Warm Bodies is not a great film, but it is a fun film. It has a cute turn on the traditional zombie movie. In this case, a human, as it were, infects the zombies and they start to turn human again.

The film includes a few theologically suggestive features. To wit, the main zombie character, R, has his human life restored in a baptism toward the end of the film.

So, too, a hint of inverted “Adam theology” informs the story arc as well. R begins the film passive, inarticulate, and bestial (he cannot remember his name beyond a growl-sounding “Rrrr”). Despite his passivity, he sees Julie at risk, and saves her from death. His relationship with Julie, the need to save her from different threats, and the need to sustain her life, e.g., finding her food, prompts R increasingly to shake off his passivity, up to the point that he has his humanity definitively restored in baptism (while saving Julie once again from death).

This contrasts with Adam, charged by God to guard and nurture the Garden, of which Eve was the epitome. The  Genesis text suggests that Adam stood passively by Eve as the Serpent lead her to death (note the “with her” in Genesis 3.6). In a narrative movement from anticipated activity to realized passivity, Adam loses his soul and becomes bestial (even looking like a beast after the Fall, being robed by God in animal skins, Gn 3.21). In contrast, R moves from an expectation of passivity to realized activity, gaining back his human life.

Not a great film. But a fun film.

Romney then capped his primary performance with a dismal summer, a merely adequate convention, and a dismal September. To be sure, the October 3 debate provided Romney with a tenuous lead in national polls. His strategy was promptly to sit on that lead, and it slowly eroded. I don’t think that Sandy was the cause of Romney’s defeat as much as it was the exclamation point at the end of the decay of the one-time effect of Romney’s October 3 performance. That one good moment almost resulted in the defeat of a sitting president underscored the president’s electoral weakness. But that Romney could generate only one good moment of unalloyed electoral quality underscored his problems as a candidate.

There are important issues that divide the nation. But this election was not about those issues, especially for the small set of voters in the middle over whom Romney and Obama contested.

This is not to say that I’m satisfied with the current state of conservatism or with the role of Christians in modern American politics. Both have reduced themselves to movements of sterile reaction. So I continue to think that there is a lot for both conservatives and Christians to muse over. But Romney’s defeat is a side-show in this bigger, and more important, story.

I don’t want to “get around” imprecatory prayers for sentimental reasons. I also reject C.S. Lewis’s idea that they exist in the Psalms as examples of the way we shouldn’t pray. I also don’t want to mitigate the problematic nature of these prayers merely by “spiritualizing” away the problem.

But it did strike me a while ago that that I pray imprecatory prayers against myself all the time, and I welcome others to pray imprecatory prayers against me as well. In his small catechism, Luther talks about us drowning the old Adam in us daily, that a new man should daily emerge. What is this but a prayer of imprecation against the old Adam in us?

God kills the old man (Col 3.3, Ro 6.2,6, Gal 2.20, 6.14,). This is the only “me” that exists prior to baptism, and this is a real death, it is a death more real than physical death. After all, in physical death the spirit merely separates from the body; the death of the old man is, ultimately, the extinction of this self.

I pray imprecatory prayers against myself, and welcome others to do so as well: I pray that every remnant of the old man would be cut off from this world. I pray that every remembrance of the old man would be forgotten, I pray that every cent of the old Adam’s wealth be taken away and given to the new man for his purposes, I want the entire legacy of the old man to die with him. Indeed, I bless the name of the one who dashes my Old Adam’s little ones against the rock – for the rock is Christ (Mt 21.44) and, like me, God kills them in baptism so that the new man may emerge.

But if I want all of that for myself, then how can I deny it to my enemy, whom I am commanded to love as myself? So I pray that God would kill them as well through baptism, that the new man may emerge.

More so, isn’t the prayer, “God forgive them, they know not what they do,” in principle, a prayer of imprecation? After all, God’s forgiveness destroys the sinful man.

To be sure, God may destroy without converting. But that’s his business. We are to take as our example God’s actions in sending rain on both the good and the evil (Mt 5.45). So I pray that God drown the old man daily. I pray it for myself, for his church, and for the whole world. The prayer for grace and forgiveness is a prayer of imprecation against the old, evil man in me.

More generally, God and his people are engaged in a holy war against Satan and his people, and the tool of this holy war is the forgiveness that God offers us in the Word and sacraments, and in his sacrifice, and his people’s sacrifice, on behalf of the world. Ironically, of course, and this is a delicious irony, God kills us by giving us life.

