Drunk-Driving Bishop Update

Maureen Mangelt's funeral was today, at St. Albert the Great Catholic Church, in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.  Please remember her and her family in your own prayers.

Meanwhile, the story of her death remains a little fuzzy.  Madison.com's Doug Erickson is keeping tabs, and we're going to rely on him. 

Bruce Burnside, the ELCA bishop who struck her with his car, has been arrested and charged with three felonies -- "homicide by intoxicated use of a vehicle, homicide by negligent operation of a vehicle and hit-and-run causing death" -- and a misdemeanor hit-and-run charge.  He is accused of striking another car after he hit Mangelt.   Burnside has entered a residential treatment program.

Surveillance video from a nearby bar is said to show the accident; in addition, there are five eyewitnesses.  Video and witnesses all agree that Burnside was moving fast, and did not stop after he hit Mangelt.

At his hearing, Burnside agreed to surrender his passport, to convince the judge that he is not a flight risk. While in jail, he was kept separated from the general population, because of concerns for his safety.

Now, here is where the fuzziness comes in.

First, there is the question of why Burnside tried to keep going after he hit Mangelt.  Was he trying to escape completely?  Simply to get off the exit ramp where the accident occurred, to prevent a pileup?  Or was he so impaired, and traveling so fast, that he could not stop his car?

Second, there is the fact that he lied to the police, and told them that he had not been drinking. The police have revealed that his preliminary blood alcohol count was .128.  The legal limit is .08.  You can punch the numbers into this BAC calculator yourself, but it basically suggests that, depending on his weight and how long he had been drinking, Burnside had put away the equivalent of four to six glasses of wine.

This raises the question of what Burnside had been up to that day -- of how, exactly, a bishop gets drunk on Sunday.

At the hearing, his attorney declined to say where Burnside was coming from.  Erickson reports that

At the time of the crash, Burnside was headed from Madison to Our Savior's Lutheran Church in Sun Prairie, where he was to preside over a 3 p.m. church ceremony,

But in another story, he also says:

Burnside was [scheduled] to be the guest speaker at an informal talk session between Sunday services at Peace Lutheran Church [in Waunkaee] .... [but an] announcement was made during the second church service that Burnside had called to say he was unable to attend due to being sick....

For the record, Sunday services at Peace are 8 and 10:30.  So, sometime in the morning, Burnside felt -- or said he felt -- unable to get out; and yet five hours later, he was racing to Sun Prairie.  Drunk.

Assuming that all this is true, it is hard to imagine what Burnside's day was like.

Our first, and most charitable, assumption was that he had been at worship somewhere, shared a little fellowship with the congregation afterward, and found himself just a smidge over the limit.  That is emphatically not the case.  He was drunker than that, and had bailed on his commitment to at least one congregation.

Frankly, the other possibilities range from bad to awful.  We won't actually type any of them out, because we don't want to prejudice anybody with our fertile imagination.  But they're ugly.

Among Lutheran pastors, this story has created a lot of noise, as you wold expect.  We'll write more about that later.  For now, though, we are hoping for more and clearer information, and we believe that Mr. Erickson is our best bet for that.

"Only Two?"

You know the way we get about the unsourced anecdotes that preachers use in sermons?  Eric Naiman gets that way, too, but he is a thousand times more dogged in his pursuit of the truth.

Some years ago, a biography of Dickens included a fascinating anecdote.  The great English writer was visited by no less than Dostoevsky, to whom he opened his creative soul.  Dickens confessed that, in his many novels, all the heroes and heroines were the people he wished that he had been, and all the villains were the person he felt he truly was.  There were two people inside him, from whom all his characters had grown.  To which Dostoevsky responded, in a murmur, "Only two people?"  The implication is that a truly great writer contains multitudes.

Great story, right?  It never happened.

Oh, you'll find it in books, published by scholars and properly footnoted.  But it never happened.

Naiman describes the effort of other suspicious scholars, who track this story to its apparent source, a short and comparatively recent essay by an otherwise unknown writer named Stephanie Harvey.  But Harvey cannot be contacted; an editor trying to ask her some questions gets a note from her sister, explaining that she has been in a terrible car accident and suffered brain damage.

Naiman tries to check Harvey;s putative source for the anecdote, which proves to be a Soviet-era journal published in Kazakhstan.  One of which no Slavic scholar has ever heard, and of which Kazakh librarians can find not trace.  And this is only the beginng

Exploring the mystery of Stephanie Harvey, Naiman enters a bizarre funhouse, filled with mirrors which reflect each other.  One unknown writer after another appears, all copying from each other and reviewing each other's books -- sometimes to praise them, sometimes to damn them.  One can only imagine that, back of it all, John Barth is laughing in his beer.

And there's lots of sex in the story, too, including a great deal about nipples and aureloae.

The whole bizarre story of a hoax -- if the story is not itself a hoax! -- appears in TLS.  It's long, but absolutely delightful.

Why Multiple Choice Tests Are Good For Everyone

In high school, young Longhair Anonymous volunteered to take part in a classroom debate.  The topic was simple:  apartheid, pro or con.  Students were allowed to choose which side they would argue and yours truly, ever the contrarian, chose to argue in favor of apartheid.

He lost, and was happy to lose.  It meant that his classmates, who judged the debate and voted, were not idiots.  Ot, if they were idiots, that they were at least decent and humane ones.

We remember this, when we hear about a situation in an Albany, New York, high school this week.  Per the Times, a teacher assigned students to write an essay, using the classical rhetorical forms of pathos, ethos or logos to argue persuasively in favor of an unpopular idea:

The students were instructed to imagine that their teacher was a Nazi and to construct an argument that Jews were “the source of our problems” using historical propaganda and, of course, a traditional high school essay structure.

“Your essay must be five paragraphs long, with an introduction, three body paragraphs containing your strongest arguments, and a conclusion,” the assignment read. “You do not have a choice in your position: you must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!”

This was a mistake.

The teacher is going to face discipline, which may include termination.  The principal spent what were no doubt some unhappy hours meeting with leaders of the capital district's Jewish community.  The Times quotes a number of very reasonable voices, students, parents and community leaders alike, all basically saying "the teacher isn't an anti-semite, just a dope."  This seems very likely to us.

Hint for next time:  give the kids a choice.  If you want to put defending Nazis on the table, okay, but give your students some other options, like pretending they are Churchill denouncing Neville Chamberlain, or FDR making the case against American isolationism.  Or, hell, throw some Commies into the mix:  it is 1940, and you are trying to convince anybody that an alliance with Stalin is the most morally defensible route.

