Back to Niebuhr

I finished David Sedaris's book, and my break from hard prose, last night. The whole book was a hoot--I'll probably try out some more trendy essays the next time I need a break from slow reading. Actually, I'm pretty charged up to continue in Christ and Culture.

No dream recollection this morning, but more dog stories. Sabrina is still on the warpath; her latest victim was a bag full of bathroom trash that I had bagged up but not taken out in the rain. Oy. That'll be a project today to gather up.

I'm not feeling like writing a great deal this morning, obviously. Mary's OBGYN appointment yesterday went entirely smoothly, and our baby has a strong heartbeat. Mary's right on track as far as gaining weight goes, and everything is cool in general. In a little over three weeks, we'll get the ultrasound on video and find out what sex our baby is. I think that'll be the coolest so far.

Doggie Speed

No dream recollection, because I was dealing with a psychotic Cocker Spaniel all night. She absolutely had to go outside at midnight, an hour after I went to bed, so I figured I'd give up the minute and a half to get six hours of uninterrupted sleep. Except then she woke me up again at three in the morning, insistent that she had to pee right then. And at five, she woke me up thundering away at the bathroom door, her signal that she's out of water. I thought she had just been left alone too long.

But then, this morning, I found the evidence of something far more sinister. Sunday night, I made chocolate chip cookies for Mary and me. We couldn't eat the whole batch, so I bagged them up and put them on the counter. This morning, I found a mangled freezer bag and chocolate stains on the guest bedroom's bedspread. So now I understand perfectly well why she needed to pee four times from ten o'clock until six o'clock, and I understand how she went through two bowls of water. She was flushing the drugs out of her system. The old conspiracy theory is that chocolate will kill a dog, but Sabrina's done things like this a number of times, and it only makes her more impulsive than a Cocker already is. For instance, this morning, she didn't wait until Mary and I had left the house as per usual but went straight from her most recent excretory outing into our bathroom to eat our toilet paper. I put her in her cage for some hard time, but she knew that I'd get in more trouble for inducing dog-noise before seven AM than for letting our little dog become more of a monster than she already is, so she got out early. And I know for a fact that, given enough time, she will do this again. There is no learning of lessons for dogs as old as Sabrina; years of ruling the house in Pennsylvania are impossible to undo here in Georgia.

On the book front, I've given Malory and Niebuhr a break to read David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day. It's got to be one of the funniest books I've read in quite some time. Even Mary, who read sections with me while we were waiting to get in to see the doctor, thought it was great stuff. And best of all, I've been reading it just for a day and a half or so, and I'm almost finished. I'm starting to understand how people can go through so many books at the library--some books are actually easier, some go faster, some don't take as much time as others! I really should have known that before now.

My father-in-law Ollie (with the best picture-taking look I could get out of him) and my mother-in-law Sue holding the plaque that West Alexander Christian Church presented them

My niece and nephew Analice and Adam

My niece Chloe (without the benefit of redeye reduction--I wanted to do this fast)

My niece Janelle

Worn Down

We flew in from Pittsburgh yesterday afternoon, and so our Fall travel season is over. My body still hasn't recovered from the 20-hour day (3:45 AM-midnight) that we turned in Saturday. Mary is still sad because we spent our last night in the parsonage. But overall, the trip was good. Mary's sister-in-law surprised us (ambushed us, really) with about two hundred dollars worth of maternity clothes for Mary. We had a retirement party at an ice hockey rink. We were there for Ollie's last Sunday school class. Pretty cool stuff. Pictures of nieces and nephews to come.

I've only got the death sequences left in Malory, but this weekend I was instead reading H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture. Having read Hauerwas's and Yoder's critiques of Niebuhr since I was nineteen, I've been spotting all kinds of categorical difficulties. No surprise. What is surprising is how well written the piece is. This book deserves its masterpiece status, and I'm sure that I'll say so when I finish the book and post on the "Christ and Culture" thread over at the Ooze.

I'm not sure that my body has regenerated to the point that my brain can generate dreams, so no dream recollection this morning. Just a weekend recap and a hot shower. Shower, here I come.

Strange Hymns

I don't remember the content of my dream last night, but I do remember that there was a hymn, to the tune of "The Way of the Cross Leads Home," somewhere in there:

The fool and the good die young
The fool and the good die young
It is good to know as I older grow
The-e-e-e fool and the good die young

Have you ever noticed in some late nineteenth and early twentieth century hymns where a syllable that shouldn't be sat upon gets elongated beyond reason? In the actual hymn, the definite article gets stretched as well.

