Author: D. G. Hart

Missing (one of) the Cats

Published on by D. G. Hart11 Comments

For cats in the Hart home, Monday is the cruelest day of the week. It was a Monday night in the fall of 2008 when we took Skip to the Vet to be “put down.” Then last Monday, en route to the coast of Maine, our dear Isabelle succumbed to the cancer that made her little more than fur and bones (despite her voracious appetite). We brought Isabelle into our Philadelphia home to fill the void left by Skip, who had been an elegant presence for eighteen years. Isabelle saw us through a number of arresting transitions, from losing a job to moving out of our favorite city. (Thankfully, we still have Cordelia, though hers is a strange comfort since she did not find Isabelle to be a welcome housemate.)

Though a pretentious name it is, Isabelle was actually named not for a queen or writer but another cat. Joseph Epstein wrote an essay almost two decades ago, “Livestock,” about his seven-year-old cat, Isabelle. Because he is one of our favorite living writers and because the essay is full of charm and mirth about the virtues of cats, we decided to give our second pet the name of Epstein’s feline.

As a tribute to our Isabelle, here is an excerpt from Epstein’s essay about his Isabelle:

I hope that I have not given the impression that Isabelle is a genius among cats, for it is not so. If cats had IQs, hers, my guess is, would fall somewhere in the middle range; if cats took SATs, we should have to look for a small school somewhere in the Middle West for her where discipline is not emphasized. Isabelle eats flowers — though for some reason not African violets — and cannot be convinced to refrain. We consequently don’t keep flowers in the apartment. Although my wife and I love flowers, we have decided that we love this cat more, and the deprivation of one of life’s several little pleasures is worth it.

I am, then, prepared to allow that Isabelle isn’t brilliant but not that she isn’t dear. She is, as I have mentioned, currently seven years old, yet already — perhaps it is a habit of my own middle age — I begin to think of the shortness of her life, even stretched to its fullest potential. Owing to the companionship of this cat, I have begun to understand friends who, having lost a dog or cat through age or illness, choose not to replace it, saying that they can’t bear to go through it all again.

Solzhenitsyn remarks in one of his novels that people who cannot be kind to animals are unlikely to be kind to human beings. A charming sentiment but far, I suspect, from generally true. (“I wanted you to see why I work with animals,” says a female veterinarian in a novel by Jim Harrison. “I can’t stand people.”) Yet genuine kindness to animals is always impressive. One of the finest stories told about Mohammed has to do with his having to answer the call to prayer while a cat is asleep on the hem of his cloak; with scissors he cuts off the hem, lest he wake the cat, and proceeds on his way. (With My Trousers Rolled, 30)

It's Not Always Sunny

Published on by D. G. Hart31 Comments

What makes Christians gullible? Is it that gullibility a fruit of the Holy Spirit and I am insufficiently sanctified? Many Christians seem to think that criticism is unbecoming of believers. But what Bible are those Christians reading? Take the prophets, who go on, and on, and on, sometimes in inscrutable Hebrew poetry, about the woes of God’s people. And what about Jesus who could be as critical of his disciples as he was of the Pharisees? And then there are all those epistles that warn the early Christians about all sorts of false teachers. To be biblical, apparently, is to be critical. And yet, many Christians seem to want to think the best of others, as if the doctrine of original sin were not true.

The gullibility of Jason and the Callers has been the object of many posts of late, but the recent piece by Owen Strachan on King’s College’s new president, Greg Thornbury, fits neatly the journalistic genre of puff piece. Truth be told, I am no fan of Dr. Thornbury’s hairdo or his sartorial choices — hipster does not connote seriousness. And when it draws attention to itself — in Thornbury’s many glam shots — it draws even more attention to the idea that the one photographed is trying to cultivate an image. And image creation is not exactly a quality we look for in a serious academic and grounded theologian.