Yes, trying to defend the indefensible can be a valuable learning experience.  We've done it.  But for some students, it can be just as valuable a lesson in rhetoric, philosophy and life to practice defending the good, the true and the beautiful.

Lots More Naked Ladies

The Atlantic has posted many pictures of Femen-associated protesters in Europe, walking the streets topless in solidarity with Aminah Tyler.  Big, glamorous pictures.

The comments posted below the pictures are also worth a quick read.  One reader, man, points out rather angrily that many women feel liberated by Islam, rather than oppressed.  This is absolutely true, and the reasons are pretty well known.  Modest dress, for example, makes objectification more difficult.  But the follow-up comments poke holes in his argument, pointing out that nobody objects to a woman wearing a veil if she chooses.  The problem is that some women are not given any choice in this or in many more serious matters.

For non-Muslims trying to understand this particular argument, it may be helpful to consider analogies to the Hebrew scriptures.  Much of what we find there, when read against the prevailing legal codes of the ancient Near East, marks a significant advance for the dignity and autonomy of women.  For example, Moses permits the daughters of Zelophehad to inherit and own property, a subject that remained iffy in Western law right into the modern era.  Even the less obviously appealing purity legislation, such as the command to leave the camp when you are menstruating, may be subjected to this sort of re-interpretation.  (For that matter, so may the Christian practice of "churching" women after childbirth.  Some people regard it as an unpleasant suggestion that parturition has somehow defiled a new mother; others see it as a loving ritual of welcome back into the community after a life-changing personal transition.)

Among the problems, of course, is that we no longer live in the ancient Near East, nor in medieval Europe nor 17th-century Persia.  Times have changed.  It is no longer particularly radical to "allow" women to own property.  In matters of dress, there is a new understanding that not judging women (or harassing them) because of their appearance is a man's responsibility, no matter what they may or may not be wearing.  And so forth, through a long list of questions, as small as the right to wear a scarf and as large as the right to leave the house without being raped.

Traditional religions are wise and right and often justified when they excavate the "liberationist" elements of their teaching.  The mistake is to insist upon the letter at the expense of the spirit.  Ultimately, the decision to bare one's breast or cover one's head must rest with the owner of the breast and head.  Society may have a legitimate interest in the matter -- no public nudity, San Franciscans! -- but it does not have the final say.

Headline of the Week

Texas political consultant -- Republican political consultant -- Dan Rasmussen has just posted a brief and readable piece at the Blaze, although the title says as much as the article:

Dear Fellow Atheists:  Stop Being Jerks!

Great header, and there's more where that came from.

Let's make a bargain with Dan:  if he can get his fellow atheists to stop being jerks, can we do likewise with our fellow Christians?

Under a Bushel

Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger is promoting a book called Contagious:  Why Things Catch On.  Here's a morsel that we heard him share on NPR, and now at HuffPo:

New York City is a tough place to open a bar. Competition is fierce and it's hard to cut through the clutter. ...

But a few years ago Brian Shebairo launched a place that's been packed since the day it opened. In fact, it's one of the most sought after drink reservations in the city. Bookings are only available day-of and people frantically hit redial again and again hoping to snag a spot. Yet he's never advertised the bar. Never spent a dollar on marketing.

How did Shebairo do it?

He hid his bar inside a hot dog restaurant.

Walk into Crif Dogs in the East Village, and you'll find the most amazing hot dog menu you've ever seen. ...

In one corner off to the side is an old-school phone booth. One of those rectangular numbers that Clark Kent used to morph into Superman. Walk inside and you'll see a rotary dial phone on the wall. Pick up the phone, and just for fun, dial the number 1. Someone will pick-up the other line and ask you if you have a reservation. And if you do, the back of the phone booth will open and you'll be let into a secret bar called, of all things, Please Don't Tell.

Has Please Don't Tell violated traditional "laws of marketing?" Sure. There is no sign on the street and no mention of it in the hot dog place. In fact, they've worked hard to make themselves a secret.

If it were that simple, the ELCA would be the hottest, hippest, fastest-growingest church body in America, if not the world.  Because no group of human beings on earth is better at keeping itself a secret than we are.  Compared to Lutherans, the Illuminati are as zealous for fame as the Kardashians.

We build ugly churches on out-of-the-way streets; we greet visitors with a handshake (maybe) and a "bulletin" full of paper that falls all over their laps and confuses more than it clarifies; we offer serious inquirers a confusing mishmash of doctrine and worship, usually filtered through the accumulated mini-traditions of the particular congregation or, worse yet, through the personal sensibilities of the pastor.  Nobody knows who we are or what we are, much less where to find us.

Sadly, mere self-effacement is not the whole of Berger's strategy for spreading the word.  The real secret, he says, is something called Social Currency, and which sounds a lot like old-fashioned bragging rights:

People talk about things that make them look good. Sharp and in-the-know. Smart and funny rather than behind the times. If people go to a place like Please Don't Tell ... they tell others because it gives them status.

Social Currency isn't just about hidden bars. It's why people brag about their thousands of Twitter followers or their kids' SAT scores. Why golfers boast about their handicaps and frequent fliers tell others when they get upgraded. ... 

Ouch.  That's a big problem for the ELCA, and for many of our sister churches:  we don't like to brag.  It isn't merely a matter of Scandinavian reserve, either.  We are wary, theologically, of the pride that goeth before a fall, and of the hypocrites who pray to be seen by others.  The thought that we should ourselves be something about which our members boast is problematic, both culturally and doctrinally.

Of course, there have always been churches that manage to make members feel special because they are members, while still maintaining at least a semblance of personal humility.   Episcopalians used to be geniuses at it, although in recent years they have seemed showier and correspondingly more desperate.  Likewise Presbyterians.

The worst case scenario, of course, is that you create a cult:  a community which makes its members feel special because they are not like Them -- not, in other words, like the aliens, the outsiders, the impure, however broadly or narrowly defined.  In the form of exaggerated claims to doctrinal purity over against the rest of world Lutheranism, this has been the Missouri Synod's strategy from the beginning.  It worked well enough, up until recently, but has certainly left them with few friends outside the kraal.

We in the ELCA, however, have no gift for this.  Making, or even allowing, people to feel special is unsettling to us.  The closest we can come, and this on our best day, is to offer them coffee and some green jello after an otherwise unremarkable hour of worship.  Coffee and jello are lovely things, but they offer no cachet, no bragging rights, no sense of having discovered a rare and marvelous treasure.

