Culture: June 2008 Archives
Pyromaniacs: George Carlin, and us
Dan Phillips on Carlin: "'I sort of gave up on this whole human adventure a long time ago,' he said a couple of years ago. 'Divorced myself from it emotionally. I think the human race has squandered its gift, and I think this country has squandered its promise. I think people in America sold out very cheaply, for sneakers and cheeseburgers. And I don't think it's fixable.'
"Here you see a man who is confronted with the disaster which autonomy has brought on our race. Carlin sees some of the bitter fruits of man's rebellion against God. He longs for redemption. He sees that it will not arise from within us. Yet, like the classic definition of insanity, he has no prescription but more of the same. He was raised Roman Catholic, and probably thought (alas, wrongly) that this exposed him to Christianity, to Christ, to the Gospel. Thus he often expressed contempt for religion. Rejecting the fake, like so many he was inoculated against the real item. Thus apparently Carlin never seriously considered the actual cure whose absence he would later feel so keenly: Jesus Christ, the only hope and redeemer of mankind (John 1:29; 1 Timothy 1:1)."
Do We Really Need a Few Billion Locavores? - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog
Is eating more local food really less costly and better for the environment? (Via Mister Snitch.)
Pyromaniacs: Christian citizenship out loud: another perspective?
Should Christians restrict engagement with the culture to evangelism? Dan Phillips thinks not: "Now, let me say first and clearly that the very best thing a Christian can do for the health of his nation is to grow in godliness, and to disciple others to Christ for all he's worth.... But by this same token, this will also necessarily mean Christian involvement in civil life. Why? Because God isn't segregated. He has something to say about every area of life.... So what is the Christian to do? Is he to clutch those truths to his breast, and let his country go to ruin as he coyly refuses to tell it anything except how to be saved? Is that love for his neighbor?"
Crunchy Con - Rod Dreher - Edwina Froehlich, hero
The founder of La Leche League died Sunday: "Froehlich co-founded La Leche League with a group of neighborhood women in Franklin Park during the late 1950s, teaching other mothers how to nurse their infants at a time when doctors promoted formula and breastfeeding rates were reportedly near 20 percent." Interesting that formula feeding flourished about the same time as urban renewal.
MY URBAN KVETCH: "Know When to Walk Away"-My Last Jewish Week Singles Column
Esther Kustanowitz bids farewell to her column on the single life: "My four years writing this column seem commensurate to an academic degree in relationships, yet somehow I'm ABD [All But Dissertation], and without the coveted 'M.R.S.' degree. Perhaps I need to concentrate on field work, move beyond the theoretical into the actual. This column has been the longest relationship of my life. But I can't marry a column. The transition will be one of the hardest things I've had to do, but I think that it's time."
Crunchy Con - Philistine critic confesses her shame
Rod Dreher remembers sharing a cab with two well-known film critics after a screening: "It was a very violent film of some sort, as I recall, and the thought occurred to me as we rounded Columbus Circle -- I do remember that part vividly -- these people don't have children. They could analyze the film more coolly than I -- who was not a father yet, but who would be in a few months -- in part because they didn't imagine, or didn't seem to imagine, what it would be like to raise kids in a society where lots of people had their moral imaginations informed by eviscerations and the like."
The Audacity of Death - WSJ.com
"According to Barack Obama, Gianna Jessen shouldn't exist." Miss Jessen, 31, was born alive after an attempted saline abortion. Had the abortionist been present when her mother went into labor, she would have been killed. Obama twice voted against recognizing the personhood of babies born alive after attempted abortions. Jessen says of Obama, "I really hope the American people will have their eyes wide open and choose to be discerning. . . . He is extreme, extreme, extreme."
Daniel Allott writes, "And [Obama] promises, 'the first thing I'd do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act,' which would overturn hundreds of federal and state laws limiting abortion, including the federal ban on partial-birth abortion and bans on public funding of abortion."
Carrie: The Current Cinema: The New Yorker
Funny, snarky take on Sex and the City, the movie: "there are four of them--banded together, like hormonal hobbits, and all obsessed with a ring... superannuated fantasy posing as a slice of modern life... their gallops of conspicuous consumption seem oddly joyless... All the film lacks is a subtitle: 'The Lying, the Bitch, and the Wardrobe.'"
Czech President Vaclav Klaus answers "no" to the four fundamental questions of global warming. "But to argue, as it's done by many contemporary environmentalists, that these questions have already been answered with a consensual 'yes' and that there is an unchallenged scientific consensus about this is unjustified. It is also morally and intellectually deceptive."
Crunchy Con - "Real England" and reactionary radicals
The elitism of crunchy conservatism isn't all bad: "For example, elitist tastes in coffee and beer in the US taught the masses that there is a such thing as better coffee and better beer -- and now it's easier to find both." Perhaps the same will be true for better urban design.