What makes Strachan’s piece sound so much like the ending to a Leave It To Beaver episode is the hopefulness he expresses in the face of what has been a rocky ride for a college that went defunct (the one Percy Crawford founded), only to be resurrected by Campus Crusade for Christ, which then changed its name to something resembling a wine varietal — Cru, which then proceeded to hire Dinesh D’Souza, only to have that appointment blow up and lose to King’s the services of Marvin Olasky. This is not an institution upon which donors would necessarily want to bestow lots of gifts (which need to be big ones if the school is going to make it in Manhattan — not Kansas, the other one). And yet, Strachan (who comes close but does not disclose fully his own ties to Thornbury) tries to string together the good things of New York City’s evangelicalism — Keller and Metaxas — along with the significance of institutions via Michael Lindsay and James Davison Hunter, to argue that Thornbury’s appointment could, may, possibly might, result in harnessing evangelicalism’s intellectual renaissance (an awakening that is not only not Great, but not even Pretty Good).

But it may be that the school will negotiate its challenges. It is possible that the school may not only survive but thrive in New York. Thornbury, after all, stands to benefit from the Manhattan evangelical network, loose as it is. The cultural prospects of evangelicalism and conservatism hang in the balance today, yet perhaps this time of tension will produce just the kind of ambition and restless energy that are needed for great projects like the one in question. To study the history of successful movements like the opposing poles of the Reformation or the Enlightenment, for example, is to see that great works rarely begin in periods of equipoise, but times of great uncertainty.

King’s cannot, in any matter, singlehandedly rehabilitate the evangelical mind. That project has already begun, and it proceeds with fits and starts, not least because to be successful, it must be confessional. Christian scholarship is, after all, at once unfettered, taking dominion of all things, and bounded, normed by divine revelation. There is hope of greater things, though. In one of the world’s truly global cities, a small college is calibrating itself for evangelical thought-leadership and cultural engagement.

It may just be that the hipster president, aided by a greater network of persons than this world can claim, will pull it off.

No one is going to refer back in future years to Strachan’s piece and hold him or The American Spectator to this positive spin. That’s the way that journalistic features work. But I (all about me) am a glass-three-quarter-empty guy. It probably has something to do with breast feeding or potty training. But I’d like to think it stems from observing life in a fallen world where the bad guys prosper, life is a struggle, and neither justice nor peace embrace. This doesn’t mean I wish Thornbury to fail or that I think Strachan should not have written about King’s. It is rather a point about how fluffy pieces like this are, with an evangelical unction mixed in for added uplift. In fact, these stories cover up realities that institutions like King’s face — both internal and external. I’ve seen spins like this before at Christian institutions of higher education. They fool trustees, donors, and those on the outside. But folks on the inside generally know a very different reality. Don’t let the hair or lapels distract you.

The Mulligan Christ Founded

Published on by D. G. Hart56 Comments

The lead singer for Jason and the Callers has tried to come clean on Roman Catholicism’s problems. But Jason doesn’t quite grasp how profound the problem is. It is not simply the disparity between the ideal and the real. It is the dilemma that comes for converts who simply place Protestantism in the leads-to-rationalism-and-skepticism box. How could such a communion as Jason envisions in the Roman Catholic church be reformed? Even more, why would it ever need to be and how would you (whether laity, religious, or bishop) know?

. . . I left behind the whole holding-the-church-hostage-to-my-personal-preferences thing when I ceased being a Protestant. I have only one Mother and I don’t get to choose her, and Christ has only one Bride (albeit an often wart-covered one). So rather than searching high and low for a church that has just the right hymns, just the right leadership, and just the right amount of plausible deniability so as to take credit for the Nicene Creed while blaming others for the Inquisition, I’ll just keep on believing in one holy catholic and apostolic church, blemishes and all.

Really? Even when the church tells you that white is black? Is the church Christ founded merely one big mess that needs one big mulligan?

