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  • No Dogs or…: Honduras Brings Back the Concession Areas

    That, basically, is what the Hondurans are doing:

    The government of Honduras has signed a deal with private investors for the construction of three privately run cities with their own legal and tax systems.

    The memorandum of agreement signed Tuesday is part of a controversial experiment meant to bring badly needed economic growth to this small Central American country. Its weak government and failing infrastructure are being overwhelmed by corruption, drug-linked crime and lingering instability from a 2009 political coup.

    Students of history (and there are fewer good ones with each passing day) will remember that, in the wake of the Opium Wars, the European powers carved out “concession” areas in major cities in Old China. In these areas Europeans were not subject to Chinese law at all.  This was the origin of the infamous “No Dogs or Chinese” sign in old Shanghai.  The concessions were a source of a great deal of resentment among the Chinese, and the Communists used that to help secure their victory.  We saw the same pattern in the Ottoman Empire as well.

    What the Hondurans are doing is no different.  They’re a form of concession, albeit to private corporations instead of governments.  And I think that the long-term results will be no different from the ones we saw with the Chinese or the Middle Easterners: resentment.

    It will be pleasant for the “foreign devils” that live there, but in the long run we may pay a higher price than we think.

  • A Pentecostal Finally Gets It on the Eucharist

    It took long enough, but Jonathan Martin finally “threw his wallet on the table” about this:

    I do not hold to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation-it is too speculative for my taste. But I do believe very much in real presence, that there is a mysterious way that we partake in the presence and power of God when we come to eat and drink. That said, I love the emphasis in Catholic tradition that there is something objectively true on the table, something you can stake your life on. When I finally got around to Thomas Merton’s famous memoir of conversion, The Seven Storey Mountain, I was surprised to find myself largely unmoved. But the one part that haunted me was where he wrote that the main reason he wanted to live in a monastery was to abide under the same roof as “the host,” to be in the same space as the elements. Even as one who doesn’t believe in transubstantiation, that moved me-the hunger to be where the meal is, because you believe that deeply that God is at work in it.

    Most regular readers of this blog know that I have advocated this for a long time.  I do have a couple of comments about this.

    First, re his comments about transubstantiation, it’s a very technical concept, but even Catholics who are very familiar with the Church’s teaching on the subject will admit that it isn’t the only way to explain the transformation that takes place in the Eucharist.  The Orthodox believe in the real presence without transubstantiation, and of course Martin mentions Wesley and Luther.

    Second, I don’t feel the compulsion that he does for a specifically “Pentecostal” theology on this or a variety of other subjects.  I think if we really believe that what the Church experienced in Acts is still for today, that we don’t need to carve out a theological niche for ourselves.  And we don’t need to set certain types of Christianity or certain periods of the history of the church as “off-limits”.

    But this is good news.  The reaction to this will be interesting.

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  • Affordability and Morality in our Social Welfare System

    Janet Daley in the Telegraph lays out the stark choices we face:

    What is being challenged is nothing less than the most basic premise of the politics of the centre ground: that you can have free market economics and a democratic socialist welfare system at the same time. The magic formula in which the wealth produced by the market economy is redistributed by the state – from those who produce it to those whom the government believes deserve it – has gone bust. The crash of 2008 exposed a devastating truth that went much deeper than the discovery of a generation of delinquent bankers, or a transitory property bubble. It has become apparent to anyone with a grip on economic reality that free markets simply cannot produce enough wealth to support the sort of universal entitlement programmes which the populations of democratic countries have been led to expect. The fantasy may be sustained for a while by the relentless production of phoney money to fund benefits and job-creation projects, until the economy is turned into a meaningless internal recycling mechanism in the style of the old Soviet Union.

    Or else democratically elected governments can be replaced by puppet austerity regimes which are free to ignore the protests of the populace when they are deprived of their promised entitlements. You can, in other words, decide to debauch the currency which underwrites the market economy, or you can dispense with democracy. Both of these possible solutions are currently being tried in the European Union, whose leaders are reduced to talking sinister gibberish in order to evade the obvious conclusion: the myth of a democratic socialist society funded by capitalism is finished. This is the defining political problem of the early 21st century.

    As the Democratic Convention gets under way in Charlotte, this is the key question, one which will not get a proper answer there and got a more fulfilling (but not entirely) one at the Republican gathering last week.

