‘Dissent’ (the magazine) comes to blogging

Literate American dissent, not the bizarre ramblings of attention hungry broadcast personalities, may be most closely identified with the small-circulation magazine “Dissent.”

True to their history, they’ve launched a blog called “The Arguing World.” Online Editor David Marcus explains:

Dissent has always been an international project. Founded with the hope of finding “what in the socialist tradition remains alive and what needs to be discarded,” the magazine took its early inspiration as much from the socialism and social democracy of postwar Europe as it did from its opposition to the growing conformity of American intellectual life. “American writers had [always] reached out toward Europe,” wrote Irving Howe in A Margin of Hope, and in the 1950s, “at the end of a line…the idea of Europe gave [us] a renewed energy.”

It is with this same hope for renewed, as well as new, energy that we are pleased to launch “Arguing the World”: a blog that will transcend borders and oceans, sects and parties. Our choice of comrades is transatlantic, and our arguments will be with those at home and abroad, on the right and on the left. Over the years, Dissent has become a platform for a breed of utopianism that has been, at once, democratic and radical, connected and cosmopolitan; and it is this vision of a grounded, worldly utopianism that will be a guiding spirit for our blog. “Arguing the World” will be an online conversation that not only traverses the world but will also be of it.

“Arguing the World” takes its name from Joseph Dorman’s documentary about four young radicals who gathered in a City College cafeteria to debate politics and literature. One of them was Irving Howe, who became a founding editor of Dissent; the others—Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, and Nathan Glazer—went on to edit the Public Interest. Each went his own political direction—Bell once quipped that he was a “liberal in politics, a conservative in culture, and a socialist in economics”—but taken together they represented a particular way of thinking, and arguing, and worrying, out loud.

Theirs is a cultured, civilized dissent, informed by history like From Nixon to Prager, and mercy, like Too Many Children Left Behind. Worth a visit.

[H/T: Matthew Boudway]

Retro-innovative Georgia Baptist Convention time travelers

Seeking to disfellowship Atlanta’s Druid Hills Baptist Church, the Georgia Baptist Convention (GBC) is fleeing present reality. The GBC executive committee recommended that change at its March 16 meeting and Shelia M. Poole of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote today:

“It seems sad that they decided to go backwards in time,” said the 52-year-old Mimi Walker, a former missionary in the Philippines. “I’m not sure what the value is of trying to go back in time when women were held in subservience.”

The overarching result, not value, is a steadily smaller, more strictly Batholic and of course less diverse Southern Baptist Convention.

Thinking about McLaren & SBTS inerrancy

Tony Cartledge’s endorsement of Brian McLaren’s book, “A New Kind of Christianity”, may be enough to drive Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) to again brand Cartledge a “heretic.”

During a panel discussion, Mohler calls McLaren’s book a “straightforward rejection … of the Christian meta-narrative.” But Cartledge writes:

Brian McLaren, among the brightest and most significant Christian thinkers of our age, is on a mission to save Christianity from itself. With impressive erudition, genuine humility, and a deep love for Christ and the church, McLaren dares to ask questions that contemporary believers need to confront. Questions, however, are quite threatening to traditionalists who are confident that they already have the answers, thank you very much.

Like their last faceoff, then, this difference is over issues which cut right to the root of Mohler’s theological world. Indeed, as Cartledge explains, Mohler “devoted a chapel service to a panel discussion designed to debunk McLaren’s work and warn students against the sort of ideas the popular author might lead them to think.”

Some say McLaren is “putting a progressive spin on traditional ideas.” Others see him as part of a “a new reformation,” as Pastor Paul Nuechterlein, of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Portage, MI., put it last week. One which is shaking the foundations at “8.8 on the Richter scale.”

Cartledge goes right to the heart of the conflict:

[. . .] in discussing biblical authority, McLaren suggests that the Bible should not be understood as a legal constitution designed as binding law to be interpreted and enforced by religious authorities, but as a community library that “preserves, presents, and inspires an ongoing vigorous conversation with and about God, a living and vital civil argument into which we are all invited and through which God is revealed” (p. 83).

To Mohler and his brand of Baptists, that kind of thinking is outlandish. They used biblical inerrancy as a battle cry during the fight for control of the Southern Baptist Convention. Those in opposition were called “liberal,” and “liberal” is the term Mohler and his panel repeatedly used to describe McLaren.

For receptive Southern Baptists, however, McLaren gently removes the foundations of legalistic Batholicism. He replaces the rationalization for frequent inquisitional disfellowshipping of churches like Druid Hills Baptist Church in Atlanta, with the necessity of dialogue. Fundamentalist-closed doors open to the dialogue which ensues. Reconsideration of red-hot issues, like the role of homosexuals in the church becomes possible, and necessary.

For those not afraid of thought and secure in their ability to manage their own thoughts, what’s to be feared in following Cartledge’s recommendation:

McLaren has much to offer for those who dare to think new thoughts and explore the future of the faith. It takes some effort to consider an approach as topsy-turvy to tradition as the one McLaren approaches, but it is well worth the work.

The debate over these issues is, after all, heating up, not cooling down. Prepare.

One priest speaking ‘the truth to power’

The Rev. Kenneth Lasch, JCD is a retired Catholic Priest, trained in canonical law. Ruminating on what happened to Jeremiah when “spoke to the religious and political leaders of his age without equivocation,” Lasch wrote on March 26:

It’s curious to me that our Church hierarchy that has taken such a prophetic stand for life is so reluctant to listen to the prophets that have been addressing another life issue – the abuse of minors and vulnerable adults by priests and even bishops. I am referring not only to sexual abuse but to physical and psychological abuse. As clear and explicit as the Holy Father has been on the rights of the unborn, why does he allow himself to be protected behind a wall of silence or prevarication and equivocation by those who surround him. Knowing what I know about how the Vatican system works, there is an inconsistency between the moral edicts of every kind it issues and its inability to hold itself accountable to the same moral standards and principles as they pertain to the inner workings of the Church. It is very disheartening indeed. The Pope’s credibility has not been enhanced and it will continue to decline until the full truth is exposed.

. . .

The Pope’s apology during his visit to the United States rang hallow and his latest apology is no better.

Jeremiah was beaten, put in stocks, thrown into a cistern and imprisoned because he continued to “speak the truth to power.”

Jeremiah was still among Lasch’s concerns on March 27 when he wrote:

There is an ancient axiom that predates the reformation and is as poignant now as it was when it was first spoken: “Ecclesia semper reformanda est!” – The church is always in need of reform – from the top to the bottom. And if it doesn’t change from the top down, it will change from the bottom up. In the words of my dear mom, “Mark my words!”

In his complex Palm Sunday message about denial, Lasch wrote:

Even the Church can slip into denial about it’s own need for reform from the top to the bottom. Years ago when the news of the sexual scandal broke in this county, blame was assigned to messengers rather than face the truth of mismanagement and cover-ups.

We were led to Lasch after encountering Catholic League President Bill Donohue’s use of false comparisons and red herrings to argue that the real problem is, somehow, criticism of the church.

Is it not cautionary that failures of church self-criticism seem to please Richard Dawkins? While simultaneously recognized by decidedly Christian Rod Dreher as “discrediting the authority of the church”?

[H/T: Andrew Sullivan]