Feb 18 2010
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It’s a bit tricky to use comment fields to give instruction on how to use HTML, since when you do it, it BECOMES HTML.
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Feb 18 2010
Kenneth Starr will have his work cut out for him as president of Baylor University
Kenneth Starr, the former special prosecutor who took on President Clinton over the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky scandals, will be leaving his post as Pepperdine University law school dean this spring to become president of Baylor University in Waco, Texas, the schools announced Monday.
Starr has headed the Malibu law school since 2004. During his West Coast tenure, he also represented the supporters of Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage, during a challenge before the California Supreme Court last year. Starr won the high-profile case, with the state high court upholding the voter initiative’s legality in a May ruling.
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Starr said he hoped to remain active in the practice of law in his new position but that it would be up to the Baylor Board of Regents to decide whether he should take on off-campus issues as he did in defending Proposition 8 while at Pepperdine.
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In a statement posted on Baylor’s website, Board of Regents member Joseph B. Armes said Starr was “a fifth-generation Texan who, throughout his distinguished career in law, the academy and public service, has been an articulate advocate for Christian ideals in the public square.”
Baylor, of course, has had real difficulties internally in the last decade or two (including some failed presidencies), with a divided faculty, a divided administration, ideological combat growing from the increasing secularization of the institution, and the attempts by some to encourage the school to retain its traditional values (it started as a Southern Baptist school) in the face of growing pressures to ape purely secular institutions. it is by no means clear that “peace” is possible at Baylor unless one side or the other clearly wins, assuming that victory is not Pyrrhic. It is not clear to most observers which side will win, though it seems to me that at this point the secularizers have the edge, or a bit more.
To take the job as president of Baylor, Kenneth Starr is leaving his role as leader of the Law School of Pepperdine University. Has his time at Pepperdine, which is experiencing the same pressures as Baylor, though perhaps not quite so extremely, prepared Judge Starr for the task at Baylor? Will he conceive his role as trying to keep Baylor faithful to its historic mission, or will he, Gorbachev-like, preside over a gradual surrender to the pressures of dissolution that will leave Baylor a thoroughly secularized school, with only an honorable mention for its religious origins?
I doubt even he is sure at this point. Some people say being a university president is the hardest job in America. Maybe. I’m pretty sure it helps if you know what you believe, and if you take a position at a school that historically resonates with your beliefs. Some presidents see their role as fundamentally changing an institution. Some see their role as preserving it. Some see their role as growing it, whatever the cost.
That’s what remains to be seen. I wish him Godspeed, in a very difficult task. And I hope he sees the task as one of preservation first (probably with elements of recovery), with growth and change coming in as distant second and third.
Feb 17 2010
Christianity and McLarenism: a review of McLaren’s new book by Kevin DeYoung
Brian McLaren’s latest book, A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith, is two steps forward in terms of clarity and ten steps backward in terms of orthodoxy. A New Kind of Christianity, more than any previous McLaren project, provides a forceful account of what the emergent leader believes and why.
I think McLaren has strayed quite far from anything recognizable as “historic Christianity”… a fact of which McLaren seems quite proud.
Continue reading “McLaren’s “new” ideas?”
Feb 17 2010
UPDATE! See the rebuttal ad at the bottom of the original post.
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The discussion before the ad was run:
And, in case you missed it, the ad:
You decide.
But it seems clear to me that “pro-choice” still doesn’t mean much more than “pro-abortion.”
NOW thinks that CBS shouldn’t have run the ad because “it might make a woman who had an abortion feel bad”.
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UPDATE! It would seem that NOW has made a rebuttal ad to the Focus on the Family ad. Here it is:
Many thanks to commenter Bob for directing my attention to this.
Feb 16 2010
I’ve commented recently on the incredibly peripatetic energizer-grandpa, Jack Bauer, on Fox’s TV show “24.”
