DNJ Column 2/3/19 We’re all familiar with various rivalries, feuds and gangs in history. The Hatfields and McCoys, famous in Kentucky and West Virginia, the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, from medieval Italy and Austria (now called), Alabama and Clemson, Liverpool and Manchester United. There are a lot of ways we sort ourselves into “teams.” Though not always, many such partisans have visible identifiers. The Bloods and the Crips, LA street gangs, often identify themselves by color, red and blue respectively. In the movie “Gangs of New York,” about 19th century gangs, the Dead Rabbits (mainly Irish-Catholic immigrants) ranged themselves against the “Bowery Boys” (mainly native-born Protestants). The Dead Rabbits carried a yes, dead rabbit on a pike when marching through the streets of their NYC Five Points neighborhood. The Bowery Boys were anti-immigration in their politics and supportive of the nascent “Know-Nothing” political party, which was also anti-immigrant. The Know-Nothings had nominated former president Millard Fillmore in 1856 for their candidate, who came in 3rd behind winner Democrat James Buchanan and Republican John Fremont. The American Civil War left us with a rivalry between the Blues and the Grays, as long as ex-soldiers continued to wear their old uniform jackets. There was a much older rivalry of the Blues and the Greens which dates back to the Roman Empire. It too, was born of sports, if chariot racing fits that description. There had been political rivalries, even semi-parties, in the earlier days of the Roman Republic, long before Julius Caesar was assassinated and the rule reverted to a mostly monarchical form with the emperors who followed him. The Optimates and the Populares were rival groups of wealthy Romans of the Senatorial class. The Optimates controlled the Senate and the Populares attempted various end runs by appealing to the less wealthy citizens, who could still vote for various Tribunes, who had near dictatorial power in some cases re: some issues. The Tribunes acted as a check on the power of the Senate and their appointed magistrates. They had the power of unappealable veto over certain legislation. There were thus two poles of power, the Senate and the People, who relied on the Tribunes and some Senatorial allies. Thus, the SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus) of their republican military standards. The Blues and the Greens started out as favorite colors of the four racing teams of horse drawn chariots of Rome, later Constantinople. The reds and the whites had faded in popularity and later vanished, and by the time of Emperor Justinian, (6th century), the Blues and the Greens were becoming dangerously divided and politically identified, which led to riots in 532 at the Hippodrome. Justinian’s army put down the riots brutally, contemporary accounts estimating perhaps 30,000 were slain inside the Hippodrome, whose exits had been sealed. Humans tend to organize based upon identity. It’s seemingly hardwired, as we in our early history lived in small groups and learned the hard way not to trust strange groups from over the mountain or across the river. Thus developed the search for identifying marks when confronted by possibly dangerous strangers. In the Bible, Judges 12, in an inter-tribal battle, the winning Gileadites stopped the losing Ephraimites from crossing back into their territory by requiring them to say the word “shibboleth,” which was notoriously hard for the Ephraimites to pronounce correctly, since they couldn’t get the “sh” right, and it came out like “sibboleth.” Surface identifiers are the heart of identity politics. When skin color, native origin, sex, and other easily identifiable markers are elevated, the importance of the role of citizen and accompanying unifying factors lose their power. Some Catholic school boys were accused of all kinds of things based on the kind of hat they wore to a political march in Washington a couple of weeks ago. In terms of opportunity for dialogue, argument, discourse and conversation do you think it’s a good idea for modern day political patrons to identify by means of recognizable garments, hats or colors? Steve Odom has a black hat and a white hat and preaches at Central Christian Church on East Main St in Murfreesboro. Email him at steven.odom@gmail.com

DNJ Column February 10, 2019 There’s no denying that Jeffery Burton Russell is a bit of an odd duck in his publishing history. Author of 14 books and Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he’s also known for his 5-volume history of the devil, beginning in 1977. The series runs Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (1977), Satan: The Early Christian Tradition (1981), Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (1984), Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World (1986), and Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History (1988). The bulk of his other research is on medieval church history. What most interests me about him, however, are his two books on heaven. He began in 1997 with “History of Heaven: The Singing Silence,” and in 2006 finished up with “Paradise Mislaid: How We Lost Heaven—and How We Can Regain It.” “History of Heaven” was full of stuff like, “Heaven…is an endless dynamic of joy in which one is ever more oneself as one was meant to be, in which one increasingly realizes one’s potential in understanding as well as love and is filled more and more with wisdom.” Now that’s a mouthful, but in it orients us toward Russell’s reading of the history of the images and metaphors of heaven found in scriptures and poetry and theology from a human point of view. He sees an uncontradictory unity of vision connecting the human good and the revealed essence of fulfilled divine love. There’s more: “Heaven is the singing silence, the still ness of God that he sings to the world.” One of the best gifts of Russell is the way he opens our vision to a metaphorical expression of the theological reality of what must be, given resurrection of Christ. He combines 2500 years of western (and not always western) philosophical reflection on reality with the book of Revelation’s picture of the New Heaven and New Earth and comes up with “the singing silence,” and all that implies. This is found in introduction, but he proceeds from the biblical views of heaven up through the early fathers and medieval thinkers to the apex of poetic reflection found in Dante’s “Paradiso.” Dante himself understands how any human expression can only fail when approaching a description of the infinite and eternal, but, in hopefully immortal lines says (in translation) “the Love that moves the sun and other stars was turning my desire and my will together as elements of one moving wheel.” Dante himself sees through a theological prism, to a world where love moves will. And, in describing this topos of the gospel, he encapsulates a great deal of scripture in a few words “turning my desire and my will together.” This is an allusion to the problem raised by Paul in the letter to the Romans in chapter 7: “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.” Dante reflects the solution Paul points toward at the beginning of chapter 8, when he says: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.” For Dante, desire and will united is only accomplished by the Love that moves the sun and the stars of the universe. Russell’s follow-up work, “Paradise Mislaid: How We Lost Heaven—and How We Can Regain It,” is the book our Sunday night class will be reading and discussing beginning in April, when we complete the book of Romans we’re studying now. Steve Odom is pastor of Central Christian Church on E. Main St. and may be reached at steven.odom@gmail.com