I'm hoping that Niebuhr's book comes to the library today--it would be nice to have something other than Jonathan Edwards to read in the airport. But I've got other books--perhaps I'll take a Vonnegut novel with me this time. I've got to get the house presentable this morning--Alex is in town, and he's wanting to grab some lunch. I suppose that's good as far as cleaning goes--it'll keep me off the computer when I get back to the house. And it'll be great to see Alex again. I'm sure we'll have scads, as always, to talk about.

Season Premieres

No dream recollection this morning, as Mary once again woke up when my alarm went off (it usually takes light and sound). But Gilmore Girls and Smallville are off and running, and our school year diversion season has started. Neither show indicated any slacking in writing or acting, so I'm anticipating a good season for each.

The Arthur cycle, or at least Malory's version of it, is a bizarre thing. Arthur is conceived when King Uther utilizes magic to have an illicit affair. Galahad, the purest of knights, comes about when Launcelot is trying to have an adulterous encounter with Guinevere but is tricked into sleeping with Elaine instead. Gawain just can't seem to keep it in his armor at all. Moreover, these knights do whatever they can to protect "maidens," but already in my little abridged version of Malory, two matrons have had their heads hacked off. I really need to read Lewis's actual work defending the concept of chivalry; from Malory, it doesn't look all that Christianized.

The old Lois Lane was on Smallville last night. The old Lana Lang is a main character. The old Clark Kent has made numerous cameos. Yes, folks, it's time for Gene Hackman to make an appearance! If the Smallville producers are reading this, you know it's true. Get Gene on the phone, and make it happen!

The Chocolate Fountain

The talk of the weekend (at least for those of us lurking in the corner and making comments) was the chocolate fountain. See the stuff in front of the fountain? Dad dipped one of everything in the falling chocolate. BTW, I promise that tomorrow I'll return to my early-morning-musings as per usual, but this morning, I just felt like posting some pictures, alright?

We're All Grandma Quick's

Even more people now have signed up to be Grandma Quick's grandchildren. From left to right are Jared, Rachel, Joe, Megan, Jill, Beau, Ryan, Tyler, Mary, and me. Grandma Quick is standing in front of us wearing the corsage (in case the generation gap is hard to spot). As often happens, the camera snapped while I was talking.

Back Home Again in Indiana

Here's a picture of Dad, Mom, Ryan, Mary, and me on the morning of Jill's wedding.

Knaughty Knights

Having finished The Analogical Imagination, I've embarked on something completely different, namely rereading my Malory book that I at best skimmed while getting the house ready for Ollie and Sue's visit last spring (or was it Ollie and Uncle Charlie? Oh well--no matter). I had forgotten just how cynical Malory's version of things turns out to be. I'm certain that my recent encounters with C.S. Lewis apologists has been the occasion for my turn back to the medieval, but I don't think Malory's was the chivalry that Lewis had in mind. But it sure is entertaining--in Malory's version, not only is Arthur the child of a Merlin-assisted bed trick but Gawain has already gotten him some while pretending to help the noble Sir Pelleas win his true love. I already know what's going to happen between Launcelot and Guinevere, and I can't imagine that it's going to differ much beyond that. Having read some of the excerpts, I wonder whether buying the full version might be a good investment. We'll see.

As my readers might have guessed, no dream recollection this morning. I've got to drive Mary to school, so I had to get up and immediately shower so that we would be ready about the same time. I've also got to set a tape to pick up the season premiere of Gilmore Girls so that we can do a late-nighter when we get back from working in Mary's classroom. So I've been running about since six AM. In fact, I need to go wake her up now. So until tomorrow...

Back Again

Our plane (the fourth we'd been on this weekend) landed just after seven o'clock last night, and we're back in Georgia. Whenever I get the chance, I'll probably try to post some images from the wedding and from Indiana in general here. This is my first morning back in Georgia since Friday, so the rapidly changing sleep environment thing has made me forget what I dreamt about.