So, too, I’d also include the quando corpus and amen from Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater on my top 50 list. Perhaps a bit more eccentrically, ever since my daughter’s choir sang it last year, I’ve been a sucker for Michael Engelhardt’s percussion-rich arrangement of Gaudete.

More in the spirit of Matt’s list, I’d include Mahalia Jackson’s Power of the Holy Ghost among my favorite songs. I’d also suggest consideration for Touch Me Lord Jesus and When My Savior Calls Me Home by the Angelics.  And for the fetching orthgonality of ominous words with toe-tapping music, I’d add Dorthy Love Coates, There’s No Hiding Place.

Finally, to leaven this with a bit of snarkiness – In the Garden would be on my bottom-50 list. Indeed, on my bottom-ten list (too sappy and sentimental). And while I’m at it, close to the bottom would also be Earth and All Stars. While I appreciate the intention of the hymn, aside from the sheer goofiness of some of the verses (“loud boiling test tubes”), my biggest complaint, as with so much modern religious communication, is that the adjectives are called upon to carry way too heavy a load.

When Mitt Romney selected Paul Ryan, Republicans undertook the perilous but commendable project of forcing voters to face the fact that they fervently hold flatly incompatible beliefs. Twice as many Americans idenify themselves as conservatives as opposed to liberal. On Nov. 6 we will know if they mean it.

Will focuses on “clientalism” as the hallmark of the modern liberalism that conservatives oppose. But he also decries New Deal- and Great Society-era entitlement programs that, he suggests, are policy requisites for that clientalism.

Enter Paul Ryan’s full-throated defense of Medicare in his convention speech yesterday. His commitment to the permanency of this entitlement program could not have been stated more emphatically:

Medicare is a promise, and we will honor it. A Romney-Ryan administration will protect and strengthen Medicare, for my Mom’s generation, for my generation, and for my kids and yours.

To be sure, Ryan’s defense of Medicare is conservative in the sense that it defends a status-quo policy against an even more intrusive and redistributionist policy. But its import for conservatism is more than that. In his speech, Ryan placed himself and Romney squarely on one side of a fault line that divides American conservatism: Ryan is reconciled with the existence of the social-insurance state. He doesn’t just tolerate Medicare as a practical political necessity, he commits to it. Contrary to Will’s intimation, this position can be an authentically conservative position. But it is conservative more in the mold of European-style Christian Democratic conservatism than in the mold of traditional American conservatism.

Ryan’s defense of Medicare is significant. Whatever the practicalities of Washington politics, a good part of modern American conservatism, both at elite and at popular levels, remains intellectually unreconciled to any form of New Deal-type social insurance policies, let alone to redistributive Great Society programs.

Given Ryan’s position as a, if not the, intellectual leader of congressional conservatives, if the Republican presidential ticket wins this election, Ryan’s speech could mark the point at which American conservatism turned definitively from a grudging, politically-expedient tolerance of social insurance to a recognition that it is fully consistent with robust forms of conservatism. By itself, this would represent a dramatic shift in American conservatism, as well as raise a host of additional questions for American conservatism and for American politics and policy. On the other hand, if this line being crossed results in the abstention of more than a very few economic libertarians or Jeffersonians in this year’s election, it could shift one or more swing states, and throw presidential elections to the Democrats.

Whatever the electoral outcome, Ryan’s selection by Romney serves as much to place added stress on fault lines within the GOP coalition as it does to call the bluff of the voting public. And if Romney and Ryan win, we may learn that those Americans who identify themselves as conservatives really ”mean it.” But even if American conservatives prove to George Will that they “mean it,” it may not be exactly the sort of conservatism that he anticipates.

Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate marks the first time in American history that no Protestant will appear on a major-party ticket for president. Ryan is Roman Catholic, and Romney, of course, is Mormon.

Biden is also a Roman Catholic. And Obama is a Protestant. (I am so not going there.)  So my conclusion is that Professor Balmer (or his editor) does not think that the Democrats are a major party. Wasn’t it Will Rogers who said, “I’m not a member of any organized party – I’m a Democrat!”

Consider Luther’s view on charity and the poor. He made the care of the poor an organized, civic obligation by proposing that a common chest be put in every German town; rather than skimp along with the traditional practice of almsgiving to the needy and deserving native poor, Luther proposed that they receive grants, or loans, from the chest. Each recipient would pledge to repay the borrowed amount after a timely recovery and return to self-sufficiency, thereby taking responsibility for both his neighbors and himself. This was love of one’s neighbor through shared civic responsibility, what the Lutherans still call “faith begetting charity.”