DNJ Column 2/17/19 How does one come to know God? The largeness of such a question need not daunt our interest in the way other largenesses might. For instance, I recently read a book by a man who read the entire 20 volume Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in a year and wrote a book about it, “Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages,” by Ammon Shea. Now that’s a daunting task. But coming to know God is different in many ways. For our purposes, it’s relevant that the OED does not seek to know me. For Ammon Shea, it was all one way. He reflects a lot in his book on the grinding necessity of staying in his seat for long hours turning pages and making notes. It’s like those unhappy relationships where one partner does all the work. How we come to know God is a large question but need not be daunting for several reasons, perhaps the most important of which is that God is indeed not the OED, nor any other object. And he’s not the OED in a lot of ways. The most important difference is that the OED does not want to know you. It’s not that the OED wants not to know you, and it’s not that the OED just doesn’t care, it’s just not a capacity of the OED. I’ve had a miniaturized version in my office since college days (comes with its own magnifying glass) and it’s not said a kind word to me in all that time. It is lifeless, an object, a creation of man, that carries the results of a lot of labor, and love, and knowledge, but not capable of initiating anything. When we seek to know God, there’s a given involved, a head start as it were. Because of the nature of God, our own interest in the question of coming to know God is an indication of his interest in us. I’m not speaking in any mechanical sense. It’s not that he “meets us halfway,” as is sometimes said. God starts the whole process. God acts, and is, in order for the knowing to even be possible. When I desire to know God, I am already beginning to know by virtue of that desire which is his willingness to be known. Because of his desire, he gives me that same desire. My desire to know God is a gift from the object of my desire that not only begins the process but enables the process to say on the right track. Because God initiates the process of me coming to know him, it is enabled to go in the right direction, through having begun on the right road. If I consider my knowing God as generated by and from myself, I may stumble in that knowing through lack of humility, and simple misapprehension of the nature of our relationship. Moses asked to see God’s glory and God said I will show you my goodness. One can know a chemical formula for example, by “force,” but knowing a person presumes willingness and love on the part of both parties. And when one is the creator and one is the creature, the path of successful knowing, however it might be described, is always the one given by the creator. The humility of God is a phrase used by Christian theologians to describe the coming of God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, initiating, seeking, beginning the search for each child of God, by showing us who he is in ways not knowable without God’s self-unveiling. In the willing, innocent suffering of the Man of God on a cross, God reveals, among many things, his willingness to be known by all drawn to him, as well as his desire to know the creature who responds in humility and love. All moments and all directions and all questions meet at the cross. “Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” Steve Odom is pastor of Central Christian Church on E. Main St. and may be reached at steven.odom@gmail.com

DNJ Column 2/24/19 I saw a Facebook post today that strongly suggested that our current president is “God’s man” for this hour. Now some of you are hyperventilating and some of you are cheering. This would be a perfect example of the inappropriate mixing of religion and politics if done by a government official using government time or money. But it was a private citizen expressing his opinion. You and I have also seen opinions opposite from that on social media, some quite extreme in the other direction. But is there any sense to the notion that a government leader can be God’s man (or woman; see the Bible, Judges 4) for this particular hour? The idea itself does indeed derive from the Bible. See cases like Joseph, great-grandson of Abraham, through whom it is said God preserved many lives during the famine in Egypt perhaps 4,000 years ago. This and other passages are foundations of the idea of the “providence of God,” i.e., that God operates behind the scenes of history, as it were, to bring about his purposes. In the story of Joseph, that purpose was specifically to keep alive the descendants of Jacob, the twelve tribes, God’s chosen people, during the region wide famine. You may be familiar with Pharaoh’s dream of seven fat cows and seven lean cows which ate up the fat cows, presaging the famine throughout the region. By virtue of interpreting Pharaoh’s dream, Joseph (“coat of many colors”: that Joseph) is promoted to #2 in Egypt and institutes government control of grain stocks to lay in enough surplus to survive the approaching famine. Many Bible readers are sometimes surprised that every character in the Bible is not a moral exemplar. Joseph’s wisdom preserves countless lives during the famine, but using Pharaoh’s delegated power, he also, having confiscated a portion of every Egyptian’s harvest during the “fat years,” turned around and sold it back to the Egyptians during the lean years. First, it was sold for money. When people ran out of money, they exchanged their livestock for grain, and when that was gone, they gave up their farmland to Pharaoh for grain, and when that was used up, Joseph essentially turned the Egyptians into slaves in exchange for grain by allowing them to sell themselves to Pharaoh. To me that seems deeply problematic for a political leader from our modern perspective of liberal democracy. But the Bible tells that story without saying “this is how good leaders act.” That episode is part of the overall Joseph story in the second half of Genesis in which, in the realm of human freedom, God nonetheless, for the purpose of advancing his intention to preserve a people to be a light to the world, sometimes pushes an actor forward onto the stage of history. There are other examples. You can look them up. Jephthah, Gideon, Ehud, Samson, Solomon, Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus the Great. Cyrus is even called, by Isaiah the prophet, God’s “messiah,” meaning he was anointed (chosen by God) for a particular task. Esther (in the biblical book of Esther) is reminded by her older cousin Mordecai, and this is where the phrase is first used, that perhaps she has her place of prominence in Xerxes’ court “for just such a time as this,” that the Jews might be spared Haman’s planned genocide. So perhaps she was “God’s woman for that hour.” I can’t explain all of history and justify every good or bad player on the world stage. But I know how the story ends. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” Steve Odom is pastor of Central Christian Church on E. Main St. and may be reached at steven.odom@gmail.com

Daily News Journal Column 8/26/18 Many churches have a guy like this. In my church, it was the late father of a member who still has the tiny animals his dad carved out of peach pits, and the strange shaped walking canes whittled from sticks and tree limbs. In my mother’s church it’s a member of her old Sunday School class, the BYKOTA class. They named themselves this because that was their slogan: Be Ye Kind One To Another (Ephesians 4:32). And so, naturally, this little old fellow in their class started carving every piece of wood he could find into acorns, turtles, frogs, top hats, bulldogs, etc., etc., and on each piece was the slogan’s initials: BYKOTA. Class members get a new one at each Christmas party. Actually, it’s quite effective in reminding one of the scriptural admonition, since it’s pronounceable and short: BYKOTA. Some of the class members even turned it into a farewell known only to them: BY – KOTA! What interests me is thinking of those folk, how many generations from now, who find these little acorns and turtles in their great grandmother’s dresser drawer with those cryptic initials (Do you want it? Not me. How bout you? Naw, give it to Melvin. He keeps everything.) What will they think? Will they be able to decipher it? Not all periods of Christian history have had the same attachment to words of wisdom like are represented in BYKOTA. Through a complicated series of developments (traced in Peter Brown’s “The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity” 2015) we learn that it took generations after the granting of legal status to Christianity by Constantine and Theodosius before you can discern any kind of wholesale BYKOTA spirit among the ruling classes in any of the successor Christian kingdoms of the west. We see it begin in a dispersed way during the rule of the Frankish King Dagobert I (629-634) during the time of the Merovingians. Dagobert was more than a century after Clovis, first Catholic king of “Francia,” and it was the presence of the Irish monk Columbanus (543-615) and his monastic successors who began a new era of courtesy and kindness among the ruling elite of early northern France. The difference was that prior to Columbanus the Gaulish, Franco-Gothic successors to the late Romans had lived and worked by the same “personal code” as their predecessors. “High talk and taking down one’s rivals by malicious tales had been the characteristic trait of great bishops and of the swaggering courtiers, warlords and great landowners of the Frankish kingdom.” (Brown, 192) In Columbanus’ new “rule” the nun in charge of the cellar (food supply) should, for example always answer requests “with mild words and without any roughness in response, so that the sweetness of her heart may be revealed by the answering of her voice.” (ibid.) The extremely strict and ascetic rules of Columbanus were intended to tame the unruly behavior of monks, nuns and rulers alike. “Day to day life was to be conducted through gently uncontentious interchanges….these pointed inversions of the codes of the new aristocracy radiated outside the convents and monasteries.” In Dagobert’s world, there was a bit of a revolving door between the monasteries and the Merovingian court, and as the standards for monkish behavior changed, life among the noble classes began to change as well. The pious habits of the monastery began to “convert” the code of behavior at the royal court as well, and improved life for all, over time. I don’t know if they carried any carved acorns around with them, but I do know that the stories we tell ourselves and words we pledge to live by are what change us from within to without. The Merovingian courtiers even came to address one another not as my lord, sir, your honor, etc., but, peccator, Late Latin for “sinner.” And that’s how the world changes. One peccator at a time. BYKOTA. Steve “Peccator” Odom is pastor of Central Christian Church on E. Main St. of Murfreesboro and may be reached at steven.odom@gmail.com

