How to Taste Wine

It is not the drinking, it is the tasting that makes wine drinking fun. Wine Spectatorinstructs.


And watch this for a bit more:

Obama's 'Decemberist' Revolution

There has been a lot written about Obama's Oregon appearance in Portland, Or at the waterfront park near the Willamette river. It turns out that his appearance was preceded by The Decemberists a popular Indie band from Portland. Let me just say I like this band and they are a very talented group. But their politics is very left.

The Decemberists apparently open many of their shows with the Soviet Anthem:


The Decemberists are also uppity about smoking and request no smoking venues. A friend of mine who attended a Decemberists show in DC said that the band called out some guy from the stage to put out his cigarette and they would not play until he did so.

A word about Portland and their bands: Portland is a trendy little place, but as far as music goes, they are somewhat on the cutting edge. When a talented band in Portland gets noticed, they attract a following. Portland has always been that kind of town. Let me count the ways: The Crazy 8s, the Wray Brothers, Curtis Salgado and the Stillettos, the Blubinos (see below), Seafood Mama--you know them as NuShooz, Johnny and the Distractions, are just a FEW of the bands over the last 20 years that have attracted a following. When these bands play--especially at a spacious place and on the banks of the Willamette, people turn out.

The point in all this is this: the people probably turned out to see Obama. But, it is likely that there were more people there to see Portland's premiere band of the moment. Though the Obama speech was promoted, the band's appearance was promoted as an open concert. There were thus people there who did not expect to see Obama and thought that the Decemberists show was all there was to see/hear. Undertsanding the Portland music scene as I do, it is highly likely most of the 75,000 who turned out were there specifically for the Decemberists.



Blubinos

Architecture & Symmetry in Public Buildings

As noted in Slate this week symmetry is back--or has it ever gone out of style? The notion of this basic architectural rule has been noted for thousands of years. I note this because cities today--the larger ones like Portland, Or., Raleigh, NC., Austin, Tx.,--are increasingly managing their public and private spaces through something called smart growth and new urbanism. And, well, sometimes symmetry is understood, other times it is not--note the Guggenheim in New York. Snip:

Symmetros is a Greek word, and ancient Greek architecture used symmetry as a basic organizing principle. As did Roman, Roman-esque, and Renaissance. Indeed, it is hard to think of any architectural tradition, Western or non-Western, that does not include symmetry. Symmetry is something that Islamic mosques, Chinese pagodas, Hindu temples, Shinto shrines, and Gothic cathedrals have in common.

Architectural Modernism thumbed its nose at tradition and firmly avoided symmetry. Being symmetrical was considered as retrograde as being, well, decorated. All exemplary Modernist buildings celebrated asymmetry

4th Circuit Strikes Down Va's Restrictive Abortion Law

The WaPo reports

The Virginia law bans the medical procedure "intact dilation and extraction" (D&E), which along with a standard dilation and extraction is used to terminate pregnancies after about 12 weeks. Up to 90 percent of abortions occur before then.

Outcome Based Higher Education

Seems to be coming, and could come our way. Is it smart for government to tell us what should be learned in, say, engineering? What happens to innovation of the market under this?

Meaning of Prayer

Ever heard a talk about the Bible and a defense of Christianity and then in the middle of that, is dropped a defense from Aristotle? Thomas Hopko enlightens, via the philosopher that doing is being.

And somewhat related, salvation requires doing.

Is Conservatism Dead?

That is the argument from George Packer at the New Yorker here. Just as I was sitting down to write about this, my reader prompted me of this post on the same subject. Is Conservatism really dead, or dying? It seems to me yes and no. And as one of the above links notes, it is not like liberalism is triumphant. But in some sense, I think it has been triumphant. People seem to be comfortable with increased government involvement in our lives, but when was the last time a bone-fide political leftist was elected? Hint--it's been 40 years. So all this talk that the linking of, say, Obama to the 60s is not as far-fetched an effective political defensive maneuver as Packer thinks.

