progressive involvement

They're just now figuring this out?

Alcohol is "more dangerous" than many illegal drugs, says Maria Cheng in the Washington Post.  A British study found that: 

Heroin, crack cocaine and methamphetamine, or crystal meth, were the most lethal to individuals. When considering their wider social effects, alcohol, heroin and crack cocaine were the deadliest. But overall, alcohol outranked all other substances, followed by heroin and crack cocaine.

This may strike some people as news, but anyone who has worked in substance abuse or mental health circles has known this for a long time.

Buck says, "Who you gonna believe on global warming? Big Oil, or your own lyin' eyes?"

One thing about Ken Buck:  He does not deviate from the "white guy worldview"--as a (white guy) friend of mine puts it--no matter the reality.  True to form, the other day he said that global warming is a "hoax".

"Sen. Inhofe (R-Awl Bidness) was the first person to stand up and say this global warming is the greatest hoax that has been perpetrated," Buck told The (Fort Collins) Coloradoan. "The evidence just keeps supporting his view, and more and more people's view, of what's going on."

Note that global warming is not wrong, not mistaken, not crazy, but a hoax.  Now, a "hoax" is a deliberate attempt to trick somebody, to fool them into thinking something that the perpetrators of the hoax know is false.

Thousands of the world's scientists and most of the world's governments seem to be in on this hoax, and they have convinced at least two groups of people whose judgment you would expect Buck to respect:  the U.S. military and the insurance business.  Both have strategies to deal with global warming, and are devising more.

In fact, so many people believe global warming to be happening as we speak, the evidence of which they have either seen with their own eyes, or felt on their own skin, that you could say that this hoax is more-or-less democratic.

Buck apparently hasn't been in the mountains recently.  If he had, he could have seen acres upon acres of pine beetle infestation and Sudden Aspen Decline, both made possible by global warming.  He apparently hasn't talked to any representatives of the ski industry who know that climate change models project significant snowpack decline, and a shortened ski season, over the next 30 years.

Obviously, Ken Buck hasn't talked to anyone at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, conveniently located right here in Colorado, or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, located in Boulder, which recently said global warming is not only happening but was "irreversible."  Possibly, he missed the newspaper report just the other day that announced 2010 to be the hottest year on record.

Or maybe he didn't.  Maybe he knows all this, but continues to promote the idea of global warming as hoax for other reasons, such as campaign contributions from the plutocrats designed to keep the rabble stirred up about non-issues.  Acknowledge the reality of climate change and those checks from the Koch brothers and Big Oil might stop rolling in. 

Flexibility not being his long suit

Prominent Southern Baptist pastor Al Mohler says yoga is derived from eastern religions and should not be engaged in by Christians.  Mohler objects "to the idea that the body is a vehicle for reaching consciousness with the divine."

One wonders at what his understanding of the incarnation might be.  Secondly, is there another way to "reaching consciousness with the divine" besides through the body?  How else would it be done?

 

Smoking theologians

According to Rodney Clapp in Christian Century (9.21.10), p. 45:  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, James Gustafson, Richard John Neuhaus, C.H. Spurgeon, J. Gresham Machen, Paul Ramsey--and perhaps God, if you count all the smoke on Mount Sinai.

Our so-called "burnout"

Yesterday, Paul Vitello had a piece in the New York Times on clergy burnout.  He discussed the piece on NPR today.

Members of the clergy now suffer from obesity, hypertension and depression at rates higher than most Americans. In the last decade, their use of antidepressants has risen, while their life expectancy has fallen.

In my own denomination, 69% of pastors reported being overweight.  (These must be easterners--no way it's that high here in the west.)  64% of ELCA pastors have high blood pressure, and 13% take antidepressants.

This, one might have noticed, is somewhat at odds with our theology.  Lutheran theology says that God's radical love and acceptance is supposed to diminish anxiety, not stir it up.  As one of my seminary profs, Fr. Thomas McGonigle, once said, "The Lutherans say they believe in salvation by grace, but they sure don't act like it."

Whence cometh all these problems?  Several forces are in play.  For one thing, clergy are no longer--thank God--held on a pedestal, which also means that we don't get the deference or respect that we used to get.  This, too, is really a good thing, but may come as a surprise to people who expected something different.

