producer, both companies said today in a statement. The offer is 31 percent more than yesterday’s closing share price.

    When I was doing business in China in the early 1980’s, one of the many things I discovered about the place was that the drilling rigs in the BoHai (the sea east of Beijing) were also places where the Chinese raised pigs.  One American associate quipped that the Chinese had “a pig a rig”.  Not to be outdone, when I visited the Soviet Union later in the decade I was taken to a scientific and engineering research institute where they too raised pigs on the side.

    Except in Jewish and Muslim places, pork has been a staple meat for millennia, because pigs are efficient (if not particularly graceful) converters of what they eat into what they become ,i.e. meat.  Both the Russian and Chinese revolutions took places in largely rural countries where people thought nothing about resuming their food raising wherever they were at, and that included drilling rigs (and I presume production platforms were not immune to this) and research institutes.  Marxist-Leninist economies were (and are in the case of places like North Korea and Cuba) notoriously poor distributors of goods and services, really by design, so economic activity on the side is a must in places like this.

    This move shows how far the Chinese have come in a short period (in their terms).  Let’s hope that their commitment to quality (something they surely expected from us in the day) is commensurate with their business acumen.

  • Les Reflets: Villanelle/Pour emmanuel, and Et Ils Suivirent Jésus

    Les Reflets was one of the premier Christian folk groups out there during the Jesus Music era, period, as they demonstrated in De l’abondance du coeur, la bouche parle.  Here are a couple of more albums (?).

    Villanelle/Pour emmanuel (J 410 502)

    Not really an album, but they “speed things up” by issuing a 45 rpm single release.  The songs:

    • Villanelle
    • Pour emmanuel

    Et Ils Suivirent Jésus (Jef 7ye part 69400314) 196?

    The songs:

    • L’homme de nazareth
    • Le temps etait court
    • Avis de recherche
    • Hermon 70

    More Music

  • Dealing With What We Can: What the I-5 Collapse Reminds Us Of

    We’ve had another bridge collapse, this time on the I-5 in Washington State.  So we can, for the moment, get away from debating natural disasters and discuss something we just might be able to do something about: fix our deteriorating transportation infrastructure.

    I’ll repeat what I said about this six years ago, after the I-35 bridge collapse in Minnesota:

    The American Society of Civil Engineers routinely puts out its Infrastructure Report Card on the state of the “physical plant” that allows this country to physically function.  The grade is inevitably low.  Since so much depends on the state of the infrastructure, and considering the fact that virtually everyone comes in contact with it on a daily basis, the serious question is, “why has this been permitted?”  In the case of roads, the U.S. has not made a broad-based, major investment in the system since the completion of the Interstate system.

    There are two interrelated reasons for this.

    The first is that most of the budget of state and federal governments is committed to entitlements of one kind or another, i.e., direct payments or transfer of wealth.  This leaves little for what is referred to as “discretionary” spending, and transportation generally falls into that category.  Events such as this cast aspersions on the concept of transportation spending as discretionary, but that’s the way it’s done.

    The second is that transportation, like education, is an investment in the future.  And it’s easier for people to send resources into the future if they’re sending children there.  But, with a declining birthrate, people are less likely to want to commit resources–to say nothing of the NIMBY reaction–to something they have no personal interest in.  It’s no accident that the development of the Interstate system corresponded with the Baby Boom, and its completion with the end of that boom.  Now it’s simply easier to transfer money for immediate use (entitlements) than to go through the long term pain of infrastructure development.

    But the general productivity of our economic system depends upon its transportation system.  This is one place where public works can actually have a private return on the investment.  If the U.S. wants to remain the pre-eminent country on the planet, it can’t just rely on dollar hegemony to get the job done.  A crumbling transportation infrastructure will in the long run become a drag on the nation’s ability to compete, which in turn will affect the quality of life that Americans are obsessed with.

    The big difference between then and now is that Americans have become more resigned to a lower economic state.  The birth rate has also dropped since that time.