Many of the people identified by Packer as Conservative are dour. The overall argument by Packer seems about right--but the reasons and the people he interviews are not the best representatives. Does anyone really consider Pat Buchanan as a conservative voice? And is he really all that influential? Packer moves through the story in a haphazard way as well--saying the Iraq war is [being] "lost" (is it really?) and that David Brooks is a conservative who does not believe in the message anymore (does that make him, more liberal than conservative, and hence not a voice of conservatism anymore?)

Something Packer mentions not, and seems to care less about, is intellectual conservatism which was the life-blood of the old way. Harry V. Jaffa says that the conservative coalition that Buckley presided over is dead, but that does not mean Packer's gleeful portrayal of the conservative movement cannot be revived in different forms. One thing that may revive conservatism is the revival of first principles of the American Founding. It is perhaps, the departure form those ideas that has led to the fracturing of conservatism. Before a creative reconstruction can commence there has to be a creative destruction--which it seems clear Bush has presided over to a degree.

Despite the limitations of the article, it is thought provoking. Read it all.

A Muslim 'Heretic' on Moyers

There is an interesting interview of Professor Anouar Majid here.

It is a video and requires Quicktime. The Professor says we are all fundamentalists in some sense, but he wants to make the middle east a land of heretics--that is moderate the religion of Islam. He contends that religious fundamentalism of all stripes ruins creativity. And although Moyers tries to get him to assent to his liberalism, in many ways he does not and takes Moyers to "school." Transcript is here. Snip:

In the case of the Islamic world, we know that religious orthodoxies have stifled creativity and have silenced the voices of dissent. And that has been happening for over a long period of time. Consequently, now the Islamic world, now, is in a very precarious intellectual and cultural state and unable to take care of itself properly if it does not allow for those heretical or dissenting voices to emerge in order to engage in solid meaningful debates, philosophical debates and conversations.

******

I initially wanted to write a book on why America matters. To explain, because I felt at that time that the United States has not been able to explain it--has not been able to explain it adequately to Muslims and Arabs. Instead of, like for example, in my view, emphasizing the significance, the landmark event of the American Revolution and what the American Revolution had inaugurated and how Americans have have been trying to negotiate the tension between a religious life and a secular one from the very early days of the-- from the late 18th century on to today--

*****

And then there's this exchange:

BILL MOYERS: You're very much of an admirer of the American Revolution, right?

ANOUAR MAJID: Oh, absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: I mean, you write about it not only here but elsewhere with great appreciation.

ANOUAR MAJID: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: What about it that appealed to you?

ANOUAR MAJID: I think it's the greatest event in modern history. Probably surpasses, in my estimation, the significance of the French Revolution because it's the first attempt in human history to create a political system where people can live without a king, without a monarch, for example. And-- it was almost like a miracle-

BILL MOYERS:You say in here that no place offers more instruction about how Islam and America might co-exist than that, the American Revolution.

ANOUAR MAJID: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: How so?

ANOUAR MAJID: Because in the early days of the American Revolution, the decade after the American Revolution-- we see it's an attempts to use Christianity for example, to justify the Republican system of government. People were quoting the Bible. The people are using Christianity as the moral edifice. And that combination, that combination would be extremely useful to Muslim society today, trying to combine, wrestling with how to create or maintain religious piety, to maintain their own spirituality while at the same time, creating cultures of freedom for everybody including for non-Christians and atheists and people with different political and cultural practices.

BILL MOYERS:But one thing that happened is that the founders substituted natural law for revealed law. The founders did not say God tells us to do this. These laws are self-evident.

ANOUAR MAJID: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: And you can't do that in the culture, when it's the Koran, the revelation of God, that is the is the measure. Right?