    Most liberals believe that we have a “moral” obligation to create and finance an extensive social net.  Partly because of upbringing and partly because of the 1960’s, I’m soured on the concept of “liberal morality”.  That being so, the key problem here is this: there can be no welfare state of any kind without a productive sector supporting it.  If you kill the productive sector through disincentives such as high taxation and unreasonable regulation, the social net will become unaffordable and go with it.  That’s what’s being faced on both sides of the Atlantic.

    In the days of the New Deal and the Beveridge Commission, expectations were relatively low, demographics for a productive workforce were stronger and politicians were practical enough to understand that a balance had to be struck.  (Well, most of the time…)  So the social nets started out as affordable.  Now we have electorates with unrealistic expectations and more elderly demographics, and between the two we have passed the critical point of affordability.  Thus the entire social model in the West is in serious trouble.

    One time I read an interview with Willem Drees, the architect of the Dutch social net.  He said that the social welfare system was set up for those who really needed help and not just to put every high school drop-out on the dole.  In the years after World War II the Dutch managed to put together a booming economy and a social safety net in this way:

    Drees was closely tied to the years in which the Netherlands was recovering from World War II. The economy had to be kick-started and everyone had to lend a hand. The emphasis was placed on cooperation rather than conflict. Employees agreed to low wages to achieve a competitive position for the Netherlands in respect of other countries. This meant that most people had to postpone buying a car or a television set. In politics, cooperation was the top priority, even though polarisation was ingrained in Dutch society during those years and most of the Dutch lived their lives within their own small social circle. Catholic boys joined a Catholic football club, socialists joined a socialist hiking association.

    Drees himself was personally thrifty and austere, and that was reflected in his policies.  Today’s Boomers are anything but, which is why they’ve spent their way through the last decade and into this one.

    The Christian Church had the same issues in New Testament times.  It rose to the occasion and created its own safety net in a society which tended to throw away people (literally, in the case of exposure.)  So a balance had to be struck here as well:

    For you know well that you ought to follow our example. When we were with you, our life was not ill-ordered, Nor did we eat any one’s bread without paying for it. Night and day, labouring and toiling, we used to work at our trades, so as not to be a burden upon any of you. This was not because we had not a right to receive support, but our object was to give you a pattern for you to copy. Indeed, when we were with you, what we urged upon you was– ‘If a man does not choose to work, then he shall not eat.’ We hear that there are among you people who are living ill- ordered lives, and who, instead of attending to their own business, are mere busy-bodies. All such people we urge, and entreat, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, to attend quietly to their business, and earn their own living. (2 Thessalonians 3:7-12)

    How we plan to discuss this need for sense in a political system lacking in it remains to be seen.  But papering over the productivity issue–which we will see a lot of in Charlotte this week–isn’t the answer.

  • Stewart Henderson: Whose Idea of Fun is a Nightmare

    (Dovetail DOVE 35) 1975

    One of the most difficult genres of albums to sell is the spoken word. That’s because it’s not easy to sustain the listener’s interest over a sustained period. Long talking head videos have the same problem.

    This album is a glorious exception to that. Henderson, originally from Liverpool, regales us with hilarious (and profound) humour that entertains, holds the interest and provokes thought. He uses some interesting music to spice things up as well. It’s too English in spots for Americans to fully grasp, and some of his humour is a little dated, but this gem shows that Christian comedy doesn’t have to be banal.

    Henderson, a poetry reader for the BBC, is presently collaborating with Martyn Joseph on their CD Because We Can.

    The poems (for individual download:)

      1. Intro
      2. And I Received A Vision
      3. Way Past My Birth Time
    2. My Garden used To Look Ever So Nice
    3. Mind The Doors
    4. Yours, Not Ours
    5. Vegetarian Love Poem
    6. Splintered Messiah
    7. She Wrote This Poem, I Just Typed The Words
    8. To Write Of Love
    9. I Die Now
    10. I’m Dousing Myself With Cosmetics
    11. Crack, Rap, Snap
    12. Incident From A Sleeping Head
    13. Hammersmith Dream
    14. Typewriter Poem
    15. Poem For A Big Al
    16. Who Never Gets In The New Year’s Honours List

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  • Atheists in the Pulpit? The Last Step, but Not the First

    Albert Mohler documents the rise of the “Clergy Project”:

    The Clergy Project’s own statement is even more blunt, describing itself as “a confidential online community for active and former clergy who do not hold supernatural beliefs.” Most people, believers and unbelievers alike, are no doubt in the habit of thinking that the Christian ministry requires supernatural beliefs. That assumption is what Richard Dawkins and the Clergy Project want to subvert. More precisely, they want to use the existence of unbelieving pastors to embarrass the church and weaken theism.

