Kissing Frogs and Beating Horses

Having attained his majority in the 1980s, Father Anonymous has always taken for granted the truth of that era's pieties:  that Madonna is a gifted artist exploring the boundaries of sexual self-expression, and that buyouts help to build strong corporations.  Increasingly, however, it seems that these are both errors.  Madge, for example, seems more and more like the chorus girl who woke up in a big bed and thinks she must be a lady.  And according to James Surowiecki in the New Yorker, those mergers and acquisitions a la Gordon Gekko actually do more harm than good.

Seems that only about 17% of corporate mergers studied by KPMG created real value, while more than fifty percent destroyed value.  This is apparently no big secret; when CBS announced it was buying CNET, the Tiffany Network's stock took a quick dive.

So why, after decades of failure -- or, heck, after AOL/TimeWarner --  is M&A still a common strategy?  Surowiecki has a couple of ideas.  In some cases, it really is good business, as when two banks merge their assets and cut their "back-room costs," meaning staff, to save money.  But many more cases can be explained by corporate myths, including the myth of synergy, which, Surowiecki writes,

appeals to executives’ sense of themselves as magic-workers. As Warren Buffett once put it, executives see the companies they acquire as handsome princes imprisoned in toads’ bodies, awaiting only the “managerial kiss” to set them free. Unfortunately, most toads turn out to be as warty as they look, and magic kisses are harder to bestow than executives think.

In other words, it's about executive ego.  But its also about the closely-related matter of investor expectations: 

C.E.O.s of public companies often feel what you might call the “grow or die” imperative .... It’s the rare C.E.O., of course, who’s comfortable presiding over a shrinking empire, and running a public company creates a bias toward action, if only as a way of convincing investors that you recognize your problems and are dealing with them. 

Wait. "Grow or die" -- this sounds familiar. How many churches, when a pastor or worse yet outside consultant is talking to them about evangelism, have been hectored to grow or die, usually with the image of a shark that can't stop swimming lest it drown? (Which is, incidentally, a myth.  Sharks do sleep.  And incidentally, the Chinese word for crisis is not a combination of danger and opportunity).

Bishops, like CEOs, are often taken by the myth of synergy.  St. Rigomortis' is a declining urban parish, ever since the Bohemians moved out of the neighborhood.  And O.L. of Aquavit has been hurting for years, ever since the Danes were replaced by Yuppies.  But if we merge them -- argue the bishops, and other judicatory leaders -- if we merge them, then we'll have one nice big healthy parish.  Right?

And sometimes it works.  Father A. knows very fine congregations formed by merger.  Saleable real estate makes a pretty good dowry, and will see the new family through a lot of tough times.  But often it fails (and we at the Egg don't know the success/failure ratio -- yet). 

Of course it does, because synergy is a myth.  Two congregations, like two companies, are the sum of both their assets and their liabilities, human as well as financial.  But in the case of churches, unlike that of companies, if both were thriving, there would be no merger.  Which means that at least one, and often both, have more liabilities than otherwise.  This is (and watch for another 80s allusion here) risky business.  

Merging two truly moribund congregations is sometimes remarkably like beating a dead horse, and makes onlookers want to cry "Just give the poor thing a decent burial."  And the executive ego-trip is matched by the myth of "the right person" -- that is, a pastor whose kisses can work magic on a frog.  Frankly, it's fun to watch the poor bastard keep kissing, until he finally leaves the synod to do the same work somewhere else.

For both churches and businesses, there will always be times when a merger makes sense.  But as Surowiecki writes, 

... history suggests that, when it comes to mergers, the best response is often to just say no. In effect, deals like the CNET acquisition are a bit like an aging outfielder taking steroids in order to stave off the boobirds. The difference is that steroids usually work.

Perhaps We Missed the Point

Per the Times, an article on "Lord's Gym," a Christian health club.  You can tell it's Christian because people read the Bible while they walk the treadmill, the music is Christian rock, and there's an airbrushed mural of the Apocalypse in the kickboxing room. 

No word on whether membership dues are tithed to a a local homeless shelter or food pantry.

The Apocalypse is Upon Us!

They're walking to work in Dallas.  And talking about congestion pricing.

Afghan Bloodbath Worsens

May 2008 was the bloodiest month in Afghanistan since 2001.  This is despite the fact that troop levels are at their highest since the campaign there began.