    All of the whining we have these days about “acts of God” such as tornadoes and other natural disasters must be considered in the context of a people who don’t care enough to invest and prevent disasters that they actually could minimise.

  • Jumping the Gun with Rachel Held Evans

    Her rage against “abusive theology” is palpable:

    I can abide differences when it comes to theology related to gender, the atonement, biblical interpretation, science, evolution, predestination and free will. Let’s debate those issues vigorously, but with grace and truth and love. But I cannot abide this theology that turns God into an abuser. I cannot abide this theology that makes God out to be a monster whose destruction is done in the name of “love.”

    Stand Firm has come back at this in their own way.  But I think there’s an easier way to deal with this.

    Piper’s citation of Job 1:19 is entirely proper.  People in Oklahoma, like their counterparts at the beginning of Job, were just going about the going about when disaster struck.  And Evans is partly correct to say that “…the story of Job stands as an ancient indictment on those who would respond to tragedy by blaming the victim”.  My guess is that Piper is aware of that, which is why he used the verse he did and not another.  But that didn’t stop Evans from “jumping the gun” and using one tweet as a platform off of which to dive into a pool of rage.

    The truth is that both Evans and her Evangelical opponents are working from one shared assumption: that we have a performance-based God whose purpose is to either a) fulfil our every wish or b) punish us for every fault.  Both implicitly assume that people are the measure, and neither really represents reality.  They represent responses to Evangelical Christianity’s current “selling point”, i.e., that if you get on God’s side you’ll have a life of bliss.  One emphasises the downside of not being on his side (and I’ll admit that too many Evangelicals are big on that) and the other attempts to apply post-modern “I deserve the best” mentality to a universe where such an assumption has no basis.

    Such dialectics are, for me, a reminder of how blessed I was that my chief intellectual formation as a Christian was as a Roman Catholic and not a Protestant, let alone an Evangelical.  It has saved me a great deal of grief and probably apostacy.  So let me lay out what I think is the reality we have.

    For all of its wonder, this world and universe is fallen and not God’s ideal for us.  That ideal will be found in eternity with him.  Before that happens we’ll have problems.  Sometimes these problems are big, sometimes these problems are small.  Sometimes these problems are the result of being in the path of unintended disaster, some are really of our own making.  (The global warming fanatics, for their part, can point to Oklahoma as a high-carbon consuming place because of its low-density settlement, large vehicles and ubiquitous air-conditioning, so there, you can make a liberal case against Evans).  But in either case the key is to secure our eternity so that we can deal with the problems that come our way in this life.

    But ultimately that redemption, like everything else we get from God, is undeserved.  We don’t have the intrinsic worth to expect otherwise; God’s act of redemption was an act of undeserved love.  Coming from a congenial region, Evans may think this is harsh.  But as I’ve said before (and there are exceptions to this) growing up in a place like South Florida convinced me that, if there is a “default” in eternity, it isn’t heaven.

    To think otherwise is, IMHO, to take on an entitlement mentality about God, which for many of us extends to the people and institutions around us.  Personally I can’t stomach that; entitlement mentalities not only go against my grain as a Christian, but they also really rub me the wrong way from my secular upbringing (and, yes, Rachel Held Evans, some of us really do have a secular background).  I would say that my walk with God has softened my attitude towards the world around me, which would otherwise be misanthropic and condescending (and I struggle with both).

    The hard truth of the matter is that the blessings we have are undeserved and the adversities we get are deserved.  Neither Evans’ dread fear of “abusive theology” nor the obsessive scorekeeping of others will change that.  Our job is to respond to what happens and make things better.

    As Jesus passed by, he saw a man who had been blind from his birth.  “Rabbi”, asked his disciples, “who was it that sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” “Neither the man nor the parents”, replied Jesus; “but he was born blind that the work of God should be made plain in him.  We must do the work of him who sent me, while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work”. (John 9:1-4)

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