Sarah Vowell on McSweeney’s

Catching up with McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, I see that they have a fresh essay by Sarah Vowell, written as the forward to Nick Hornby’s latest book. It is an extended complaint about all the books we don’t have time to read, and it is, of course, excellent. One highlight is a brief detour into the question of what the World Cup is, and whether it might be as compelling as a certain other televisual time-suck:

In that column, collected herein, [Hornby] confesses that he didn’t read a book at all because something called “the World Cup” was on TV. I’m not entirely sure what that is, as I do not live in the world; I live in the United States. But from what I can tell, he didn’t crack a book because this World Cup thing was as all-consuming a free-time eater-upper as the DVDs of the first three seasons of Battlestar Galactica were to me. Not that I’m convinced that this Ukraine v. Tunisia rivalry he describes has the depth of feeling and moral ambiguity so dramatically summoned by the space humans’ ongoing war with the Cylons the humans themselves created, but then again what does?

“I think that religion at its best comes with a big dose of doubt.”

Over on BeliefNet, Steve Walden has the transcript of a fantastic 2004 interview Barack Obama gave to Chicago Sun Times columnist Cathleen Falsani, in which the future president discusses his faith in detail. As in other discussions of religion, the overwhelming impression is that Obama’s beliefs are heavily filtered through introspection and reflection on the consequence of particular doctrines. He believes that different religious perspectives can find common ground in shared values that transcend doctrine:

So, I’m rooted in the Christian tradition. I believe that there are many paths to the same place, and that is a belief that there is a higher power, a belief that we are connected as a people. That there are values that transcend race or culture, that move us forward, and there’s an obligation for all of us individually as well as collectively to take responsibility to make those values lived.

He responds to questions thoroughly, and with flashes of humor, cracking wise about “harps and clouds” when asked about heaven, for instance. And, over and over again, Obama turns away from certainty in favor of a more tenuous, dynamic, active faith:

I think that religion at it’s best comes with a big dose of doubt. I’m suspicious of too much certainty in the pursuit of understanding just because I think people are limited in their understanding.

I think that … there’s an enormous amount of damage done around the world in the name of religion and certainty.

This is miles away from the faith of our current President, which is blinkered in the literal sense of wearing blinders – unable and unwilling to reflect on the meaning of positions taken, the kind of faith has no real response to reason or doubt. Barack Obama’s faith is a living faith, and it means that he’ll be a more truly Christian President than George W. Bush could ever be.

Left Behind movie: as bad as the book

Someone has, for reasons upon which I will not speculate, uploaded the entirety of the film adaptation of apocolypti-porn blockbuster Left Behind to YouTube. Which is as good as an invitation to slacktivist Fred Clark, who’s already eviscerated the book. A brief sample:

This is why NORAD doesn’t let foreigners with satellite-broadcasting equipment just wander in to their central command. You shout something, some botanist translates it for them, and the next thing you know your military secrets are being broadcast to the entire world by some hack reporter who acts like you’d just sat down with him for an interview.

California’s Proposition 8: bad for straight marriage, too

On Slacktivist, lefty evangelical Fred Clark reams the State of California for “un-Californian” behavior and makes a very important point about recently-passed anti-gay-marriage ballot measure Proposition 8:

For all the scaremongering “defense of marriage” language used by supporters of Proposition 8, the passage of this silly measure actually dealt the institution a severe blow. What had been a right is now only a privilege — a privilege that the state is free to withhold as it sees fit. Yielding that kind of power to the state is not the sort of thing that a free people ought to be doing if they wish to remain a free people.

Utah town won’t take seven more Commandments

I can’t resist this one: a (very) minority religious group is suing a Utah town because it wouldn’t accept their donation of a monument to sit beside a Ten Commandments plaque in a public park. The New York Times says the case goes to the Supreme Court tomorrow. The minority religion in question is called Summum – it apparently incorporates elements of Gnostic Christianity and ancient Egyptian iconography. The monument they to donate would have been carved with the text of Summum’s Seven Aphorisms, which are supposed to have been given to Moses along with the Ten Commandments.

The situation is a real-world version of the Flying Spaghetti Monster argument against mixing church and state – once you incorporate one religious narrative into state-sponsored architecture, science curricula, or whatever, how can you argue that any religious narrative isn’t appropriate for inclusion? (The FSM is a facetious Creator originally proposed for inclusion in Kansan public school science classes, as an “alternative” to both scientific explanations and Christian Creationism.) The Summum church has a point. And that point is (perhaps contrary to their actual wishes) that the Ten Commandments has no more business in a government-funded public space than the Seven Aphorisms do.

President Barack Hussein Obama


Photo by jmtimages.

It’s real. In spite of frantic flipping between (at various points) tallies by NPR, the New York Times, good ol’ FiveThirtyEight, and the BBC, I actually saw the news first from “The Daily Show” election special.

I have never felt so proud of my country. Americans did the right thing, even if after trying everything else first. Barack Obama’s win tonight represents a victory for deliberation over impulse and for nuance over polarization. He withstood some of the ugliest things Americans are willing to say about other Americans, and reminded us that we are all in this together. There is a lot of work to be done – and much of it just undoing the work of the previous President. But if anyone can do it, it’s Barack Obama.

Enough from me. Take a gander at a presidential candidate who speaks, and thinks, like a President.