Please skim down to the Egg's may 12 post, "The Moral Minority," for a reminder of how blinded by their own ideology and propaganda the neo-cons were when the fight in Afghanistan was still fresh.  In early 2002, our colleague Father Ron assured us that the war was "winding down."  Of course, he also thought that nobody cared much about the World Trade Center.  It was this counting of un-hatched chickens that led us to fight the unnecessary war in Iraq before winning the thoroughly necessary one in Afghanistan.

But don't lose sight of the fact that Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, is an essential front in the war against terrorism.  This is one that we actually do have to win, as we will probably have to win the eventual combat operations in Pakistan, whether or not they are undertaken with the support of that nation's government.  (Holy cow!  Did I just type that?  it feels like I've broken the code of silence.  But come on -- we all know it will have to be done.)

Preaching the Gospel is a Hate Crime

Well, sometimes, when it's done very badly.

But we are still a little shocked that two street-corner evangelists in England were told they could not do their thing "because this is a Muslim area."  We are considerably more shocked that a police officer agreed, and warned that if they came back, they would be beaten up.

We at the Egg will confess that we have occasionally wanted to beat up a street preacher.  They just bug us.  But we have always refrained, both because of our a priori commitment to free speech, and because we were convinced that the law would punish us if we assaulted somebody because we didn't like what they said.  

Apparently Britons -- or at least British Muslims -- lack this commitment or this conviction.

Obama STILL Needs a New Church

Jacques Berlinerblau has some suggestions.  We still think ours is better, though.

Fox News is Now the Pope

And it has excommunicated Obama.

Columnist Cal Thomas, writing on the Fox website, unearths a 2004 book in which Obama was interviewed about his faith.  And he doesn't like what he finds.  Thomas snidely observes that Obama "has declared himself a Christian," but quotes the senator saying “I believe there are many paths to the same place, and that is a belief that there is a higher power, a belief that we are connected as a people.”  Uh-oh, says Thomas -- universalism!

Worse yet, Obama is guilty of "work salvation," (sic) because he isn't sure that he or his children will go to heaven, but is nonetheless proud to have raised them well, and tucks them in at night.

Thomas claims that "any first-year seminary student could deconstruct" these remarks, and concludes that "Obama can call himself anything he likes, but there is a clear requirement for one to qualify as a Christian and Obama doesn’t meet that requirement."

Err.  Hmmm.  Sorta.  Obama certainly doesn't meet the requirements for fundamentalist Christianity, nor even rigid Evangelicalism.  But then, we never thought he did. He is, after all -- or was until last week -- a member of the United Church of Christ, the most theologically flexible of the mainline Protestant groups.

But here's the thing.  Obama says nothing, at least as quoted here, that Father Anonymous doesn't hear on a regular basis from members of his church.  A great many devout and thoughtful Christians have wrestled with the issues surrounding the ultimate destiny of non-Christians.  

In a seventeenth-century sermon, John Donne addressed the question by saying (and this is from memory, so the details may be off) "I don't know what provision God may have made for saving souls in China or India; I only know the provision he has made for saving mine."  During the 20th century, this line of thought was pursued more aggressively, especially among those with a special interest in missiology.  Robert Jenson, a hero to many Lutheran theologians, has written that evangelical theology according to the Augsburg Confession permits the possibility (although it cannot declare the fact) of universal salvation.  The Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner devised the theory that "anonymous Christians," good people who have not heard or even have rejected the Gospel, may nonetheless be saved by the merits of Christ.  Rahner's far more conservative student, Joseph Ratzinger, appears to have been taken with this idea.  At a papal audience in 2005, commenting on something by Augustine, Pope Benedict XVI said "Whoever seeks peace and the good of the community with a pure conscience, and keeps alive the desire for the transcendent, will be saved even if he lacks biblical faith."  (Note the works-righteousness here, far more piquant than anything Obama says!)

So, while Thomas may be correct from one narrow perspective, it is important to recognize that from the same perspective most Anglicans, Lutherans and Roman Catholics, along with virtually all liberal Protestants, are not Christians any more than Obama is.  If Cal's church won't have him, then one of ours certainly will.

The real question for us is why Fox feels that it should be in the business of theological analysis as part of its campaign coverage.  After all, America doesn't have any religious test for office ... does it?

Cheney Says West Virginians are Incestuous

This could explain why they refuse to believe that Obama is a Christian.

But seriously, folks.  The Veep's display of contempt for West Virginia should come as no surprise.  The Bush Administration, with its love of cheap energy and hatred of industrial oversight, has done its best to destroy the state, one mountaintop and one river at a time.  it is pretty clear that, if they don't actually hate the Mountain State, they certainly have no use for it.