Most painful of all is this:  we at the Egg believe that Lutheranism, particularly as represented by the ELCA and its LWF partners, is indeed a rare and marvelous treasure.  It holds, deep inside, gems both spiritual and intellectual, tools which, properly understood, can critique modernity without denying it, and lead the soul toward God without compelling it.  But, at least if Berger is right, we have no real hope of ever going viral.

Maybe we should ask the Methodists if they have a phone booth we can hide behind.

Fishing at the End of the World

St Augustine's exegesis of John 21:1-11 is well known, and yet for some reason TextWeek does not link to it.  You can find it (miserably translated) at CCEL.

Briefly, it goes like this.  Augustine reads the story from John as an eschatological "mystery," so important that it has been saved for the final chapter of the book:

[I]nasmuch as there were seven disciples taking part in that fishing, Peter, and Thomas, and Nathaneal [sic], and the two sons of Zebedee, and two others whose names are withheld, they point, by their septenary number, to the end of time. For there is a revolution of all time in seven days. To this also pertains the statement, that when the morning was come, Jesus stood on the shore; for the shore likewise is the limit of the sea, and signifies therefore the end of the world. ...

The story in Luke, he concludes, is of an earlier event.  But both fishing trips are symbolic descriptions of the Church itself:

[J]ust as in [John] the Lord indicated by an outward action the kind of character the Church would have in the end of the world, so in the same way, by that other fishing [in Luke], He indicated its present character. In doing the one at the commencement of His preaching and this latter after His resurrection, He showed thereby in the former case that the capture of fishes signified the good and bad presently existing in the Church; but in the latter, the good only, whom it will contain everlastingly, when the resurrection of the dead shall have been completed in the end of this world. 

... By these signs, and any others that may be found, [we see that in Luke]  the Church was prefigured as it exists in this world, and [in John], as it shall be in the end of the world: the one accordingly took place before, and the other subsequently to the resurrection of the Lord; because there we were signified by Christ as called, and here as raised from the dead. 

The fish are Christians, the net is the Church itself.  He contrasts the details of the two stories.  In Luke, the net contains both saints and sinners.  In John, it is saints alone:

[In Luke], the nets are not let down on the right side, that the good [people within the Church] alone might not be signified, nor on the left, lest the application should be limited to the bad; but without any reference to either side, He says, “Let down your nets for a draught,” that we may understand the good and bad as mingled together. 

[But in John] He says, “Cast the net on the right side of the ship,” to signify those who stood on the right hand, the good alone. There the net was broken on account of the schisms that were meant to be signified; but here, as then there will be no more schisms in that supreme peace of the saints, the evangelist was entitled to say, “And for all they were so great,” that is, so large, “yet was not the net broken” .... 

You get the idea:  the Church Militant is "by schisms torn asunder," the result of its catholicity. It includes the saved and the damned, heretics and troublemakers:

[In Luke], the multitude of fishes caught was so great, that the two vessels were filled and began to sink .... For whence exist in the Church the great evils under which we groan, save from the impossibility of withstanding the enormous multitude that, almost to the entire subversion of discipline, gain an entrance, with their morals so utterly at variance with the pathway of the saints? 

But the Church Triumphant is a different matter.  There, the net is not torn apart, the Church is not divided, because only the elect are included:

[In John], however, they cast the net on the right side, “and now they were not able to draw it for the multitude of fishes.” 

What is meant by the words, “Now they were not able to draw it,” but this, that those who belong to the resurrection of life, that is to say, to the right hand, and depart this life within the nets of the Christian name, will be made manifest only on the shore, in other words, when they shall rise from the dead at the end of the world? 

He goes on to add that St. John has specified the number of fish -- 153 -- because the number of the chosen is finite, and smaller than the total number of those who have been called.  (There's quite a bit more about symbolic numbers, if you like that sort of thing; we don't.)

There is much to dislike about Augustine's interpretation.  There is no room here for universal salvation,  and scarcely any for grace.  At least on the surface, it seems to presume double predestination, and even to admit a touch of works righteousness.  God has called many and chosen a few; the reprobate -- those who are not chosen for salvation -- are distinguished both by their numbers and their "bad morals."

Frankly, those are not the hermeneutical maneuvers that we Lutherans, at least, so treasure about Augustine.  It is Calvinist at best and Pelagian at worst.

But if we strip away the comparison with Luke, it is possible to find in Augustine a very useable interpretation of the Miraculous Draught in John.  The image of the Church as a net, holding together a strange variety of individuals and yet not breaking, is quite beautiful.  So too is the idea that it cannot be "drawn" -- not merely counted, but in a broader sense manipulated, swayed, pulled -- short of Heaven.  (Needless to say, both of these are ideals; they do, inevitably, contrast with the Church as we know it.)

For a fine example of a modern sermon that draws heavily on Augustine's exegesis, we recommend Travis Poling's "Every Time the World Ends," in Brethren Life and Thought for Fall, 2006.  If you're logged into ATLA, you can read it here.

A Reminder

If you are preaching Sunday, it may be helpful to remember that (as is so often the case), the place where some of our Biblical story occurs is today the site of a terrifying and bloody war.

Although the two-year battle for Syria has largely been kept out of Damascus, bombings are common enough and over the last week rebel artillery has succeeded in striking the city.

There are no simple answers here.  The government is tyrannical and unpopular; the Islamist insurgents are not likely to be much better, at least over time.  Just ask the Iranians, or anybody who has lived under the Taliban.

The Syrian government provides some protection for the Christian minority, a fact that hardly justifies its continued rule but which may at least give us pause.  Long before Damascus was a Muslim city, it was a Christian one.  Even today, the city is full of churches, not merely signs of an ancient heritage but also homes to living and faithful Christians.  But that heritage is not insignificant, either.  We still sing songs by St. John Damascene.    And it is, of course, the place where Saul became Paul, and the course of Christian history began its epochal shift from Messianic Judaism to a universal, Gentile-inclusive, community.

There may not be much that we can do for Damascus on Sunday, either as Americans or as Christians. But we can, at the very least, remember its importance, and pray for its people.

Simple English Propers

If you haven't heard any of these, take a minute.  Here's this Sunday:



There are many more where that came from.  Just go to YouTube and search for "Simple English Propers."  They are advertisements for The Vatican II Hymnal, which we have never seen, much less used, but which might be helpful to some congregations.