Tonight has gotten really ridiculous. After being stabbed and tortured with electrical shock, our later-middle-aged grandpa manages to grab the electric prod with his feet, hold it the chest of his torturer, rendering him unconscious, and then, with bound feet (!) and bound wrists (!) he does an incredible ab-toning move to get his feet above the pipe he’s hanging from, wriggles down the pipe, manages to break it loose, fall to the floor, and, still bound, hop-scotch over to the waking torturer and break his neck.
The show is turning into a caricature of itself. I mean, he’s Jack Bauer, not Batman… or the Shadow.
Maybe he has a secret stash of X-Kryptonite.
Temporary super-powers seems to be the only explanation.
Feb 16 2010
Our Vice President is at it again: Just what kind of person does it take to trash and disparage the war in Iraq at every turn, then claim credit for its success? Apparently for Joe there is no statement too outrageous, too inconsistent or too false. But then truth is truly just a matter of inconvenience when you are a politician in power.
Our President is at it again as well. Apparently there is no campaign promise too big or too small that cannot be broken. But when you believe you are “the one” I suppose promises mean only what you need them to mean at the moment. Am I the only one who remembers the oft-spoken Obama promise of no new taxes for those who make less than $250,00 a year?
Feb 15 2010
3 Seattle bus tunnel guards watch brutal beating
A 15-year-old girl who was badly beaten and robbed in a Seattle bus tunnel as three unarmed security guards looked on told investigators that she thought the men would protect her.
The statements were revealed in court papers filed Wednesday against the teen girl accused of attacking her and the three young men accused of stealing her purse, phone and iPod. The four were all charged with first-degree robbery.
The victim told a King County sheriff’s detective that the group followed her from a nearby department store into the bus tunnel at Westlake Station on Jan. 28, and she deliberately stood next to the three guards.
The guards didn’t intervene, though. They have standing orders to “observe and report,” so they called police but did nothing else as another 15-year-old girl punched and repeatedly kicked the victim in the head.
Get used to it. Think about what it means. Consider your options. No one is likely to help you when you need it most. It’s all up to you. So stay out of situations if you can… and decide what you will do if you cannot. You won’t have time then to think through it.
The USA isn’t quite as bad as Britain… yet, anyway. It’s still legal to defend yourself.
Mostly. If you’re not too effective at it.
Feb 14 2010
That’s It? Tebow Ad Unmasks the Abortion Movement
In the days running up to last weekend’s Super Bowl, the media and blogosphere erupted in a frenzy of debate over an innocuous pro-life ad sponsored by Focus on the Family. The news was that 2007 Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow and his mother Pam would be featured in a “Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life” spot, which, it was assumed, would tell the story of Tim, “the miracle baby” whose mother refused an abortion during a difficult pregnancy. Missionaries in the Philippines, Pam and Bob Tebow refused to choose the doctor-advised abortion option, although Pam had been taking heavy medication following a bout with dysentery.
Without seeing the ad, and with very little information, groups like Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and NOW (National Organization for Women) responded with a fury that awakened mainstream America. Expecting the ad to convey an anti-abortion message, they demanded CBS remove it from airing. A protest letter, penned by the Women’s Media Center, suggested the ad be refused because it was sponsored by Focus on the Family. “By offering one of the most coveted advertising spots of the year to an anti-equality, anti-choice, homophobic organization, CBS is aligning itself with a political stance that will damage its reputation, alienate viewers, and discourage consumers from supporting its shows and advertisers,” the letter said. Jemhu Greene, president of the group, said, “An ad that uses sports to divide rather than to unite has no place in the biggest national sports event of the year — an event designed to bring Americans together.”
The characters of both Tim and Pam were maligned and subjected to malicious gossip. A charge by feminist Gloria Allred that Pam Tebow was a liar grew wings of its own as it spread throughout talk radio and the Internet. Allred based her charge on the fact that abortion was illegal in the strongly Catholic nation of the Philippines. An ESPN columnist warned Tim not to be manipulated by the far right. “Tebow is not an innocent, and he does not appear to be deluded. He may agree with everything Focus on the Family represents. But he’s still a young man, still breathing the fumes of a home-schooled background with two parents who believe in the inerrancy of every single word of the Bible. Now, they could be right and I could be wrong on the Bible thing, although it’s going to be hard to convince me the whole belly-of-the-whale thing wasn’t allegory, but he could be setting himself up to be associated with causes and beliefs that may not be his own. All the qualities that make him admirable, earnestness, devotion, a willingness to expound on his beliefs, make him vulnerable.”
