The Episcopal Church recently put out a survey asking Episcopalians for their opinions on the possibility of revising their 1982 hymnal. The results? Young people like hymns!

http://thecuratesdesk.org/2012/05/15/dont-do-it-for-the-kids-of-hymnal-revision-and-young-adults/

 

 

Apparently a recent article in the Journal of Medical Ethics argues that infanticide is no different, morally, from abortion, and that therefore it should be permitted. I’ve only read about it on other sites, and at this point all of their links to the Journal and the article itself are dead. I couldn’t find the article on the Journal’s website, either. But read about it here.

The basics of the argument seem to be that a baby is no more a person than a fetus. The authors call babies “potential” rather than “actual” persons. The article seems to have generated some controversy and also death threats against the authors, who insist they are participating in an academic discussion of ethics and not recommending policy. I think that’s probably fair, and for my part, I’m sorry not to be able to read about their understanding of personhood.

It occurs to me that progressives sometimes seem very retrograde.

Thousands of years ago, unwanted children were exposed after birth, left in garbage dumps to die. Abortions were also accomplished by means of drugs, which are mentioned now and then in ancient sources. Armchair philosophers wonder whether humanity progresses morally as time goes on. We’d like to think that we better ourselves as a species, that our ancestors were more primitive, less enlightened, while we, on the other hand, are “watching the world wake up from history.”

Well, there are some landmark developments to point to. One of them is the beginning of Christianity. The early Christians had enormous respect for life, in a culture in which people were fed to animals as entertainment and infants were abandoned in dumps. Early Christians made a practice of saving and adopting these exposed infants. And one of the earliest Christian “how-to” documents (the Didache at 2.2) states that no Christian shall kill a child, whether already born or by an abortifacient. Yup.

Progressives, as it turns out, despite calling themselves progressive, are thousands of years behind the times.

I am at a loss for words. Read this article.

When the Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghamton, N.Y., left the Episcopal Church over disagreements about what the Bible says about sexuality, the congregation offered to pay for the building in which it worshiped. In return the Episcopal Church sued to seize the building, then sold it for a fraction of the price to someone who turned it into a mosque.

. . .

“We can’t sell to an organization that wants to put us out of business,” said Bishop Jefferts Schori, who added that her job is to ensure that “no competing branch of the Anglican Communion impose on the mission strategy” of the Episcopal Church. Indeed she has no complaint with Muslims, Baptists or barkeepers buying Episcopal properties—only fellow Anglicans.

It’s about taxes, but it is interesting. Hauser’s Law isn’t new, but it’s new to me, and I’m fascinated enough to put something about it on this blog.

Read about Hauser’s Law here, at the Wall Street Journal. Hauser’s Law isn’t a law so much as an observation. Hauser noticed that although U.S. tax policy has changed often and sometimes dramatically over the past several decades, federal tax revenues have never amounted to more than about twenty percent of the GDP. He reasons that higher tax rates slow the growth of GDP and lower tax revenues (and vice-versa), and twenty percent of the GDP seems to be some sort of natural limit to what the federal government can extract.

I’ve heard it observed that a VAT might be slick enough to enable the government to take in more than Hauser’s natural limit, but for now, the U.S. doesn’t have one.

This article (about the President’s recent jobs bill) at the Huffington Post has juxtaposed congressional Republicans’ and Democrats’ views on jobs perfectly! The battle lines, it seems, are drawn as follows:

———————————————————————————————————————-

Boehner says, “Now it’s time for both parties to work together and find common ground on removing government barriers to private-sector job growth.”

(Get the government out of the way.)

———————————————————————————————————————-

House Democratic leaders “accused Republicans of standing in the way of job creation.”

The CEO of a liberal group says,”It’s long past time for Congress to take the steps necessary to get our economy working by helping to create the good paying jobs that Americans depend on to support their families and their communities.”

(The government is the only way; get the Republicans out of the way.)

————————————————————————————————————————-

So, who’s really in the way?

