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  • The Digital Age Underscores the Need for Grace

    As the New York Times observes, in the digital world it’s the end of forgetting, and in the midst of this Jeffrey Rosen draws from the Jewish world:

    In addition to exposing less for the Web to forget, it might be helpful for us to explore new ways of living in a world that is slow to forgive. It’s sobering, now that we live in a world misleadingly called a “global village,” to think about privacy in actual, small villages long ago. In the villages described in the Babylonian Talmud, for example, any kind of gossip or tale-bearing about other people — oral or written, true or false, friendly or mean — was considered a terrible sin because small communities have long memories and every word spoken about other people was thought to ascend to the heavenly cloud. (The digital cloud has made this metaphor literal.) But the Talmudic villages were, in fact, far more humane and forgiving than our brutal global village, where much of the content on the Internet would meet the Talmudic definition of gossip: although the Talmudic sages believed that God reads our thoughts and records them in the book of life, they also believed that God erases the book for those who atone for their sins by asking forgiveness of those they have wronged. In the Talmud, people have an obligation not to remind others of their past misdeeds, on the assumption they may have atoned and grown spiritually from their mistakes. “If a man was a repentant [sinner],” the Talmud says, “one must not say to him, ‘Remember your former deeds.’ ”

    Unlike God, however, the digital cloud rarely wipes our slates clean, and the keepers of the cloud today are sometimes less forgiving than their all-powerful divine predecessor. In an interview with Charlie Rose on PBS, Eric Schmidt, the C.E.O. of Google, said that “the next generation is infinitely more social online” — and less private — “as evidenced by their Facebook pictures,” which “will be around when they’re running for president years from now.” Schmidt added: “As long as the answer is that I chose to make a mess of myself with this picture, then it’s fine. The issue is when somebody else does it.” If people chose to expose themselves for 15 minutes of fame, Schmidt says, “that’s their choice, and they have to live with it.”

    I think it’s fair to say that God will be around long after our digital cloud is gone.  But much of the problem here is that we are trying to force people into a perfect construct, something that human beings are simply not built for.  And that problem is going to get worse as we not only compete with each other for jobs and advancement but also with digital intelligence.

    Christians know but don’t always understand that we are saved by grace, which we define as God’s unmerited favour.  The imperfections screamed out in cyberspace–be they by ourselves or others–underscore “unmerited.”  The reason why Jesus Christ came to give us eternal life by his work and not ours is because we could not meet God’s standard of perfection, and the problems people face by stuff getting out on the Internet only underscores our need for grace from God, who has by his own Son furnished the means to obtain it.

  • The Chattanooga Times-Free Press Endorses Art Rhodes for Congress

    A welcome endorsement in a race (TN-3) where the perception has gone with the big mouths:

    Candidate Art Rhodes, of Cleveland, the CEO of a pension plan with $250 million in assets, also wants to control “runaway spending,” but he has a far better sense of how to grapple with the issue and how it has developed. He served for 10 years as chief of staff for U.S. Rep. Mike Parker, R-Miss., until he left Washington in 1998. He expresses disappointment in both parties, but he at least is honest enough to acknowledge what he calls “the utter failure” of fiscal discipline by George W. Bush and Republicans in Mr. Bush’s second term.

    His breakdown of the current $3.8 trillion federal budget suggests that mandatory spending (mainly on entitlements and debt service) will rise from the current 60 percent of the budget, to 80 percent in 10 years, and 100 percent in 20 years. But given the uncertainty of ordinary investment returns, he does not advocate privatizing Social Security. He has more informed views than any other Republican candidate in the race on everything from financial reform to excessive partisanship to the IRS tax code.

    Mr. Rhodes is clearly conservative, but he articulates a rational reason for every position he takes. He also recognizes the need to find more consensus about what the country needs, rather than the political parties.

