Posts Tagged ‘evangelical Christianity’
These Sunday Links Are Rated to Temperatures of -30 Below
* Baby, it’s cold outside. Behold the power of this fully operational polar vortex.
* Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For. #3 and #4 seem to imply an unstated ecological agenda that is really the zeroeth reform, the precondition for all the others.
* “We thought we were doing God’s work” — chasing down student debtors.
* Towards an open-ended commitment to our grad students.
* “The “Teachgreat.org” initiative would limit teacher contracts to no more than three years. It also requires “teachers to be dismissed, retained, demoted, promoted, and paid primarily using quantifiable student performance data as part of the evaluation system,” according to the summary on the group’s website.
* When Modernism Met Science Fiction: Three New Wave Classics.
* In the midst of a truly terrible piece calling for every bad higher ed reform ever proposed, Instapundit makes one suggestion we can all get behind: adjunct administration.
* Solve Hollywood sexism the Geena Davis way.
Step 2: When describing a crowd scene, write in the script, “A crowd gathers, which is half female.” That may seem weird, but I promise you, somehow or other on the set that day the crowd will turn out to be 17 percent female otherwise. Maybe first ADs think women don’t gather, I don’t know.
* American exceptionalism: The US has been voted as the most significant threat to world peace in a survey across 68 different countries.
* Is Frozen letting young girls in on the secret that men are scum too early?
* Buzzkill! There’s not enough legal weed in Colorado.
* Daily Caller BANNED from MLA. Literal wailing about communofascism at the link.
In addition to The Daily Caller, all audio-taping and videotaping will also be outlawed at the 2013 MLA convention. The completely Orwellian-sounding Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession further demands that no one wear any scented products of any kind.
And I said nothing, because I did not wear perfume!
* Testimony of Langston Hughes before the McCarthy Committee.
* A local politician heroically overrode the concerns of his constituents to advance the cause of global capitalism, and the New York Times is ON IT.
* Brooks’ rumination on his stoner days is kind of funny. It’s certainly elitist. But it is also an example of the two Americas we’ve fomented through legislative, cultural, and organizational boundaries that disrupt every single path for opportunity available for those not born to wealth and privilege.
* “Why Obamacare isn’t implementing beheading.”
* Thank you for your letter inviting me to join the committee of the Arts and Sciences for Eisenhower. I must decline, for secret reasons.
* Finally, Yale law professors reveal exactly which ethnicities are innately superior. A bit churlish to give themselves two of the top slots, but I guess the completely made-up facts speak for themselves.
* FREEDOM! U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson plans to file a lawsuit on Monday challenging a federal rule that allows members of Congress and their staffs to continue to receive health benefits similar to other federal employees.
* Banished for Questioning the Gospel of Guns.
* Good news, everyone! You’ll work until you’re dead.
* The bad news is you’re going to hell. The good news is the decision was made before you were born!
* Heaven on Earth: A History of American Utopias.
* Like a piece of equipment, the black athlete is used. The old cliché ‘You give us your athletic ability, we give you a free education’ is a bare-faced lie, concocted by the white sports establishment to hoodwink athletes, white as well as black. First of all, there is no such thing as a ‘free’ ride. A black athlete pays dearly with his blood, sweat, tears, and ultimately with some portion of his manhood, for the questionable right to represent his school on the athletic field. Second the white athletic establishments on the various college campuses frequently fail to live up to even the most rudimentary responsibilities implied in their half of the agreement.
* First dogs had magnetic poop powers; now foxes are magnetic too.
Rating the Superhunks
Republican presidential primary edition. Ezra Klein thinks Chris Christie is the only real threat to Obama’s reelection, but it seems to me that Romney is the real powerhouse—if the evangelicals can decide that Mormons are all right. I think Glenn Beck has done a lot to move this particular ball forward.
Also, it’s really hard to take seriously any ranking that doesn’t recognize Sarah Palin as the out-of-the-gate frontrunner.
Cultural Melange
Cultural melange.
* David Gill reviews Christopher Miller’s fictionalized biography of Philip K. Dick, A Cardboard Universe: A Guide to the World of Phoebus K. Dank, for Boing Boing.
* Judy Han’s dissertation on Korean-American Christian missionaries and U.S. imperialism is available in comic form. (Via @barbarahui.)
* A nine-word story that will take one thousand years to read. Kottke says this problem is just crying out for good old-fashioned American know-how.
* The five people still watching Heroes will be devastated when they find out Bryan Fuller’s left again.
* NPR remembers Harvey Kurtzman and the heyday of Mad Magazine.
