by I confess. I couldn’t stop myself. This morning I read the entire GQ interview with Rielle Hunter (of John Edwards infamy). It is depressing on several levels. One exchange was particularly noteworthy:
Read the full postMonthly Archive for March, 2010
Page 3 of 4
by I received a thoughtful challenge to the suggestion in my post below (“Glen Beck’s and Jim Wallis’s Dueling Boycotts”) that the church should be concerned with justice issues. It read as follows:
Read the full post“I believe Christ commands us to love [the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner] in tangible ways, giving sacrificially of our own resources to those who are in need. I also believe we should hold those in the body of Christ accountable to those who are in need, so I have no problem with pushing those in the Church to do justice in their own lives.”
by Steve Smith’s thoughtful post on descriptions of the United States as a “Christian” or “Judeo-Christian” nation has important implications for questions about the place of religion in American law. I would like to note the significance of this issue to an emerging field of American legal scholarship, which some have termed “Religious Legal Theory” (“RLT”).
Read the full postCNN reports today that evangelical progressive Jim Wallis is calling on Christians to boycott Glenn Beck’s Fox News television show in response to Glenn Beck’s call for Christians to boycott churches that preach economic and social justice. I suspect that neither social justice churches nor Glenn Beck will take much of a ratings hit—there is probably not much overlap in their fan bases.
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by Rob Vischer made the very good point, in response to my previous blog post, that the education debate is too easily reduced to slogans, and that the situation “on the ground” is more complex. He doubts whether national educational directives make much sense. As a former high school teacher I have a lot of sympathy with his position. From the worm’s eye the view is very different indeed. But since our public schools are now thoroughly addicted to federal money, that money will invariably and even necessarily come with strings. Just this week the Department of Education rolled out a proposed new set of strings – a veritable web of strings – in the name of proposed grade-by-grade common standards.
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by Yesterday the Ninth Circuit, in a 2-1 decision, backed away from its controversial position of a few years ago and ruled that the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance do not violate the Establishment Clause. The majority opinion by Judge Carlos Bea is lengthy and careful– and sensible, I think, given the law that it had to work with. It doesn’t pretend that “under God” isn’t religious or has been drained of its religious content; rather, the opinion emphasizes that the dominant purpose of the Pledge is patriotic, and that is what should matter. The dissenting opinion by (surprise!) Judge Stephen Reinhardt is even longer, also very thorough, utterly self-assured, and characteristically indignant: the majority is just caving in to political pressure, Reinhardt says, and upholding an expression that is clearly unconstitutional.
Read the full postDoes our society’s emphasis on tolerance and inclusiveness actually serve to weaken religious commitment among young adults? Brad Wilcox has a short review of sociologist Christian Smith’s latest volume in his (hopefully) lifelong tracking of a generation’s religious journey. Now at the ages of 18 to 23, the cohort is even more disconnected from religion than previous generations (for whom 18 to 23 is the nadir of religious involvement).
Read the full postMany who read this blog know Bill Stuntz, law professor at Harvard, previously at Virginia. He blogs with David Skeel at “Less than the Least” http://www.law.upenn.edu/blogs/dskeel/, where he has been quite candid about dealing with pain and cancer.
Read the full postAlthough the health care debate continues to suck air from public discussion of almost every other domestic policy initiative, a couple of big education stories did hit the headlines last week.
On March 2 President Obama roiled the American educational establishment when he appeared to laud Rhodes Island school authorities for firing every teacher at Central Falls High School (effective for the 2010-11 school year) after the union rejected a modest set of “turnaround” improvements. These included lengthening the school day by 25 minutes, tutoring students before and after school on a rotating schedule, and – as a former teacher I can’t help wonder if this one was the deal-killer – eating lunch with students once a week…
“This is a Christian nation.” Assertions like this one, referring not to any officially designated faith but to something like the nation’s ethos or political culture or theological presuppositions, were common in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, similar claims were made (and they still are), but the “Christian” was often changed to “Judeo-Christian.” Many find all such assertions implausible or objectionable, of course. But for the sort of view that is being advanced, is “Judeo-Christian” an improvement over “Christian”?
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