ANOUAR MAJID: That's true. But if you have the Koran sort of supervising that entire structure, it makes it very difficult for the people who are not of the Islamic faith to live comfortably in those societies and have equal, full equal rights on those societies But it's equally bad for Muslims. Because Muslims are losing the opportunity to engage and to converse. Conversation, by the way, was a critical element in the philosophy of the enlightenment. Adam Smith and Condorcet and others thought of conversation as that which keeps enlightenment alive. If conversations vanish from any society, meaningful conversations where you're talking with people that are very different from-- radically different from you, then you end up with a series of monologues.

BILL MOYERS: But there's another conundrum in what you write and say, which is that in the early days of the American republic, there was almost a bipartisan agreement among our founding fathers, that Islam was a despotic religion. And that it was to be resisted. In fact, our first war as a nation, as you know, was with, what you could say were Muslim rogue states, the Barbary states. We had-- our Navy came out of that war with the Barbary corsairs, right?

ANOUAR MAJID: Yeah, yes.

BILL MOYERS: And there was a great animosity toward, and fear of, Islam.

ANOUAR MAJID: And Jefferson was a hawk in that war. He was a strident, an absolute believer that the United States should not negotiate with the Barbary state. But by the same token, it was also Jefferson who created the Religious Act in Virginia prior to the writing of the Constitution. It was Jefferson who was the first one to eliminate - the religious-- quo-- religious--affiliation.

BILL MOYERS: No religious test--

ANOUAR MAJID: No religious test to become-- every other state had it except Virginia. Virginia was the first one to do it. And Jefferson was behind it.

BILL MOYERS: In the world as polarized as it is right now, how do you get Muslims in the theocracies to take this kind of look at the American Revolution that you recommend?

ANOUAR MAJID:What I've noticed is Americans berate themselves all the time for not knowing enough about other cultures. But the truth is, a lot of Muslims do not know nearly enough about American history and culture. Most of their understanding of American culture comes through TV and current events and so on. Very little understanding of the origins of the settlements and the colonial period and how-- you know, and how it became the revolution it became and so on. Almost none.

And the other interesting thing, and it's something I've always believed in, is like, if you're gonna bring foreign students from the Islamic and the Arab world to study in the United States, they should at least take a number of course in American studies. Because most of them tend to be in the sciences, in the hard sciences or engineer, you know, MBA. Very few go into humanities. So, if people had a much fuller understanding of American history and culture, maybe what they see on TV or the commercial-- in the commercial world will be somehow alleviated or attenuated by their understanding of the history, the depths of American history.

BILL MOYERS:Where I come from, heresy is belief or practice contrary to orthodox opinion. What is the orthodoxy ruling the Islamic world today?

ANOUAR MAJID:The Sharia is the cannon law that regulates Islamic behavior. And it's basically the tyranny of the imams -- imams who are highly schooled in very traditional form of Islamic learning. So, what happens is, they they basically influence people thinking about their fate and their spirituality. And that is the kind of orthodoxy that you see. For example I was reading recently a number of reports on-- you know-- morality cops or vice cops in a variety of nations in the Islamic world, watching people behave or how they dress or where they're breaking the fast of Ramadan. It's really — faith ought to be a personal matter. It should not be monitored by the police or by a security apparatus that makes sure people are in line and so on. The relationship between the individual and his or her God ought to be in some ways a private relationship.

BILL MOYERS: But the orthodoxy is that we have God's voice in our ear. We have the last word from God. Right?

ANOUAR MAJID: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: And anybody who challenges that is in trouble. I mean, if you look at what happened to Salman Rushdie --

ANOUAR MAJID: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: And the, the penalty for asking questions or for challenging the tenets of faith is often death, right?

ANOUAR MAJID: Yeah, and I think - for me, it's like-- when I talk about heresy, I'm, as I said, I don't care too much about settlers and/or religiosity. What I want is to preserve a culture of augmentation and discussion and conversation.

Religious Academics

The fact is that at many secular colleges there is a religious resurgence that includes students and faculty. Does this mean that the call for a specifically religious colleges because of the hostility from secular higher education is nearing an end? Perhaps.