This weekend made me feel terribly old. We didn't check any bags, so hauling all that crap down the narrow airplane aisle banged up my elbows and made me sore. Mary can't really carry anything heavy, being pregnant, so I ended up hauling thirty pounds of her students' papers for grading, twenty pounds of clothes, shoes, and toiletries, and ten pounds of miscellaneous junk on my shoulders through three airports and for what seemed miles and miles. My back and shoulders are sore. And I had to ride in the middle of the back seat two and a half hours from central Indiana to southern Indiana and two and a half hours back from southern Indiana to central Indiana; my joints are all sore. The good thing is that I've actually become sore enough that I'll likely exercise more this week as penance. The bad thing is that I've become quite sore!

The wedding itself was quite nice; I'll probably write about seeing family, talking with people, and other such things in subsequent posts. But being with Mom and Dad, knowing that Cindy Weaver died hardly a week before, has really shaken me up. I know that nothing is ultimately in my power, that my folks could live to ninety or live to sixty and I would have control over neither. But more than ever, I need to get away from the South. My own distaste for Georgia has not changed, but now Cindy's death has added urgency to the pull towards family. Scott Weaver is movinig back to Indiana from Washington, D.C., but it doesn't matter--he's never going to be able to make trips to see his mother. I want to move before that happens. More later.

Ivan's not so Bad

I just checked in on the flight status for our plane out of here, and Northwest Airlines hasn't indicated any delay... yet. Mary's principal issued an order last night that everyone was to go home instead of staying late to work, but the superintendent of the too-large Gwinnett County School System has not yet, as of this writing, canceled school in light of the hurricane. The school systems to the North, South, East, and West of the hubristic system have closed, but not Gwinnett, by gum.

My post is coming so early this morning because I set my hit-and-miss little battery-operated alarm clock just in case the power went out in the middle of the night and shut down my more dependable, plug-in clock radio. Unlike the days in which the alarm just refuses to turn on, this morning it decided to go off half an hour early. So it goes.

Another good paragraph from Tracy on theology's task:

Yet the basic grammar of Christian systematics endures. That grammar is constituted by the classic symbols and doctrines which every theology worthy of the history of the classic self-understandings of Christianity recognize as the paradigmatic candidates for Christian response and recognition--God, Christ, grace; creation-redemption-eschatology; church-world; nature-grace, grace-sin; revelation; faith, hope, love; word-sacrament; cross-resurrection-incarnation. All these symbols, like Everest, are simply there. They serve, minimally, as reminders that certain responses, certain moments of recognition, certain internal self-correctives, certain directions of thought and feeling have achieved paradigmatic, classic status. They cannot be ignored. In every cultural situation, an adequate Christian response demands that attention must be paid to the entire symbol system: through both critique and suspicion, retrieval and reinterpretation in and for the situation, yet controlled by some present experience of the event. (Tracy 373)

Wow. If theology is going to be more than a "period piece," this is the standard to which it must rise. And here's a passage about whether theology can ever be adequate to its task:

All the clasic systematic theologies from Paul and John to our own day are de jure inadequate, de facto relatively adequate accounts of the fuller range fo the entire symbol system from the dominating perspective of a singular stance of personal response. (Tracy 407)

This is an incredibly helpful evaluative tool, as is the whole of Tracy's book. It doesn't claim too much for the practice of theology, yet it does not default to ineffability as the only important theological category. Instead, the relativeness of any theology's adequacy is at the forefront; no systematic theology is going to "get it right" in an unqualified way, but given that YHWH is a God who reveals God's self, a theology can be adequate relative to other attempts to make YHWH's self-revelation intelligible. I like that.

I've only got about a dozen pages left before this book is done, and I'm not planning to haul the heavy booger onto the airplane today. On the plane I'm taking my copy of the Jonathan Edwards Reader, and assuming that Mary can muster the discipline to grade at the airports, I'm going to try to get some more of the greatest American theologian read. I'm looking forward to seeing my cousin Jill get married, but I'm not looking forward to the airport experience, getting on a plane with Mary in the middle of a hurricane, or any of the details surrounding the trip. So it goes.

Revival's Over

No recollection this morning, because Mary was up and accused me of stealing all the covers. It's funny, and it shows what part of my brain is engaged when I pray the Psalms in the morning. If I have to interact conversationally, I don't remember. If I'm meditating on a phrase or a verse, I still might. But no dream recollection today.