Jesus at Gunpoint

American soldiers, notably the 101st Airborne, are working overtime to convert Iraqis to Christianity.  On patrol, they pass out Bibles and fundamentalist tracts, as well as fake coins imprinted with a "Jesus loves you" message.  Some of these tracts are pretty damned offensive, such as the Jack Chick comic books, which not only show cartoon pictures of Mohammed, but also show him roasting in Hell along with other Muslims.

This is a direct violation of General Order 1A, Part 2, Section J as issued by Tommy Franks, which forbids proselytization.  It is probably a violation of the US Constitution, which forbids the government (for which these soldiers work) from promoting one religion at the expense of others.

It is also -- and here's the part that troubles us today -- incomparably bad military strategy.  It virtually guarantees that American troops will be perceived as a "Crusader army," in Iraq not for political but for religious reasons.  This, in turn, will feed the Islamist recruiting machine.  Religion -- and we say this in our driest tone -- has proven to be a remarkably good motivator in those parts.   Good strategists know better, of course.  The  Army/Marine Counterinsurgency Manual, written principally by Gen. David Petraeus, says bluntly that "US forces should show respect for local religions and traditions .... US forces must make clear that they do not intend to undermine or change the local religion or traditions."  (6-60, if you want to check).

Do we need to mention that it isn't an especially good evangelism strategy, either?  The Gospel promoted by soldiers carrying automatic weapons smacks strongly of colonialism and forced conversion.

It gets a lot worse when we hear stories like the one about a sniper using the Quran for target practice.  To Iraqi ears -- and frankly, not only theirs -- it really does sound as if our soldiers have begun to perceive themselves not as the instruments of a secular nation, deployed to achieve its political goals, but as religious crusaders, sent to either convert the infidel or to kill him.

The chaplain corps is complicit here.  Once dominated by moderate Episcopalians and, to a lesser degree, Lutherans, it has in recent years been the object of a fundamentalist takeover attempt, apparently not yet entirely completed.  The problems at the Air Force academy are pretty well documented, and we have heard instructors at West Point describe heavy pressure on new cadets from moderate Christian households to accept the Christianist model.  And it appears that chaplains are the conduit by which Jack Chick comics, in Arabic, have reached the Middle East -- suggesting strongly that military chaplains have overstepped their bounds.  They need to be reminded that they are there to serve the religious needs of the soldiers, not to re-write American military doctrine.

This behavior undermines the American military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.  It is illegal and it is foolish.  It endangers our forces and emboldens our enemies.  Certainly, the individual soldiers caught doing these things will be punished, as they should be.  But more is needed.  A thorough house-cleaning of the chaplain corps is required.  Careers need to be ended abruptly.  Relationships with the publishers who provide these printed materials need to be terminated.  And it needs to happen yesterday.

Obama Needs a New Church

After all, he quit Trinity UCC last week.  And who could blame him?  Trinity's pulpit has done what neither Hillary Clinton nor the secret-Muslim-fearing morons of West Virginia could accomplish:  actually hurt Obama's campaign.  

At coffee hour today, old Father Anonymous made a deal with some of his parishioners.  "If any of you ever runs for president," he said, "I promise not to publicly humiliate you.  And if I do it by mistake, I promise to apologize quickly, and then keep my damn mouth shut until you're elected."  It just seemed like the decent thing to do.

But why wait?  We can begin not embarrassing candidates today. If Senator Obama would like to join a church where visiting clergy are politely asked to talk about Jesus rather than make fun of a woman's tears, and "inflammatory rhetoric" really just means talking about how to get the incense lit, then he should consider our little neo-Gothic patch of Paradise.

But fair warning, sir:  we will ask you to bring baked goods to coffee hour.

Which Inflammatory Pastor Are You?

A quiz from 236.com.  Turns out I'm Arthur Tooth, who -- oh, wait, that was the Facebook "Great Anglo-Catholics" quiz.

McCain Team Unafraid of Grammar

On the hustings, Sen. McCain recently boasted that troops in Iraq had been drawn down to pre-surge levels.  They have not.  When confronted with his misrepresentation of the facts, McCain simply denied that he had made a mistake.  (Why?  Maybe he is afraid people will call him senile -- or maybe he's just another GOPer who doesn't want to be troubled by facts).

Confusion about troop levels does nothing to bolster our confidence in the mastery of military policy which is supposedly McCain's advantage in the coming race.  But far more serious, for our money, is his claim at the same conference that "things are quiet" in Mosul, on a day when suicide bombers killed 30 people.  It smacks of the claim that war is peace.

