Culture: January 2019 Archives
Scott Aniol examines the vocabulary and assumptions of the social justice movement, regarding intersectionality, oppression, privileges, structural racism. He writes:
"The tragic result of allowing all of these categories to be defined, not by Scripture, but by secular ideology, is that it has led to a redefining of biblical justice to fit into the secular idea of 'social justice' as framed by these secular categories.
"'Justice,' for many evangelical social justice advocates, has become characterized by tearing down traditional structures deemed to be evidence of 'systemic oppression' and by marginalized intersectional groups 'standing up to power,' that is resisting and even fighting against the influence, control, and values of more powerful majority intersectional groups. Those more powerful groups, then, are expected to withdraw their influence, repenting of and making reparations for their group's collective oppression of minority groups, and give the marginalized groups a more prominent voice, which usually takes the form of "affirmative action" hirings and appointments to leadership positions based on the color of one's skin rather than competency, character, and skill.
"On the contrary, biblical justice is simply choosing to do what is right. If there is something that is wrong, justice makes it right. Justice biblically does not entail blaming the sins of individuals on 'systemic' problems, unless of course you consider original sin a systemic problem, which I suppose it is for the entire human race (Eph 2:2-3). In fact, Scripture is very clear that true justice will mean favoring neither the majority, powerful, or privileged group nor the less privileged group (Exodus 23:2-3). Justice is simply doing right without any notion of intersectionality.
"What creates injustice in the world is sin, plain and simple, and sin is a problem for every individual of every group of individuals. The only solution to injustice in the world is belief in the gospel of Jesus Christ."
Millionaire benefactor pulls support over Lady Cilento name change
"It is understood the family provided about $330,000 between 2016 and 2017 to the Starlight Children's Foundation for the room and would continue to support the national foundation, but decline future opportunities at the Queensland hospital.
"But the St Bakers have told the hospital's board they have lost any future support from them following the name change decision.
"The couple said they were horrified by the decision to scrub the name of the pioneering doctor from the hospital, despite Nine revealing a small number of government IP addresses were used to make thousands of 'yes' votes in the poll.
"'We told the board they should never contact us again,' Mrs St Baker said."
Dems Seek To Ban Christianity Using So-Called Anti-Discrimination Laws
Bills filed in the Texas legislature would require conformity with the fantasies of the Left under threat of fines and imprisonment. As we've seen in Oklahoma's major cities, you can't assume that Republican elected officials will support religious liberty.
"'Ban the Bible' doesn't have to mean confiscating physical Bibles. LGBT activists aren't that obvious with their intentions (yet). But it does mean something even worse: stripping Texans of their right to practice biblical teachings in their day to day lives.
"These bills would create new government power and protections that ban the free expression of biblically grounded beliefs, especially teaching on marriage and sexuality. Numerous bills seek to force people of faith to conform to others' personal and political activities, while setting aside their own sincerely held religious beliefs. Those who do not comply will face fines, possible jail time, or other criminal charges."
A Kentucky Bishop, the Covington Kids, and the Ideology of Antichrist
John Zmirak writes about the response of Catholic bishops to the New York full-term abortion laws and the targeting of Catholic high school students at the March for Life:
"What are the worst ideas on earth? Who is spreading them? What should we think of those who wield power, or hijack our churches, to impose them and punish dissenters?
"Liberal Christianity. That's the worst ideology in the world. Not just today, but ever. Since Adam ate the apple.
"[Kentucky bishop John Stowe's] column joining the elite lynch mob targeting the Covington Catholic boys is really stunning. It reads as if lifted from the pages of The Lord of the World, a prophetic novel of the Antichrist penned in 1900. Stowe, who has praised heretical Catholic LGBT activists, launches into a vicious attack not just on teenage fellow Catholics subject to death threats. He denounces virtually the entire pro-life movement and the half of Americans who voted for a pro-life presidential candidate. He does so with little logic, but vast, overweening self-confidence and unearned moral hauteur.
"There is no scenario on earth in which abortion becomes unthinkable, any more than rape or murder or stealing citizenship will ever be unthinkable. No combination of government policies could ever achieve that. Ideologues like Bishop Stowe surely know that. They intentionally and culpably, with premeditation and full consent of the will, conjure Utopia as an idol in place of Christ.
"Yes, they know that it's ludicrous to pretend that every issue that could possibly affect human life is a 'life issue,' comparable to murdering a million kids per year for sexual convenience. They know better. They know they're helping to keep abortion legal. It's time we admit that and see such men for exactly what they are. And whom they serve."