The problem for Jason is that he will still need to look the other way in Roman Catholic circles or he will be a closeted Martin Luther who lacks the chutzpah to take out a nail and hammer post his list of dislikes on the door of the Tacoma cathedral. In this case, Jason may want to consider the case of Rod Dreher:

The new Catholic just doesn’t know who to trust on moral and theological matters. From the outside, theological conservatives weary of confusion and fighting within Mainline Protestant churches see Rome as a bulwark of stability. It is, but it also isn’t. Once you come in, you’ll find the same fighting over the same issues, but it’s harder to identify who’s who, and what’s what. Just because Rome has a Magisterium does not mean that it is recognized at the local level. I heard or read an older Catholic once who said that the good thing about liberal and conservative Catholic arguments prior to the Second Vatican Council is that both sides recognized a common source of authority, a common set of teachings to which they appealed to support their contentions. After Vatican II, that faded away. It does orthodox Catholics no good to base arguments on teachings that liberal Catholics reserve the right to reject as they see fit, and still consider themselves Catholics in good standing.

I managed to stay pretty well informed by reading on my own, so I knew when a priest or Catholic academic was giving me a line. Most Catholics, I found, really didn’t, because they didn’t have the time or the inclination to study these things, and they believed they could trust all priests and academics who did.

Toward the end of my life as a Catholic, I thought about how often I had to drive home from Sunday mass and tell my older son, who was starting to pay attention to the homilies, that what Father said that day in his sermon was not actually what the Church teaches. It occurred to me that I was teaching my child to distrust the Church — the institutional Church, I mean, which in this case means the clergy — before he learned as a Catholic to trust the Church. That’s messed up. I’ve written before that I allowed myself to become an overly political Catholic (re: Church politics and factionalism), but that often happens to engaged orthodox Catholics because you really don’t know who’s a trustworthy guide within the Church to its authentic teaching and spirituality. That factionalism is a bitter fruit of the deep crisis of authority within the Catholic Church in the postwar era.

It was probably good for me, on the whole, to have all vestiges of clericalism stripped from me, though I hate how difficult I find it to fully trust clergy at all (conflict and betrayal within the Orthodox Church in recent years are part of that, I concede, though they have to do with trust on a non-theological level). Still, I think orthodox American Catholics have a particularly difficult struggle on this front, given how a certain kind of liberal priest and fellow traveler wish to use the authority given them by the Church to undermine the authority of the Church.

So does Jason file away his list, never to be examined again, or does he wind up questioning the father that expects holy submission? I’m not sure Descartes epistemological doubts rival that one.

Territorial Old Life Week

Published on by D. G. Hart459 Comments

While Francis is in Brazil and points South American for World Youth Day, the directors of the Old Life Theological Society will be conducting editorial meetings and pursuing other fun on the coast of Maine. I hope to finish Allen Guelzo’s history of the Civil War, and read Mary Gordon’s Final Payments, Francis Oakley’s The Conciliarist Tradition, and William Manchester’s biography of H. L. Mencken. Probably won’t, but you can always dream.

God willing, I should be back on the grid later next week. I am sure Stellman can’t wait.

In the meantime, some considerations for cultural warriors of the family friendly variety, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant.

What Happened to Gender?

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Carl Trueman has already raised questions about feminism but those thoughts returned while reading a variety of reactions to the George Zimmerman trial. You see a lot about race and class, but hear nothing about gender.

What does gender have to do with this? Well, both Martin and Zimmerman received their father’s surnames. That includes President Obama who gave a speech about the verdict on Friday (more below). What would the press and pundits have been saying about the case had Zimmerman been called George Mesa (his mother’s surname)? And what would those folks have said about race and ethnicity in the U.S. if Zimmerman were identified as a Hispanic-American with Afro-Peruvian blood (from his maternal grandfather)? And what about Zimmerman’s membership in the Democratic Party? The country has had a lot of debates for the last five years about illegal immigration or undocumented aliens (with Republicans trying to get out from under their white-only reputation), many of whom come to the U.S. from south of the border. Granted, Hispanic hardly does justice to Mexican-, Cuban-, or Peruvian-Americans, nor does Mexican do justice to the diversity of ethnic backgrounds in Mexico. But in the strange world of white/majority-non-white/minority relations in the U.S., George Zimmerman should qualify as a fellow as much on the minds of those who worry about race, class, and gender/transgender as they do about Sandra Fluke. In which case, the trial has an upside. A Hispanic-American, at a time when many Americans are skittish about immigrants from Central and South America, gained a welcome verdict in the nation’s white-dominated justice system. Obviously, that is no consolation to Trayvon Martin’s family. But since so much of the discussion of the trial and its aftermath has been about race, with the implication of how white Americans and their institutions mistreat non-whites, why doesn’t Zimmerman’s minority status provide some consolation to those sensitive to race and ethnicity?

