The Bosque Boys

At-home bioengineering the new hobby among science geeks known as biohackers. This sounds like chapter one of a novel that ends badly for humanity. Link Instapundit.

My own opinion of Joel Osteen's message is well expressed by Michael S. Horton in this essay on the Westminster Seminary California website. Link from Monergism.

Although explicit proponents of the so-called "prosperity gospel" may be fewer than their influence suggests, its big names and best-selling authors (T. D. Jakes, Benny Hinn, Joel Osteen, and Joyce Meyer) are purveyors of a pagan worldview with a peculiarly American flavor. It's basically what the sixteenth century German monk turned church reformer Martin Luther called the "theology of glory": How can I climb the ladder and attain the glory here and now that God has actually promised for us after a life of suffering? The contrast is the "theology of the cross": the story of God's merciful descent to us, at great personal cost, a message that the Apostle Paul acknowledged was offensive and "foolish to Greeks."
. . .
Osteen reflects the broader assumption among evangelicals that we are saved by making a decision to have a personal relationship with God. If one's greatest problem is loneliness, the good news is that Jesus is a reliable friend. If the big problem is anxiety, Jesus will calm us down. Jesus is the glue that holds our marriages and families together, gives us purpose for us to strive toward, wisdom for daily life. And there are half-truths in all of these pleas, but they never really bring hearers face to face with their real problem: that they stand naked and ashamed before a holy God and can only be acceptably clothed in his presence by being clothed, head to toe, in Christ's righteousness.

This gospel of "submission," "commitment," "decision," and "having a personal relationship with God" fails to realize, first of all, that everyone has a personal relationship with God already: either as a condemned criminal standing before a righteous judge or as a justified co-heir with Christ and adopted child of the Father. "How can I be right with God?" is no longer a question when my happiness rather than God's holiness is the main issue. My concern is that Joel Osteen is simply the latest in a long line of self-help evangelists who appeal to the native American obsession with pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Salvation is not a matter of divine rescue from the judgment that is coming on the world, but a matter of self-improvement in order to have your best life now.

Today I am trying to reclaim my office from Chaos.

In so doing I discovered this bit from my daily calender for this past Thursday, May 7. On May 7, 1789 the first Inaugural Ball was held in New York City. The plan had been for the new government to form in March, but bad travel conditions delayed assembling enough members of Congress to count the electoral votes before April 6. Additional time was required to reach Mt. Vernon to inform George Washington of the results, then for the newly-elected president to reach New York City, then the nation's capital.

Story here.

I missed this story when it happened. I have no insights to offer, including how it might affect his political ambitions.

A sentence in the coverage did sadden me once again.

The family-values crowd has never completely embraced Newt, probably because he has been married three times, most recently to a former Hill staff member, Callista Bisek.

Republicans seem to have trouble finding spokesmen and leaders who exemplify conservative values. In 1980 and 1984 the Republicans ran the divorced-and-remarried Reagan against the married-to-their-first-wives Carter and Mondale. In 1996 the divorced-and-remarried Dole against the married philanderer Clinton. In 2008 the divorced-and-remarried MCain against married-to-his-first-wive Obama. Conservative favorite Fred Thompson--divorced and remarried. I've lost count of Rush's wives.

Thank God for the Bushes.

The Episcopal Divinity School (i.e., a seminary for training Episcopal priests) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, appoints a radically pro-abortion lesbian priest, Kathrine Ragsdale, as its new president. Story. In a past sermon this woman called abortion a blessing, and has testified before Congress that she transported a fifteen-year-old girl across a state line to get an abortion--and would again if it became illegal. My point is not so much this priest herself, as the message it sends to any remaining conservative Episcopalians--as a conservative believer you will be increasingly marginalized. Small wonder conservatives have been leaving the Episcopal denomination.

To make the same point again--the marginalization of conservative Episcopalians within their own denomination--Gene Robinson, the Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire who himself is a practicing homosexual, recently spoke at a pro LGBT event in Washington, D.C., in which he proclaimed

“You and I stand on the shoulders of drag queens in Stonewall bar who had enough, [San Francisco politician] Harvey Milk and Dr. King,” Robinson said. “It will be enough to have others stand on our shoulders” and “enough to be in the parade.”

Robinson identified gay rights as a part of the agenda of the Kingdom of God. Story.

Organizations send messages to their members by the choice of those who are given positions of power. The elevation of Ragsdale and Robinson tells members more than any number of position papers and platitudes.

According to the Pew Forum, Americans tend to be a praying people, with 58% of the population responding that they pray daily. Even 22% of those who self-identified as "unaffiliated" responded that they prayed at least once a day. Figures were higher for older Americans, women, and those with incomes under $30,000/year. Among religious groups, Jehovah's Witnesses seemed the most prayerful, followed by Mormons and Black Protestants. Tellingly, Mainline Protestants came in under the national average, at only 53% praying daily.