Daily News Journal Column 9/9/18 “Ubi Sunt Qui Ante Nos Fuerunt,” is the Latin title for a Medieval English poem that begins, “Were beth they that biforen us weren, houndes ladden and havekes beren, and hadden feld and wode?” That is to say, in modern English, “Where are they that were before us, who led hounds and carried hawks, and owned fields and woods?” It is a common motif in much poetry, written by those puzzled by the evidences all around them of a civilization whose traces and ruins they lived among and pondered. Anglo Saxons of the 6th and 7th centuries could look around England and see the Roman forts and walls and castles gone to ruin when the Romans left in 4th and 5th centuries. But who built them? What happened to those people? Who were they? Even the Anglo-Normans in England of the High Middle Ages looking at ruins left from Alfred’s time were sometimes puzzled at what they saw, for written records were often hard to come by. Things like Stonehenge confused many, and the Little Ice Age of 5th-10th centuries drove many Nordic peoples further south out of Scandinavia and into Britain and the mainland of Europe. One of the earliest poems that features the “ubi sunt” motif is “The Wanderer,” which is found in The Exeter Book in Old English. Hard to date, it surely comes from a time before the Norman invasion of England in 1066. As a young psychology major in college when I first read it in an English literature class (in translation), I was struck by passages that said things like, “I know it truly, that it is in men a noble custom, that one should keep secure his spirit-chest (mind), guard his treasure-chamber (thoughts).” This was so contrary to what we were taught in the Psychology dept (in the 70s). Under the continuing influence of Dr. Freud, all the various clinical schools back then, consciously or not, seemed to cling to the notion of the human psyche as some sort of steam boiler, which, when the steam built up, had to be vented to prevent a disastrous explosion. You’re probably nodding your head in agreement. The Freudian metaphor, for that’s all it is, has captured the minds of most of us, whether we know it or not. We talk about “venting,” and “letting it out” as if thoughts and feelings are water heated to the boiling point. But Freud himself and his unscientific theories are fairly “exploded” among most psychologists, even though his influence remains prevalent, ensconced deeply and widely among all exposed to schooling and or the baleful influence of Hollywood. Read Frederick Crews’ book “Freud: The Making of an Illusion,” to unshackle yourself from the invisible bonds that Sigmund has wrapped around you. So, I was thinking, in the context of the current debate about civility, Facebook/Twitter and social media in general, and the explosion of so much anger in the partisan world that has grown up around us, maybe the Anglo-Saxon poets of more than a millennium ago have more to say to us than we give them credit for? Have we become so accustomed to “expressing” ourselves, and “letting it all out” when we’re angry, or upset, that we’ve fallen into some kind of recurring feedback loop, so that the more we express our anger the more we need to express our anger? Before there was “social media” did people learn how to control themselves and their thoughts and opinions just out of necessity? Because if you said to a loved one or a friend what you say to strangers on FB or Twitter, etc., you’d get it right back in the face? And so we moderated our tone and thought more carefully about who we were talking to because he or she was right there in front of us? As a man said whose bones have long been dust, “A wise man must be patient, He must never be too impulsive, nor too hasty of speech.” Steve Odom, who has to talk more than is good for him, is pastor of Central Christian Church on East Main St., and may be reached at steven.odom@gmail.com

Daily News Journal Column September 2, 2018 “There’s nothing like a stadium full of people coming together to remind you what life’s about." -Kenny Chesney. OK, first let’s acknowledge that people in “public life” constantly say things that they wish they hadn’t. Occupational hazard. You can’t just be mum, sing your songs, and leave the stage. Not if you want adoring fans, anyway. People want to know you outside of your songs. It’s a real need for some that almost a pproaches a level of idolatry. Years ago, there were those who had shrines to Elvis in their homes. He defined and formed their very lives, their souls. Some celebrities encourage this. Elvis certainly didn’t seem to discourage it. Those adoring crowds can be frightening though, even dangerous. I don’t know Mr. Chesney or his music, couldn’t quote you the name of a single one of what I assume are his many hits. You may hate me for taking his name in vain. I’m sorry. Mr. Chesney certainly seems to be expressing a heartfelt thought with his comment, for I’m sure that’s what it feels like to him. A stadium full of adoring fans is indeed what life’s all about when you are the idol of many beating hearts and object of much adulation, and he must indeed be good at what he does, for it’s certainly a competitive business. But my dudgeon is aroused with comments like Mr. Chesney’s. What is life “about?” I want to vote for more than just stadiums full of ticket buyers. If he’d said, “I was visiting someone at the hospital the other day and saw a young, very slight nurse struggling to help a large, sick patient sit up in bed and I thought, ‘You know, that’s what life’s all about,’” I could go with that. There are any number of things that might pass muster. “I saw some newlyweds drive off from the church the other day and stop at the corner to give a homeless woman some money and the bridal bouquet.” Or, “I saw a girl go into McDonald’s to buy a burger and get some water to take to a sick dog on the sidewalk who looked abandoned.” Or, “A friend of mine got his 20 year Sobriety coin last week.” Or, “I heard about a family that had fostered 100 sick or addicted infants in the last 20 years.” “I saw a mailman stop and help a kid up who’d hurt himself when he fell off his bike, and I thought, “that’s what life is all about.” I’ve been to a couple of stadium concerts, long ago. I know what Mr. Chesney means, at least from the perspective of the cheap seats, not the stage. The emotive power of a crowd, thousands strong, is felt and it’s intoxicating. I’m just not sure that’s always a good thing. Compared to what crowds down through history have wrought, country music concerts and other similar events are as innocent as a buttercup. Stimulating, exciting, uplifting even, sometimes. But not even close to the power of a nurse’s hand wiping a sick patient’s brow, or a father sitting up with a sick child all night. “What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare. No time to stand beneath the boughs And stare as long as sheep or cows. No time to see, when woods we pass, Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass. No time to see, in broad daylight, Streams full of stars, like skies at night. No time to turn at Beauty's glance, And watch her feet, how they can dance. No time to wait till her mouth can Enrich that smile her eyes began. A poor life this if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.” (Henry Davies) Steve Odom is pastor Central Christian Church on E. Main St. in Murfreesboro and may be reached at steven.odom@gmail.com

