The Private Intellectual

The Private Intellectual
Ecclesiastes-Based Real Estate Advice

Sunday, January 01, 2012

The Word Made Flesh

My Christmas Day column for The Daily:

In church on Christmas Day, Christians hear the famous passage that opens the Gospel of John. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ... and the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son.” Unfortunately, “lived” is a pretty domesticated translation of the original Greek verb, which means literally “pitched his tent.” I like to think of the verse, and of the birth of Jesus, that way: The Word pitched his tent with us. A tent, of course, is a portable dwelling. It’s for people who need to move around, people whose lives carry them from place to place. It’s not the image of a divine substance congealing in one particular home, but of the Word of God joining an itinerant humanity in our life of change and loss.

The Christmas reading is the classic text for what Christians call the doctrine of the Incarnation. In the time in which John wrote, people often speculated about a divine Word that shaped and animated the whole universe. The peculiar Christian move was to say that this Word became flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This was a difficult and controversial idea at the time (as it still is today), but it’s at the heart of how I account for my faith.

posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 1:51 PM

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Whither Republican Unity?

Today John Boehner decided to follow Mitch McConnell's lead and accept a two-month extension of the payroll tax holiday. This was a very strange political debate in that everyone (or almost everyone) claimed to be in favor of the move, but yet it stalled over unrelated policy issues. That's how our institutional design works these days, I guess.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see what the impact of this development is on the policy issues next year. One of the more striking, and under-discussed, features of American politics since January, 2009 has been the high degree of Republican unity. With very few exceptions, the President has had to move his agenda items with only Democratic support. This was true, interestingly enough, even on issues over which there was broad bipartisan agreement literally months earlier (Mitt Romney's health care policy, or John McCain's climate policy to name only two).

The simplest explanation for this unusual degree of Republican solidarity is that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell both saw thwarting the president on every issue as broadly beneficial to them both in electoral terms (and thus beneficial to the country as a whole in the medium-to-long run). And this was true, and probably remains true. But while Republican members have less diversity of ideology and individual interests than their Democratic counterparts, they don't have entirely identical interests. And for once this diversity of views and interests turned into a public rift between the House and Senate caucuses. A strategy of total obstruction has benefited both caucuses, but only because both caucuses have denied the president the "bipartisan" label on any of his measures. Once that cooperation fractures, it seems like it should be pretty hard to repair. I don't know who has the more right to feel double-crossed right now, Boehner or McConnell, which perhaps means that they both feel abused by the other, and it will be much easier for the president to play them against each other than it was only days ago. It would not surprise me if the next payroll tax holiday extension debate plays out rather differently than this one.

posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 9:42 PM

We Didn't Know It Was You

Last Sunday's column was on Robert MacGimsey's classic "Sweet Little Jesus Boy" and Mahalia Jackson's rendition:

The songwriter Robert MacGimsey was an early and forceful white advocate for African-American music. Born in Arkansas in 1898, he grew up in an age where demeaning “coon songs” were the most popular adaptations of African-American culture by white composers. In addition to writing “Sweet Little Jesus Boy,” “Shadrack” and other original gospel songs, MacGimsey transcribed many of the traditional slave songs of the Georgia Sea Islands and lectured white composers and performers on their tendency to ruin African-American vernacular music by forcing it into more European forms.

MacGimsey’s work stands out as an attempt to honor and celebrate black music and the people who made it. Inspired by the singers MacGimsey knew in the Jim Crow South of his youth, yet written with white performers and audiences in mind, “Sweet Little Jesus Boy” would eventually come full circle. It found its way into the heart of the gospel music canon alongside “authentic” classics like “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”

I did some actual, in-the-library, out-of-print textual research for this one. It's got embedded video of the song, too.

posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 9:37 PM

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Confessions of a Failed Evangelist

The new issue of Let's Talk is online, and my column is about being bad at getting people to go to church:

During three years at Wicker Park Lutheran Church I was uniquely positioned to do the kinds of evangelism we are frequently encouraged to do. I had a number of good friends of long standing living in the neighborhood, all of whom had at least a glancing relationship with church in the past and who had a genuine, if intermittent, curiosity about religious matters. And they had friends with similar dispositions who knew me at least slightly and knew I was a pastor. As an evangelist I had relationships to build on and social networks to move in. I didn’t view any of these people as “targets” for evangelism, of course - I wanted their friendship more than I wanted their church attendance - but I was not without hope that my pastoral role in their neighborhood would draw them to church at least from time to time.

Needless to say, that’s not quite how things worked out.

Labels: Christianity

posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 5:51 PM

Monday, November 28, 2011

Redistributing Money is What Budgets Do

On the Tri-State today I saw a car with the popular bumper sticker "Redistribute My Work Ethic." Very clever, and expressive of a current and historically rather exaggerated right-wing opposition to "redistribution of wealth."