    Atheist clergy may be the last step in the corruption of people of the cloth, but it certainly isn’t the first.  The saga of the fall of the Episcopal Church began when its clergy began to doubt and cast off the essentials of the Christian faith.  The rot then spread to the laity.  Denial of doctrines such as the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection and other key beliefs antedated the controversies that engulf our times.  That may be hard to remember for some, but it’s a fact.  And I have heard snippets, over the years, that certain Episcopal clergy didn’t believe in God.

    That, of course, makes atheist clergy an interesting situation in liberal churches:

    Dennett and LaScola made a very interesting and important observation in their research report. They acknowledged that defining an unbelieving pastor is actually quite difficult. Given the fact that so many liberal churches and denominations already believe so little, how is atheism really different? In the name of tolerance, the liberal denominations have embraced so much unbelief that atheism is a practical challenge.

    From a Christian standpoint, the only way something like this and the unbeliefs that led up to it can stand is when the church is characterised as a social agency and not the Body of Christ.  Once you do that, the church is no different from the ill-starred Komen Foundation.

    I also found this distasteful as well:

    Why didn’t they just resign? Most shockingly, some openly spoke of losing their salaries as the main concern. So much for intellectual honesty.

    The truth of the matter is that atheist clergy who stay are no better than the likes of Robert Tilton, for whom the money was the deal both doctrinally and personally.  They can set themselves up in the usual liberal self-righteousness but in the end if it’s all about the money and a career it’s no different.

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  • Mitt Romney and the Religion of the Middle Class

    So we now have Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee for President.  It’s an odd thing in many ways, not because the party grandees threw their lot in with him–that’s par for the course.  It’s odd because they were able to get it past the people who supposedly dominate the party–the “Religious Right”, those dreadful Evangelicals who are supposedly gunning for a theocracy that would make John Calvin look like a wimp.

    Such a result reminds us that only God is omnipotent.  Yes, we will have base enthusiasm problems, but both parties are having that, and those tend to get papered over with our polarised Electoral College system.  But there are still many Evangelicals out there who are uneasy about voting for a Mormon.  The obvious question is why.

    There are serious doctrinal and theological differences between Mormonism and Christianity.  And I don’t think that it’s unfair to make the distinction either; many Mormons do.  Mormonism was intended to restore the faith to a supposedly pristine state, as the other churches were characterised as corrupt.  Since same churches (and the ones formed after them) haven’t gone along with the “Restoration” churches, it’s fair to say the Mormons’ basic opinion about the rest of us hasn’t changed, and we’re happy to reciprocate.

    I could detail many of the differences between Mormonism and Christianity, and between Mormonism and itself.  For the moment, I’ll leave that to others.  What I want to concentrate on is the broader political and social implications of the conflict between Mormonism and Christianity on the one hand and both arrayed against a secularising culture with an “upstairs/downstairs” political alliance to advance that secularisation.

    In trying to condense a great deal of American history and demography, let’s make a few stipulations.  First, if you want to be the central religion of a culture, you want to capture its key demographic.  In the United States, that means the “middle class” with all the complexities that go with that characterisation.  Up until the 1960’s, and especially in the immediate post-World War II era, that pride of place among religions belonged to Main Line Protestantism.  Other religions out there–including Evangelicals such as the Southern Baptists, the Pentecostals, the Roman Catholics, the Mormons and even in a different way the Jews–were on the outside, not just looking in but trying to arrive themselves.  Each of these had their enclaves, be they regional, ethnic or what not, but none of them had the broad appeal to the American middle class that Main Line Protestantism had.

    The decline of Main Line Protestantism is a well documented story, and that decline has become especially steep in the last twenty years or so.  That has created is a vacuum, and one knows that nature abhors a vacuum.  Each of the aforementioned contenders would like to fill that vacuum, and a great deal of the story of Christianity the last forty years or so is the story of the various attempts to fill that vacuum.  (I emphasise Christianity because Judaism, and to a lesser extent Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism aren’t the seekers of converts that Christianity is).