Daily News Journal Column 8/26/18 Many churches have a guy like this. In my church, it was the late father of a member who still has the tiny animals his dad carved out of peach pits, and the strange shaped walking canes whittled from sticks and tree limbs. In my mother’s church it’s a member of her old Sunday School class, the BYKOTA class. They named themselves this because that was their slogan: Be Ye Kind One To Another (Ephesians 4:32). And so, naturally, this little old fellow in their class started carving every piece of wood he could find into acorns, turtles, frogs, top hats, bulldogs, etc., etc., and on each piece was the slogan’s initials: BYKOTA. Class members get a new one at each Christmas party. Actually, it’s quite effective in reminding one of the scriptural admonition, since it’s pronounceable and short: BYKOTA. Some of the class members even turned it into a farewell known only to them: BY – KOTA! What interests me is thinking of those folk, how many generations from now, who find these little acorns and turtles in their great grandmother’s dresser drawer with those cryptic initials (Do you want it? Not me. How bout you? Naw, give it to Melvin. He keeps everything.) What will they think? Will they be able to decipher it? Not all periods of Christian history have had the same attachment to words of wisdom like are represented in BYKOTA. Through a complicated series of developments (traced in Peter Brown’s “The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity” 2015) we learn that it took generations after the granting of legal status to Christianity by Constantine and Theodosius before you can discern any kind of wholesale BYKOTA spirit among the ruling classes in any of the successor Christian kingdoms of the west. We see it begin in a dispersed way during the rule of the Frankish King Dagobert I (629-634) during the time of the Merovingians. Dagobert was more than a century after Clovis, first Catholic king of “Francia,” and it was the presence of the Irish monk Columbanus (543-615) and his monastic successors who began a new era of courtesy and kindness among the ruling elite of early northern France. The difference was that prior to Columbanus the Gaulish, Franco-Gothic successors to the late Romans had lived and worked by the same “personal code” as their predecessors. “High talk and taking down one’s rivals by malicious tales had been the characteristic trait of great bishops and of the swaggering courtiers, warlords and great landowners of the Frankish kingdom.” (Brown, 192) In Columbanus’ new “rule” the nun in charge of the cellar (food supply) should, for example always answer requests “with mild words and without any roughness in response, so that the sweetness of her heart may be revealed by the answering of her voice.” (ibid.) The extremely strict and ascetic rules of Columbanus were intended to tame the unruly behavior of monks, nuns and rulers alike. “Day to day life was to be conducted through gently uncontentious interchanges….these pointed inversions of the codes of the new aristocracy radiated outside the convents and monasteries.” In Dagobert’s world, there was a bit of a revolving door between the monasteries and the Merovingian court, and as the standards for monkish behavior changed, life among the noble classes began to change as well. The pious habits of the monastery began to “convert” the code of behavior at the royal court as well, and improved life for all, over time. I don’t know if they carried any carved acorns around with them, but I do know that the stories we tell ourselves and words we pledge to live by are what change us from within to without. The Merovingian courtiers even came to address one another not as my lord, sir, your honor, etc., but, peccator, Late Latin for “sinner.” And that’s how the world changes. One peccator at a time. BYKOTA. Steve “Peccator” Odom is pastor of Central Christian Church on E. Main St. of Murfreesboro and may be reached at steven.odom@gmail.com

Daily News Journal Column 8/19/18 Amazon is a popular whipping boy for the many who long for the good days of “real” bookstores, but if you’re like me, you may have a different perspective. If you didn’t grow up in a big city, bookstores were fairly thin on the ground. I was a book-starved teenager long ago who was thrilled just to learn that the local mall (in Tallahassee) was opening a Walden Books, which was the first bookstore chain to have a store in every state. Even the little paperback Penguin Classics and Everyman Library books they carried were a revelation. I knew of no used bookstores in our town at the time and the only other place I knew of that sold actual books was the drugstore, which didn’t have a real deep bench, let’s say. In my years of loitering in bookstores, I’ve often come across titles like, “The Lost Books of the Bible,” or “Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” “Mysteries of the Bible Explained,” and “Hidden Books of the Bible Revealed,” etc. Usually you could pick them up and read the first page of the preface to learn that the author was something akin to the guy who wanted to sell you “The Secrets to Winning at the Stock Market!” In other words, yet another scam, with the added frisson of religion. Over the years, with the multiplication of outlets, Cable TV, Internet, etc., I’ve witnessed the same expansion of hucksterism make its way into previously respectable organizations like mainstream national newspapers and magazines and even the National Geographic and its TV arm. Time and Newsweek have for years had the seeming attitude of “if these cretins insist on going to church at Christmas and Easter, let’s at least give them some of the latest hoaxes about Jesus we can find.” Secrets of the Nativity! Was there Really a Star? The Wise Men. Who Were They and What Were They Really Doing There! I’ve heard content chieftains say things like “We just give the public what it wants.” Well, stop it. One time I heard a father answer the question, years ago, why he didn’t let his kids watch TV by responding, “Same reason I don’t let them drink out of the toilet.” Some of the stuff people believe astounds me, but nobody ever taught them otherwise. Churches and pastors have sometimes fallen down on the job as well, because many Christians have been taken in by over-hyped claims like you find in books by the Dan Browns and Bart Ehrmans of the world. Typically, what hoaxes have in common is described well by Phillip Jenkins of Penn State who says, “The real (story) was hidden behind the deceptive façade of Christianity, until hidden and suppressed documents were found which exposed the truth and overthrew a conspiracy that had lasted for centuries.” I will be teaching a class on Bible Hoaxes this year at Adventures In Learning, along with one on Politics and Religion and How to Read the Bible. AIL is held at First United Methodist Church on Thompson Lane this year on three Mondays, September 10, 17 and 24 from 9:30 to Noon. Most attendees are retired and some of the classes offered are, History of the War in Vietnam, Tips and Tricks for your iPhone/iPad, Stress and Relationships, Rutherford County History, the Opioid Epidemic and more. Hundreds of retired Boro-ites have attended the AIL for 28 years. Email AILmurfreesboro@gmail.com for more information on how to register and follow Adventures In Learning on Facebook. Steve Odom is pastor of Central Christian Church and recently discovered a cache of letters from the Emperor Constantine in his church basement. He may be reached at steven.odom@gmail.com