McCain's staff mounted a spirited and creative defense.  Advisor Randy Scheunemann told reporters it was all a question of "semantics," and said that "if you're going to start fact-checking verb tenses, we're going to make sure we start monitoring verb tenses a lot more closely than we have in this campaign."

An excellent idea, and we thank Mr. Scheunemann for volunteering to undertake monitor duty.  Because, as our old Latin teacher was at pains to make us understand, verb tenses actually make a difference in the meaning of a sentence.  "I am old" is a rather different thing than "I will be old," for example.  (And we thank Mr. Scheunemann for his observation that Sen. Obama is apparently confused about the number of states in the Union.)

Nonetheless, we at the Egg are concerned that McCain's team does not seem to grasp the distinctions among grammar (the rules that govern meaning in a language), semantics (the study of how meaning is communicated) and facts (the actual things that are meant).  McCain's initial error was one of fact, not of grammar:  155,000 American soldiers risking their lives in Iraq today is demonstrably not fewer than the 130,000 who did do before the surge.  He apparently attempted to argue that the error was a grammatical one, because the number of soldiers may someday -- perhaps even in July -- be smaller than it is now.  And his advisors seem to believe that the press has committed a semantic error by failing to conflate the present indicative and future subjunctive.

It is possible that McCain and his team are correct here.  It simply depends -- as someone close to the campaign once observed, in another context -- on what the meaning of "is" is.

Department of No Surprise: Vatican Edition

Times header:  "Vatican Asserts Rule that Bars Female Priests."

Really?  We hadn't guessed.  Oh, wait, we had guessed -- since the Vatican has ben utterly unwavering on this question since the dawn of time.  It is "news," by the broadest possible definition of that term, only because the challenge from groups like Womanpriest forces periodic restatements, most recently phrased in a terse threat of excommunication.

Side note to Womanpriest and its adherents:  So you want a Catholic Church that has been reformed?  Married priests, female priests, congregations choosing their own pastors?  maybe even a little flexibility on divorce?  But still identifiably catholic -- saints' days, vestments, a strong commitment to the reality of Christ's presence in the world, made visible by the sacraments?  The good news is that your dream church already exists.

We call it Lutheranism.  Join today.

Department of No Surprise: Sex (& City) Edition

The Times doesn't like the Sex and the City movie.  Per Manohla Dargis, it is "vulgar, shrill, shallow, and overlong."  Confirming what husbands and boyfriends all over the tristate region have been dreading.  We'll bet there isn't even a car chase.

In All Fairness to Geraldo ...

...who's still an idiot.  Click the link to read the kind of dumbassery he was referring to.  Obama's supposed "friend" Michael Pfleger, a Roman priest, stood in the pulpit of Trinity UCC and went off on Senator Clinton's campaign-trail tears as emblems of white privilege.  In no uncertain terms. So much for compassion.  

Pfleger has since apologized, which is the least he could do.  Obama's "friends" from church seem to be among his worst enemies.  Wright and Pfleger could not do the Obama campaign more harm if they tried -- which makes many of us wonder whether in fact they are trying.

Geraldo's an Idiot

Per the HuffPo:  Geraldo "Troop Locations" Rivera had a little hissyfit on TV this morning, complaining about religious figures who express political opinions.  Apparently, it "gives him the creeps."  His most quoted remark will certainly be:  "If I hear one more rabbi talking about Israel, excuse me:  shut up!"

While we confess a certain sympathy on this matter -- we too are irritated by churches that actually tell their members how to vote, as we are by Christians who go to church hoping to be told how to vote -- he is missing many of the bigger points.  A nation in which religious views are systematically excluded from matters of public policy is a nation teetering toward disaster (please read Bishop Nazir-Ali's essay, linked below).  

And we don't know that much about Judaism, but it occurs to us that a rabbi who doesn't talk about Israel is about as useless as a Christian priest who doesn't talk about Heaven.

Nice Schmattes, Your Grace

We at the Egg have a terrible confession to make.  We are dreadfully, pitifully shallow.

Here's a f'rinstance:  The Rt. Rev. Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester (that would be, ahem, the one in Britain) is one of the most potentially important figures in the emerging conversation about Christianity and Islam as they meet in the public square.  He is a native of Pakistan, and has served a priest both there and in England; he was an assistant to Archbishop Runcie, and advisor to Prince Charles.  And he has recently published an essay which lays out, as clearly as one could hope, the position of cultural conservatives, especially Christian ones, with regard to the vexed matter of passionate Muslims residing in a nation that grows steadily less Christian.