Young Conservatives in France

Conservatism is not usually known for its activism--it aggressive and demonstrative thumos--but in France, Sarkozy's son seems to be taking it to a whole 'nother level, though moderate it is:

He launched the first in a series of meetings called “jeudis jeunes” - “young Thursdays” - in a cafe where young conservatives were invited to question prominent government members and other celebrity guests.

“The idea is to show young people that you can get involved in politics,” said Jean, 21, referring to youths who did not feel attracted to the left. “It irritates me that when you are young it’s always easier to carry the banner of the left or the extreme left. But it is possible for young people to have other convictions.”

Monday Morning Indie Wake-up

Death Cab for Cutie



Teddybears featuring Iggy Pop

Evangelicals Strike Back

Some background on the recent Evangelical Manifesto: And they want to take back their faith and the true meaning of evangelical.

The Tom Wolfe Interview

An excellent 5 part interview with Tom Wolfe--novelist extraordinaire and snappy dresser with is trademark white--via NRO may be viewed here.

Marvelous stuff here. Watch the entire 5 part series.

Sunday of the Paralytic

On this day the Church remembers the man who lay by the Sheep's Pool in Jerusalem for thirty-eight years, waiting for someone to put him into the pool. The first one to enter the pool after an angel troubled the water would be healed of his infirmities, but someone always entered the pool before him. Seeing the man, the Lord felt compassion for him and healed him.

The Kontakion for this Fourth Sunday of Pascha asks Christ to raise up our souls, "paralyzed by sins and thoughtless acts."

California Court Bans Marriage Ban

Here.

Will Smart Cars Invade America?

These little cars are all over Rome. They were everywhere when I made my trek to the beautiful boot. DC Met Blog has the scoop on these little, and safe, autos.

Evangelical Manifesto

I finally dove into the Evangelical Manifesto, which may be read here.

There is much to like about the 20 page document. The authors try to do 2 things: 1) provide a statement of identity, and 2) criticize Evans who have gotten carried away with their politics. The criticism is of both left and right political Evans. The result is a very moderate and acceptable statement on the meaning of Evangelical politically.

The authors take to task both the leftist Evangelicals who seems to find too much accommodation with the world, and the fundamentalist right who despise the world and seem to also act as if they despise human beings who disagree with them. The problem is that both of these groups put politics above faith. They also place certain political requirements on others in terms of belief that have nothing to do with the Faith. These gatekeepers thus have the opposite effect and fail to evangelize. Those who politicize the Faith are weak: we could not agree more.

As such, the manifesto rights a ship gone aground in that it emphasizes the reason for their existence in the first place--to spread the Word. Therefore, the document spends a lot of time defining--catechizing--their faith.

As a document and a statement, this manifesto was needed to counter the political extremism and theological error of some who consider themselves Evangelical. In that sense, it is remarkable who is not on the list of those supporting it--Dobson, Hagee, and various other minor figures and presidents/provosts of colleges that purport to be religious. Who is absent from the document is probably more important than the figures who signed it.

Perhaps not surprising, I find much to dislike regardless. I will take them in no particular order:

1. They claim that Evangelicals are fast growing. I think that is incorrect. They are shrinking as Pew noted recently. Further, they are not doing very well retaining believers. This does not bode well for the future of Evangelicalism. Anything that does not honestly portray this apparent fact is a bit self-serving.
   
2. Though they note the dangers of identity politics, they proceed to identify. As a matter of theology, the authors take some unChristian like pride in their brand of Christianity which they assert is its own great sect on the level of Protestant. This is a mistake and unfortunate. As Christians we ought not take too much pride in our "identity" and should instead be striving for unity of the Church. This the authors seem resolute not to do.
   