    He wisely says that the problem with most people in Congress is that they think it’s “the best job they ever had, so they’ll do anything to keep it.” For himself, he says, “it would be the highest honor, but not the best job I’ve ever had.” His goal would be to do something good to deserve the honor. That’s the sort of sensible approach that makes him the best candidate in the Republican field.

    He is the only candidate with real, live Washington experience.  Although many will consider that a disadvantage, those who do not understand Washington’s ways will ultimately be rolled by them, as we have found out the hard way time and time again.

  • Note to Damian Thompson: Lay Off the Old Album Covers

    He couldn’t resist the dig for the artwork being used for the Pope’s upcoming visit to the UK:

    I swear, the Catholic Church in this country is incapable of designing anything that doesn’t feature Pentecostal flames that look as if they’ve been copied from a 30-year-old album cover. I’m sure the Holy Father will be too polite to wince visibly when he sees those banners – but, seriously, you don’t have to be infallible to work out that the Bishops of England and Wales (and Scotland, too, alas) have no aesthetic judgement whatsoever.

    Those are fighting words for those of us who are fans of the “Jesus Music” era.  If you want to see the original covers and hear the music for yourself, visit The Ancient Star Song or Heavenly Grooves (and, yes, they feature music from both the RCC, the UK or both.)  I’ll admit some are better than others (music and covers,) but perhaps there’s a fan of one or both of these sites in the RCC’s UK bureaucracy, who just happened to think, “That cover would be perfect…”

    Next step would be to download and play some of the music in the street while His Holiness is there, but that’s a stretch…

  • It's Back to the Old Dirt Road

    It’s amazing, but some places are allowing their paved roads to revert to gravel ones:

    Paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue. State money for local roads was cut in many places amid budget shortfalls.

    In Michigan, at least 38 of the 83 counties have converted some asphalt roads to gravel in recent years. Last year, South Dakota turned at least 100 miles of asphalt road surfaces to gravel. Counties in Alabama and Pennsylvania have begun downgrading asphalt roads to cheaper chip-and-seal road, also known as “poor man’s pavement.” Some counties in Ohio are simply letting roads erode to gravel.

    Growing up, my mother would take us to see her parents in central Arkansas.  After her father retired from the railroad (yes, leftists, he was a union man) they moved out to a house on a lake.  When we first started going there, once we left the main highway (which ran towards Hot Springs, where Bill Clinton grew up) we were on gravel roads until we got to the house.  The progress we saw was the progressive extension of the paved road until it reached their house.

    Now we see the reverse taking place.  It’s hard on the windscreen and paint, but perhaps a new generation will get the experience of bouncing down a gravel road, going slowly to avoid kicking up the rocks.  (My mother used to navigate it in her 1958 Cadillac, but the experience just wasn’t the same…)  Don’t forget to roll the windows down for the entire experience: it saves on fuel and CO2 emissions, too.

  • Donald Trump Doesn't Want to be a Part of Flyover Country

    And he’ll sue to stop it, too:

    Donald Trump is going after the county over its operation of Palm Beach International Airport and any expansion of the airport, which is located less than 3 miles west of the Mar-a-Lago Club.

    The suit also names airport director Bruce Pelly.

    The 68-page document, filed Monday, claims jets flying directly over Trump’s private club create undue and unnecessary noise at the historic mansion. It also maintains jet emissions damage the exterior of the former home of Marjorie Merriweather Post.

    Trump, through his attorney James Beasley Jr., is asking the court for a permanent injunction against what he describes as a “public nuisance.”

    He is seeking several remedies, including a ban on flights over or near Mar-a-Lago now and in the future.

    Now how many of you who live near an airport could sue single-handedly and get anywhere?

  • Poor White People and Élite Universities: Beating the Dog in the Water

    This from, of all places, the New York Times, and Ross Douthat:

    Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.

    This was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in the study. For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications…

    This provides statistical confirmation for what alumni of highly selective universities already know. The most underrepresented groups on elite campuses often aren’t racial minorities; they’re working-class whites (and white Christians in particular) from conservative states and regions. Inevitably, the same underrepresentation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: in law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.