Daily News Journal Column 8/12/18 I’ve always wondered about the “Red Scare” of my childhood years. I don’t mean our neighbor building a bomb shelter in his backyard. A fear of nuclear war was not irrational in 1961. The prospect may have been unlikely, but who could tell? We were certainly no experts, no prognosticators. Neither do I mean the rush to spend money on the “space race” kicked off by the success of the launch of Sputnik, or even the vast amounts of treasure invested in nuclear and conventional weapons. In an existential struggle, nations don’t count pennies. A bankrupt life is widely considered to be better than none at all. I was so young I have no real memories of the widespread hysteria that percolated down to the everyday American of the time, in the late late forties and early fifties. Alger Hiss, Joe McCarthy, blacklists. And perhaps the putative hysteria is merely the creation of tendentious parties, eager, for their own partisan reasons, to pooh-pooh any tendency to believe that communism was ever a threat to America. Reds under the beds! Hard to tell, now. I am of course a partisan, as is every living and breathing American to one degree or another. To truly have no opinion on political issues is to be in the grip of anomie and by reason of inattention or inability on the side of political entropy and chaos. Some religious folk consider that worldly politics is pointless, fruitless and corrupting. And while politics as idolatry fits that description, as long as we take the words of scripture seriously, love your neighbor, honor the emperor, give to Caesar what’s Caesar’s, clothe the naked, and feed the hungry, etc., we will and must participate in this worldly deeds, and why not let them be for good and not for evil? Like everyone else, I’ve been trying to get my bearings in a new era of a Republican President that many Republican poohbahs repudiate and did not support in the election. Everyone was certainly astonished that day, perhaps even the winner, though I don’t think he’d admit that. Bible readers know that God is not at all averse to working outside the list of the great and the good and the most likely to succeed and use the lowly, the person of no reputation, the unlikely. A twice-divorced philandering billionaire was never on my wish list for president. But, as is said so often, a tree is judged by its fruit, and when we breathe into our paper bag for a bit perhaps we can see that many good things have already been accomplished at the federal level. Accomplishments that have frankly surprised me. The media haven’t reported on many of them, and you have to dig to find them. And the things they cannot ignore they denigrate, like the “crumbs” of the Tax-cuts. The tariff situation makes me nervous, because Smoot-Hawley is not the historical precedent we want to evoke, but I have to plead ignorance on the economic technicalities of this issue. Have our trading partners been taking advantage of us? I just don’t know. Is that a problem? After all, if we buy more of their stuff, they have dollars, but we have cars and smart phones. Like I say, I’m no economist. Mainly what I want to say is that if you’re short of breath just thinking about Trump or hearing his name, someone’s misleading you. We’ve been through this before. There were Republicans who thought, and said, the world was ending back in 2009. Chicken Little is always with us. How much money was wasted by some preppers on guns and ammo and powdered milk because they thought Obama was coming for them? I must confess that it feels like Democrats and Republicans at the Federal level have gotten too comfortable over the last 40 years, and the Great Disrupter may (I say may) be just what this country needs. I know. Crazy, right? Steve Odom does not currently have a bomb shelter and writes his column from an undisclosed location. He is pastor of Central Christian Church on E. Main St. and can be reached at steven.odom@gmail.com

Daily News Journal, August 5, 2018 Sometimes the problem with preaching is the hecklers. That’s right. You didn’t know preachers have hecklers? All preachers have hecklers. They’re often that little old guy that stands in the back, can’t sit down for 20 minutes, restless, walking back and forth, wants to say something. I saw Ezra in church the other Sunday. Little fellow, long pointed white beard like a dwarf out of Lord of the Rings, yellow in the middle from tobacco juice dribbling. Ezra was hopping mad. “It’s just not right! It’s just not right!” I ignored him, of course. You have to, or you’d never finish a sermon. Jeremiah’s usually back there, too, just standing in the corner mostly, glaring at me. Never says a word. I definitely don’t let him get going. Hoo boy. That happened one time and we didn’t get out of there till near 5 PM. Everybody was too scared to leave. Of course, you’re catching on. I’m speaking, imaginatively, let’s call it. More on that in a minute, but did you hear the one about the preacher who just preached his heart out one Sunday? “I just need five men, five men sold out for the Lord, and we can change this church, change this city, set this place ON FIRE for the Lord! We can turn things around. We can make a difference! Five men!” That afternoon, during his Sunday nap, there was a knock at the door, and the preacher, in his skivvies, put on a robe and went to the door. Five guys standing on his steps. “We’re here,” they said. “Let’s get started.” They were fired up. “Started? On what?” the preacher said. “Saving this town, preacher! You said you wanted five men. We’re ready to roll!” Preacher looked a little abashed, and finally said, “Boys, I’s just talking. I was just preaching, you know?” When Jeremiah’s there, I know better than to just “talk.” I know better than to fill up the time with just so much verbiage. I don’t know how many “authors” there actually are of our 66 books in the Bible, but they all want a say. They all need a say. We all need them to have a say, too. Of course, Jesus and Paul do most of the talking. I got no problem with that. And Peter and John and Isaiah and Moses. But Ezra’s in there, too. And even Obadiah, old one-chapter Obadiah, stuck there between those other chart-toppers, Amos and Jonah, yeah, that Jonah. Even Obadiah needs to be heard. Why? Because he’s there. The presence in the scriptures of a particular book means that God’s people over the centuries realized “we can’t leave this out.” Some folk weren’t too thrilled with the Song of Solomon being in there (too racy) or the book of Revelation (too scary), but they’re there. The church needs to hear them. Uncle Bob may be a little nutty, from your perspective, but you need to meet him. You need to hear his story. You haven’t lived what he’s lived through, but he’s family. That makes his story your story. There are a lot of ways to ensure that the “whole counsel of God” is at least read on Sunday mornings. The lectionary is an organized trip through the Bible on a 3 (sometimes 4) year basis, revolving around the gospels. Any given Sunday there’s also an Old Testament reading, a New Testament reading and a Psalm. Myself, I just preach from one text per Sunday. You can easily find a lectionary on the Internet. Look up Revised Common Lectionary. Or, just alternate OT, NT, OT, NT, a different book each week. You’ll eventually hit old Ezra. That’ll put a smile on his face and maybe he’ll leave me alone for a while. Have you, or your preacher, ever preached from Obadiah, or the Song of Solomon, or even Philemon? That one’s easy to miss. If not, you should ask why. Isn’t the whole Bible worth hearing from? Steve Odom preaches nearly every week at Central Christian Church on E. Main St. in Murfreesboro and can be heard at borodisciples.org

Islam NOT a Religion?

One aspect of our local controversy regarding the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro has been the accusation, made both in court and the media, that Islam is NOT a religion. Why is this important? Because religious people, and those who value freedom, should never want the state involved in defining what religion is.
Of course, there are reasons that this charge is made, and while there is some substance to these ideas, they are in the end not adequate to support the accusation and not helpful to any side of the ongoing multisided debate.

The first of these reasons is the well-known linkage to what's informally called Shariah, the Islamic system of jurisprudence. At the foundation of Islam are laws promulgated by Mohammed and his successors. As Islam developed, Shariah followed as a form of binding interpretation of those laws and subsequent authoritative traditions (the sunna).

