Disintegration of the world financial system …

The world financial system has effectively disintegrated says said George Soros on Friday at a Columbia University dinner. Reaganomic deregulation is at the root of our current, perhaps historically unprecedented catastrophe.

Bailout, anyone?

‘Muscular Christianity’ takedown

Critical reservations about our positive reviews of Muscular Christianity came to us by way of this Saturday Night Live Hans & Franz lampoon.

Dog, elephant and Southern Baptist intolerance

Oklahoma Baptist bloggers like Wade Burleson aren’t all about animal-friends stories. Or, once upon a time when the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) was still larger, they weren’t reduced to a metaphoric tale about about a dog and an elephant who are best friends. Even as recently as Nov. 7, 2007, although he had already left the SBC, pastor David Flick met the issues of SBC conflict head-on with a bullet-point historic summation.

Like Burleson, he sees intolerance as an overarching problem. He wrote:

This week, Southern Baptist intolerance has raised its ugly head yet again. The International Mission Board could not tolerate trustee, Wade Burleson’s, principled dissent on several issues of little consequence. In the scheme of things, Burleson’s dissent amounts to little more than a hill of beans. Yet the IMB, led by chairman John Floyd and former chairman, Jerry Corbaley, censured him. In a wildly slanderous and lengthy report, Cobaley accused Burleson of slander and sin. Burleson’s censure says a lot about the credibility of the IMB. on a scale of 1-10, the IMB’s credibility is minus-6. It says a lot about Burleson’s credibility as well. On the same scale, Burleson’s credibility is a strong-9.

Yet more than intolerance is involved, Flick argues in a document here which deserves to be revisited while others attempt to arrest the well-foreseen inquisitorial process which has been grinding down the SBC. Flick details a history of manipulative conservative Baptist myth-making. Baptist-associated businesslike institutions — colleges and hospitals, for example — which are capable of reacting to the conservative takeover strategies have in general done so. They have progressively disassociated themselves from the SBC. Tony Cartledge chronicles North Carolina’s experience with those departures in The Changing Face of the BSC [.pdf].

Left behind are enterprises like the North Carolina Biblical Recorder, which was apparently too legally entangled to detach.

Yes, Burleson is late to the game, as John Pierce of Baptists Today observed in reviewing Burleson’s new book, Hardball Religion: Feeling the Fury of Fundamentalism.

Still it is Hardball, as Burleson said in the title of his book — not saccharine zoo-animal stories — and has been played for decades, with an accumulating destruction score.

James Madison on where the ‘wall of separation’ applies to faith-based initiatives

Today is the anniversary of President James Madison 1811 veto of “An act incorporating the Protestant Episcopal Church in the town of Alexandria, in the District of Columbia.”

Rob Boston reminds us of Madison’s words:

“[T]he bill,” he wrote, “exceeds the rightful authority to which governments are limited by the essential distinction between civil and religious functions, and violates in particular the article of the Constitution of the United States which declares that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting a religious establishment.’”
. . .
“[T]he bill vests in the said incorporated church an authority to provide for the support of the poor and the education of poor children of the same, an authority which, being altogether superfluous if the provision is to be the result of pious charity, would be a precedent for giving to religious societies as such a legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil duty.”

Boston argues that Madison would have similarly resisted the Obama administration’s current blurring of church/state lines in the faith-based initiatives.

The Anti-Defamation League is similarly concerned.

Mark Silk writes, “The [ADL] letter goes beyond the hiring issue to make it clear that additional safeguards are needed, including separation of religious and secular functions, oversight, and the assurance of secular alternatives to faith-based service provision.”

Right on target, and this is the right day to remember it.

Nurse Ratched didn’t have modern, psychotropic drugs

Charged with using psychotropic drugs to achieve the goals of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, three former top managers of a Kern County, Calif., were arrested. The Los Angeles Times reported:

“The state attorney general’s office contended in a criminal complaint that more than 20 residents at a skilled nursing center run by the Kern Valley Healthcare District were drugged ‘for staff convenience.’ Many of them experienced side effects that included dramatic weight loss, slurred speech, tremors, loss of cognition and even psychosis, according to the complaint.”
. . .
“These people maliciously violated the trust of their patients by holding them down and forcibly administering psychotropic medications if they dared to question their care,” state Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown said.

“Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.”

You can read the entire complaint from California Attorney General Jerry Brown’s office here.

Holocaust-denying bishop ordered out of Argentina

Williamson

Unrepentant Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson is being booted out of Argentina, where on Feb. 9 he was dismissed as director of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) seminary in La Reja. He has 10 days to leave.

Legally, Williamson failed to declare his true job as director of a seminary on immigration forms interior ministry, but Argentine officials make it clear that his Holocaust-denials “profoundly insulted Argentine society, the Jewish community and all of humanity by denying the historic truth.”

Argentina’s Jewish population, one of the world’s largest, praised the decision.

Ordered by Pope Benedict XVI to recant, Williamson has not done so, claiming he needed time to research the issue so that he can act with sincerity. The head of Williamson’s Swiss-based society, Monsignor Bernard Fellay, said in an interview published Monday that Williamson should be given time to reconsider his denials.

There is pressure on the pope to further repudiate Williamson’s views, and time appears to be running out, now in more than one regard.

Hardball Religion: Feeling the Fury of Fundamentalism

The book Hardball Religion by Wade Burleson gets an almost play-by-play punches-unpulled review from John Pierce, executive editor of Baptists Today.

Key snippet:

Burleson’s courage to stand toe-to-toe with abusive power-brokers, to expose the misuse of denominational authority and resources, and to defend those harmed by heavy-handed tactics is commendable.

Yet, for so many of us, his recent “discovery” of fundamentalism in the Southern Baptist Convention is not breaking news. It shows just how late Burleson is getting to the game.

He writes: “I began to realize in 2005, to my horror, that the issue causing such pain in the Southern Baptist Convention was not a battle for a belief in the inspired, inerrant word of God.”

Burleson is right. It is about something else — something very destructive.

Read the entire review here.

FOCA uncampaign with key story

Amid the uproar over the still-unintroduced Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), one news story occasions almost as much refutation as the Time magazine article describing a fear-provoking, Catholic-led campaign against nonexistent legislation. That story had been largely ignored since its publication on Jan. 26, until cited by Time

At Catholics in Alliance for the Good, the story says [their summary]:

Internet rumors to the contrary, no Catholic hospital in the United States is in danger of closing because of the Freedom of Choice Act. As a matter of fact, the Freedom of Choice Act died with the 110th Congress and, a week after the inauguration of President Barack Obama, has not been reintroduced. But that hasn’t kept misleading e-mails from flying around the Internet, warning of the dire consequences if Obama signs FOCA into law and promoting a “FOCA novena” in the days leading up to Inauguration Day. Sister Carol Keehan, a Daughter of Charity who is CHA president and CEO, was equally sure that FOCA poses no threat to Catholic hospitals or to the conscience rights of those who work there.

Time’s Amy Sullivan didn’t write a perfect article, but the current campaign is still against legislation which has not been introduced, is unlikely to pass if introduced and may do far less harm to opponents’ interests than they suggest.

Perhaps the purpose of current efforts is to cut a firebreak. That’s a part of ordinary American political life, charges and counter-charges and all.

On abortion rights issues like this one, with a pro-choice president in office, expect more intensity. Not less.

Fundamental considerations

In Ethics Daily Baptist pastor Jim Evans wrote of Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.:

Mohler would likely argue that it’s impossible to believe in Jesus without first believing in the Bible. The problem here is the simple fact that for the first 1,000 years of the history of the church, the Bible was hardly available to believers. Jesus was experienced in preaching, in fellowship and in the ordinances of the church. It’s only been since the invention of moveable type that the printed word became the primary source of revelation.

Is Evans not saying that American Fundamentalism and Inerrancy are too new, historically, to support some species of sweeping claims? His entire piece is here.

How much religious liberty should Arkansans have?

Don Byrd blogging for The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty reports:

Believe it or not, a few states still have constitutional provisions disallowing atheists from holding office, completely – of course, at odds with the US Constitution’s guarantee that there can be no religious test. An effort is under way in Arkansas to do something about it.