    This breeds paranoia, among elite and non-elites alike. Among the white working class, increasingly the most reliable Republican constituency, alienation from the American meritocracy fuels the kind of racially tinged conspiracy theories that Beck and others have exploited — that Barack Obama is a foreign-born Marxist hand-picked by a shadowy liberal cabal, that a Wall Street-Washington axis wants to flood the country with third world immigrants, and so forth.

    It’s no secret that the road out of provincial ignominy runs through select universities.  To bar people from these places, intentionally or otherwise, in a society where people can see how the other half lives as easily as can be done in ours, is to invite resentment and blowback.  IMHO, it’s taken too long for the Evangelical community to figure this out.  But figure it out they have.

    The left can continue to demonise and marginalise these people all they want, but ultimately to hold power they have only two choices.  The first is to cut a deal, and part of that deal would be to reshuffle the admissions process.  (A better deal would be to cut out this “Ivy League or Bust” régime we have in this country, but I digress…)  The second is to mercilessly beat this group down, whether in the court of public opinion or by the long arm of the law (“beat the dog in the water,” as V.I. Lenin used to say.)

    The weakness with the second plan is that lower middle class white people, under-represented in the élite universities, are overrepresented in two places which make the difference at crunch time: law enforcement and the military.  That’s why the left continues to live in fear and disgorge the rhetoric they do to go with it.  (It also explains the fanatical effort to do away with DADT.)

    HT to Live the Trinity.

  • It's Official: We're an Elitist Snob Country Now

    Well, it has been since 2008, but Janet Daley at the Telegraph has a Brit’s “déjà vu all over again” feeling about it:

    What is more startling is the growth in America of precisely the sort of political alignment which we have known for many years in Britain: an electoral alliance of the educated, self-consciously (or self-deceivingly, depending on your point of view) “enlightened” class with the poor and deprived.

    America, in other words, has discovered bourgeois guilt. A country without a hereditary nobility has embraced noblesse oblige. Now, there is nothing inherently strange or perverse about people who lead successful, secure lives feeling a sense of responsibility toward those who are disadvantaged. What is peculiar in American terms is that this sentiment is taking on precisely the pseudo-aristocratic tone of disdain for the aspiring, struggling middle class that is such a familiar part of the British scene.

    Liberal politics is now – over there as much as here – a form of social snobbery. To express concern about mass immigration, or reservations about the Obama healthcare plan, is unacceptable in bien-pensant circles because this is simply not the way educated people are supposed to think. It follows that those who do think (and talk) this way are small-minded bigots, rednecks, oiks, or whatever your local code word is for “not the right sort”.

    If this sticks–and there’s no reason to think it won’t, at least for a while–it’s a sea change in American life.  What’s really amazing about this is how blindly so many substantial segments of the American population–especially Generation Y–accept this and follow along, even if their economic interests are compromised in the bargain.  That’s why Barack Obama could get away with his “Bibles and guns” comment and the like.  Not only is the snobbery absolute, in this age of rapid dissemination of just about everything, it’s blatant, but people just go along with it.

    Evangelicals need to take note of this, and do so in a hurry.  That’s because American Evangelicalism in particular is very populistic in nature, and has relied on a populistic culture to thrive.  If we don’t wake up and rethink our idea, life in this country for Evangelicals will continue to be the “nine yards and a cloud of dust” business it’s been for some time–at best.

    There’s a cloud in every silver lining, though, and Daley notes it carefully:

    What is most depressing about this – apart from the injustice of it – is that the people who have been disenfranchised and disowned are the very ones on whom both countries’ economic recovery depends.

    I’m not sure that our élites–particularly those in government–especially care if we experience real economic recovery, as the upward social mobility that would result is always a threat to those already at the top.  But they may not like the social unrest that results, especially if it’s mixed with a debt-induced national bankruptcy.