Similar questions can be raised about President Obama. What if his name were Barack Dunham, and what if Americans perceived him as a white man instead of an African-American? (No one is really going to defend the idea that the slightest amount of African blood in a person makes them black, are they?) And what if the President himself thought more about being reared by a white mother and white grandparents before saying this:

You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.

Instead of the Trayvon Martin case showing how badly America treats blacks, the overwhelming reaction has been how much white America empathizes with blacks.

Does this mean that everything is fine in the U.S. and that we can all go back to work believing that this is a great land where the justice and economic systems work fairly? If you’ve seen The Wire (or read Wendell Berry), you never go to work thinking that. In fact, it is hard not to see a photo of Trayvon Martin and not think of Dukie Weems, or to have watched the series and not understand David Simon’s recent reaction:

In the state of Florida, the season on African-Americans now runs year round. Come one, come all. And bring a handgun. The legislators are fine with this blood on their hands. The governor, too. One man accosted another and when it became a fist fight, one man — and one man only — had a firearm. The rest is racial rationalization and dishonorable commentary.

At the same time, the inequities of the U.S. extend beyond white-black relations. Turning the George Zimmerman case into only a discussion of race and class will miss the larger canvass on which the tragic encounter between Martin and Zimmerman played out. I think I even learned about the complications of all social interactions from David Simon himself.

The Old Normal Is Still Normal

Published on by D. G. Hart20 Comments

Communions like the OPC (and probably the RPCNA) suffer from statistic-envy. We see other denominations that are bigger, congregations larger, and buildings newer (and owned). Turns out that small churches are par for the course among Protestants in the U.S. In a post about how much congregations would have to spend if Congress cut significantly the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also came statistics about the average size of congregations in the United States.

177,000 congregations (59%) have between 7 and 99 worshipers weekly.
105,000 congregations (35%) have between 100 and 499 worshipers weekly.
12,000 congregations (4%) have between 500 and 999 worshipers weekly.
6,000 congregations (2%) have between 1,000 and 1,999 worshipers weekly.
1,210 congregations (.4%) have more than 2,000 worshipers weekly (megachurch).

As for finances, the average congregation’s budget is $55,000.

If SNAP were reduced from $133.5 billion to $36 billion:

asking a 75-member church to absorb $50,000 in increased ministry costs works out to about $666 per person each year, a 44 percent surcharge on the average worshiper’s contribution.

To make matters worse, according to one estimate, the average church budget is $55,000. In other words, saddling the average congregation with the costs of not renewing SNAP would mean almost doubling its entire annual budget. And of course, as Sullivan points out, SNAP is just one program among many that conservatives would like to slash. You don’t need a calculator to figure out that it’s more than the churches could keep up with.

I suspect that giving in some normal congregations is better than others. So maybe it would not be that hard a hit (assuming for the moment that the church in general has a responsibility to provide physical resources for the public in general). But why should Christians have all the good charity?

Do Jason and the Callers Think Much about Wadi al-Kharrar?

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Recent discussion of John Paul II’s beatification resurrected parts of the pope’s career that I had completely forgotten, such as his 2000 trip to the place of Jesus’ baptism (Wadi-al-Kharrar). On that trip the pope said, “May Saint John Baptist protect Islam and all the people of Jordan, and all who partecipated in this celebration, a memorable celebration. I’m very grateful to all of you.” This was a year after John Paul II kissed the Qur’an during a visit to Rome by a delegation of Muslim leaders.