Democrats seem to assign strange motives to all the people who should be creating jobs but aren’t. They call the Republicans in Congress obstructionist, but despite all that obstruction, we have not really been spared the government’s help. Has the help helped? Economists said that jobs would lag behind other economic growth, but eventually even President Obama got impatient. He said the following in an address to the Chamber of Commerce in February of 2011:

“So if I’ve got one message, my message is now is the time to invest in America.  Now is the time to invest in America. Today, American companies have nearly $2 trillion sitting on their balance sheets.  And I know that many of you have told me that you’re waiting for demand to rise before you get off the sidelines and expand, and that with millions of Americans out of work, demand has risen more slowly than any of us would like. We’re in this together, but many of your own economists and salespeople are now forecasting a healthy increase in demand.  So I just want to encourage you to get in the game.”

That set the tone of the debate for the next few months. A lot of ordinary folks made arguments like this: “$2 trillion can hire 40 million people at a salary of $50,000. I say we tell the corporations to start hiring.” Corporations are just sitting on cash! Why can’t we just make them spend it on us?

What do business have to say for themselves? I think you should read, in its entirety, this article by a fantastic professor of law. In this instance, he is writing from the perspective of a liberal academic, though on the whole I’d say Stephen Carter defies categorization. (I think all law professors aspire to that.) In case you don’t feel like reading all of it, I’m copying its highlights below:

The man in the aisle seat is trying to tell me why he refuses to hire anybody. His business is successful, he says, as the 737 cruises smoothly eastward. Demand for his product is up. But he still won’t hire.

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know how much it will cost,” he explains. “How can I hire new workers today, when I don’t know how much they will cost me tomorrow?”

He’s referring not to wages, but to regulation: He has no way of telling what new rules will go into effect when. His business, although it covers several states, operates on low margins. He can’t afford to take the chance of losing what little profit there is to the next round of regulatory changes.

…

‘‘I don’t understand,” he continues, “why Washington won’t just get out of our way and let us hire.”

…

I ask him what, precisely, he thinks is the proper role of government as it relates to business.

“Invisible,” he says. “I know there are things the government has to do. But they need to find a way to do them without people like me having to bump into a new regulation every time we turn a corner.” He reflects for a moment, then finds the analogy he seeks. “Government should act like my assistant, not my boss.”

I’ve heard the business sector express similar concerns over and over again these past months.

The Obama administration and Democrats keep insisting they’re the ones who want us to have jobs. It’s no mystery where the jobs are. The business sector has been very candid. But they’re being ignored. Re-visit the battle lines above. Remember the key question:

Who’s in the way?

The guy we’re trying to encourage to hire says, “I don’t understand why Washington won’t just get out of our way and let us hire.”

I don’t understand, either.

Is this story biased?

I was driving across Pennsylvania (and some other states) yesterday and I heard this story on the radio. The wording is approximate, so we can’t give it a very close analysis at the level of word choice. On the other hand, I’m pretty confident about a few specific phrases and I’m confident about the subjects and predicates/objects of the sentences, so maybe we can do more than I think.

It went sortof like this:

SOUND CLIP OF PROTEST: What do we want? Jobs! When do we want them? Now! (and other unintelligible protest slogans)

REPORTER: People (Some specific union around Pittsburg?) are upset that there are no jobs and that the government seems to be unable to create any.

UNION GUY INTERVIEWED: The problem is the wrong priorities that the government has, all this talk about cutting spending and the deficit, when they should be talking about jobs.

REPORTER: But, President Obama has a plan! It’s put to the Senate today. Obama says this plan is just the thing we need.

REPORTER: However, it is uncertain whether such a bill would pass. Obama says that the bill has to be passed in its entirety for it to be effective, but Republicans are not in favor of it. Obama is traveling to Pittsburg right now to promote the bill.

Is this a biased news story? Or just the facts?

It doesn’t take sides overtly; the reporter doesn’t say, “Thankfully, Obama is going to set all right with this fabulous new jobs bill he’s proposing.” The reporter doesn’t say, “Republicans don’t want you to have jobs and they’re going to try to prevent Obama from helping us.”

What does the reporter say? Let’s talk rhetoric.