The public face of Islam in pluralistic countries of more than one prominent religion (France, UK, Nigeria) tends to be at the intersection of Muslims’ attempting to follow both Shariah law and the jurisprudence of the country they live in, such as conflicts with having Drivers License photos made with veiled faces for women (the niqab). What are perceived as essential Islamic practices appear to be at odds with the law of the land, giving rise to the notion that the totalizing tendencies of Islam disqualify it from being called a religion.

If anything, however, these collisions are more a measure of the short amount of time that Islam has been constrained to interact with modern secular states, which tolerate a dizzying variety of religious belief, while at the same time observing carefully codified restrictions on certain religious practices (think polygamy).

The other main reason for the charge that Islam is not a religion is the development and spread of Islamism, or “radical Islam” in the last 40 years. Since we in the west began really paying attention to Islam in the last decade or so, many have commented on the absence of any notion of the separation of “church and state” in majority Islam countries. There are many reasons for this, none of them simple, which is apparently a problem for the way we're accustomed to dealing with political controversies.

By analogy with Moses, the lawgiver of Israel, Mohammed was both the political leader of his followers and their religious leader at the same time. Israel, however, was called as a specific ethnos, a people linked by ancestry and given a promised land. Israel did not begin with an outward oriented mission to bring the world into “submission” (Islam). It was more centripetal than centrifugal.

Islam, by contrast, exploded outward in political/military conquest into the power vacuum of the “burnt-over” district between the exhausted empires of Sassanid Persia (greater Iran) and the Byzantine Roman Empire (Greece, the Balkans, Turkey, the Caucasus, Syria, North Africa and the Levant). Very soon after Mohammed's hegira(migration with followers) to Medina in 622 AD (Year One in the Islamic calendar) he was the leader of a united Medina, having militarily defeated the Jews of Medina and conquered the remaining pagan Arabs of the city.

Because it arose as a unitary ideology, there was never a significant time in those early centuries during which Islam was practiced as a minority religion in conflict with the ruling government. In fairness, we need to remember that this was the universal experience in antiquity before the rise of Christianity. Religion was always coterminous with a people and its national identity. Islam expanded outward, first to Mecca, and then up the Arabian peninsula, defeating Byzantine and Persian armies in major battles, both within the first ten years after Mohammed's death.

Contrast this with the first followers of Jesus of Nazareth, who were Jews. Jews had been accustomed to living under Roman domination for the previous 150 years, and under Greek, Persian and Babylonian rule for the 500 years before that. The subsequent Jewish/Roman relationship was not a happy one, and in 70 AD and 135 AD there were uprisings followed by swift and efficient Roman suppressions. Early Christians, small in number, were powerless politically and oriented in a different direction than Mohammed's first followers. Jesus had already rejected the political/military route that many had expected him to follow and this set the tone for at least the next 250 years of church history, during which time Christianity doctrinally became what it is today.

There was much mixing of government, religion, church and state after the time of Emperor Theodosius (381 AD) but the foundational documents (e.g., the New Testament) came from the earlier period of minority status, and seeded Jesus' ideas regarding the role of faith and worldly power (“my kingdom is not of this world” ; “give to Caesar that which is Caesar’s”) into modern, Western thinking about religion and politics. At the time of the rise of Islam, however, Christianity was entirely identified with the ruling government of Rome, now based in Constantinople. This close knit arrangement gradually dissolved as a result of the Reformation of the 16th century, the religious conflicts of the 17th century and the American founding of the 18th century.

So though it must be acknowledged that the kind of thinking about religion and politics that's been normative in Islamic writings for centuries is foreign to what we're now familiar with, just because a religion is very different from what we're accustomed to does not mean it's not a religion. Many Christians are very familiar, after all, with preachers opining that Christianity is “not a religion at all, but a relationship.” In such cases religion is often denigrated by Christian thinkers as what humanity does to try to reach God on its own, which would fit the way I, and many Christians, think about Islam and other religions.

In Japan, for example, the vast majority of people who take part in Shinto rituals also practice Buddhist ancestor worship. In our world, a Southern Baptist would never ask a Catholic priest to come perform an infant baptism. We don’t “get” Japanese religious practices, just like we don’t “get” Islamic political/religious attitudes. This is just another example of how unfamiliar religions don’t always fit the default pattern of American ideas of religion.

Believe me, the last thing Americans want is somebody “defining” what a religion is, because the court of last appeal is always the government and it is not in the interest of any religious people to have the government involved in that. Shintoism and Japanese Buddhism are of course religions, just as Islam, with its complicated political/military history and, for some, distasteful, ideology is a religion, and therefore covered under our constitution's First Amendment protections.

The secular nation-state, economically liberal, religiously tolerant, democratically governed, was designed from its beginning to tame competing religious ideologies (Catholic/Protestant and Protestant/Protestant) with freedom, expansion of personal property rights, property ownership and access to political power. If given the chance, the modern secular state will do the same with Islam of whatever form or forms. If Islam cannot adapt to that, it will probably meet the same unhappy fate bar-Kochba's Jewish followers met in 135 AD, when they decided that God would fight for them against the Roman legions of the Emperor Hadrian. He did not.

Steve Odom is the pastor of Central Christian Church in Murfreesboro and a former community member of The DNJ's Editorial Board. He blogs at borodisciples.org.

Christians, Muslims both have Higher Allegiance

Lately I've read many times and in many places that a Muslim's first loyalty is to Shariah law, as for example in Marshall Boates' letter to the editor (The DNJ, Dec. 7): "The Muslims' first pledge is to Shariah law. All other authority is subordinate to Shariah law. Therefore Muslims cannot be allowed to defend our country because it is not their highest authority."

I would guess that many if not most of those who make statements like this are church-going Christians. Which puzzles me because they seem not to have thought of equally absolute statements like the apostle Peter's "We must obey God rather than men," when sanctioned by the "council" (local government in Jerusalem) for evangelizing. Christians have ever since referenced this and other similar statements and the history of subsequent encounters with imperial government in the Roman Empire. Repeatedly, in various sporadic persecutions by Roman government, Christians were given the opportunity to acknowledge the government's role as "highest authority." Repeatedly, Christians gave up their lives rather than do so. Religious allegiance has always been a part of the history of the West and Christians have sometimes been pressed to violate their ethics or beliefs by an inordinately dominant government.

These two religions' claim to have a higher authority than government should be seen as a salutary thing, not a problem. They are, while not identical, at least analogous to one another. Christians who understand their faith know implicitly that we hold allegiance to our country and its government only at arm's length, so to speak. It is a secondary allegiance at best. God is our first allegiance, and we may not sacrifice that loyalty on the altar of convenience. Fortunately, in a well run representative republic, there are seldom occasions when a Christian is absolutely pressed to the wall of sacrificing allegiance to God in favor of government or facing the consequences.