For some Roman Catholics like Robert Spencer, Islam and Christianity are fundamentally at odds and Islam is a threat to the United States. Others believe that John Paul II should never have been as friendly to other religions of the world:

I am an Orthodox Catholic (I do not consider myself ultra-conservative) and I cannot get beyond the incident at Assisi where the statue of Buddha was placed on top of the tabernacle (in the very presence of His Holiness), an act which Arch-Bishop Lefebvre called “diabolical.” Nor can I get the picture out of my mind of JPII kissing the Quran. And what about the joint prayer services with the pagans?

And then, of course, there is the condition of the Church under his watch. Need I say more?

Of all the popes- saints before JPII, would any of these things have happened under their watches? Does it preclude his sainthood? Should it? I don’t know the answers. But these are valid questions that cannot summarily be dismissed as “ultra-conservative” as Mr. Weigel attempts to do.

Then again, the reporters who cover the Vatican provide useful insights into what may drive Vatican policy (though it does not appear to be informed by Peter’s warnings about false teachers). This is from an old story about Benedict XVI’s 2009 visit to the Land many call “holy”:

When Benedict XVI lands in Jordan on May 8, it will be his first visit to an Arab nation and his first to a predominantly Muslim country since Turkey in late November/early December 2006. As it turned out, the Turkey trip became a kiss-and-make-up exercise in the wake of the pope’s famous September 2006 speech in Regensburg, Germany, which inflamed sentiment across the Muslim world because of its incendiary citation of a 14th century Byzantine emperor with some nasty things to say about Muhammad, the founder of Islam. The iconic image from Turkey was Benedict XVI standing inside the Blue Mosque, shoulder-to-shoulder with the Grand Mufti of Istanbul, for a moment of silent prayer in the direction of Mecca.

Because the Turkey trip was hijacked by damage control, Jordan offers Benedict his first real opportunity to lay out his vision of Catholic/Muslim relations while on Islamic turf. That vision goes under the heading of “inter-cultural dialogue,” and it boils down to this: Benedict XVI believes the real clash of civilizations in the world today runs not between Islam and the West, but between belief and unbelief. In that struggle, he believes Christians and Muslims should be natural allies. As a result, he has deemphasized the fine points of theological exchange – how Christians and Muslims each understand atonement, for example, or scripture. Instead, his priority is a grand partnership with Muslims in defense of a robust role for religion in public affairs, as well as shared values such as the family and the sanctity of life. (Among other things, that means joint efforts against abortion and gay marriage.)

The price of admission to that partnership, Benedict believes, is for Islam to denounce violence and to accept the legitimacy of religious freedom. In that sense, he sees himself as a friend of Islam, promoting reform from within a shared space of religious and moral commitment. To date, however, he has not found an argot for making that pitch successfully to the Muslim “street.”

All of this, and you can find a lot more about the Vatican’s relations with Muslims, adds up to a relationship between Roman Catholicism and Islam that is decidedly contested, with popes doing damage control and pursuing inter-religious dialogue in ways that would have made liberal Protestants proud, and some laity incredulous that the Vatican could be so indifferent to the claims of church dogma, with others willing to bless the popes in ways that John Paul II wanted John the Baptist to bless Islam.

But one additional item caught my eye while trying to take the pulse of Vatican-Muslim relations. It was a comment on the proper way to conduct inter-religious dialogue:

I am all for dialogue between Muslims and Christians when it is honest and not based on false pretenses. There doesn’t seem to be any use to dialogue that ignores difficulties and points of disagreement rather than confronting them. . . . One thing that must be recognized is that for many Muslim spokesmen and leaders, dialogue with adherents of other religions is simply a proselytizing mechanism designed to convert the “dialogue” partner to Islam, as the Muslim Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb explained: “The chasm between Islam and Jahiliyyah [the society of unbelievers] is great, and a bridge is not to be built across it so that the people on the two sides may mix with each other, but only so that the people of Jahiliyyah may come over to Islam.”