Secondly, the culture at large has pretty much had it with religion.  The ranks of those who self-identify as "secular" expands with every passing day.  If "spiritual, but not religious" people--i.e. people who take the trouble to self-identify as "spiritual" but don't like church--were a denomination, they would be the largest in the country.  (Second largest?  Former Roman Catholics.)

You can't really blame people.  If they had a dollar for every time they heard about a crime committed by clergy, or heard a clergyperson say something inane or ridiculous, most could retire.  Compared to our latter-day charlatans, Elmer Gantry was a piker.  Wear a clergy collar on the street and people are as likely to see you as a child molester as they are to see you as an emissary of Jesus the Lord.

Third, people in this country don't care all that much for preachers anyway, and never really have.  In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the so-called "Great Awakenings"--(which weren't)--were anti-clergy.  Why?  Partly, it was egalitarian fervor.  The idea of a clerical class struck many early Americans as undemocratic. 

Priests weren't even popular in the New Testament.  When Jesus told a story about a priest who passed by a half-dead man without helping (Lk 10:25-37), you can bet that heads nodded throughout the crowd.  They didn't much care for these priests, who usually left you with the feeling that you weren't giving enough, or praying enough, or righteous enough.  Who needs that? 

It is true that there's always a certain market for piety--some people actually like it.  That point acknowledged, it's also true that most people don't care for sanctimony or smarminess, which, unfortunately, is stock-in-trade for some pastors.  As my Uncle Robert likes to say, "Save it for Sunday, preacher."

Some clergy discomfort, it must be said, is their own dang fault.  Some pastors go into the business because they want to be loved.  In order to get love, they act loving themselves.  They will do about anything in order to be well thought of.  They'll work 100 hours a week.  They'll make sure the pop machine is stocked.  They'll come back from vacation to visit the council president's nephew with an infected hangnail.  ("See how much pastor loves us!")

Gerhard Krodel, seminary professor at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, used to say that every seminary student had one quality which prevented him or her from ever being a decent pastor.  "They're all obsessed with righteousness," he said.

Yes, one must get it right.  One must perform.  One must be "righteous".  Only then do my parents--or my congregation--pat me on the head and tell me how "good" I am.  We make prospective seminary students pay $1500 for a psychological assessment before they can even think about going to seminary, yet we don't check for one psychological imbalance, called "neediness" or "dependency," which is quite likely to keep that person, and the congregation, in a state of emotional and spiritual immaturity.

This is my theory of why so many pastors smile through their sermons.  They could be preaching on depression and heartbreak, smiling all the while.  To steal a line from Sally Fields, their smile says, "Like me, like me, really like me.  See how loveable I am?" 

Congregations themselves are quite often partners with the pastor in keeping him or her in the immaturity of "co-dependency."  He or she dotes on them, and, as long as that behavior continues, they'll dote back. 

Both get what they want, sort of.  The pastor gets love and acceptance, or mistakenly thinks so, and may not consciously notice that he or she has to keep performing in order to keep getting this fake ersatz variety of love--emotional "fool's gold," you might call it.  For their part, the congregation gets a devoted servant at their beck and call (who is also seething with rage at their continual "demands"). 

Easily lost in this twisted psychological maelstrom is the whole question of its horrible theology.  You don't have to perform for God's love and mercy, and following Jesus by serving others does not need to be yet another chore.

Jesus didn't chew Martha out for her serving (Luke 10:28-42).  No, he said, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things."  The life of service, following the example of Jesus, is not to be drudgery, nor should it generate anxiety or burn you out.  If it does, you're not doing it right.

Oil is toxic

The clean-up workers on the Exxon Valdez spill died at an average age of 51.

Liberal democratic countries have the "most liveable" cities

Says the Economist.  Their methodology was to examine many factors within the broad categories of stability, health care, culture, environment, education, infrastructure.

By their measures, Vancouver is the "most liveable" city in the world.  Eight of the top ten are in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.  The other two are Helsinki and Vienna. 

The Economist says that this is mostly because of their "perfect" scores on education and health care.  Health care, no doubt, is probably why no cities in the USA were in the top 10--that, and the possibility of being shot at.

Overall, the cities of western Europe are a tad bit more liveable than those in North America.  Both had scores in the low 90's.  The world average is 76.  For all its problems, Detroit (40) scored higher than New York City (56) or London (54).  The Economist blog attributes this to differing scores on "stability," i.e. crime, terrorism, but, whatever the explanation, that particular result seems mighty strange.