Different Christians see the religious/governmental conflicts differently, and it is out of the pacifist heritage against all forms of violence and war that the traditions of affording citizens the opportunity to register as Conscientious Objectors originates.

Certainly Muslims have a higher allegiance than government. The problem lately has come from the misreading by certain Muslims of what that requires them to do when different allegiances clash. There is this aspect to the Islamic tradition, but it is by no means monolithic.

There are thousands of American Muslims who serve in the Armed Forces well and honorably. Rather than the rather simpleminded tactic of excluding service based on one's religion, it may well behoove the Department of Defense to be more attentive to statements like those made by Maj. Nidal Hasan prior to his murderous attacks on service members at Ft. Hood. This is simply common sense, such as the current administration has occasionally demonstrated when attacking terrorists and their leaders in recent events in Pakistan and Yemen for example.

The Christian and Islamic tradition re: Church/State relations are not identical, of course. But, we hold in common, with Jews also, the notion that God is Almighty, and to him alone belongs ultimate authority over the affairs of all. How this is sometimes put into practice reflects our different theologies and traditions. But it is not, in this country anyway, a basis for blanket exclusion from military service based on religion.

Steven Odom is the pastor of Central Christian Church in Murfreesboro and a former community member of The DNJ's Editorial Board.

Tit for Tat?

So, I've wondered lately, re: the sad preacher in Gainesville, Terry Jones, and his plan to burn the Quran, why doesn't someone in Mecca, or Baghdad, whereever, burn a Bible and call it even steven? I'd do it for 'em if that would call off the rabid jihadists that will make hay out of this media fed kerfuffle for months and months. Just sayin'.

Islamic Woman Hating

Don't be too quick to attribute the overwhelming misogyny all over Islamic lands to the "culture." Take it from someone who's lived there. Judy Bachrach has the goods on these folks. The school fire in Mecca sorta settles the issue for me.

Twice Branded: Western Women in Muslim Lands

Judy Bachrach Every time I despair of the way women are treated in Muslim countries—and the few syllables Western leaders and op-ed columnists expend on their humiliations, mutilations, harassments, and, yes, murders—I turn to the Web site of Mona Eltahawy. Eltahawy spent her formative years in Egypt and Saudi Arabia: A couple of years after I stopped visiting, a horrific fire broke out in a school in Mecca, home to the Muslim world’s holiest site. Fifteen girls burned to death because morality police standing outside the school wouldn’t let them out of the burning building. Why? Because they weren’t wearing headscarves and abayas, the black cloaks that girls and women must wear in public in Saudi Arabia. And here is Eltahawy on a girl’s lot in Egypt: When I was only four years old and still living in Cairo, a man exposed himself to me as I stood on a balcony at my family’s, and gestured for me to come down. At 15, I was groped as I was performing the rites of the hajj pilgrimage at Mecca, the holiest site for Muslims. Every part of my body was covered except for my face and hands. I’d never been groped before and burst into tears, but I was too ashamed to explain to my family what had happened. Read more...

More Debt This year than the Previous 232 years....

Mark Steyn's lecture at Hillsdale College is published in Imprimis.

In most of the developed world, the state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood—health care, child care, care of the elderly—to the point where it's effectively severed its citizens from humanity's primal instincts, not least the survival instinct. Hillary Rodham Clinton said it takes a village to raise a child. It's supposedly an African proverb—there is no record of anyone in Africa ever using this proverb, but let that pass. P.J. O'Rourke summed up that book superbly: It takes a village to raise a child. The government is the village, and you're the child. Oh, and by the way, even if it did take a village to raise a child, I wouldn't want it to be an African village. If you fly over West Africa at night, the lights form one giant coastal megalopolis: Not even Africans regard the African village as a useful societal model. But nor is the European village. Europe's addiction to big government, unaffordable entitlements, cradle-to-grave welfare, and a dependence on mass immigration needed to sustain it has become an existential threat to some of the oldest nation-states in the world.

And now the last holdout, the United States, is embarking on the same grim path: After the President unveiled his budget, I heard Americans complain, oh, it's another Jimmy Carter, or LBJ's Great Society, or the new New Deal. You should be so lucky. Those nickel-and-dime comparisons barely begin to encompass the wholesale Europeanization that's underway. The 44th president's multi-trillion-dollar budget, the first of many, adds more to the national debt than all the previous 43 presidents combined, from George Washington to George Dubya. The President wants Europeanized health care, Europeanized daycare, Europeanized education, and, as the Europeans have discovered, even with Europeanized tax rates you can't make that math add up. In Sweden, state spending accounts for 54% of GDP. In America, it was 34%—ten years ago. Today, it's about 40%. In four years' time, that number will be trending very Swede-like.

CNN and Freedom of Speech

Here's the latest on the Obama/Abortion Ad that NBC wouldn't run on Super Bowl night. See video below:
We have been quieter than usual the past two weeks for good reason. Following NBC's refusal to air our ad during the Super Bowl, we received some great feedback from our members on what we should do next. The consensus was that our latest ad should be broadcast following President Obama's first State of the Union Address -- scheduled for next Tuesday.

So we contacted CNN, thinking their audience contains precisely the type of people we want to reach. Further, given CNN's track record of running advocacy ads, we were confident we would succeed. Not so.

For the past two weeks, we have been pushing and prodding them for an answer. And late this week we finally got a response: No way.

A representative from CNN wrote: "Thank you for your patience. We have decided to pass on this creative. CNN doesn't accept advocacy ads that portray personal decisions in a manner that suggests a position in favor of the advocacy message, without having permission of the persons involved."

This is absurd. Our ad does not suggest that Barack Obama is pro-life. Instead, our ad presents nothing but facts. President Obama, like every human being, began as an unborn child. Because he was born, he was able to become the President of the United States.

CNN and others simply don't like the obvious conclusion of our ad - there was no ‘choice' for abortion back in 1961. Thankfully, we had laws then safeguarding unborn children -- laws that protected the life of a future president who tragically is unwilling to fight for those same protections today.

But wait. Is this fair?

The standard CNN used to reject our ad did not prevent the network from airing a 2005 ad sponsored by the pro-abortion group NARAL that suggested that then Judge John Roberts supported violence against abortion clinics.

FactCheck.org described the NARAL ad this way: "An abortion-rights group is running an attack ad accusing Supreme Court nominee John Roberts of filing legal papers ‘supporting . . . a convicted clinic bomber' and of having an ideology that ‘leads him to excuse violence against other Americans' It shows images of a bombed clinic in Birmingham, Alabama. The ad is false.'"

Several prominent pro-abortion supporters condemned the ad, including President Clinton's Solicitor General Walter Dellinger. The commercial, which attributed views to John Roberts that were not his, was ultimately pulled from the air not by CNN, but by NARAL.

At the time CNN issued a statement saying: "CNN accepts advocacy advertising from responsible groups from across the political spectrum who wish to express their views and their opinions about issues of public importance."

