David Sessions | Patrol Magazine

Fox News Sunday, Now With Altar Calls [1]

David Sessions — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:17:13 GMT

As you perhaps know by now, Brit Hume of the Fox News Channel got famous yesterday morning for saying on the air that Tiger Woods should convert to Christianity if he wants to make a personal comeback. (Video above.) My colleague David Gibson writes:

Hume's framing of his altar call to the wayward golfer raises at least two other debatable points.

One is the purpose of Christianity: It is eternal salvation through belief in Jesus Christ. That is the entry point, the foundation of it all. Christian belief should lead believers to behave in upright ways, to sacrifice themselves totally, and to live as Christ did. But if that happens, it is really a welcome result of belief. In his remarks, Hume almost sounds like all those Christian "life coaches" and prosperity gospel preachers who see Christianity as a means to a happy and successful life. Christianity is more about what has been called "the sanctification of failure," namely through Jesus on the cross. In that sense Tiger has plenty of opportunity to be a witness.

The other problem with Hume's comments is that they are contradicted by so much evidence. Anecdotally, one need look no further than the sanctimonious Christian pols-turned-philanderers, or the many high-profile pastors who turn out to have feet of clay. Statistics also show that Christians are as likely to divorce or abort as everyone else, and Bible Belt states often have much higher rates of marital breakdown and teen pregnancy than other regions.

After Theory: My Life-Changing Book of 2009 [1]

David Sessions — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 05:30:41 GMT

Over 40 years after first drawing attention in British academic circles with a Marxist reading of Shakespeare plays, Terry Eagleton played a significant role in 2009’s discourse in a rather different way: as the defender of religion from Richard Dawkins, whose popular 2008 polemic he eviscerated in the London Review of Books and whom he continued to pursue in a Yale lecture series that became his latest book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate.

In a year where books and talks about “losing faith” were the rage on the fringes of the Christian dialogue, Eagleton’s philosophizing had a particular prescience. James Wood threw him to the mat over the differences between his Christianity and orthodox faith, but there is something deeply humane and alluring about his leftist sort-of-Catholicism: his earthy rendition of the Jesus as a revolutionary anti-Messiah, and his disgusted account of the New Testament’s reincarnation as the battering ram of the powerful.

But enough about this year. After Theory, published in 2003 the shadow of 9/11 and in the midst of the Bush adminstration’s macho posturing, did not address religion per se. It’s a two faced assessment of Theory, a field in which Eagleton has been monumentally influential but now seems bored with; he appreciates the challenges it mounts to accepted dogmas, but dislikes how postmodernism has splintered it into a million frivolous niches. So his book sets out to size up the situation, but ends up a wide-ranging overview of current world thought—a incisively witty critique of capitalism, postmodernism, and West’s triumphal notions of its own progress. It’s funny, brilliant, and at times scatter-shot, which contributes to its being impossible to summarize.

(More after the jump.)

Climate Change Pragmatism [2]

David Sessions — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:36:33 GMT

I admit to knowing very little about climate science. At one point I could give you an overview of the latest IPCC models, but I have long since forgotten those reams of data. Perhaps on account of that ignorance, I find Bjorn Lomborg's pragmatism and wariness of conventional wisdom appealing:

As I write this in the Bella Center in Copenhagen, I am surrounded by delegates, politicians and activists engaged in negotiating a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. Almost every one of them is singing from the same hymn-book: The world's nations must commit themselves to drastic, immediate carbon cuts if we are to avoid the worst of global warming.

The tune may be seductive, but the lyrics don't make any sense. Even if every major government were to slap huge taxes on carbon fuels—which is not going to happen—it wouldn't do much to halt climate change any time soon. What it would do is cost us hundreds of billions—if not trillions—of dollars, because alternative energy technologies are not yet ready to take up the slack.

Of course, I would like to see the politicians move even further away from the Kyoto approach. Instead of making far-fetched promises about greenhouse gases, how about a concrete commitment to green energy research and development? Specifically, we should radically increase spending on R&D for green energy—to 0.2% of global GDP, or $100 billion. That's 50 times more than the world spends now—but still twice as cheap as Kyoto. Not only would this be both affordable and politically achievable, but it would also have a real chance of working.