Our revival preacher, Chris Micheal, was phenomenal. His preaching style is quite reminiscent of Will Willimon's and last night he went on a tangent that actually led back into his central image! It's so rare that I hear a crafted sermon, I always appreciate the ones I hear, and Chris delivered four works of art this week. Perhaps they're special "traveling revival" sermons, and perhaps his normal week-to-week work isn't anything like it, but I don't know, and I don't care. This week has been great.

I've got one chapter plus the epilogue left in Tracy's book. I don't know why people hadn't been reading this guy at Emmanuel--his work is great for integrating all the kinds of things that Emmanuel folks tend to be interested in. I finally got to the part in which he lines out what "Analogical Imagination" is, and it's great. Basically, in an intellectual context that will not allow an easy denial of otherness, analogies are the best way to connect between two story-selves. No ontological category is assumed for both participants to fit into; instead, each conversation partner's categories are left intact, and the work of connection involves imagining analogous experiences and symbolic moves and those sorts of things between people. I've not articulated that entirely well, and the book is sitting next to Mary, who is sleeping, in complete darkness, so I'm not going to go get it. But all the same, I have a hunch this book is going to join the hall of great theology books in my story.

No apologies?

I dreamt last night that I was sitting and reading (I do a lot of that even in my dreams) at my father-in-law's house when a garbage truck backed into the front wall of the house, cracking the drywall around where I was sitting and shattering the window. When I went outside to demand that they repair the house, they pointed at the obviously damaged house and told me that there was no damage. I looked at the broken window and crumbling wall and said, "Well, what about the window and the wall?" The driver said, "No, you said the house was damaged!" Then the alarm went off.

Here's another passage from the Tracy book. I ought to be finishing this one up in the next few days.

Nor does the actual rich diversity of forms in the New Testament grounded in the unifying unity of an even tseeking a response of personal faith signal the call to any kind of thoughtless, lazy theological pluralism. Rather the New Testament diversity is impelled by the dynamism of the event itself and its self-expression into the otherness of a wide range of responses to, witnesses to, that event: responses which posit themselves in and by the event by implying their own fulfillment in the next needed form. Proclamation's positing of the bare that of the event of Jesus Christ implies the who and what of the narratives; the surprises, the resolutions, the end and non-end of the narratives imply the need for symbols and imagesable to capture in manifestation the clues disclosed by the narrative as teh key to their interpretation of the ministry; the irreducible tension of each symbol and the conflict within the whole complex of symbols (cross-resurrection-incarnation) demands the interpretation of critical reflective thought.

So the diversity of the New Testament does not have to be historical accident but can be conceived of systematically as the very stuff of God's self-revelation. Cool, eh?

Faulty Hardware

My alarm clock did not go off this morning. Like many other things, the realization that one has lost forty minutes, that the morning routine is shot, will monkey with the best established pattern. So no dream recollections this morning.

I'm about a hundred and twenty pages away from finishing David Tracy's book. In his last section he's going to bring his concept of genre as productive rather than simply taxonomical to bear on Christology. I think that genre concept is definitely going to play a role in my book on prayer. Speaking of which, I've got rough outlines laid out for all nine chapters now, so I suppose I can say that I know basically what the book is going to be about. Assuming that I can be disciplined enough to write a few pages a week, I could potentially have proposals sent to publishers by February or March. I'm not sure that anyone will be interested, but I suppose that's just one of the risks that goes along with spending the time to write a book.

Learning, not Winning

This morning, my childhood friend Scott Weaver has no mother. My father's former coworker Dave Weaver has no wife. When my high school Spanish teacher Cindy Weaver's funeral ends on Tuesday, the people will go home, and Wednesday morning, all of this will still be true. I thought this thought as I made my way from the bedroom to the computer room this morning, and now I can't come up with the first detail of what I think must have been a benign dream. The most disturbing thing for me is that in the sixteen hours since my mother let me know Cindy died, I've thought myself to the edge of crying, into a still calm, towards guilt, into abstraction. My emotions are not themselves in control, yet I can't say any rational process is controlling them either. Instead, something that is not my will yet is not what I think of as emotional momentum is fiddling with whatever chemicals make for emotional responses. I must admit, I'm a bit scared. My reactions have been something other than human.