Even if the book is not for your flock, the promotional videos may inspire creative music directors.

"Lesbian Nuns Puking Nails"

A Renaissance bishop casting out demons.  Image stolen from Al Mohler, of all people.

That is the least forgettable image in a Prospect review of Brian Levack's new book, The Devil Within, a history of demonic possession, and exorcism therefrom, in the Christian West.

The real takeaway, however, is this thought:

Like witch-burning, demonic possession feels “medieval” in our contemporary imagination but it didn’t actually happen with any regularity in the medieval period. Rather, Levack shows how demonology persisted into the era of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, when one thinks of science and rationality beginning to shine light on the darkness.

Just so.  We're well acquainted with the history of witch trials, which were in fact discouraged by Church law from antiquity through the late Middle Ages, and only came into their own during the period of the Renaissance and Reformation.   (Much of our time in college was taken up with this stuff, which helps to explain why we are unemployed today).

The natural conclusion, and one much in vogue among witchcraft scholars in the 1980s, is that witch trials arose out of a pervasive anxiety connected to destabilizing social change.  This change is not merely the rise of Humanism and Protestantism, although those were indeed destabilizing, but also changes in the age of marriage and the number of unmarried women, as well as changes resulting from the first hints of capitalism and a rising middle class.  Like fundamentalism today, it was a reactionary movement passing itself off as a conservative one, even though it did not seek to conserve a genuine heritage.

To extend the study beyond witchcraft (about which Levack has written a previous book) to possession and exorcism is one of those brilliant ideas that seems obvious after somebody else thinks of it.  One principal difference appears to be that, while witch trials were spread fairly evenly over Roman Catholics and Protestants on the continent -- having been rare in Britain -- exorcism is said to have been principally a Roman Catholic affair.

As reported in the review, Levack takes a different tack, less sociological and more anthropological.  He describes possession and exorcism as public rituals that express the needs and beliefs of the surrounding culture, in the same sense that a coronation does or, more aptly, a modern politician's drama of sin and repentance.  This sounds extremely promising.

We are a little uncertain about some of the specifics, however -- but this may have less to do with Levack's scholarship than with the limitations of the reviewer, a grad student named Josephine Livingstone.  At one point, having described the public, practically festival, exorcisms typical of the 17th century, she says blithely, "But we all know what goes on in a Catholic exorcism," and lists as her authorities a string of Hollywood movies.  It is not clear whether Levack imagines that movies are a good guide to historical practices or Livingstone does, but in either case the idea is mistaken.

Indeed, Livingstone has a great deal to say about horror movies.  She believes that Levack has handed her the key to understanding, say, Children of the Corn and other "psychological dramas that go heavy on the religion and that feature supernatural children."  This seems unlikely.

More problematic still is this paragraph:

Levack explains [the rise of exorcism in the 16th and 17th centuries] by highlighting the rise of nominalism in the early 15th century, the view that “an inscrutable, arbitrary God might give the devil great latitude in the world for reasons unknown to humankind.” Popular apocalyptic thought—the strong suspicion that the final battle between good and evil was under way—made possession seem reasonable, even expected. The devil (or his attendant demons) taking control of your body was like the forces of evil saving seats at the cinema by putting coats on them.

Really?  Is that what nominalism was?  Because we were fairly convinced that it was, and remains, the philosophical rejection of Platonic universals, pioneered in the fourteenth century by William of Ockham.  While we do not doubt that somebody with a New Historicist bent might capably bring together nominalism, theodicy, and apocalypticism, they are not related in any immediately obvious or intuitive fashion.  As it stands, this paragraph is gibberish.

Nonetheless, this book sounds extremely interesting, not only to medievalists and but to anybody with an interest in the ways that a society in turmoil creates public rituals.

ELCA BIshop Accused in DUI-Related Death

A woman named Maureen Mengelt was out running near her home in Wisconsin on Sunday, as she often did.  She was struck by a car and killed.  Our prayers go out to her family and friends.

Sadly, the driver of the car was Bruce Burnside, bishop of the ELCA's South-Central Wisconsid Synod.  He is being held by police, and has been accused of driving under the influence of alcohol.  The police did not release his BAC to the press.  Our prayers go out to Bishop Burnside and, especially, the people of his synod.

Burnside was on his way to a meeting at one of his synod's congregations.

Although we do not find that Lutheran pastors drink any more than the average person, or even as much, we most definitely have come to believe that alcoholism and depression occur at very high rates among our colleagues.  This includes bishops; it was not long ago that Bishop Marsh was required to step down from his position in Detroit for similar reasons.

We have no numbers to back any of this up.  We're not even aware that anybody has ever studied it.  But we do think that our health plan, which famously rewards us for taking a five-minute online assessment of things like our vegetable intake, might reward us even more highly for getting into AA and/or seeing a psychotherapist regularly.

(On the) Download

The guys at TorrentFreak did a little checking and discovered what kind of pornography gets downloaded at the  Vatican. (Gawker has, of course, more data on specific titles.  Also links to Fleshbot's NSFW details.)

This sort of story, prurient and tacky, only exists because it sounds so naughty -- Celibate priests watch porn!  Ooooh!  It's really just a modern, and tamer, version of the hundreds of old books dedicated to "revelations" concerning the sex lives of people who aren't supposed to have sex.  (Compare it to Charles Chiniquy's Fifty Years in the Church of Rome and The Priest, the Woman and the Confessional, or to Maria Monk's fraudulent Awful Disclosures.)

What is more interesting to us than the sexy bits, though, is that these are illegal downloads.

In fact, TorrentFreak makes the same point.  Their lede is about a parish priest in Ireland who drops by his local video store to rent old movies, and mentions having seen a number of pictures that he has seen a number of new ones lately -- nothing racy, just new.  He mention several films that haven't been released locally, or on DVD -- Les Miserables, Django Unchained, and Lincoln -- and reveals that he's seen them as part of a "film club" at the local monastery.

In other words, the priest and the monks are stealing intellectual property.

We claim no moral high ground here, mind you.  After three years in Romania, which must be the torrent capital of the planet, our already-blase attitude toward illegal downloads has grown even blase-ier.  We don't do it ourselves, because of a few vestigial moral qualms but principally because we are bad at the technical stuff, but we have no doubt watched hours and hours of TV and movies downloaded illegally by other people.  So we are guilty.