Sad to say, the same mindset is creeping into the PCA, led by big-city pastors who are bothered that only one political party (the one that's out of step with the controllers of popular culture) is welcoming of a Biblical view of abortion, and so they tell their congregations that socialized medicine and open borders are just as important as the murder of millions of children annually.
Prepare For an Onslaught of Woke Scolds | www.splicetoday.com
2019 will be the year of the Performatively Woke Scold, writes Chris Beck: "PWS types love the concept of white privilege for obvious reasons--it widens the scope of their wokesplaining. When they can't find actual misdeeds to pounce upon, they remain active by going after people with a particular DNA.... These scolds--miserable busybodies--are like your old upstairs neighbor who'd go to the landlord if you were playing music after nine p.m. They're a sign of the current era's moral panic. Their power's disproportionate to their numbers. They skew young, and like the power upbraiding others gives them. Their success is made possible by the risk-averse nature of corporate America and college presidents. Until those in power wake up, they'll continue to terrorize people."
Patriotism Begins With Localism | The American Conservative
Ian Marcus Corbin writes:
"It is perhaps easier to say what America isn't, and to love her for that. Recent immigrants will tell you that things are easier here: less regulation, more opportunity, more efficient bureaucracy, less snobbery. And this is all true. While class distinctions are pretty much as real here as anywhere in the 'old world'--a high school dropout would have a hard time making friends on a Beacon Hill roof deck--they are also more porous than elsewhere. All a poor Irish kid needs to do is get himself admitted to Boston College or Harvard or Boston University and learn to pronounce his R's, and he's welcome to don a pair of boat shoes and clamber up onto the roof. And that's not nothing. The hungry and ostracized have a hell of a better shot escaping their station here than they do in Venezuela, Russia, or even France. This is America at its best: wide open and hospitable, playing host to transplants from abroad. This is our particular national genius....
"I believe we should shamelessly embrace our cultural balkanization, or to put it more gently, our cultural federalism. It is nowhere written that a person ought to feel equally at home in every nook and cranny of the state she calls home. If there is a deep sense of patriotism available to us Americans, it will have to be based in local soil."
More Than a Technical Debate | National Review
David Klinghoffer writes, regarding evolution vs. intelligent design:
"Here's what is missing: serious public debate. Telling scientists to 'slug it out' in professional journals and not try to persuade others is like asking a free-market advocate to persuade his Marxist colleagues before he dares offer his case to the public. What makes Kevin [Williamson] think entrenched Darwinists are willing even to listen to scientific challenges? Kevin is saying that critics of Darwin should allow themselves to be abused -- by non-scientists like Kevin D. Williamson -- and just take it. Why is Williamson such an (entertaining) scourge of experts in other fields, yet eager to accept and amplify the prejudices of Darwinists?
"There's no 'conspiracy' here. Scientists are as subject to careerism, groupthink, and status anxiety as anyone else. The hypothesis of purpose in nature is too important to leave to the 'experts' alone. We needn't be impressed by pseudo-Menckenesque put-downs."
Abortion: The Mark of Dystopia - Catholic World Report
"...two of the... most preeminent dystopia novels even include swipes at one of the most sacred cows of the 21st-century liberal project: abortion....
"Concerned with the homogenizing and stultifying effects of television upon culture, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 depicts an America that had degenerated into a state of utter inanity, where reading is a lost art and people spend more quality time with strangers on video screens than with their own family and neighbors....
"When they are horrified by [the protagonist's] attempt to draw them out from their shells of entertainment, consumption, and light gossip, he becomes so incensed that he finally explodes at one of them:
"'Go home and think of your first husband divorced and your second husband killed in a jet and your third husband blowing his brains out, go home and think of the dozen abortions you've had, go home and think of that and your damn Caesarian sections, too, and your children who hate your guts! Go home and think how it all happened and what did you ever do to stop it?'...
"The same mark is found in Aldous Huxley's classic Brave New World, which depicts a world where sex has been disassociated from family and procreation, religion has been reduced to a form of social therapy, and science is meticulously censored so as to preserve a political orthodoxy....
"...Without the benefit of modern technology, Linda has suffered the ultimate indignity during her exile from the cosmopolis: She has had a baby. But it isn't her fault, she explains, for 'of course there wasn't anything like an Abortion Centre here.' She goes on to reminisce somewhat nostalgically about the brightly-decorated and well-equipped abortion centers near her childhood home--a narrative detail that was no doubt shocking in the 1930s, when Huxley was mocked for his preposterous and alarmist outline of an antiseptic future.