1) Who gets a voice in this piece? Whose voice is not heard? Who gets to speak for himself? What points are “illustrated” (here by audio clips), or otherwise highlighted?

2) Does this news story have a protagonist? Does it have more than one? Does it have an antagonist? What is the conflict presented? Block out the narrative if it’s hard to tell.

3) The reporter didn’t sound sarcastic or anything. Why would she? That would be an odd news story to listen to. But would everyone say these words with the same tone of voice? Imagine a political liberal giving you this news story and saying these words. Now, imagine a political conservative saying these words. Does one fit better than the other? Does “But President Obama has a plan!” seem any different in the mouth of a conservative?

I’ve struggled sometimes to articulate my impression that some news sources really do sound biased. Most of the time, it isn’t any more obvious than the bias in the story above. Of course, that’s the most effective kind. Anyone who agrees is pretty likely to hear nothing objectionable. The silences will only seem peculiar to those who disagree and who are paying attention. Rhetorical analysis is subtle, because rhetoric is subtle. The art of persuasion is subtle. And bias is probably usually unintentional.

(So let’s call the whole thing off!)

Read this article. It is a lot like another I linked to a while back, in an entry I titled “I think gender is a zero-sum game“. I don’t have much more to say here than I’ve said before. Bennett argues that the advancement of women has been bad for men. He needs to use some statistics a little more carefully, but his point is not unsubstantiated. I think his conclusion is spot-on.

Here’s some from the end of the piece:

Movies are filled with stories of men who refuse to grow up and refuse to take responsibility in relationships. Men, some obsessed with sex, treat women as toys to be discarded when things get complicated. Through all these different and conflicting signals, our boys must decipher what it means to be a man, and for many of them it is harder to figure out. For boys to become men, they need to be guided through advice, habit, instruction, example and correction. It is true in all ages. . . .We need to respond to this culture that sends confusing signals to young men, a culture that is agnostic about what it wants men to be, with a clear and achievable notion of manhood.

We have left young men and young women without guidance, not just about who they are, but about who they should be. We’ve abandoned them.

It’s a running joke, I guess, that some pockets of the Academy may have run out of things to write about. We start performing exegesis on the exegetes. This is a recent title via the Society of Biblical Literature: The Flesh Was Made Word: A Metahistorical Critique of the Contemporary Quest of the Historical Jesus.  Here’s a description, lifted entirely from the SBL’s online bookstore:

The ‘historical Jesus’ still remains elusive. Who was Jesus? What really happened? How can we know for sure? The latest quest for the truth about him comes at a time marked by radical uncertainty and postmodern scepticism about master narratives, along with a loss of confidence in the traditional methods of historical analysis. In this context, Susan Lochrie Graham approaches the old debates from an entirely new direction. Armed with a ‘metahistorical’ approach adapted from the work of Hayden White, the philosopher of history, she reads the work of four representative historical Jesus writers: John P. Meier, N.T. Wright, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and John Dominic Crossan. The analysis brings to light the deep literary structures of their portraits, showing the differing plots and rhetorical concepts that shape them, and the types of argument that are deployed by each writer. This ground-breaking critical investigation exposes the theological and cultural meanings embedded in all historical Jesus writing, showing how narrative forms function ideologically. It concludes with fresh answers to questions both about the methods we use and about the social implications of the contemporary quest of the historical Jesus, and proposes different directions for future research.

It rewards a careful reading: she’s doing to the Historical Jesus scholars’ books what they do to the Evangelists’ books! And now I’ve done the same to her book. (Also, note that the subjects of her book are still alive and publishing.)

“So do we all get the point and the larger point, there?”

-my professor

One of my earliest entries on this blog was a list of enigmatic file names from my computer. I hadn’t looked in a while. Here are some more. I hope any readers will be encouraged to look through your own files, encounter your past selves, and share your enigmatic document titles here if you want.

REMEMBER.doc

(no idea)

for_later.docx

(never for now.)

replytoreason.docx

(authored by emotion?)

funny_looking.xlsx

(Aw.)