While I don’t know whether Rev. Ken Hennings, President of the 100,000+ plus Lutherans in the Texas District of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, drew explicitly on the approach to charity discussed by Ozment to craft the District’s financial approach to funding missions and evangelism, but a similarity certainly exists. (Full disclosure: I am a lay representative on the District’s Board of Directors.) 

Hennings developed a funding system for new ministries in which the District provides significant financial assistance for mission efforts and new churches, particularly for ethnic, racial, and social groups traditionally unreached by the LCMS. That part is, of course, not new. The twist in the traditional model of support, however, is that, after a period of supporting the new ministry from the center at their beginning, the ministries agree to start returning a fraction of their support (if they have the means to do so) to the District, for use then to start additional new ministries. The system not only allows the District to leverage its mission dollars to an extent far greater than the traditional model of commiting direct support ad infinitum, it also provides opportunities for new churches and ministries to help support yet-newer churches and ministries as soon as the former are financially on their feet.

 The data Stiglitz used came from a recent Census report. (Scroll down to Table P-5, “People by median income and sex ▪ all races”). In constant dollars, the median income for U.S.men in 2010 was lower than it was in 1968 ($32,127 in 2010, $32,844 in 1968).

 Curious about the exclusive focus on the experience of U.S. men during this period, I shifted my eyes to the data on women reported in a parallel column. Unremarked on by Stiglitz, the Census data for women provides a striking contrast to the data for men during the same period.

 While median income for men has basically stagnated in constant (2010) dollars since 1968, median income for women almost doubled during the same period, from $11,089 in 1968 to $20,831 to 2010, an increase of 87.8%. While the median income in 2010 for women in 2010 was 64.8 percent of the median income for men, this increased from 1968 when the median income for women was 33.7 percent of the median income for men.

 For female workers, inflation-adjusted median incomes in 2010 are lower today than they were . . . in 2007. And even then, for women, the median income in 2010 was only $92 less than it was in 2007. Median income for women were higher in 2010 than for every year prior to 2007.

 Moreover, looking at the Census data for both genders suggests a partial hypothesis for why we’ve more or less seen stagnation in median income for men since 1968.

 Between 1968 and 2010, the number of men in the workplace grew by 68.6 percent. Over this same period, the number of women participating in the paid workplace more than doubled, increasing by a whopping 118.7 percent. Prior to 1979 there were more men working in the paid workforce than women. Since 1979, women have outnumbered men in the paid workforce every year.

 If the ratio of women in the workforce to men remained what it was in 1968, there would today be 24 million fewer women in the workforce than there actually were in 2010. Put another way, the increase in the supply of labor during this time (most of which came between 1968 and 1979) was disproportionately a result of increased female participation in the workforce. 

Further, that women’s median income increased more-or-less consistently during this time period (through around 2001) suggests that women were increasingly competitive for better paying jobs relative to men. Even without any increase in female participation in the paid workforce, an increase in the competitiveness of women for better-paying positions would tend to reduce salaries for men: as better-compensated women “sorted up,” they would edge out the men who once held those positions. In essence, a significant amount (although not all) of the monopoly rent for being male in the workforce dissipated since 1968. 

I doubt that the increase in the supply of labor disproportionately derived from increased female participation in the U.S. workforce explains all, or even most, of the income stagnation for men since 1968. But the influx of women into the paid workforce, and the apparent increasing competitiveness of women for better-paying jobs, would seem to be a likely explanation for at least a part of the stagnation in median incomes for U.S. men.

An interesting question arises if Professor Rogers has inadvertently created a problem: if certain rights are inalienable then would it not be immoral for a person to renounce those rights, such as, say a monk who swears poverty (renouncing the right to property) or even to obey always a rule or superior (renouncing the right of liberty), or even a martyr who willingly gives himself up to a just cause (renouncing life). Seems that the argument he is constructing does not necessarily fit anecdotally with the Western tradition.

Good questions, but I “think” the response is straightforward. Starting with the last example first, the case of the martyr: In the theory of the Declaration, life is an inalienable right because God has endowed us with that right. So, too, in Locke, a person cannot commit suicide because God owns us rather than we ourselves.

What that means is that our lives are at God’s disposal even though they are not at our own disposal. God authorizes martyrdom in certain cases, as he authorizes sacrificing our lives to save others, or allows us to kill attackers to save innocents. We can give our lives away for God’s purposes, but not for our own purposes. I’d think that a version of the same answer can apply to the question about the liberty of monks.

Further, while I don’t know anything about the theology of promise in Catholic orders, I’d assume that a Superior cannot command a member to commit an ungodly act. So promising a Superior obedience to a command that is sinful would seem to me to be the alienation of something that is inalienable.