Anthony, roll over… roll over!

Sit! Stay!…

Good boy.

Now, wait in this line for two hours.

It’s Black Friday and I’m feeling like a dog on a corporate leash. Keep in mind, I am here blogging and sipping on coffee, and watching HGTV, but I feel the call of the pied piper playing his tune of limited-time-only uberdeals, and it makes me feel manipulated, and a little mad. I’m mad at the dominating system of consumerism that attenuates our humanity and overwhelms the holiday season, and perhaps attenuates our humanity by overwhelming the holiday season. I’m also mad that I am so vulnerable to such obvious appeals and manipulations.

So, will I go out and buy?… Maybe. But, if I do, I’m going to pull back on the leash a little by going on my time.

Of course a big part of the debate regarding welfare is about the proper role of government in alleviating poverty, and honestly I am not sure how to respond to this matter except to say that in the Old Testament God did establish political structures to prevent people from going into poverty, and I am talking radical structures that completely trespass upon the sacrosanct principles of capitalism. In saying this I realize I am getting into hermeneutics, which is a relatively complex matter. Nonetheless, given what I know of human nature, and our capacity to be self seeking and acquisitive, I think Christians should factor in God’s willingness to curtail and at times undermine natural economic dynamics through the use of political structures.

While intending to ease the plight of the underclass, liberal policies usually end up doing quite the opposite, breeding dependency (often multi-generational), destroying initiative, creating an entitlement mentality, harming the family by rendering fathers economically unnecessary, and rendering children the means of attaining bigger handouts, etc.

So, I have to admit that I do see some truth in the above comment, and yet the first thing that came to mind when I first read it is that lack of opportunity also kills initiative. Along with that, it struck me that without some of the opportunities that welfare provides many people will be strongly tempted to resentment, bitterness and despair, which likely puts children at risk no less than the temptation to use them for bigger handouts.

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When it comes to the television of yesteryear, I don’t imagine that most moderately sophisticated viewers think that such shows are an accurate expression of the actual practices of the cultures portrayed. Instead, it is understood that such shows express the ideals of that culture, not the reality of what actually happened in that culture. This being the case, it is instructive that one can readily see a shift of ideals in the shows we currently have. There is no longer a disparity between the sexual ideals and the actual sexual practices of a culture. There is instead a shift in ideals so as to match the practices, which is functionally to have no ideals, because an ideal is a vision to strive for. If an ideal is changed to reflect what actually is, there is no striving, there is just an affirmation of the status quo.

It seems to me that the Sexual Revolution wanted to deconstruct traditional sexual norms so as to alleviate the tension that existed between those norms and the impulses of sexual desire. By deconstructing such norms there was no longer any standard above, nothing to call us beyond our desires as is. This, of course, legitimizes the unfettered expression of desire, with the only restraint being consensuality.

All the arguments I’ve read demanding specific causal relationships between the Sexual Revolution and the various symptoms we are experiencing in our culture are frustrating, and perhaps naive. Reality is very complex, particularly social reality, where various systems function so as to create a whole that is more than just the sum of its parts. So, it is not easy, and perhaps not possible, to identify such strict cause and effect relationships when it comes to the aftermath of social revolutions. All you can do is point at the whole, where there clearly has been a shift in geist, and with it new social realities that seem to be symptomatic of some kind of illness. Of course, I say this as one who believes there is a standard of genuine humanity and related to that, an ideal for sexual conduct.

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The following will take you to the post and comments I was responding to:

The Right to Solipsism

The blog as a whole…

Mere Comments

The magazine it is affiliated with

Touchstone Magazine

Celebrant: We pray for Barak our president, Arnold our governor, Ashley our mayor, and for all who govern and hold authority in the nations of the world
Congregation : That there may be justice and peace on the earth

In this particular prayer a liberal president and a conservative governor and mayor are equally upheld, and so it forces Christians to pray across party lines. To generalize, it puts the name of potential political adversaries on the lips of believers to ask that God would not curse them, nor judge them, but uphold them, and regardless of their political persuasion, guide them by wisdom.