It is well-written, and not the least foolish.  Nazir-Ali describes the loss of a national identity, and national consensus on ethics, which emerged from and depended largely upon, Christianity. He contends that Islam, and specifically radical Islam, will fill the void, replacing "the Christian virtues of humility, service and sacrifice" with the Islamic ones, which he identifies as "honour, piety, and the importance of 'saving face.'"  (We may quibble with his lists -- both religions have a more complex value system, but certainly both can be reduced to something like this in the popular imagination).

While formally renouncing any vision of theocracy or legal coercion, he calls for his government to take greater notice of religious values, and for Christians to be more persuasive in arguing for the superiority of our values.  (He puts it more tactfully:  "to argue our case in terms of the common good.")  He also takes a swipe at Rowan Williams -- we almost typed Rowan Atkinson, such is our fury on this matter -- when he argues that although Muslims will "of course" continue to be guided by sharia law, "recognising its jurisdiction in terms of public law is fraught with difficulties because it arises from a different set of assumptions from the traditions of law here."  To say the least.

Irritatingly, Nazir-Ali roots the "fragmentation" of national identity in the student and related movements of the 1960s, and cites a series of almost-certainly-rightist scholars to support this. This is trite conservative cant.  In fact, worries about the loss of an ethical tradition, in which theology and  national identity were bound up, was at the heart of literary Modernism, from the First World War forward.  Think of Yeats' deaf falcon, or of every single word ever written by T.S. Eliot, including but and the.  It takes a lot more than some whiny undergrads, and a lot longer than a decade, to undermine centuries of social evolution.  The blame-the-60s crowd has always been shortsighted on this, probably because of Boomer self-regard.

So we do not by any means endorse or agree with everything in Bishop Nazir-Ali's essay, but we find the piece thoughtful, well-informed, and frank.  By all means click on the link to read it.

Ah, yes.  But what, you ask makes us shallow?  Only this:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk:80/news/article-1022491/Bishop-says-collapse-Christianity-wrecking-British-society--Islam-filling-void.html

Copy and paste the link to read a so-so press summary of the bishop's essay.  And then look at the picture.  Nazir-Ali may be thoughtful and all that, but he is wearing what must be the ugliest cope and mitre we have ever seen, and it breaks our shallow, shallow heart.

The Bridge to Nowhere

It's not just for Alaska anymore.

Developers in the Middle East want to build the world's longest suspension bridge, 18 miles across the Red Sea, to connect Egypt to the Arabian peninsula.  It would make sense, I guess, except that the proposed Arabian end of the bridge would be a barely-inhabited rural desert in Yemen, a nation in which 80% of the population chews a narcotic called khat just to get through the day.  They don't need a bridge, they need rehab.

But the kicker, at least for Americans, is that one of the lead developers is Osama bin Laden's brother.  Sure, he's a legit entrepreneur, whose family cut ties to the bad boy, et cetera.  But still -- would you buy an 18-mile bridge from this man?

Vikings Come to Jurassic Park

Scientists raiding a pagan burial ground have retrieved useable DNA strands from ten Vikings, all dead about 1000 years.  (Apparently, not all Vikings were incinerated at sea).  It's a big deal, because previous efforts have been contaminated with modern DNA, leading some people to think we could never clone our ancestors.  Joke's on them, though.

Oh, they'll try to tell you it's all about the boring stuff that constitutes "real science" -- migration patterns, the origin of genetic diseases, yadda-yadda.  The authors of the paper even write that "retrieval of authentic DNA opens the way for a valuable use of prehistoric human remains to elucidate the genetic history of past and extant populations."

Sure it will, boys.  Sure it will.  But we all know what you're up to:  A cloned army of berserkers, sweeping down from the frozen north to pillage and destroy.  Or else a revolution in Minnesota football.

Paging Father Damian

Every day, according to an inside estimate, one person in Germany has a demon driven out of them in the rite of exorcism.  Apparently, the demand is steep (insert obligatory German joke here).  About one applicant in ten is actually exorcised; the others must make do with Thorazine.  Still, the demand is so high that -- when bishops don't authorize the rite frequently enough -- the possessed will seek help in neighboring countries, or from unauthorized exorcists.

Next January, we expect to read that a team of highly skilled exorcists has been called to Number One Observatory Circle, in DC.  'Cause He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named will finally be gone, but who knows what he'll leave behind?