    But none of these groups has really gotten the job done.  Roman Catholicism, for all its ability to get its people into the middle and upper reaches of our society, lacks the strong pastoral system and desire to mobilise its laity either for God or country to command the field.  Evangelicals, incessantly demonised by their media opponents and hampered by their own “low hanging fruit” approach to evangelisation and church growth, can’t get the breakthrough they’re looking for.  Charismatics and Pentecostals are even further behind the demographic curve than their Evangelical counterparts, although they have one key advantage which they haven’t figured out how to make best use of: their broad appeal to non-white people groups.

    That of course leaves the Mormons.  In many ways they are the perfect cast for the role: superbly organised, hopelessly bourgeois, economically prosperous.  Those reasons and more explain Evangelicals’ hostility towards them: from their own perspective, they see Mormonism as their most single dangerous rival.  More than the isolationist Jehovah’s Witnesses or the apolitical Seventh Day Adventists,  Mormons are to Evangelicals what Mao Zedong was to Chiang Kai-Shek: a cancer to be removed at all costs.  Having a Mormon President, with all the favourable publicity and testimonial value that he would have for the LDS church, is a major source of consternation for Evangelicals in particular.

    Unfortunately there are more serious problems out there.  The most serious of those problems is the growing appeal of secularism in our society.  It’s hard to communicate what that means and the appeal it has in a society as consistently religious as ours has been, but the possibility of secularism becoming this country’s favourite middle class religion is real–except for one trout in the milk…

    That smelly fish is, of course, the current structure of American liberalism, embodied in the Democrat Party and the current Occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Same Occupant got there with what we call in politics an “upstairs/downstairs” coalition.  The way you keep such a coalition together is through patronage, which has become a powerful force in American politics, one overlooked by the mind-numbing pundits with their prognostications based on elections past.  The upstairs–be that upstairs employed by the state or by the very wealthy–basically spreads enough money around the downstairs so that the latter will keep them in power.  They get those funds from those caught in the middle, whom the upstairs thinks will continue working as always while they are taxed and regulated without relief.  When same middle falls down the stairs and quits being a cash cow, your economy collapses and you have poverty.

    What Evangelical and Mormon have come to realise–implicitly if not explicitly–is that it doesn’t matter who becomes the new middle class religion if there is no middle class.  We have to save the middle class before we can fight over it, among ourselves or with the secularists.

    That, ultimately, is the glue that holds the Republican Party’s hostile religious groups together.  To succeed we must convince a critical mass of the American people that it’s still possible to succeed by merit in a real economic system, and stacked against patronage that won’t be easy.  Whether this new-found unity will be enough to make the difference in November will be one for the record books.

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  • The Alethians and the Right Angle with David Pope: One Way

    (Myrrh MST 6506) 1972 UK

    One curiosity of Christian records in the “Jesus Music” era are albums where one side is recorded by a different group than the other. A helpful way for two groups to share the cost, it had the added bonus of not requiring one group to come up with more that 20-25 minutes of music. Given the quality of some of the groups, that was a big plus for everyone.

    Although both groups get lead vocals from David Pope, that’s where the similarity ends. The Alethians are a straight-up, Fisherfolk type group whose acoustic guitars and very light percussion will gladden the heart of any 1970’s Christian folk fan. The Right Angle, however, did something that few other Christian groups tried: a “lounge lizard,” jazzy style that would be happier in a bar than in a church. Their “rat pack” rendition of “Pass It On” is an absolute classic, and reason enough alone to have the album.

    The songs:

    • The Alethians:
      1. Come And Go With Me
      2. The Reason Why
      3. You Can ‘Tell The World
      4. Reflections
      5. Darkness
      6. One Way
    • The Right Angle:
      1. I Cannot Understand
      2. The Way Was Dark
      3. Pass It On
      4. Questions
      5. I Heard About
      6. A Quiet Place

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  • And now a word about the Field Mass…

    Last week I took a page from “cassock and surplice” Anglicanism–the funeral of World War I flying ace Manfred “Red Baron” von Richtofen–to show what “1662 BCP” Anglicanism looked like in a celebrated event.  The significance of my slighting the alb was well understood.  So I guess a little “equal time” might be in order.  (Well, sort of…)

    The “field Mass” is part and parcel with Roman Catholics serving in the various armed forces they do.  In years past and in countries such as Italy and Austria-Hungary, the field Mass was an important part of their military tradition.  (We also see it in our own armed forces as well).

