From a religious publisher, an email just arrived urging me to take advantage of a sale on “End Times Books.” Why are they so heavily discounted? What does the publisher know that the rest of us don’t? The whole thing makes me a little nervous.
In the latest issue of the New Yorker, Peter J. Boyer weighs in on the importance of religious voters in the upcoming presidential election and the difficulties both parties are having connecting to that crucial segment of the electorate. The article, while not entirely impartial, does an excellent job highlighting some of the most basic concerns for faith-directed voters:
The Saddleback event illuminated Obama’s greatest liability for faith-based voters: his resolute support for abortion rights. Many, including Doug Kmiec, winced when Obama said, at a town-hall meeting last spring, that he supported sex education because he didn’t want his daughters “punished with a baby.” The week after the Saddleback event, conservative commentators advanced the theme that Obama supported infanticide, as evidenced by his opposition to a 2003 bill in the Illinois legislature requiring medical personnel to attempt to sustain the lives of babies that survive abortion procedures. Obama’s various explanations—that the bill threatened the rights established by Roe v. Wade; that his opposition was largely procedural—did not stand up well to scrutiny, and even Doug Kmiec admitted to having doubts.
“Here is a bit of an Achilles’ heel,” Kmiec says. “Senator Obama the candidate, as many have observed, is different from Senator Obama the legislator. That’s the unanswered question about the Senator. And it’s a question that does require a leap of faith on my part, and on the part of anyone who comes to him from perspectives like my own.”
Kmiec has decided that he is willing to take that leap. Obama has no reason to expect a mass exodus of religious conservatives from the Republican ranks, but if he can persuade even a portion of those voters who were swayed to Bush’s side by the Rove religious machine, it could be enough.
I enjoy Clive James, but in a recent issue of Times Literary Supplement, he casually remarks that the composer Arnold Schoenberg “actually had to concentrate quite hard to stay unpopular.”
No, man, let’s not start thinking down that road. Unpopularity came as naturally to Schoenberg as water to a duck.
When I mentioned James’ odd comment to a friend, he responded: “Here’s something too weird. When he moved to Los Angeles, Schoenberg developed a love for tennis. His neighbor down the street who was Hollywood’s reigning star at the time loved tennis too. So they played tennis together. A lot. The star? Shirley Temple. Shirley Temple and Schoenberg playing tennis. There’s a one-act play there somewhere.”
Ibn Khaldûn is the Muslim theologian and scholar who in 1377 wrote the Muqaddimah
In his epic work, Ibn Khaldûn never balks at giving the study of history respect and praise:
It should be known that history is a discipline that has a great number of approaches. Its useful aspects are very many. Its goal is distinguished. . . . The writing of history requires numerous sources and much varied knowledge. It also requires a good speculative mind and thoroughness, which lead the historian to the truth and keep him from slips and errors. If he trusts historical information in its plain transmitted form and has no clear knowledge of the principles resulting from the custom, the fundamental facts of politics, the nature of civilization, or the conditions governing human social organization, and if, furthermore, he does not evaluate remote or ancient material through comparison with near or contemporary material, he often cannot avoid stumbling and slipping and deviating from the path of truth.
What’s so refreshing about Khaldûn’s description of the project of history, however, isn’t that he simply offers up praise, but that he also holds the dicipline to a high standard:
[False stories] are always ending up in the works of the historians. The incentive for inventing and reporting them shows a tendency to forbidden pleasures and for smearing the reputation of others. People justify their own subservience to pleasure by citing the supposed doings of men and women of the past. Therefore, they often appear very eager for such information and are alert to find it when they go through the pages of published works.
Studying history is exciting because, in the end, it is a search for truth. Ibn Khaldûn understood that, and let’s hope the next generation of historians will, too.