"This outline was based upon Huxley's conviction that the 'truly revolutionary revolution' was not the Scientific Revolution, not the Industrial Revolution, nor the French Revolution, but rather the Sexual Revolution initiated by the Marquis de Sade. This was, in Huxley's words, 'the revolution in individual men, women, and children, whose bodies were henceforward to become the common sexual property of all and whose minds were to be purged of all the natural decencies, all the laboriously acquired inhibitions of traditional civilization.'"
Why Ex-Churchgoers Flocked to Trump | The American Conservative
Veteran political reporter Tim Carney looks at the inverse correlation between Trump primary support and levels of church attendance and religious involvement.
"The best way to describe Trump's support in the Republican primaries--when he was running against the likes of Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich--would be: white evangelicals who do not go to church....
"In March [2016], as the GOP field was narrowing down to Trump and Cruz, one Pew Research Center survey found Trump trailing by 16 points among white evangelical voters who attended church weekly, but leading by 19 points among those who do not....
"While there are no great county-level measures of church attendance, and so we need to rely on ARDA's adherence numbers, the higher the religious adherence, the lower the Trump vote. The correlation is far stronger when you focus on the more rural counties. Exclude the 10 most populous counties in Iowa, and look at the 89 least populous. Among those, differences in median weekly wages explain about 2.4 percent of the variation in the Trump vote, while religious adherence explains about 10.5 percent of the variation. If we could track attendance, the correlation would probably be much stronger....
"Absent strong job prospects, fewer adults form families. When people have fewer weddings and christenings, and fewer kids to educate on right and wrong, they go to church less. Of course then, this becomes a vicious circle: in communities less anchored in church, there's less family formation. A place with fewer families is a place less attractive to employers--thus this social and moral collapse is both a consequence and a cause of economic collapse....
"If you are enmeshed in strong institutions--if you live in a close-knit neighborhood, are rooted in a small town like Orange City, belong to a strong congregation--you may notice how much higher the trust is. Kids leave their bikes on the front lawn. You don't fret if you show up without a ride home arranged, as someone there will take care of you. You don't keep a ledger of favors you do, because reciprocity is the norm, and you're confident you'll receive back about as much as you gave out.
"Social trust is an immensely valuable asset. Increasingly, it's a luxury good that is abundant only in elite neighborhoods and strong religious institutions. Low trust is a condition of the white working class. Charles Murray, in Coming Apart, reported that white-collar Americans were twice as likely as blue-collar Americans to say "people can generally be trusted."
Inside the 'Trend-Free' World of Wisconsin's Supper Clubs - Gastro Obscura
Reminds me of the Celebrity Club in Tulsa: "Apart from the food and decor, supper clubs also function differently from typical restaurants. Many are only open for dinner, or 'supper' in Midwestern parlance. They tend to be owned by families, who may even live on the premises. 'You're in their house, basically,' Faiola says. Employees are family members, or stick around long enough to become family. Supper clubs have unusual hours, based on the family's schedule, and tend to be passed from generation to generation. That's the case with Don Petersilka, owner of the Mill Supper Club, an establishment that Faiola says has the 'Holy Trinity' of supper club decor: taxidermy, twinkly lights, and dark wood. 'My grandparents bought the Mill in March of 1963,' Petersilka says, and he bought it from his parents in 1991."
Postnatural Intelligence by David Lloyd Dusenbury | First Things
"[Mary] Shelley [in the novel Frankenstein] may have been the first to see that humankind will only know that it has constructed a real 'Talker'--a linguistically expressive, intellectually creative machine (or living being)--at the precise moment it realizes that this device can no longer be trusted."
Greek to Me, by Mary Norris | The New Yorker
"On returning to New York, I registered for an elementary class in ancient Greek at Columbia University and blithely submitted the bill to the [New Yorker] magazine's new executive editor, Tony Gibbs. To my disbelief, he turned me down, saying that ancient Greek was not relevant to my job. After a year in collating, I had moved to the copy desk, and so I started a dossier of sorts, keeping a list of words from the Greek that cropped up in The New Yorker, everything from 'pi' to 'ophthalmologist,' which is often misspelled with a 'p' instead of a 'ph.' John McPhee was then in his geology period, and from his work I learned the word 'autochthonous' (autós, 'self,' plus chthón, 'earth'), which means something like 'self-generated from the earth' and contains a tricky consonant cluster in the transliteration of chi (χ) and theta (θ). To reinforce my petition, Eleanor Gould, whose cool intelligence made her something of an oracle to the editors, wrote a letter to Gibbs stating that her own knowledge of the language might not be current enough to save us from 'ignorant mistakes.' I showed the document to my friend John Bennet, an editor, who said, 'You're using a cannon to shoot a flea.' Tony Gibbs was persuaded.
