Simple Living Isn’t Always

Incharacter.org’s article about Henry David Thoreau points out the differences between Thoreau’s America and our own. They note first of all the frustration some first-time Walden readers experience. As writer Bill McKibben puts it, they see “our apostle of solitary, individual self-reliance, out in his cabin with his hoe and his beans, the most determinedly asocial man of his time — nonetheless was immersed in his community to a degree few people today can comprehend.” Continue Reading »

[NOTE: Apparently, with the All-Star game looming, it’s time for a baseball post. Or I’m just copying my friend Greg, who recently wrote about baseball by way of TV and football.]

National Review just published summer reads from some of its writers, and this year they included Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, who writes for GetReligion.org, one of my favorite blogs. Sad to say, she writes about baseball as if America reigned supreme simply by virtue of invention. Sure, Abner Doubleday built the game, and we certainly put our hearts into it (or did before the modern, scandal-ridden era turned our minds toward other things). But times have changed; or have they? Continue Reading »

Despite the evil, brutality and violence that have become hallmarks of the weekly show, much of the channel’s audience has formed a bond of affection for the Sopranos. (Reuters)

I watched a handful of Sopranos episodes the first season. I concluded that it was a cleverly written paean to violence and crime, and with its boss in therapy, to postmodern moral pseudo-angst. Now, with the finale drawing fire and blame, I think I was right to “fugeddaboudit.” But Tony and company simply illustrate a heartbreaking decline in our society, and the accompanying violation of its potential innocence, as we develop “affection” for evil. Our descent into immorality is broadening in scope and accelerating as we move from “affection” for immorality to its glorification in the interests of our own entertainment. As we consider such developments, one begins to see more marked similarities between the modern West and the Roman empire at its decadent height, and I wonder if the decline and fall of the West will mirror Rome’s: torn down by the very populations it had attempted to “help.” Continue Reading »

As Election 2008 draws near, we’ll hear countless pastors and Christians assert that electing the “right person” (literally and metaphorically) is the only way to see the nation redeemed from evil and returned to its roots. I’m certainly susceptible to this idea, and while it’s true to some extent, we tend to overestimate the power of top-down social influence. The Scriptures present a very different model, one that’s not bottom-up but bottom-out. In remembering our weakness, we open the door to God’s omnipotence. Professor and farmer Dave Black posted the following reminders on his blog recently, in response to the increasingly politicized American existence. Continue Reading »

Al Gore’s new book (excerpted at Time.com) is called The Assault on Reason. It’s mainly about the absence of reason in the public/political square, best I can tell. The description calls it “A visionary analysis of how the politics of fear, secrecy, cronyism, and blind faith has combined with the degration of the public sphere to create an environment dangerously hostile to reason.” Finally, something Gore and I agree on!

But I see broader evidence that reason is at risk. Continue Reading »