* Trending upward today: references to Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome.”
Finished with Politics
Is the Christian right finished as a political entity? Or, more to the point, are principled Christians finished with politics?
It’s not the end of Christian America, but this period could mark a change in the way conservative Christians understand their relationship with the state, and in particular put an end to the toxic alliance between the Christian right and the Republican party.
Sweet Zombie Jesus
Inside Higher Ed has an interview with Kim Paffenroth, author of Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth.
Q: In the New Testament, Jesus dies, then comes back to life. His followers gather to eat his flesh and drink his blood. I am probably going to hell for this, but …. Is Christianity a zombie religion?
A: I think zombie movies want to portray the state of zombification as a monstrous perversion of the idea of Christian resurrection. Christians believe in a resurrection to a new, perfect state where there will be no pain or disease or violence. Zombies, on the other hand, are risen, but exist in a state where only the basest, most destructive human drive is left — the insatiable urge to consume, both as voracious gluttons of their fellow humans, and as mindless shoppers after petty, useless, meaningless objects. It’s both a profoundly cynical look at human nature, and a sobering indictment of modern, American consumer culture.
Q: The human beings in Romero’s world are living through an experience of “hell on earth.” as your subtitle says. There are nods towards some possible naturalistic explanation for the dead within the films (that a virus or “space radiation” somehow brought corpses back to life) but the cause is never very useful or important to any of the characters. And some characters do think mankind is finally being punished. Is the apocalyptic dimension just more or less inevitable in this kind of disaster, or is it deliberate? To what degree is Romero’s social satire consciously influenced by Christian themes? Or are those themes just inevitably built into the scenario and imagery?
A: I think “apocalyptic” has just come to mean “end of civilization,” so of course, any movie or book with that as its premise is, by definition, “apocalyptic.” And even if we throw in the interpretation “God’s mad at us — that big, mean God!” I still don’t think that’s very close to real, biblical apocalyptic.
Romero’s view is a lot closer to biblical apocalyptic or prophetic literature, for he seems to make it clear, over and over, that humanity deserves this horror, and the humans in the films go to great lengths to make the situation even worse than it is already — by their cruelty, greed, racism, and selfishness. Whether this is conscious or accidental, I really can’t address with certainty: I only note that his prophetic vision is compatible with a Christian worldview, not that it stems from that.
Thanks to Allen for the link.
Wednesday, Wednesday
Obviously posting took a backseat to real-life nonsense today. But I did look at the Internets. Here’s what I looked at.
* The House Next Door and SF Signal try to figure out whether this season of Heroes is back on track.
* Gang of 100? Via Lenin’s Tomb, Columbia president Lee Bollinger receives a “statement of concern” from over 100 faculty members partly in response to his poor behavior during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit.
* Nicholas Guyatt reviews Chris Hedges’s American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America for London Review of Books. I linked to Hedges a bit on the old blog earlier in the year, when this book was getting a lot of hype—I’m curious why this review comes so late. I’m also surprised to see Guyatt take such a skeptical attitude towards Hedges’s thesis. I haven’t read American Fascists, but my impression has been that the book is about the (very real) dominionist movement within American evangelicism, not an assertion that all evangelicals are dominionists. And what to make of this:
It would be a mistake to imagine that the religious right has controlled American politics for the past quarter-century. Despite the present spate of books decrying a fundamentalist takeover of the Republican Party, there has been plenty for evangelicals to complain about even since the triumphs of Bush and Karl Rove. As Thomas Frank argued in 2004 in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, the striking thing about the Republican alliance with evangelicals has been the thinness of their legislative achievements: abortion is still legal, campaigners for gay rights have made real strides and the wall between church and state remains largely intact in American classrooms. Frank suggested that legislators had pulled off a confidence trick in their courting of evangelicals.
The truth is precisely this: the religious right has controlled American politics for the past quarter-century without actually getting any of the things they want. What happens when they finally realize they’ve been hoodwinked? Hedges has this right; the business wing of the Republican Party is locked into an alliance with powerful and dangerous forces it will not necessarily be able to control forever.
* NYU students would trade their right to vote for an iPod. Can you blame them? In a country so completely gerrymandered on both a macro (Electoral College) and micro (Congressional district) scale, voting is more or less a fraud across the board. The vote of someone living in New York City isn’t even worth an iPod; the vote of someone in Florida or Ohio, maybe, but only just.
* Train passengers face routine airline-style bag checks and body searches as part of a new counter-terror crackdown announced by Gordon Brown. Next up, strip searches. Freedom isn’t free.