The Economist didn't release the full list, but no doubt Denver scores high in the United States.  Using different metrics, the Partners for Liveable Communities had ranked Denver first.  On the other hand, by some (poorly informed) accounts, Pittsburgh is best, and Denver isn't even in the top 10.

Vancouver deserves the designation.  It's a great place.  In North America, its natural setting is rivalled only by San Francisco, and, may I say, Denver.  Credit where credit is due, Vancouver has mountains and ocean.  Denver just has mountains--albeit cooler ones. 

Most striking to me was the large number of people who live downtown in Vancouver.  Most of the high-rises downtown are apartments and condos, not offices.  People live there as well as work there, which brings a pleasant vibrancy to the core of the city.

Congrats to our wonderful neighbor to the north.  When you need a break from the rain, come to Denver where the sun shines 300 days a year.

Photo:  HuffPost  

Any questions?

When I became an adult, I put away childish things

Republicans are jumping on President Obama for not going into a hissy fit over the latest incident of terrorism.  This is in support of their underlying message, which is that Democrats aren't tough enough, and, in the current context, can't keep us safe. 

They've been working this angle for at least 40 years, longer than that if you go back to McCarthy.  Says Philip Rucker in the Washington Post:  "The result of the GOP offensive could be to create doubt, even fear, among the American public that Obama cannot protect them."

It might work, especially if the lady I heard on NPR the other day is representative of the American public.  Pleadingly, she kept saying, "Keep us safe, keep us safe, keep us safe."  There's a person, I thought, who would follow and support virtually anyone--even (or especially) Attilla the Hun--in order to feel more secure. 

Frankly, it also seemed a little pathetic.  I've talked to people who live in the middle east--people who face real danger each and every day--and they don't freak out at every incident.  They shrug their shoulders and live with it.  Just the other day, I read a piece about an American who was in London the day the subway was bombed who noted that the British seemed to take the episode in stride.  Sometimes a stiff upper lip is a good thing.

We, on the other hand, sometimes seem to be a nation of drama queens.  Something isn't properly done unless we've all emoted all over the place.  In some cases, such as therapy, emoting is appropriate.  In others, such as public policy, it's not. 

Terrorist incidents should be met with perseverence and courage, not national bed-wetting.  The American people should resist infantilization and dependency.  If we are to become adults, we must put away childish things.

Sarah Palin has apparently written more op-eds than she's read

Sure, I've defended her a few times, but that doesn't mean that Sarah Palin has all-of-a-sudden started making sense.  She who could not name a newspaper she reads has weighed in on the Copenhagen climate change talks in today's Washington Post.

She hangs her whole argument on the flap generated when hackers broke in to the electronic files of the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in Britain--isn't that against the law?--and found some emails which said unkind things about climate change deniers.  Some at East Anglia also didn't want climate change deniers' research to be published in peer-reviewed journals.  Says Palin:

The e-mails reveal that leading climate "experts" deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals.

Actually not, as the Post's own reporting, and this piece in Popular Mechanics, shows.  Yet climate change deniers have seized upon this as evidence that climate change is all--pardon the pun--"cooked up." 

Somebody sends a snarky email and this is supposed to mean that the glaciers aren't melting, the ice caps are where they've always been, sea levels are stable, Lake Titicaca is not drying up, Kilamanjaro still has snow, and the great forests of Colorado aren't dying.  Egads, the stuff you have to believe to be a climate change denier. 

I've always believed that policy should be based on sound science, not politics. As governor of Alaska, I took a stand against politicized science when I sued the federal government over its decision to list the polar bear as an endangered species despite the fact that the polar bear population had more than doubled.

Oops, this isn't true either.  Polar bears will be extinct within 70 years, and perhaps much sooner.  Palin apparently got this particular talking point from Fox News which mentioned rising polar bear populations in the 1970's, but neglected to tell people that the increase was because Alaska outlawed sport hunting of polar bears back in the 1960's.  Naturally, if you're not getting shot at, your numbers will rise, at least in the short term.

Now, however, the polar bear population faces a much larger problem than hunters.  Their population is in decline because of the diminished amount of sea ice due to global warming.  Last summer alone, arctic sea ice was diminished by an area the size of Alaska and Texas combined.  Without sea ice, the polar bears cannot find food. 

Palin says she doesn't like "politicized science," but "politicized pseudo-science," or just flat making things up, is apparently all right.