But how guilty?  The laws governing intellectual property are a mess.  They disagree from one nation to the next, and from one form of property to another.  America, in particular, has jiggered them to give creators ever-longer and ever-broader rights.

This lead to every sort of anomaly:  sixty-three years after the death of its author, Tarzan of the Apes is a novel in the public domain; "Tarzan," however, is a protected trademark, so good luck writing your own sequel.  The story of Winnie-the-Pooh has become the permanent property of Walt Disney, which has turned Pooh and Tigger into superhero detectives, and replaced Christopher Robin with a little American girl.

In Eastern Europe, piracy is rife.  On the other hand, legally downloading an episode of Mad Men is quite a challenge for those of us unfamiliar with the world of proxies and anonymizers -- it can be done, but even so you have to lie about who and where you are.  Once you lie, you may as well steal.  As The Economist argued years ago, studios are so frightened of losing money from piracy that they have simply abandoned markets like Romania -- in which piracy then becomes the norm.

So, yeah, the priest in Ireland shouldn't have pirated Django.  And somebody at the Vatican should get his wrists slapped, except that he'd probably like that.  But, for us, the real question is how conscience and law will interact in the coming age of freely available "paid" media.

"F*ck Your Morals"

A Tunisian woman named Amina Tyler has been targeted by Islamists after posting a picture of herself on Facebook.  In the photo, she is naked, and has scrawled across her body the words "Fuck Your Morals" and "My Body Belongs To Me, And Is Not The Source Of Anyone's Honour".

This is extremely brave, and could easily result in her death.

Tyler has founded the Tunisian branch of the the Ukraine-based protest group Femen (remember them?), which in solidarity declared April 4th "International Topless Jihad Day," at least in Paris.  Yes,that's right:  the streets of of Paris were full of naked women, and we were stranded across the ocean.  There is no justice.  (Actually, "full" is an overstatement.  There may have been a protester or two.)

The Guardian raises the legitimate question of whether the best response to religious extremism is anti-religious extremism.  The truth is, as observers of the American scene know well, that fundamentalists thrive on the reactivity of their ideological opponents.  Stuff like this just gives them more ammunition.

But we're not convinced.  Propaganda -- literally, the art of spreading an ideological message -- requires strong, in-your-face symbolism.  The Islamists already have theirs:  burning flags, "Death to America" and Kalashnikov rifles pointed in the face of everybody who disagrees with them.  So too do the Christianists:  burning Korans, threatening gynecologists, Jesus riding a dinosaur.

The people who support personal freedom, whether of speech or of a woman's decision about her own body, need symbols, too.  In America, they have the Constitution (most notably its first, thirteenth and nineteenth amendments); in Europe, we suppose, Luther and Voltaire.  But none of those has the power to speak to the Muslim world, or indeed to most of the southern hemisphere, as clearly and as powerfully as Malala Yousufzai's gunshot wounds, or -- we hope -- Amina Tyler's marked-up bosom.

Grandpapa Was (Almost) Right

Our late grandfather used to complain that the Democratic Party in New York City was unspeakably corrupt, with the center of its corruption in the Queens County Courthouse.  Of course, our late grandfather complained about many things, including, inter alia, onions, the metric system and Swedes.

So, in the arrogance of youth, we discounted Grandpapa's warning.  Then we moved to New York and, within a year or so, a prominent politician stabbed himself in the chest.  Because his years of corruption were coming to light.  And yes, he was a Democrat.  From Queens.

We have thought of our wise old grandfather many times over the years, as one local politician after another has been revealed to be criminal and/or criminally stupid.  Is it worse than Chicago?  Probably not, but it is at least as bad as Philadelphia, and on a larger scale.

We do need to qualify Grandpa's dictum just a bit.  In the City, the Democrats are the more corrupt party, because they are the party with the power.  Theodore Roosevelt and couple of recent mayors aside, this is a Democratic town.  But if you step out into the suburbs, things change.  Nassau County Republicans are a pretty uninspiring crew, as anybody who has ever greased the palm of a building inspector can tell you.

New York State politics are corrupt and incompetent on an epic and bipartisan scale.  We are the Romania of the northeastern United States.

All of this, of course brings us to the past couple of days.

Most recently, a Bronx assemblyman named Eric Stevenson has been arrested for taking bribes.  Apparently, he was pocketing envelopes full of cash in Bronx steakhouses and Albany hotel bathrooms.  Just like the movies.  Another assemblyman, Nelson Castro, cooperated with the Feds to make the arrest happen.  Castro admits now to having been a federal informant since his 2009 perjury indictment.

But the big news came a couple of days ago, when Malcolm Smith was arrested.  Smith, a Democratic state senator, wanted to run for mayor on the Republican ticket without switching parties.  This can be done, but it's a little complicated; he decided to simplify it by bribing Republican officials all over the state.   His collaborator in this scheme was Republican city councilman (and neo-pagan) Dan Halloran.

So don't waste your breath talking about how America's polarized political debate keeps the two parties from working together.  Here in New York, we know exactly what will bring them to the table:  big wads of unmarked bills in plain manila envelopes.

Do Re Mi Fuggedabout It

Since his elevation, Pope Francis has not been heard to chant the liturgy.  There have been various guesses as to why, including the joking suggestion that it is because Jesuits can't sing.

Well, not all Jesuits.

But in fact, it turns out that the pope is tone-deaf.

This gives poor Father A. some hope.  His liturgies may not be celebrated with as much elegance as he would like, but he can at least be comforted by knowing that they sound like the pope's.

Calling Thrivent

Years ago, Lutherans in the United States created two fine fraternal benefits organizations, called Lutheran Brotherhood and the Aid Association for Lutherans.  Both sold insurance and other financial products, and, rather than turning the profit over to shareholders, channeled it back to congregations.  It was, and remains, a neat system, and many congregations have benefited from it over the years.

Things being what they are, when LB and AAL merged, they chose one of those trendy names that says nothing: Thrivent.  Still a good organization, and one with which we are pleased to be associated.

But things being what they are, this company, which no longer has "Lutheran" in its name, now no longer wants to serve Lutherans.  Or at least not exclusively; Thrivent is contemplating changes to its charter which would open it up to other Christian communities.

There are no doubt good reasons for this idea, and they are no doubt financial.  But we still think it is a very bad idea.  This is part of a decades-long trend toward the de-Lutheranizing of Lutheran institutions.  From old folks' homes to colleges, our institutions try to soft-pedal their Lutheranism in order to attract a broader constituency.  The danger is that, in the end, they wind up just like anybody else's institutions.