Christina Hoff Sommers at the American Enterprise Institute has an interesting essay on recovering a truly liberating feminism (via Arts & Letters Daily). A sample:
That is an understandable but unwarranted reaction. Women in the West did form a movement and did liberate themselves in ways of vital importance to the evolution of liberal society. Feminism in its classical phase was a critical chapter in the history of freedom. For most of the world’s women, that history has just begun; for them, classical feminism offers a tried-and-true roadmap to equality and freedom. And even in the West, there are unresolved equity issues, and the work of feminism is not over. Who needs feminism? We do. The world does. Women everywhere need the liberty to be what they are–not, as contemporary feminism insists, liberation from what they are. This we can see if we look back at the history of women’s liberation–not as it is taught in women’s studies departments, but as it truly was.
She starred alongside Elvis Presley as the stunning teenage beauty in Loving You, and then again in King Creole, at the beginning of her short but phenomenal acting career. “Elvis was such a sweet, personable young man. He would always call me Miss Dolores. The only other persons who called me that were Clark Gable and Mother Abbess when I was a postulant.”” So recalled Dolores Hart, in a rare interview conducted recently for The Tablet of Brooklyn:
“Many times on the set, in between breaks, Elvis would ask me how often I read the Bible or if I had a favorite Psalm. He seemed to always want to know if there was a Bible around somewhere.”
Elvis loved to sing and record Gospel music. “Those spiritual songs had an unquestionable depth of soul to them,” she notes. “They were like incarnational expressions for all who heard them. Elvis no doubt touched something very deep in the heart and soul of so many individuals. He reached deep down into that place that awakened a call to Christ. I have no doubt that Elvis Presley made the Lord a reality for others not only in his Gospel music but in his countless gestures of generosity and caring compassion. People seemed to be called out of darkness by his voice in those songs of deep devotion, hope and abiding faith.”
Life as an actress “was a definitive call,” said Hart, but it was not the only or the ultimate one. She still votes for the Oscars each year, but now from behind the walls of Connecticut’s Regina Laudis monastery, where she has lived and prayed and chanted the psalms for the last forty-five years, since leaving the star-studded film industry at age twenty-five. Undoubtedly, Elvis continues to touch the soul of America. Unseen and speaking now in silence, Mother Dolores’ impact is no less.
Asked to elaborate about her “nudge” from God to enter the cloistered monastic community, she added, “It is hard to explain. I guess the best way I could answer that this is this way: if one is married, why did one marry so and so and not another? . . .
In response to a question about what truly makes her happy, she looked intently with her beautiful and tranquil clear blue eyes and said, “To be with someone I love.” . . . Visitors [to Regina Laudis] still may be amazed at her choice of vocation and seek more of an explanation. But for Mother Dolores, no explanation is necessary.
Joseph Bottum wrote: “though surely it’s an odd moment when an out-of-wedlock pregnancy becomes a symbol of conservative cultural values, but chalk it all up as yet another way in which abortion has skewed the natural divisions of American politics.”
I beg to differ. The issue is not only that we applaud Bristol Palin for upholding the sanctity of life. The issue is how social conservatives deal with people when they don’t live up to our moral values. Do we stand up and roundly condemn them, or do we care for them while continuing to propose a more excellent way?
What we’ve seen is that, contrary to expectation, social conservatives have chosen not to condemn. The country has seen that “family values” not only means teaching your children not to have sex outside of marriage, but also supporting them responsibly should they fail to follow the teaching. In other words, it means teaching them what sin is and loving them if they sin.
That kind of standing in the truth with love should be a hallmark of those who believe in traditional morality. And it should be incomprehensible to those who do not understand the spirit behind that morality. In that light, it’s only natural that the way Sarah Palin has handled her daughter’s pregnancy should be seen as a symbol of conservative cultural values, and that those who do not share those values should be threatened by the truth lived in love.
The argument is being made that the Palin grandchild shifts the election from the economy and the war, two grounds on which Republicans are losing in public polls, to cultural issues, the one ground on which the Republicans are winning.
Maybe—though surely it’s an odd moment when an out-of-wedlock pregnancy becomes a symbol of conservative cultural values, but chalk it all up as yet another way in which abortion has skewed the natural divisions of American politics.
Still, I find the level of vituperation in this election cycle inexplicable. Events—even the war—are not making people angry, as far as I can tell. It seems, rather, that anger exists, a being in itself, and events are merely the excuses, plausible or not, by which it expresses itself.