CNN is willing to run ads insinuating that a federal judge supports violent criminal activity, but it won't allow an ad celebrating the potential of all human life, including Barack Obama? Not to mention, we are fairly sure NARAL didn't get permission from John Roberts to run their ad.

If you want to express your concerns, please do so firmly, but charitably. You can write CNN President Jonathan Klein at jonathan.klein@cnn.com

So what now?

We aren't going to sit back and complain. We are still looking at several additional options to air the ad. We are also working on our next ad, and have set our sights high once again.

If you liked what we have done so far, we are confident you will be excited about what is coming next.


Brian Burch
CatholicVote.org



P.S. I discussed the decision by CNN to reject our recent ad with an executive of a prominent commercial ad agency. He said bluntly: "Their excuse is a textbook answer for a network that does not want to run your ad."

Of course, all is not lost. CNN's refusal will only create more attention for our ad, which has been widely discussed even among abortion groups like NARAL and nationally-syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman. The ad remains a viral hit on the Internet with over 1.6 million views on YouTube.

We have successfully provoked a national conversation about the gift of every human life -- which is why we created the ad to begin with.

Rest assured, we are working hard on the next phase of this campaign. Thank you for your continued prayers and support.

Hollywood Should Pledge Its Money Where Its Collective Mouth Is

Don't know who Brett Joshpe is but he's got a GREAT idea.

by Brett Joshpe

Go to YouTube and type in, “I Pledge” for the latest insufferably, self-important pat on its own back courtesy of Hollywood. The video montage is Tinsletown’s way of pledging fidelity to Barack Obama and letting him know that…”You’re Not Alone!” Because while Iran scurries to acquire a nuclear weapon and the economy falters, Demi Moore pledges to smile more (and “to be a servant to our President”), Eva Longoria pledges to laugh more, Cameron Diaz pledges to learn her neighbors’ names, and Jason Bateman pledges to save the planet by only flushing after a deuce. Give Barack Obama credit for one thing: he seems to have woken the consciousness of an entire class of people who are out of touch and inspired them to demonstrate how they are completely and utterly out of touch.

But heck, Hollywood, good for you guys. You have finally realized that you are Americans too, and you can once again attend overseas premieres with pride, rather than the shame of citizenship under the Bush administration. While you are at it, maybe you could pledge to make Khalid Sheikh Mohammed smile and love more too. That guy could use a hug and an environmentally friendly toilet. And since you are looking to pitch in now and to “turn the lights off,” “trade in your obnoxious car and buy a hybrid,” and “drive slower,” I have a few other ideas for how you might be able to help. Please, forgive me if these suggestions may seem a little punitive, perhaps counter-productive, but this is a time for sacrifice and a time to embrace the collective, selfless philosophy of Democrats and The One.

Until Republicans acted this week, the Senate was actually prepared to bestow hundreds of millions of dollars of stimulation for Hollywood. The “Hollywood clause” would have given movie studios special tax breaks and enabled them to depreciate the costs of production equipment at a quicker rate. Perhaps, however, Congress should consider reinserting that provision. Doing so would give us the perfect excuse to impose the types of compensation controls on the movie industry that President Obama is now demanding of other industries who receive federal help.

Unlike the greedy Wall Street executives though, who have torpedoed our economy by allowing federal bureaucrats to bludgeon them into making bad loans, Hollywood would surely understand the merit of pay caps. After all, it would enable the entertainment world to fulfill its pledge “to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other.” (Cut for laughter and gagging and take two!)

But seriously, for the people who are leading the environmental movement and spearheading efforts to turn the Academy Awards green, cut back on the number of SUV’s in their entourage, and demonstrate frugality to Al Gore, this is such a great opportunity to demonstrate restraint and help out the new President. What better way to show solidarity with Democrats who want to impose a command and control economy and to confiscate wealth from the rich. Especially since everyone needs to make sacrifices right now. Not to worry though, Steven Spielberg and crew, it will feel patriotic.

As such, we should cap the compensation that movie studios and Silver Screen stars make, particularly given the wealth disparities between the actors and actresses and the grips, stagehands, and extras. While there will be times for profits, this is not that time, especially when people are losing jobs and the Golden State’s $40 billion budget deficit is bigger than most countries’ total economic GDP.

It so refreshing to see Hollywood stars embracing this new America. They are just in time to put their dollars where their mouths are and to start fulfilling their pledge.

Ah, Yes, San Fran Nan

From the Denver Post

In October 2008, Nancy Pelosi had this to say:

“Elect us, hold us accountable, and make a judgment and then go from there. But I do tell you that if the Democrats win and have substantial majorities, Congress of the United States will be more bipartisan.”

Today, Pelosi said this:

“Washington seems consumed in the process argument of bipartisanship, when the rest of the country says they need this bill.”

Change.

Jake Tapper, You Da Man!

Unintended Consequences

Hmmm. Turns out that those who identify with the environment the strongest tend to imperil it the most, by where they choose to live. Dean Bill Chameides of the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke says,

Sometimes going green is counterproductive. Think corn ethanol. Or the new super-high mileage, low-cost car in India by Tata Motors. It may lead to more pollution by making it possible for millions of people to afford a car. Even more surprising is a recent study that concludes: people who identify strongest with the environment may imperil it the most — by where they choose to live.

Researcher M. Nils Peterson and colleagues compiled data from more than 400 households in the Teton Valley (of Wyoming and Idaho), arguably one of the country's most breathtaking areas, to gauge whether there is a consistent relationship between people’s attitudes about the environment and their behavior when it comes to deciding where to live.

The researchers, whose study was published in Conservation Biology, found that people who valued nature the most overwhelmingly chose to live in natural, relatively undeveloped areas. This, in spite of the fact that that choice eats away at the heart of what made them attractive in the first place – by placing natural, functioning ecosystems and the plants and animals that depend on them at risk from bulldozers and all that they bring.

Once the researchers compiled this data with other demographic information the picture became bleaker.

The people who valued nature the most also tended to be somewhat older and more educated and have smaller households. In contrast, somewhat younger, less educated people, to whom the environment was of less consequence, chose to live in established neighborhoods. These locations, ironically, had little direct impact on surrounding natural ecosystems. While there also appears to be a correlation between higher income and those choosing to live in natural areas, the study concluded that education more than wealth was the driver of this correlation (i.e., statistically speaking, wealthier people tend to be more educated).

So what is going on here? Why would people who care most about the environment (and, in light of their educational backgrounds, probably best understand the importance of leaving precious ecosystems undisturbed) choose to live in and thus disrupt those very same ecosystems?

Perhaps they believe that development is inevitable and they would be better stewards than others. Perhaps they think their little incursion into Mother Nature’s land is insignificant in the great scheme of things. Or perhaps they figure some development of pristine areas is okay, as long as it is done responsibly – in the same way that proper management of forests can maximize forest production.

The researchers conclude that their unexpected findings "demonstrate a need for environmentalists to make household location decisions that reflect their environmental attitudes."