How far do we want to go with this?  Right now, the contemplated change is to serve "Lutheran and other Christian congregations," which is a dramatic expansion of Thrivent's mission.  But how long until we decide to sell insurance to our Jewish and Muslim cousins, and serve "Lutheran, Christian and other communities of faith"?  And how long after that until Thrivent serves individuals with no faith community, or who are part of communities with no faith?  And how long after that until it merges with Met Life, and converts our annuity (or whatever) into shares of stock?

Lutheran identity is a tired old rallying cry, but it is still a real thing with real value in organizing our life together, and we are interested in strategies to increase it, rather than to eliminate it.

Mother A.  was chatting with a Thrivent staffer this this afternoon, and the proposed changes came up.  She asked a few basic questions, including whether the fraternal benefits would now become available to other Christian congregations.  The nice young man seemed to have no idea what she was talking about.  It wasn't his department, but he really seemed a little vague on what these "fraternal benefits" actually were.  This is the wrong direction for the firm to be heading.

She thanked him for her time, logged on to Thrivent's website and voted against the change.  Then she voted again, as Father A.'s proxy.  We encourage our Lutheran readers to do likewise.

Freakout Update

We spent a ton of time yesterday speculating on the service at St. John's Episcopal Church, where the Obamas worshiped on Easter Sunday.  We should have saved ourselves the effort, and waited for Brian Schoeneman.

Schoeneman is a long-time Republican lawyer and activist; he is also a member of St. John's.  Writing at Bearing Drift, "Virginia's Conservative Voice," he describes the service and the sermon

Luis was preaching on our Gospel lesson for the day, which came from John 20: 11-18, where Mary Magdalene sees Christ for the first time since he rose from the dead.  She refers to him as “rabbouni” (teacher) and he tells her she must not cling to him.  Luis explained that passage by talking about the dangers of nostalgia, and how Christ was explaining to Mary that she must not live in the past because we cannot go back to the past, no matter how much we may want to.  Christ knew that because he came, died for our sins and was resurrected, nothing would ever be the same again.  Mary and the disciples needed to understand that, and she did – when she tells the disciples of what she saw, she tells them “I saw the Lord” not “I saw our rabbi.”  His sermon was a message of hope, not hate, that he was delivering to our congregation.

He also takes to task the righttist pundits:

Sunday night, I perused the blogs after an excellent Easter dinner and saw that my pastor – my friend – was being accused of being the next Jeremiah Wright.  They called him a “dunce,” an “oaf,” and a “clown,” even going so far as to say that he’s a “false prophet,” or a “fake Christian” pastor, and that he was preaching “Satan’s deception.”

This isn’t a joke.  This is just the tip of the iceberg of the vile hate and disgusting nonsense that came out of people on Easter because of what they thought my pastor said.  Can you imagine someone saying that about your pastor?

Case closed, Breitbart.

Unless You're Into Phosphates ...

Gunnar Garfors has compiled a list of the 25 least-visited nations in the world.  In our misspent youth, a list like this would have been a challenge to be met; today, it is just an interesting read.

Untouristy nations divide into three categories:  (a) dangerous [Somalia]; (b) inaccessible [North Korea]; or (c) move-along-nothing-to-see-here.

The least visited nation in the world, Nauru, fits into that third category:

Nauru is a tiny island nation in the Pacific. The smallest republic in the world covers only 21 square kilometers. There is almost nothing to see there as most of the island (there's only one) is a large open phosphate mine. 

"Til Faith Do Us Part"

That's the title of a new study of interfaith marriages, by Naomi Schaefer Riley.  You can buy it from Oxford, or read a Times review by Stanley Fish.  (We did the latter.)

Back in the 1950s, our mother was forbidden to date Roman Catholic boys, on the grounds that religious differences would ultimately destroy any possible marriage.  This, at least, was the announced purpose of the prohibition; such were the times that, as Mom once hinted, the real goal may have been to keep her away from Italians.

Seems that something like 45% of US marriages over the last decade were between people of different religious faiths.  We're not sure whether marriages between sects of a single religion count toward that figure.  Is it Lutheran-Presbyterian, Shaiva-Vaishnava, or just Christian-Hindu?

In any case, this fact jumps out at us, from Fish's review:

Riley’s data show that “inter political party marriages are far less common than interfaith marriages.” Why, she asks, “do Americans seem so much more reluctant to marry outside of their political affiliation than their faith?”, and she answers that they may be “unaware or unwilling to acknowledge that religion can be a serious dividing in a marriage.” Because debating political differences is part of the culture in a way that debating religious differences is not, two people entering into a relationship are likely to be more concerned with the former than the latter.

It is a profoundly revealing sign of the times that our political convictions are now more emotionally fraught than our religious ones.

Prolepsis Redivivus

Recently, we proposed that, so far as same-sex marriage goes, "it's all over but the shouting."  That is, the tide has turned so rapidly and so irreversibly that the Supreme Court's pending decisions, whatever they turn out to be, are likely to be rendered moot by lawmakers.  Maybe not today, as Rick told Ilsa, maybe not tomorrow, but someday and for the rest of your life.

Today, Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) became the 50th senator and the 2nd Republican to back same-sex marriage.  Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) has announced that her views are "evolving," which means that she will switch over unless somebody offers her a lot of money not to.

Fifty means a dead heat.  Fifty-one means a majority.  Of course, it takes 60 to be unstoppable, but the dominoes are falling.

President Goes to Church; Right Wing Freaks Out

On Easter Sunday, President Obama and his family attended St. John's Episcopal Church, in Lafayette Square.  It is, we are told, one of the churches they frequent.  The rector preached a sermon, as you might expect, and then all hell broke loose.

Hate speech!  Preaching politics instead of religion!  Does Obama ever go to a church where they talk about God, or only to the ones where they attack his political enemies?  Does the President personally inspire racist sermons?

It is apparent at a glance that the president's political foes hope, whenever he worships, that they will be able to score the sort of propaganda victory that they did during the 2008 election, when they dug up some poorly-phrased remarks by his then-pastor, Jeremiah Wright.  Have they succeeded -- and if so, have they done so fairly or unfairly?

At the moment, it is nearly impossible to say, because neither a transcript nor an audio file of the entire sermon has been released.  Sermons from St. John's are normally posted on the parish website, and we suppose this one will be as well.  (Click here to check.  By the way, his Laetare sermon is pretty good.) At this writing, however, the only document in circulation consists of notes made by the press pool.  Here it is, as posted by the Washington Times:

Highlights from the Rev. Dr. Luis Leon’s sermon:

Opened with a welcome and a joke about people who came to church just so they could tell their parents or people they’re having lunch with later that they did.