In line with this, 138 Muslim scholars wrote to Pope Benedict XVI, inviting him to dialogue. The title of the document they sent to him was A Common Word Between Us and You. Reading the entire Qur’anic verse from which the phrase “a common word between us and you” was taken makes the Common Word initiative’s agenda clear: “Say: ‘People of the Book! Come now to a word common between us and you, that we serve none but God, and that we associate not aught with Him, and do not some of us take others as Lords, apart from God.’ And if they turn their backs, say: ‘Bear witness that we are Muslims’” (3:64). Since Muslims consider the Christian confession of the divinity of Christ to be an unacceptable association of a partner with God, this verse is saying that the “common word” that Muslims and the People of the Book should agree on is that Christians should discard one of the central tenets of their faith and essentially become Muslims. Not a promising basis for an honest and mutually respectful dialogue of equals.

Which brings us back to Jason and the Callers. What kind of ecumenical dialogue do they encourage when some think it is really a form of proselytizing? And what kind of conversation do they facilitate when the Protestant paradigm is off limits? Rhetorical questions, perhaps. But given the way they call others to communion, one suspects they can’t be all that pleased with the recent popes’ outreach to Islam. (Or maybe they are.)

Jamie Smith Gives, and Jamie Smith Takes Away

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Erik has already commented that neo-Calvinists could learn from the Vatican, but the affinities between neo-Calvinism and Rome were even more striking in Jamie Smith’s recent post about Lumen Fidei. His remarks suggest that the real gateway drug for Protestant converts to Roman Catholicism is the sort of comprehensive Christianity that fuels every-square-inch transformationalism. Part of what makes neo-Calvinism appealing to evangelical Protestantism is that it offers so much MORE than salvation from sin and the need to evangelize daily. It talks about redeeming the whole world and promotes the value of every legal walk of life.

But just imagine how much more comprehensive Rome looks when it has 1500 more years of history, and an institution that (in addition to opposing the French Revolution, a neo-Calvinist requirement) put the Holy in Holy Roman Empire. If you want a culturally influential Christianity, Dutch or Dutch-American Calvinism looks like a piker compared to Rome.

This may explain why Jamie was so pleased by Francis’ first encyclical:

. . . the Pope rightly argues that the standpoint of Christian faith is not opting for un-reality—to believe the Gospel is not an irrational escape from “the real.” To the contrary, it is an invitation to participate in the One in whom all reality holds together. And this is an incarnational faith: tangible, sticky, concrete, embodied, in contrast to the vague Gnosticism that too often passes itself off as “Christian.”

So if Christians practice an otherworldly faith because Christ has gone somewhere else to prepare a home for his people, or because Paul tells us to set our minds on things above, or Calvin prays that we should not become too deeply attached to earthly and perishable things, these otherworldly saints are simply gnostics or fundamentalists.

And Smith goes on to quote approvingly Francis’ depiction of faith as a common (as opposed to a Spirit-wrought) good. Here’s Francis:

Faith makes us appreciate the architecture of human relationships because it grasps their ultimate foundation and definitive destiny in God, in his love, and thus sheds light on the art of building; as such it becomes a service to the common good. Faith is truly a good for everyone; it is a common good. Its light does not simply brighten the interior of the Church, nor does it serve solely to build an eternal city in the hereafter; it helps us build our societies in such a way that they can journey towards a future of hope.

To which Smith adds:

I can’t imagine a better articulation of the faith that animates our work here at Cardus. The Reformation isn’t over, but the protest that has separated us might not be as significant as the Gospel that unites us. This Protestant is deeply grateful for the witness of Pope Francis to the light of faith for the common good.

I know it is a sign of doctrinalist, logo-centric nit-picking to compare Smith’s words to the confessional standards he subscribes. But how exactly does faith become a common good when you define it the way Heidelberg does? (Can’t you at least show that you know what the Three Forms teach and then try a form of reconciliation?)

Question 21. What is true faith?
Answer: True faith is not only a certain knowledge, whereby I hold for truth all that God has revealed to us in his word, but also an assured confidence, which the Holy Ghost works by the gospel in my heart; that not only to others, but to me also, remission of sin, everlasting righteousness and salvation, are freely given by God, merely of grace, only for the sake of Christ’s merits.