The implication of the sticker, and of the whole school of rhetoric it neatly summarizes, is that wealth is being redistributed from the well-off (who work hard) to the poor (who do not) by means of federal programs. But when you think about the federal budget in those terms, you might be surprised at what you find. The biggest "redistribution" that the budget engages in is from people under age 65, regardless of their health or wealth, to people over age 65, regardless of theirs (and importantly, to their doctors). Going down the list, we see that the federal budget redistributes wealth on net from non-defense contractors to defense contractors and from non-farmers to farmers. Through the tax code, it redistributes wealth from renters to homeowners, and especially to the owners of very expensive or multiple homes. It redistributes from the childless to people with children and from people who do not have group health insurance to people who do.

I mention all of these things because these are, for good or ill, very popular redistributive programs (especially among Republican voters and officeholders). If you keep going down from the big-ticket programs and tax subsidies I've mentioned, you'll eventually run into some programs that directly redistribute from the comparatively wealthy to the poor: TANF, food stamps, WIC, Medicaid (this last being, legitimately, a very large program, though very cheap in unit costs). Social Security and Medicare have some progressive distributive impacts, but they are not the purpose of the programs per se, and in any event, as I mentioned, they are very popular among very conservative voters. Apart from Medicaid, poverty programs are quite small and their impact on overall distribution of wealth is not very impressive. But more to the point, even assuming we get rid of all of these things, the federal budget would still be doing a lot of redistribution of wealth. And that's because redistributing wealth is what public budgets do. We settle on common purposes and goods--putting criminals in jail, having national parks, promoting almond exports, whatever--and then we raise tax revenue from other sources to make those things happen.

Perhaps our irritable motorist thinks that feeding people and giving them access to health care is a stupid thing to do--presumably he does--but choosing not to do those things does not mean that the nightmare of redistribution will be over. It's important to have democratic debates over what purposes are important enough to override the rather strong presumption we have in favor of letting everyone keep their money. I, for instance, am not thrilled with the mortgage interest tax deduction, which I help pay for but which I do not benefit from. But for my objection to make any sense, it has to be based on the facts that 1) I think it's bad policy and 2) it happens to be disadvantageous to me. That it's a program of redistribution is itself neither here nor there. If you object to the very notion of redistributing wealth, you object to the notion of the state.

posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 11:28 PM

Sunday, November 27, 2011

The War on Advent

My new column in The Daily is up. Liturgical seasons, consumerism, and W.H. Auden, check, check, and check:

The Bible lessons for Sundays in Advent focus on prophecy, both grave and joyous. We hear Jesus warn in the Gospel of Matthew that, in the days of Noah, people were eating and drinking and marrying until they were taken by surprise in the flood. The lesson is that trials will always come amid life’s pleasures and distractions.

While people display crèches as visible gestures of Christian identity, Isaiah laments to God, “Because you hid yourself, we transgressed” — reminding the faithful that God cannot be put on display for our own purposes.

While we ransack stores for the year’s must-have toys and games, Isaiah imagines children playing in a new world entirely: “The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp” — a poisonous snake — “and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den,” because “they will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain.”

The teachings seem meant to measure the smallness of our aspirations and the heedlessness in which we often live. Advent is not about gloom and doom, but its stories and songs give voice to the world’s radical incompleteness, its yearning, its anticipation.

Labels: Auden, Christianity

posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 9:40 PM

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Blow the Whistle on that Analogy
(UPDATED)

Sullivan:

And we might as well face it: college football is a kind of religion for many. Challenging the Pope of Penn State was unthinkable.

See also.

Granting with alacrity that no one has any business feeling sorry for Joe Pa, that his actions and inactions both reasonably established and highly probable are utterly deplorable, and that the students who rioted in State College last night were drunk idiots at best: is it really at all helpful to describe Joe Pa as the "Pope of Penn State"? Do we not cheapen the metaphor and the quality of our outrage by making so careless an association? Penn State is a big school and Paterno is as big as they get in the world of college football, but come on--there are a lot of football-factory schools, a lot of state universities that have a lot of pull in their environs, and a lot of unaccountable power out there. And we may just as well remember that the cultural and theological issues that were so often blamed for the church abuse crisis are mostly absent from a state university football program. There is no onerous ethic of celibacy, of course, and no dogmatic structure in need of defense. There are no keys to the kingdom and no sacramental power.

Indeed, the only thing in common, beyond vague talk about hierarchies and authority, is the immense importance of institutional survival and well-being. But here's the thing: there are a whole lot of institutions that are scared witless by stuff like this and prioritize survival above all else. I really appreciate Sullivan's zeal in this cause, and I share it. But surely he knew about college football, surely he'd heard of Joe Paterno at some point. Did it ever occur to Sullivan or anyone else to compare a football coach to a man styled as the Vicar of Christ until this week?