What God wants of every one of us is to believe as much as we can at a given moment … it’s all right to have doubts.

We often want things to go back to the way things used to be, before “work got difficult and faith got confused, and life got more confusing,” but when we dwell on the “if only” of life we forget that “God addresses us in the now.”

As Jesus told Mary not to hold on to the past, “You cannot go back.”

“It drives me crazy when the captains of the religious right are always calling us back … for blacks to be back in the back of the bus … for women to be back in the kitchen … for immigrants to be back on their side of the border.”

“The message of Easter is about the power of love over loveless power.”

“Easter vision” will allow you to see the whole world in a different way. “There is no injustice so insidious that there can be no truth … no war so deep that there can be no peace … no enemy so bitter that they can’t become a friend.”

“Easter vision” means recognizing reality in a new and wonderful way.

“May God bless you with Easter vision now and forever.”

The sermon was followed by the prayers of the faithful, led by Rev. Patrick Williams, which included prayers for “Barack, our president,” and for “leaders in Afghanistan, Haiti, and the Middle East.

Next on the program was “The Peace”(during which members of the congregation shake hands and greet each other with “The peace of the Lord be with you,” etc.)

This was followed by the Holy Communion (along with its accompanying collection, hymns, and recitation of The Lord’s Prayer).

Pool was able to catch a glimpse of POTUS and the First Lady taking communion.

The post-communion prayer was “Hallelujah Chorus.”

Pool was ushered out at 12:39, before the dismissal. Now outside the church waiting for the president’s exit.

A correction: It was an error to assume that the Obamas were seated in the first pew. National Journal’s George Condon has pointed out that, according to the church website, it is tradition for the president to sit in pew 54.

The transcript ends there. The pool report was filed early Sunday afternoon by Jenee Desmond-Harris of TheRoot.com, an online magazine.

Obviously, this tells us very little about the service, or about the sermon.  Was the text from Luke or John?  (We gather John, from the reference to noli me tangere, but can we be sure?)  How did Fr. Luis Leon, the preacher, handle the apparent conflicts in the Resurrection narratives?  Did he treat the Resurrection of Jesus as the fulfillment of prophecy, an eschatological foreshadowing, or a symbol of the individual soul's mystical journey from sin to forgiveness?  Nobody knows except the people who were present, and then only if they were listening.

(We do have to love this commentary in the HuffPo takeout:

A person who who attended the church service told The Huffington Post there was no audible approval or disapproval from members of the congregation when León made his remarks about the religious right

Well, obviously.  They're Episcopalians.)

In any case, the freakout is entirely concerned with the single paragraph about "captains of the religious right."  Nobody seems to care much about what "Easter vision"might be, or whether Leon danced around the matter of a bodily Resurrection.

 Republicans are, understandably, sensitive about charges of racism these days, since only about 10 African Americans voted for them in the 2012 election, since their election strategy routinely includes suppression of the black and Hispanic vote, and since one of their elders recently spoke nostalgically about the good old days when "wetbacks" picked his tomatoes.  They are sensitive, in other words, because -- despite the presence of Bobby Jindal and Marco Rubio among their stars -- they are still old and white to a degree that poses serious questions about their future as a party.

Still, that begs the question of whether their concern in this case is valid.  Was Fr. Leon out of line, and if so, then how far?

To be honest, our own experience of the Religious Right suggests that, although it is home to many strange ideas about the relationship of church and state, Islam, Judiasm, women, science and history, it is not, by the standards of American conservatism, particularly racist at all -- and for good reasons.  Notwithstanding the likes of James Cone, black churches in America lean in a theologically and socially conservative direction that is familiar and congenial to the white nondenominationals.  Both groups like their families traditional, their gays closeted, and their Bible literal.  Among mainline Protestants, it is the Southern Baptists, rather than Lutherans or Episcopalians, who have been most effective at diversifying their own pews.  Racism may be at home on the American right, but the churches are not where it dwells most naturally.

So it seems to us that Fr. Leon might have chosen his words more wisely.  A lot more wisely, and more charitably to boot.  [UPDATE:  Mother A., who was raised in the bosom of the religious right, disagrees with our analysis.  She argues that racism is so deeply ingrained in American culture, and especially the culture of the South, that it is tacitly present in the life and teaching of most right-leaning Bible Belt churches.  We're still unsure, but she does know a lot more about that world than we do.]

The second, and broader, question is whether he should have mentioned politics at all in his Easter sermon.

This is tricky.  In our polarized nation, there is no easier way to divide a congregation than to treat the pulpit as a politician's rostrum, and to take firm positions on hotly disputed questions.  On the other hand, a preacher who looks away from the real world gives a poor testimony to the Incarnation or the Biblical vision of a just and merciful society.

In other words, the dichotomy between talking about God and talking about society is false, because God has quite a bit to say about how society is ordered.  (Related note of over-the-top hypocrisy:  When First Things writers argue that religion and politics don't mix.)

Our own Easter sermon, on "Why seek ye the living," etc., included this passage:

So if you are looking for Jesus, don't stand in the cemetery, reading the gravestones.  They are beautiful and touching, but they are not where Jesus lives.  If you are looking for Jesus, look among the young people held in an Italian prison, look among the victims of war in Afghanistan.  Look for him here on Long Island, among the families that have lost their homes and their savings in a hurricane.  Look for him among migrant workers, exploited because they do not know the law, or worse because the law does not protect them.  Look for Jesus in hospitals and nursing homes and hospices, where people are suffering and struggling and maybe, just maybe, making peace with their Creator and their Judge.  In Sandy Hook or Aurora, Colorado; in the Bronx or Brooklyn, any night of the week.  Anywhere there is pain or fear, injustice or violence, oppression or tyranny; anywhere that people are held captive by their own sin or by the sins of the world around them.  That's where Jesus is, because those are his people; that's where Jesus is, because it is his power, the power of love that leads to new life, that can set them free.

This may not look as "political" as Fr. Leon's sermon,  but it helps to remember that we are preaching in an area notorious for is exploitation and outright criminal abuse of Latino farm workers.  The guilty hear their sin named, while the rest barely notice.  And please do note that we share with Leon an emphasis upon the liberating power of God's love.