    The photo at the right is one reason this is so.  It shows a field Mass during World War I for Italian Alpine troops in the Tyrolean Alps.  Italian Alpine troops were some of their nation’s finest, as were their Austrian counterparts.  Superbly trained and fighting in the most difficult conditions, it was a special duty for a chaplain to minister to them.

    In the years immediately following Vatican II, American Catholics were told that, before that watershed event, the Mass was “vertical” in focus, i.e., towards God, while afterwards it was more “horizontal” (community) in emphasis.  Be that as it may, this photo shows the most vertical Mass I have ever seen.

    As was the case uniformly before Vatican II, the priest is facing the altar and behind it.  Generally speaking the congregation in its turn is behind the priest.  But, in these conditions, the faithful had to view the elevation of the Host from whatever place they could stabilise themselves in.

    We’re still waiting for Anglo-Catholicism to rival this…

    HT

  • Same-Sex Civil Marriage: Not Quite Ready to Go for Broke

    The famous (if unlikely) team of Boies and Olsen are backpedaling on their case to overturn Proposition 8–and establish same-sex civil marriage by national default:

    The two high-profile lawyers who started the nation’s most significant lawsuit attempting to gain marriage rights for same-sex couples told the Supreme Court on Friday that it might find it very interesting to take up that issue now, but urged the Justices not to do so in the only case now at the Court that could raise that question — the case testing the constitutionality of California’s “Proposition 8.”   Attorneys Theodore B. Olson and David Boies argued that the case has procedural flaws, made no change in the law, involves no conflict among lower courts, and might raise core constitutional issues that the Court may not be ready to confront.

    I’ll try to avoid oversimplification, but there are two major tracks running through our court system on this subject.

    The first are all the “DOMA” cases, such as this (HT to Rubin on Tax for keeping up with this).  Basically these seek to overturn the 1996 law, which denies federal recognition for same-sex civil marriages permitted by state law for purposes such as the tax code.  Success in this wouldn’t mandate same-sex civil marriage everywhere, but it would take the campaign to a new level.

    The second are cases like this, which seek to mandate same-sex civil marriage based on equal protection under the laws.  Although opponents of same-sex civil marriage hate to admit it, our élite opinion has given an air of inevitability to the success of this venture.

    Or has it?  It’s sometimes hard to know why attorneys do what they do, but my guess is that Boies and Olsen are afraid that SCOTUS will issue a muddled, narrow opinion which would overturn Proposition 8 in California but which might in the long run make winning a broader case difficult.  That, more or less, is what happened with the Obamacare case, especially with the Medicaid issue, which is why liberals, while relieved at its basic upholding of the “Affordable Care” act, aren’t dancing in the streets just yet.

    I still believe that abolition of civil marriage, with or without civil unions (I would prefer the latter) is the best way to go on this issue, and the one that advocates of “traditional marriage” should have pursued to start with.  Boies and Olsen are in a tight place right at the moment, but one of these days people will see Proposition 8 for the strategic error that it was.

  • The Difference Between Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood

    On a recent edition of Stakelbeck on Terror, he discusses with Tawfik Hamid the difference between the Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.  (That discussion starts at about 13:30 into the video below).

    http://dl2.cbn.com/cbnplayer/cbnPlayer.swf?s=/Archive/News/Stakelbeck_Terror_082112_WS

    Five years ago, I got into an extended email debate with an Indonesian Salafi.  One of the points he tried to make with me was that the Salafi Islam he practised was different from the Sayyid Qutb-inspired version that appeared in places such as al-Qaeda, one which incorporated concepts from Western political ideologies.  That certainly includes the Muslim Brotherhood; Qutb was a leading figure in the Brotherhood in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

    To be honest, I was sceptical.  But now the two “versions” of political Islam are on display for everyone to see.  As was the case with my Sudanese imam friend on the difference between Sunni and Shi’a Islam, my Muslim contacts/debaters were more educational than sources on either side of our political divide, all of which look uninformed at times like this.  The difference between the two has practical significance; which one ends up on top in Egypt (and the Brotherhood has the distinct advantage at this stage) will end up driving events in the Middle East for some time.

    If you want to learn about Islam, start by asking a Muslim, or better more than one, you’ll get more perspectives.

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