  • Take the Celebration to the People

    As many of you know, for me, in one sense, this is it: at the end of August, I will be leaving as Ministries Coordinator of the Church of God Department of Laity Ministries.  Next week is our General Assembly in Orlando, in many ways the place where I will make my parting “social.”

    As this 13 1/2 year span of my life comes to a close, I wanted to recount something I heard some time back and have been thinking about it ever since.  It came from the Rt. Rev. Daniel Vassell (right), Administrative Bishop of the Church of God in Ontario.  Before he went to Canada, he worked for the church’s Youth and Christian Education department, and working in the same building we got to know each other.

    One Christmastime I met him in the lobby, and I think I mentioned something to him about my Anglican activities.  For someone whose roots are Jamaican like Daniel, Anglicanism is a familiar thing.  You even see Anglican traits reflected in the way Pentecostal West Indian churches worship and operate.  I remember one church I preached at in New Jersey where the Grenandan pastor changed the colour of the pulpit stoles.

    Daniel was emphatic at the mention.  “You mark it down,” he said, not wanting me to forget what he was about to say.  Anglican and other liturgical churches were, in some ways, better at taking the “celebration” outside of the four walls of the church.  Pentecostal churches gathered on Sunday, exuberantly worshipping, and, in too many cases, that was it.  Because of the constraints of the liturgy, other churches had to celebrate elsewhere–and if there’s one thing that West Indian churches like to do, it’s celebrate.  But it’s better when the church took the celebration to the community around it and not just kept it to itself.

    In many ways, that encapsulates what is, IMHO, wrong with most of North American Evangelical Christianity these days.  To start with, our churches–especially our Anglo ones–are far and away too performance oriented.  That’s odd, considering we preach that Jesus Christ’s work on the cross is what gets us to heaven, not our own works.  But we’ve come to equate fulfilling the mission of Jesus with what amounts to a business model of performance.

    Beyond that, our obsession with worship has led us to focus our attention and resources on our Sunday service and how it’s done and housed.  That in turn has led both to wrapping our Christian life around our worship and to the expensive edifices that we’ve built to house that worship, edifices that have sapped the financial resources God has given us from directly ministry related activities, to say nothing of the celebration we’re supposed to be having.

    But our life in Christ is to be celebrated, and that celebration needs to come out of the confines of the walls of our churches and into the world around us.  How that takes place depends upon the culture we’re ministering into and the legal status we have, but in a world racked by economic uncertainty the sight and experience of people who still have something to celebrate and do it is a powerful message.

    So, as I prepare to venture out from the confines of the International Offices (my work has been part time, so the venturing in has been likewise) my message is this: it’s time to take the celebration of the life that Jesus Christ has given us out of the confines of our churches and into the community around us.   It’s time to take the celebration to the people.

    ,

  • Is This The Last Act for Civil Marriage?

    Coming from a blog like First Things, it could be:

    Legal recognition of marriage would become a purely civil matter. A couple who wanted to marry would have to get a license and go to a civil magistrate. If they then wanted their union sacramentalized, they would go to the Church. If the Church refused to marry them because they did not meet its criteria for a sacramental wedding—if both parties were of the same sex, for example—the state could do nothing about it, since the Church is a voluntary association protected by the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.

    Fans of this blog know that I have advocated the complete abolition of civil marriage for a long time.  I would urge you to read this and the comments carefully.  He includes a quote from the American Spectator’s Emmett Tyrell calling for the privatisation of marriage.

    I’ve talked about this for a long time, but I’ll reiterate the following:

    1. As long as our ministers are agents of the state in civil marriage, they will be subject to anti-discrimination attacks.  It doesn’t make sense, but that’s the way our law has gone (and it doesn’t make sense either.)  Ending their role as agents of the state isn’t a complete bar for legal attack, but it would put things well down the road.
    2. Doing the “two marriage” (civil and religious) deal, as is done in France, Germany, Russia and many other places, isn’t a complete guarantee that ministers would be free from attack either.  Many jurisdictions prohibit religious agents from sacramentalising marriage before its civil recognition, as Belgian King Leopold and Lillian Baels found out the hard way during World War II.