And let's be serious.  How many other preachers spent some time on Sunday talking about moral questions that happen also to be matters of political dispute?  We're willing to bet that more than one Roman Catholic mentioned abortion, and that more than one nondenominational mentioned the Second Amendment.  We can't swear to this, but we'd be surprised if it were not true.  For an Episcopal priest to express concern about racism, sexism and the treatment of immigrants is hardly surprising.

Mind you, we're waiting to hear the whole sermon.  We certainly hope that Fr. Leon had more to say about Jesus than the press pool cared to report, and we do wish that his one paragraph about the the backward-looking elements of American society had been phrased more tactfully.  And, for all we know, the rest of his sermon was a rousing call to sacrifice goats to Baal.

But, barring that, it must be said that by gum, our nation has more than its share of people who want black people and women and immigrants to go back to the places they used to have.  And, by further gum, these people are missing the moral mark, and badly.  If it is not a preacher's job to identify the sin, then whose?

It's On, Baby

The town council of Nelson, Georgia has voted to make gun ownership obligatory for its citizens.

To deal with those Tennesseans, no doubt.

We're At War!

Well, not us, safe up north.  But the simmering border dispute between the states of Tennessee and Georgia is about to boil over.  (Seriously:  this is a real thing.)

Fortunately, Danger Room's Andrew Exum has performed a tactical assessment.  It's a long read, full of maps and military jargon, but worth a look.  Exum, a former Army Ranger, born in Tennessee, envisions .50 caliber machine guns aimed down I-75 near the Eastgate Mall, and mortar positions near near Sir Goony's Family Fun Center.  Still, he knows it will be a long, hard slog to victory:

Two problems immediately come to mind, though. Even if Georgia is only able to mobilize half the residents of Atlanta, that’s still a lot of SUVs to stop. We can’t count on all of them to stop at the Cracker Barrel in Dalton and lose interest. That means we’ll soon run low on ammunition and be forced to retreat to Hixson. 

The other problem is that the University of Tennessee’s performance against the University of Georgia last year — in which Tennessee’s defense tackled like a bunch of Pop Warner 8-year-olds — doesn’t fill one with a lot of confidence about our state’s ability to stop much of anything coming out of Georgia. Indeed, the best we could hope for in this course of action is that the Georgians bring a Varsity franchise along with their invading army.

We also like his close:

The wars of the 9/11 era have demonstrated the perils of fighting heavily armed religious fundamentalists on their own soil. We Tennessee Presbyterians are a little like the Taliban — only certainly better armed and probably less tolerant of the Roman Catholic Church. Still, if Georgia wants to invade and occupy East Tennessee, it is welcome to try. Getting in should be easy. Getting out, however, is another matter entirely.

New New Atheism

The New Statesman is an annoying waste of paper.  We bought a copy at the airport, on a trip from London to Munich, and were simply appalled by the combination of smugness and outright hostility to its perceived opponents, whether religious or political.  It makes the National Review look like a model of thoughtful and open-minded discourse.

So we are pleasantly surprised by a feature posted at the New Statesman website called "After God:  What Can Atheists Learn from Believers?"  It includes brief essays by several prominent intellectuals:  Alain  de Botton, Karen Armstrong, and so forth.  One is a former bishop, one a physicist.

 Yes, it is smug -- it proceeds from the assumption that, in our society, "atheists are the mainstream," which seems tendentious at best.  Worse yet, it speaks unironically about "rid[ding] the world of the bigoted attitudes held and the injustices carried out in the name of religion," which would be fair enough were it not for the matter of the mote and beam.

Still, the general direction of the piece is to call upon atheists to display greater tolerance for religious believers, and perhaps to go beyond that, so far as to ask whether religion -- easily the most powerful force in the history of civilization, saving only money -- has something to contribute to the world they envision as "modern."

Some of the answers are deeply wrongheaded.  De Botton has nothing better to propose than that atheists seek out a new priesthood, with new gospels and new churches; perhaps he would like atheists to find their own forms of holy war and papal infallibility as well.

Others, however, are subtler and show a greater understanding of the subject.  Francis Spufford argues that the New Atheism, as represented specifically by Dawkins, is a sort of puritanism, a rigid creed which sees others only as enemies to be extirpated.  Thus, he says, is unrealistic:

That gunk the New Atheists scrub at so assiduously is the inevitable matter of human culture, of imagination. People secrete it, necessarily, faster than it can be removed. Metaphors solidify into stories wherever the reformers’ backs are turned. 

We’ll never arrive at the Year Zero where everything means only what science says it should. Religion being a thing that humans as a species do continuously, it seems unlikely that we’ll stop, any more than we’ll stop making music, laws, poetry or non-utilitarian clothes to wear. Imagination grows as fast as bamboo in the rain. 

The world cannot be disenchanted. Even advocacy for disenchantment becomes, inexorably, comically, an enchantment of its own, with prophets, with heresies and with its own pious mythography.

Precisely.

Perhaps the most poignant paragraph comes from the physicist, Jim Al-Khalili.  Aware that some of his comrades will accuse him of accommodating religion, he nonetheless writes:

There are many issues on which we [atheists] cannot afford to be complacent or conciliatory, such as the evil intent of religious fanatics, the wrong-headedness of creationists or the many injustices carried out against women or minority groups in the name of barbaric medieval laws, but we can often be more effective in getting our message across with a softer approach. 

Most Egg readers will see at a glance that the matters which concern Al-Khalili are precisely those which concern most mainline Protestants, not to mention a great majority of Roman Catholics in the US, as well as a significant number of believers across the world's religious spectrum.  The average Muslim has little use  for Al Qaeda, and in fact knows very well that it has deeply undermined his own (or, far more probably, her own) prospects for a free, prosperous and dignified life.  We have yet to find a Roman Catholic who actually supports child molestation, or an Episcopalian who thinks that Jesus rode a dinosaur.

We are all troubled by fanaticism and barbarism, especially when undertaken in the name of our various faiths.  It is on these matters that the New Atheists, had they not been so blinded by the fury of Creationists that they met it with their own blind fury, could most easily have made common cause with the moderate religionists.  And, if the Spuffords and Al-Khalilis among them are right, they still may.

We invite our atheist neighbors to go a step further, and join both mainline Protestantism and Roman Catholicism in public action around the other matters of civil righteousness that have, over the last century, preoccupied us:  concern for the poor and the disenfranchised; civil and human rights; making peace, both among nations and among communities with different beliefs.