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The editors of Arts & Letters Daily state it bluntly: “If God is God, he’s not good. If God is good, he’s not God. You can’t have it both ways, especially not after the Indian Ocean catastrophe.”
Here’s a quick way to take the theological pulse of churchgoers. Imagine you’re attending an urban parish with a reputation for liberal theology and political activism. Your new senior pastor begins the Lord’s Prayer with “Our Mother and Father in heaven,” baptizes children in the name of “the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sustainer,” attends an anti-war rally in Washington and offers unequivocal support when the associate pastor announces from the pulpit that she is a lesbian.
The Christian Science Monitor reports today on the important and sometimes troubling intersection of church and commerce, but correspondent G. Jeffrey MacDonald’s compact article sometimes omits important points.
Two cheers for Nicholas Kristof and his realization that Christian conservatives like Sen. Sam Brownback are the “new internationalists.” Kristof assures his readers that he considers Brownback “to the right of Atilla the Hun,” and he sees the prolife aspect of new internationalism as causing more suffering than it prevents. Nevertheless, Kristof expresses a more than grudging respect for Brownback:
I’ve begun to feel empathy for Jim Wallis. First he was unable to persuade enough of his fellow evangelicals that abortion and gay rights should not have been determining issues in the 2004 presidential vote. Now he’s taking flak from the left — specifically Frances Kissling of Catholics for a Free Choice, writing in the Dec. 13 issue of The Nation.
Allen Salkin brings a playful spirit to his New York Times report about how Festivus is becoming a countercultural tradition in the more ironic circles of American culture. If Festivus sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because it had an unusually powerful forum for its birth: An episode of Seinfeld, broadcast in the week before Christmas in 1997.
Bob Carlton of The Corner, cribbing an idea from A Penny For, has generously invited various bloggers to cite their five favorite pieces from 2004.
David Crumm, a veteran religion writer and columnist at the Detroit Free Press, makes an ingenious gift suggestion for Christmas: Offer a heartfelt apology to somebody.
Priya Jain has published a fascinating essay in Salon, which holds up the 12th-century lovers Abelard and Heloise as icons for religious progressives in the 21st century. Jain bases her essay on a biography of the couple published by British journalist James Burge earlier this year.