I would love it if all who called themselves followers of Christ would demonstrate the spirit of this prayer in their lives. I would love it if the spirit of this prayer was so characteristic of Christians that the world, and particularly the media, couldn’t figure out where to place them on the political spectrum. This certainly is one way the Church could demonstrate that it lives, moves, and has its being beyond the broken options of this world.

Somewhere in the New Testament Christians are referred to as a peculiar people. The idea behind this designation is that Christians are to be genuinely engaged in the world, without fitting into the pattern or patterns of this world. Christians are to be completely active in societies without becoming rooted in the ideologies that profoundly constitute the people of those societies. In short, to be peculiar is to not fit, and to not fit is to be so caught up in the Kingdom that no worldly category can contain you.

To sum up what I am saying, I want to see the liturgy spill across the walls of the Church and out into the world.

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Below I give a small excerpt from one of his sermons titled “The Gospel, The Church, and the World,” which was based on a passage from 1 Peter 2:4-12, and in which one of the key ideas is that believers are called to live as resident aliens. Just prior to this excerpt Keller had been talking about the reputation of the Early Church in Ancient Roman society.

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No one had ever seen a group of people that held to all those practices. They were aliens. They weren’t like the Greeks. They weren’t like the Romans. They weren’t like the Jews. They were aliens. Well, you say, “That was then.” Well, okay, now think about this for a second. What if there was a group of people now that were following those same set of biblical values?… Rejecting blood thirsty sports (militarism), empowering women, reveling in the combination of races and classes, radically serving the poor. What kind of group is that?… Sounds liberal. Forbidding abortion, forbidding sex outside of marriage, forbidding same sex practices, insisting that Jesus is the only way of salvation, and what’s that sound like?… It sounds like a horribly conservative group. Guess what, we’re still aliens. We do not fit into Western  relativistic individualism; we don’t fit into traditional hierarchical legalism, we don’t fit. We don’t fit conservative, we don’t fit liberal. We’ve always been aliens.

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Redeemer Presbyterian

The Sermon Above

Free Sermons

Putting the Golden Mean aside, the other day I was listening to NPR and I heard a report by their ombudsmen, Alicia C. Shepherd, about bias and the media. In this report, Ms. Shepherd mentioned that “between June 9 and Oct. 19, 2008 [her] office received 282 emails specifically accusing NPR of favoring Obama and 252 emails accusing NPR of favoring McCain.” She further said she had received hundreds of more email that charged the network with being too conservative or too liberal. As the report continued, Ms. Shepherd went on to give further information and statistics regarding NPR’s coverage during this election season, the summation of which was that both candidates received roughly equal coverage, and if anything, McCain received slightly more.

Beyond the amount of coverage, Ms. Shepherd also acknowledged that a complete picture regarding media bias must address “how a broadcast network covers political candidates.” Elaborating on this, she gave a few examples of how different types of coverage can leave different types of impressions upon the listeners, even when the coverage is analytical and not promotional in nature.

Perhaps the most illuminating factor that Ms. Shepherd addressed regarding media bias was the related issue of listener bias, which is to say that people hear through their values and convictions, which influences their impressions of how content was presented. Not wanting to place the impression of bias solely upon the listeners, however, Ms. Shepherd referred to a report conducted by Timothy Groseclose, a political science professor, which stated that 18 of the 20 major media outlets were just left of center in relation to the average American voter.

In the end, what I found interesting regarding Ms. Shepherd’s report was the location of bias. Is it something in the media or something in the listener? My own personal conviction, one that I think was implied by Ms. Shepherd’s report, is that though journalists are professionals who are trained to approach news coverage objectively, no one is ever completely free from values and viewpoints when it comes to handling and presenting information.

So, do you think complete objectivity is possible? Given human nature, what should we reasonably expect from journalists and the news media? How sensitive and alert are you to your own biases? How do you strive to be as truthful or objective as possible? Are there news sources you recommend, and do you recommend them because they are fairly objective or might they just align with your convictions?