Our society is not secular yet.

Brits at Their Best reported that about 170 years ago a man named Rowland Hill put the British postal service into a profitable position by

the brilliant and counter-intuitive idea that postal costs have little to do with distance and that the whole cumbersome process could be speeded up and the charge for sending mail could be drastically reduced. And profits? Profits increased because the numbers of people who could afford to send a letter increased dramatically.

Under Hill's plan, postage on a letter would not be collected after complicated travel computations which slowed down delivery and were often so high recipients of letters refused to accept them. Instead, those sending mail would simply buy adhesive stamps for a uniform charge at the post office.

The government bureaucrats of the day naturally called Hill's idea wild and visionary - and these were not compliments - but his plan made such obvious sense it swept Britain and, soon after, the world.

Simplification and reduction in costs of a government service leading to growth and profitability.

Jack Kemp, R.I.P.

The Decline of Middle America and the Problem of Meritocracy by Jeremy Beer

Excerpt:

The seemingly unassailable ideal of “equality of opportunity” demanded by the meritocratic regime has drawn scorn from thinkers such as those I have quoted in part because they have understood that in order for talent to triumph, it must be mobile. This, as we have seen, is precisely the aim of a meritocracy. It seeks to remove the barriers posed by tradition or culture — that is, barriers posed by institutions, texts, myths, habits, social forms, sensibilities, affections, characteristic practices, and the like — to the mobility of the intelligent. Thus, the more perfect the meritocracy, which we typically equate with justice itself, the more mobility — both geographic and social — is required, until talent is able to flow freely to where it can command the highest price. A perfect market for talent is the dream and goal of meritocracy: nothing must stand in the way of the rise of talent to primacy. Progress, understood both as the never-ending process of self-liberation and self-fulfillment, and as the indefinite expansion of our consumer economy, depends upon such mobility.

. . . .

The fact that our meritocracy rewards most those at home in the world of “abstractions and images” has further isolated our new elites from the rest of society by their insulation from manual labor. “The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life,” and indeed, only under such circumstances could such academic theories as “the social construction of reality” gain any purchase on the mind, concludes Lasch.

Another serious disadvantage to rule by the “best and brightest” is that, unlike the older, premeritocratic elite, with its codes of chivalry and concern for honor and family, the new elite, thinking that it owes its power to intelligence alone, has “little sense of ancestral gratitude or of an obligation to live up to responsibilities inherited from the past.” It “thinks of itself as a self-made elite owing its privileges exclusively to its own efforts.”

In sum, social mobility, far from being the sine qua non of democracy, actually “helps to solidify [elites'] influence by supporting the illusion that it rests solely on merit.”

For ten years I have defended Arlen Specter as a "principled moderate Republican."

I apologize.

PREDICTION: even with the guarantee of support from President Obama (which he undoubtedly will honor--to some extent), my hunch is that Specter will find it extremely difficult to win the Democratic nomination in Pennsylvania in 2010.

"If we credit the Bible's description of the relationship between Creator and Creation, then we cannot deny the spiritual importance of our economic life. Then we see how religious issues lead to issues of economy, and how issues of economy lead to issues of art, of how to make things. If we understand that no artist--no maker--can work except by reworking the works of Creation, then we see that by our work, by the way we practice our arts, we reveal what we think of the works of God. How we take our lives from this world, how we work, what work we do, how well we use the materials we use and what we do with them after we have used them--all these are questions of the highest and gravest religious significance. These questions cannot be answered by thinking, but only by doing. In answering them, we practice, or do not practice, our religion."

. . . .

"If we think of ourselves as lofty souls entrapped temporarily in lowly bodies in a dispirited, desperate, unlovable world that we must despise for Heaven's sake, then what have we done for this question of significance? Not much, I think. For we are still stuck, like Macbeth, in a condemnation of this life and this world, which were not made for our condemnation. If we divide reality into two parts, spiritual and material, and hold (as the Bible does not hold) that only the spiritual is good or desirable, then our relation to the material Creation becomes arbitrary, having only the quantitative or mercenary value that we have, in fact, and for this reason, assigned to it. Thus we become the judges, and thus inevitably the destroyers, of a world we did not make, and that we are bidden to understand as a divine gift.

It is impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in this world either signifies nothing or has only a negative significance.

If, on the other hand, we believe that we are living souls, God's dust and God's breath, acting our parts among other creatures all made of the same dust and breath as ourselves; and if we understand that we are free, within the obvious limits of mortal human life, to do evil or good to ourselves and to the other creatures--then all our acts have a supreme significance. If it is true that we are living souls and morally free, then all of us are artists. All of us makers, within mortal terms and limits, of our lives, of one another's lives, of things we need and use."

--Wendell Berry, Christianity and the Survival of Creation