3. The manifesto asserts that Evans accept the ecumenical councils. This is an exaggeration at best. I do not know of 1 evangelical church/group/etc that believes in the totality of all the 7 councils. More specifically, I know not 1 who believes in the veneration of icons, much less adoring their churches in the windows to heaven.
   
4. Reason and Revelation: While on the one hand they assert that neither contradicts the other, they hedge to favor one over the other--Scripture trumps reason. This is a mistake and leads them to an irrationality they criticize throughout much of the document. This portrays an Evangelical confused. It certainly undermines the heart of their argument. Perhaps if they admitted they are in tension would make the document a bit more transparent. Papering over these distinctions is unwise.
   
5. Finally, they criticize Constantine for imposing the Faith on others. This is misleading. Perhaps they have not thought what Christianity did when it was applied to the Ancient City. The fault, then, is not necessarily Constantine's as much as it was a reality of the Ancient City's soul before the American Revolution solved this problem. A bit more clarity and modification of the argument, here would make that section of the document more coherent and more historically accurate.
   

Evangelicals Abandoning Republicans?

Well, perhaps they won't receive as big a share of the vote as they used to.

Again we ask: what if McCain does not need them?

Huckabee to Speak to Graduating Class

of about 70.

Not a political force for the future we think.

We note that Huckabee never really denies the "anonymous" sources, but he certainly felt the need to clarify his position. Does this mean the anonymous sources were correct then, but are not correct now? Huckabee has more explaining to do.

Since Huckabee is concerned about Novak's report using hidden sources, how about he release his sermons? That might make us here believe he is honestly transparent.

Novak on the Religious Right & McCain

What happens if McCain wins, and he does so without the Evan right, and especially the "fringe" of that group? They lose.

Nevertheless, the word is that some evangelicals dispute Huckabee's support. One experienced, credible activist in Christian politics who would not let his name be used told me that Huckabee, in personal conversation with him, had embraced the concept that an Obama presidency might be what the American people deserve. That fits what has largely been a fringe position among evangelicals: that the pain of an Obama presidency is in keeping with the Bible's prophecy.

According to this activist, at the heart of the let-Obama-win movement is longtime Virginia conservative leader Michael Farris -- the nation's leading home-school advocate, who is now chancellor of Patrick Henry College (in Purcellville, Va.) for home-schooled students. Best known politically as the losing Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Virginia in 1993, Farris is regarded as one of the hardest-edged Christian politicians. He is reported in evangelical circles to promote the biblical justification for an Obama plague-like presidency.

In conversations with me, Huckabee and Farris both denied saying that an Obama presidency should be inflicted on the country. Huckabee was enthusiastic in his support for McCain, noting how well they had gotten along during their primary competition.

Farris is another matter. A vigorous supporter of Huckabee for president, he has not endorsed McCain and may never do so (though he quickly adds that he never would vote for Obama or Hillary Clinton). "I am concerned about what judges [McCain] may name," Farris told me, "and the test will be who he selects for vice president." He made it clear that Huckabee would be his choice, and ruefully added, "I understand he is not under consideration."

Gustav adds:

This is a non sequitur:

Farris is another matter. A vigorous supporter of Huckabee for president, he has not endorsed McCain and may never do so (though he quickly adds that he never would vote for Obama or Hillary Clinton). "I am concerned about what judges [McCain] may name," Farris told me, "and the test will be who he selects for vice president." He made it clear that Huckabee would be his choice, and ruefully added, "I understand he is not under consideration."

First, what kind of judges does Farris think Obama would pick? Second, as someone now in law school and getting a peek (but only a peek) inside influential conservative legal circles, I think Farris is a complete and total poseur on this issue. He talks about it because he's a lawyer and, therefore, it must be within his area of expertise. And that might fool home school mothers, but I don't think he has any credibility or influence on this issue (let alone anything important or original to add). Third, what the does the VP have to do with judicial picks? Nothing. Fourth, even if the VP did have something to do with judicial picks, why should we trust Huckabee. What credibility does Huckabee have with judges? None what so ever.