As I said yesterday, the most awful thing about this revelation, apart from the suffering of the victims themselves, is precisely how it gives the lie to the idea that this is somehow a distinctively Catholic Church issue. After the fact you can identify the structures with the Catholic Church if you want, but this only serves to make the problem more distant and exotic than it in fact is. There are a lot of college football programs, a lot of college towns, a lot of pro teams, a lot of companies that anchor a local economy, a lot of institutions that have a very, very powerful interest in making stories like this go away. And a whole lot of people depend on them for their livelihood and are thus quite susceptible to pressure, and a whole lot of influence gets brought to bear in their protection. You don't need 15th-century Italian court garb or extravagant claims of spiritual and temporal authority in order to know who writes your paychecks.

This is all the more reason to be rigorous in holding people like Joe Paterno accountable for their actions and inactions, even if they fall short of breaking the law. If a career as long and remarkable as his can be ended in a matter of days because of cowardice in the matter of protecting children from rape, then it can happen to anyone, and so much the better.

And while I don't really see the case, in the instance, for abolishing Penn State football (as if that will prevent such things from happening in the future) or even for cancelling the rest of the season, I do think you should all read Whet on why the U of C ended football in 1939 and how that decision has been vindicated. It might be best for everyone, or at least a bunch of schools, to take that leap all at once (or, as I've mused in the past, to spin off their football programs as semi-pro, for-profit teams that rent the colors and the stadiums, pay players, and otherwise avoid the pretense of functioning within a university).

UPDATE: I would rather bashfully direct your attention to Joe Posnanski's post on all of this. However you'd like to bicker over the details, he's right that the reactions have snowballed much faster than the facts have been established. Anger is a poor substitute for courage or righteousness, two things we would like to feel when we hear stories like this. One wonders how long it will be before we hear a call to shutter Penn State, raze State College to the ground, and salt the earth. Pedophilia is a crime committed by a very small but apparently persistent sliver of the human population. Institutions with incentives to sweep it and other potentially damaging misdeeds under various rugs are not going anywhere, and neither is the influence they can sometimes exert on all kinds of political and cultural actors. A cathartic howl of rage won't change that.

posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 8:53 PM

Wednesday, November 09, 2011

Abuse and the Elusive Virtue

The striking and horrifying revelations that have come out of Penn State and its football program this week have left people with urgent questions about how such serious abuse could have gone unreported for so long. Quite understandably, a good deal of the questioners have settled, often with hostility, on the figure of Mike McQueary, the graduate assistant and now assistant coach who claims to have seen defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky raping a ten-year-old boy in 2002. By his own account, McQueary left the scene, called his father, and then reported the incident to head coach Joe Paterno, who in turn seems to have kicked the story upstairs to the school's athletic director.

The fallout from this series of events will be severe and wide-ranging--it has already cost the University president his job and Paterno, the dean of college football coaches, his--but McQueary has drawn particular ire for failing to intervene directly in the assault he witnessed. Alan Jacobs blames this cowardice on the culture of football. Sullivan agrees and compares it to the culture of the Catholic Church hierarchy.

There may be something to those sorts of explanations, but as a general rule one should be wary of accounts that exempt the observer from the vice being explained. The unfortunate fact is that it appears to be, even at this late date, rather easy to get away with sexually abusing minors. What McQueary claims to have witnessed is more severe and frankly abusive than most cases of molestation, but it would surprise me very much if the same factors that make it feasible for the kindly neighbor, touchy-feely uncle, or beloved teacher to get away with more or less open misconduct were not at play in this case.

For one thing, we have plenty of evidence that bystanders tend toward cowardice. People really, really don't want to feel responsible or implicated and really, really want to get away from the situation. Not everyone, of course, but ask yourself if you haven't been guilty of this at some point.

For another, child sexual abuse is so foreign to people's expectations that seeing it happen creates cognitive dissonance that people seem tempted to resolve in ways that are not especially helpful to the victims. After the fact, it often turns out that people had suspicions, but they eased them one way or another: I was imagining things, I assumed it must have been innocent, etc. (again this goes for things like fondling or excessive attention rather than actual rape, which seems much harder to accommodate in those ways). And this impulse will be buttressed by strong institutional incentives toward silence, incentives that are well known even outside of churches and D-I football programs.

We have not been especially protective of children, as a society, for all that long. Old habits die hard, and we still tolerate the mistreatment of children in a variety of ways (ahem*). This is by no means to excuse the cowardice of anyone who knew about this abuse and did not take adequate steps to stop it. But courage is a difficult virtue. I hope all of us who have been appalled at the failure of Mike McQueary will bear that in mind the next time--and it will not be so long, in all likelihood--we are called on to protect someone who is vulnerable.

* Seriously, not to keep banging the drum on this, but you should check out the comments to that article. One thing I didn't end up emphasizing is that we've had a pretty smooth trip through the system, all things considered: a young, comparatively normal child, a dedicated caseworker, and medical professionals who were more or less willing to treat the girl. Check out some of the problems other foster parents have to deal with and the callous way we've chosen to treat them.

posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 8:50 PM