And what comes of the protest that separates Protestants and Roman Catholics when Heidelberg goes on to describe the centrality of faith to the imputation of Christ’s righteousness?

Question 60. How are thou righteous before God?
Answer: Only by a true faith in Jesus Christ; so that, though my conscience accuse me, that I have grossly transgressed all the commandments of God, and kept none of them, and am still inclined to all evil; notwithstanding, God, without any merit of mine, but only of mere grace, grants and imputes to me, the perfect satisfaction, righteousness and holiness of Christ; even so, as if I never had had, nor committed any sin: yea, as if I had fully accomplished all that obedience which Christ has accomplished for me; inasmuch as I embrace such benefit with a believing heart.

I understand and even admire the desire of Christians and NPR listeners to make the world a better place (even if I also think that desire can look fairly naive or self-righteous at times). But if you do grasp the otherworldliness of Christ, Paul, and the Reformers, you do understand that the good of a common life together on planet earth is remarkably inconsequential compared to a separate existence in heaven or hell. Gussying up the goods of western civilization, the humanities, Christendom, or social and political solidarity in talk of “the permanent things” still doesn’t cross the gulf that exists between the life that believers and unbelievers share in this world and the separate worlds they will inhabit in the world to come.

(all about) My Movie Idea

Published on by D. G. Hart6 Comments

While Alan Jacobs is speculating on a script about rival realtors in Waco, Texas, the Baylys have me thinking about a movie about a letter to Congress. Having recently re-watched Broken Flowers (can’t get enough Billy Murray these days) and remembering the fairly vivid shots of a pink envelope winding its way through the USPS’ automated sorting system that open the movie, I wonder if someone could make a similar short about this letter from evangelical scientists to Congress. Here is the opening of the letter:

Dear Speaker Boehner, Senate Majority Leader Reid, and Members of the United States Congress:

As evangelical scientists and academics, we understand climate change is real and action is urgently needed. All of God’s Creation – humans and our environment – is groaning under the weight of our uncontrolled use of fossil fuels, bringing on a warming planet, melting ice, and rising seas. The negative consequences and burdens of a changing climate will fall disproportionately on those whom Jesus called “the least of these”: the poor, vulnerable, and oppressed. Our nation has entrusted you with political power; we plead with you to lead on this issue and enact policies this year that will protect our climate and help us all to be better stewards of Creation.

It goes on for a couple more paragraphs before seven (yes, 7!) pages of signatures.

This movie, after showing the letter’s advance through USPS hands (and machines) would then follow its advance to an assistant’s desk in the Capital Building, his or her disposition of the letter, and then what? Does it go to a staffer? Does it ever make it on Boehner’s desk? Who writes a response? Does anyone? And should the movie include tense scenes of evangelical scientists fervently awaiting a mere acknowledgement of the letter’s contents?

Then again, maybe no one ever sent the letter to Congress, in which case a letter is less a communication calling for action than a political gesture. Who knows? Screenplay writer’s call.

When Churches Build Cities, Where Do the Non-Christians Live?

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Thanks to the Allies, I went to discover what Austin Stone is. It turns out it has a lot less to do with Austin, Texas than with TKNY:

The Austin Stone is a Church for the City. We’re much more than a church to attend, but a community centered on the person and mission of Jesus Christ. We’re actively working to build a great Austin, renewed and redeemed by the gospel.

It could be that Austin Stone inspired Keller and Redeemer NYC, but if I were a betting man, I’d put money on the Yankees influencing the Don’t-Mess-with-Texas-Texans.

Of course, the website reveals nothing all that shocking after two decades of TKNY. But I do have to wonder why Christians who say they want to build cities to be great don’t seem to think about Jews and Muslims and Roman Catholics, not to mention skeptics and jazz musicians, who may also be living in a particular city and also want to promote the town but not on evangelical Protestant grounds.

This is a classic case of theonomy-lite. It sounds inspiring. It may even sound hip, though urbanism is hardly cutting edge these days. But this vision has no awareness of how believers and unbelievers might live together for a common good that is not explicitly Christian.