Both CBS and Focus on the Family assured audiences that the ad had been approved and was suitable for broadcast. Yet the nation was drawn into this debate, as the life issue made its way onto business and sports pages, talk radio, and Facebook pages. Over 250,000 “fans” joined one Facebook group supporting the commercial. Surveys found support for CBS to run the commercial outnumbering its opposition.
Much more at the link above. And it reveals the Left for what it is… essentially totalitarian and against free speech, interested in muzzling anyone who disagrees, and believing that they should be able to suppress a message just because of its source…. or its content.
Feb 13 2010
The Lefty academics are at it again, this time Making Up Evangelical History.
Randall Balmer is Professor of American Religious History at Barnard College, Columbia University. He has written several books which explore the development of political activism by people of faith, specifically conservative evangelicals.
After describing Balmer’s attempt to revise the history of the “Religious Right” to exclude concern about abortion, marriage and homosexuality, and demolishing Balmer’s claim that the “Religious Right’s” founding was really about racism and money, the author of this review, Paul Edwards at Townhall, says this:
Dr. Balmer is firmly in the camp of those who see the purpose of the Gospel as primarily about reforming the ills of society through social action. He’s part of the new “Religious Left,” a category of evangelicals he denied exists during a recent radio interview with me. While his bias is implicit in his conclusions, it’s also explicitly stated. Not until you get to the end of Balmer’s 84-page revisionism does he show his hand: “For too many years I offered an exasperated defense, arguing that the Bible I read enjoins me to act with justice and points me toward the left of the political spectrum.””The Making of Evangelicalism” is a distortion of facts in support of biased characterizations of conservative evangelicals. In addition to the absurd notion that a defense of the sanctity of life was not the precipitating cause of the formation of the Religious Right, Balmer asserts that conservative Christians opposed women’s rights, supported torture, care more about abortion than divorce, support the destruction of the environment, and favor the affluent more than poor, without once offering a shred of objective balance from those he accuses. This sounds more like Keith Olbermann than a respected historian.
What kind of historian produces a history that presents facts in evidence supporting only half the history? Balmer has not written a history of the making of evangelicalism. The reality is Balmer is “making up” evangelicalism by reading into history a conclusion influenced by his own progressive bias against conservative evangelical political engagement. He has written history as he would like it to have been, not as it was.
Sadly, I suspect that this book will be getting some play among the Christian Left at Christian universities, who are only too happy to criticize the “fundamentalism” they fear more than skepticism, agnosticism, and the social gospel.
Trying to claim that the Religious Right isn’t deeply concerned about divorce is risible on its face, but I do have to say this: it is proper to “care more about abortion than divorce,” for a very simple reason.
No one ever died from being divorced.
Feb 12 2010
“House Divided” Speech by Abraham Lincoln
On June 16, 1858, more than 1,000 Republican delegates met in the Springfield, Illinois, statehouse for the Republican State Convention. At 5 p.m. they chose Abraham Lincoln as their candidate for the U.S. Senate, running against Democrat Stephen A. Douglas. At 8 p.m. Lincoln delivered this address to his Republican colleagues in the Hall of Representatives. The title comes from a sentence in the speech’s introduction, “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” which paraphrases a statement by Jesus in the New Testament.
Even Lincoln’s friends believed the speech was too radical for the occasion. His law partner, William H. Herndon, thought that Lincoln was morally courageous but politically incorrect. Herndon said Lincoln told him he was looking for a universally known figure of speech that would rouse people to the peril of the times.
Click the link above to read Lincoln’s world-changing speech (Harry Jaffa’s phrase).