Crazy Like a Tea Partier [1]

David Sessions — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 16:12:37 GMT

Anne Applebaum reminds us there are other political crazies out there, and we don't hear nearly as much about the ones flooding Copenhagen this week:

While it's true that human beings are often greedy, stupid, and destructive, it's also true that we got to where we are at least partly thanks to human creativity, ingenuity, and talent. Electricity is a miracle, an invention that has literally brought light and life to millions. Modern communication and transportation systems are no less extraordinary, helping create economic growth in places where poverty and misery were the norm for centuries.

All of them depend on fossil fuels, but they don't have to: A profound change in the nature of human energy consumption can be achieved—thanks to the entrepreneurship that created the Internet, the compassion that lies behind the advances in modern medicine, and the scientific reasoning that sent men into outer space. As for nihilism and hatred of humankind, it teaches us nothing, except to give up. And we shouldn't be passing it on to our children, either.

Of Money and Clarity

David Sessions — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 16:10:16 GMT

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Upton Sinclair

Alas [3]

David Sessions — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 19:37:33 GMT

"What is needed is neither the overweening rationalist atheism of a Dawkins nor the rarified religious belief of an Eagleton, but a theologically engaged atheism that resembles disappointed belief. Such atheism, only a semitone from faith, would be, like musical dissonance, the more acute for its proximity. It could give a brother's account of belief, rather than treat it as some unwanted impoverished relative. It would be unafraid to credit the immense allure of religious tradition, but at the same time it would be ready to argue that the abstract God of the philosophers is no more probably than the idolatrous God of the fundamentalists, makes no better sense of the fallen world and is certainly no more likable or worthy our worshipful respect -- alas."

James Wood, "God in the Quad," The New Yorker, Aug 31, 2009.

You'll Know Them By Their Questions

David Sessions — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 17:37:01 GMT

"I do not have clear answers to current questions. I have questions, and, as a matter of fact, I think a man is better known by his questions than his answers. To make known one's questions is, no doubt, to come out in the open oneself. I am not in the market for ready-made and wholesale answers so easily volunteered by the public and I question nothing so much as the viability of public and popular answers, including some of those which claim to be most progressive."

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

Why Does Everybody Hate Newsweek? [1]

David Sessions — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 19:54:05 GMT

"Jon Meacham is clearly an intelligent person and skilled writer, but his judgment about America and what America needs is somewhat inferior to that of my cat Lexie," John B. Judis wrote on the Web site of The New Republic. He was referring to the editor of Newsweek and a column he wrote for the magazine's Dec. 7 issue, boldly headlined "Why Dick Cheney Should Run for President."

Judis is far from the only journalist savaging Meacham's column as well as the revamped Newsweek. In the column, the editor argued that Cheney is a "man of conviction" who would give Americans the chance to vote for "vigorous unilateralism." Amid asides about liberals "spitting out their lattes" at his idea, Meacham suggests that a Cheney vs. Obama contest would be one of clearly drawn lines, where the will of the people could be easily determined and might translate into a "mandate" to govern. "A campaign would also give us an occasion that history denied us in 2008: an opportunity to adjudicate the George W. Bush years in a direct way," Meacham wrote.

Click here to read the rest of this article at Politics Daily.

Left Behind By the Right [4]

David Sessions — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 18:12:29 GMT

Andrew Sullivan explains how the right left him, and, for many of the same reasons, it has left me as well. I think it's important to point that out for those who are tempted to suggest we're wandering out onto the left just because we feel like it:

I cannot support a movement that claims to believe in limited government but backed an unlimited domestic and foreign policy presidency that assumed illegal, extra-constitutional dictatorial powers until forced by the system to return to the rule of law.

I cannot support a movement that exploded spending and borrowing and blames its successor for the debt.

I cannot support a movement that holds torture as a core value.

I cannot support a movement which has no real respect for the institutions of government and is prepared to use any tactic and any means to fight political warfare rather than conduct a political conversation.

I cannot support a movement that sees permanent war as compatible with liberal democratic norms and limited government.

I cannot support a movement that sees climate change as a hoax and offers domestic oil exploration as the core plank of an energy policy.

I cannot support a movement that believes that the United States should be the sole global power, should sustain a permanent war machine to police the entire planet, and sees violence as the core tool for international relations.

More here.

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? [2]

David Sessions — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 20:02:54 GMT

Based on everything I've ever read about Vladimir Putin -- and now this -- I am.