    The only way to really solve this dilemma is to abolish civil marriage altogether.  Civil unions won’t cut it.  It’s that simple.  If the LGBT community won’t be the progressive group they claim to be on this, we should.

    HT to Sanctus for this.

    ,

  • The Non-Economic Objectives of Trade Unions

    This subject is getting some traction these days, so I’d like to repeat something I posted a long time ago about the non-economic objectives of trade unions.  The consequences of these are, IMHO, the biggest argument against them.

    Trade unions and the labour movement in general have always loomed large for me. Our family business was unionised for most of its incorporated existence, both in Chicago and in Chattanooga. I have sat across the table from both shop stewards and representatives from the local (and a federal mediator at one point) through three contract cycles and a good number of grievances as well, some of which went to arbitration.

    But growing up in a world where the “dictatorship of the proletariat” seemed headed for triumph put special focus on the activities of organised working people. Reading works such as Émile Zola’s Germinal (and later Mao Dun’s Midnight) gave the impression of a militant labour force, prepared to use violence to get their way. Such presentations both inspired fear and to some extent romanticised trade unions.

    The one and only strike against our family business took place before I came back full time, but I was in town to witness it. To see it was a shocking experience; instead of full picket lines and vandalised cars and property, what I saw was lawn chairs, makeshift awnings and barbecue pits, a pattern pretty typical with strikes in our area, at least. They didn’t even stand up with their signs! Such a sight was deceiving to some degree, because inducing the workforce to decertify the union was beyond our grasp, as is the case in many other companies.

    The ostensible purpose of a trade union is to secure higher wages/benefits and better working conditions for their members. To a large extent unions have thrown away the latter through their political activities, something that has cost unions in the long run. But anyone who has dealt with a trade union will tell you that it is very difficult to “buy” one out through higher wages. The reason for this goes to the heart of the “non-economic” rationale of American trade unions. Beyond more money, there are two related reasons why organised American workers stick with trade unions.

    The first is to eliminate “employment at will” from the workplace. In an “employment at will” situation, an employer can terminate an employee without cause. Getting rid of this is an obvious protection for the employees, and the trade union enforces this through the grievance process.

    An important corollary to this is that no “self-respecting” (to use a favourite expression) union will voluntarily concede any form of merit in promotion and compensation in the workplace. This is shocking on its face, but the union’s logic behind this is simple: any form of merit contains subjective judgement of employee performance, and this leads in turn to favouritism. In addition to producing an unhappy workforce (and one vulnerable to being organised,) consistent favouritism and “politics” in promotion and compensation will kill a private company through degraded performance. In government situations, however, favouritism and politics are very much evident in the process, and the government is insulated from the effects of this by its coercive powers of taxation. This is the central reason why public sector unions are the largest constituent of trade unions in the US today: public employees are (or at least feel) more vulnerable to favouritism, and this in turn is a stronger motivation to organisation.

    Unions, left to themselves, will always favour seniority and classification/job description as the method of choice in promotion and compensation. Over time, this turns the union into an advocate for its members with the higher seniority at the expense of those with less. This trend tends to run unions down as it becomes difficult to attract younger workers into the union.

    We would be remiss if we did not mention some of the mitigating factors to this picture. Police and fire fighters, for example, will think long and hard if going strictly on seniority leads to having a partner who will let you down when life and death are on the table. Construction trade unions mitigate this through their worker training programs which seek to add the value of their members to their employers. (Their employment situation tends to be more unstable than other industries due to the cyclic nature of construction.) We simply want to identify the ideal goal of the unions and its rationale, all other things being equal.

    The second goal is related to the first: the union wants to control the workplace, or the “shop floor” as we say in manufacturing. Doing so makes enforcement of the first goal considerably simpler. This is also designed to insulate the workforce from changes induced by the employer, which unions generally assume to the inimical to the interest of the membership. It is generally done through classification/job description and workplace rules.

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