I've had some good conversations on The Ooze lately. One of them has had to do with the character of evangelizing, while another has dealt with the second amendment and its defenders. I am pleased that my own tendency in online discussion is tending away from winning debate points and towards achieving an understanding of those with whom I disagree. I've come to the point where I am a pacifist, and I'm in little danger of "changing my mind." At this point, "my mind" is so bound up in disciplines of prayer, in expectations of friends, and in an eschatological mindset, that a mere cognitive encounter isn't going to be able to shake it. I think I'm at the point now where, like my theological mentors Yoder and Hauerwas and Kenneson, I can do some honest thinking about just war and about the logic of the American system without necessarily being "tempted" to become adherents of those traditions. Three years ago I don't think this would have been the case. But now, I have the confidence that I can understand without betraying, and coupled with that I've lost the ability to be satisfied with winning debates. I want really to know what's going on in the other person's system so that I can really know the difference. If there is a singular difference between what I was intellectually three years ago and what I've become, this has to be it.

Back into the Dorm

My dream was quite vivid last night--I dreamed that Mary and I moved into the dorm room in which I was a resident assistant my last two years of college. I was trying to get people to borrow the stupid safety video individually instead of watching it in a meeting, and I caught some guys coming in after having way too much tequila. May God help me if I ever want to move into a dorm again.

David Tracy's book has one of the most sensible paragraphs on the diversity in the New Testament that I've read in some time. I'll produce it at length here:

Both these major genres--apocalyptic and the doctrines of early Catholicism--may best serve their roles in a contemporary interpretation of the actual diversity of the New Testament not as the truth but as the truth of important correctives. Apocalyptic serves constantly as the corrective of any slackening of eschatological intensity for real history, for the novum and the future, any relaxing of the power of the negative and the not-yet in all other genres. Early Catholicisim serves as the coorective of any temptation fo shirk the ordinary, including the ordinary and necessary human need to find some clarity and explicitness for certain central shared beliefs as doctrines to allow for the human need to find order in thought and some structure in community. (Tracy 268)

The paragraph goes on to line out the tensions that each genre maintains, holding each forth as a necessary check on our tendencies to lose the ordinariness or the newness of the gospel proclamation. This is what good systematic theology should look like.

Pretty clear memories

Mary was up when I woke up this morning, so I had a conversation before I sat down at the computer, usually a killer of dream recollection. But I remember distinctly that in my dream, I was selling sniper rifles. Of course, just when I was about to make a sale, Mary grabbed the pillow underneath my head and spun my head nearly all the way around (she said that she thought I was underneath said pillow suffocating).

Another hurricane, another dig into presidential candidate Vietnam records... nothing new on the news, it wouldn't seem. And I haven't progressed far enough in David Tracy's book to offer much more than I've already said. So this morning's entry is going to be a short one. Perhaps there'll be more to say tomorrow.

America hater?

I don't know what to do with my historical consciousness. When I hear people talking about the latest terrorist attack as if those involved invented baby-killing, my mind always goes back to Dresden and Hiroshima. When Civil Liberties folks talk about Duh-Bya and his merry men as the worst violators of civil rights the world has ever seen, I think back to Abe Lincoln. And so it goes. Sean Hannity and his ilk in the last three years have made it treasonous to ask historical questions, and now even the news networks are afraid of those kinds of questions (not that they were entirely reflective before). I don't think these historical antecedents excuse the evils that go on, but I do tire of the melodrama, the people who pitch this year as the worst year the world has ever seen. I'm not sure to what extent these folks really believe it or to what extent they're using it cynically in order to win political points, but after seeing it on television at least since the early nineties, I'm sick of it.

I actually hit a smooth patch working on the book last night. A section of Tracy's The Analogical Imagination is going to be very helpful in crafting the chapter on what it means to be human and to pray. Besides, the book is helping me think through what it means for the Bible to be sacred and to be literature. I think his account of things is a hair too Blakean for me, but right now he's talking about religious classics in general. Perhaps when he turns to talk about the Bible and particularly the gospels in particular, I'll find more resonance.

It has not yet begun to rain

The remnants of Hurricane Frances came to north Georgia at about three o'clock this morning. I knew this because I had the window above our bed open, and I was getting wet. Later, around five this morning, our dog Sabrina started going nuts when the wind picked up. That dog is going to have a heck of a time if we end up moving to Kentucky--they have real weather there. The rain is still coming down, but I just took the dog out to go to the bathroom, and the wind is barely blowing now. I think this tropical storm is running out of gas.

I finished reading Praying with Icons last night. It reminded me again why I respect the Russian church so much and why I can never get too close to it. To address the latter first, the author, James Forest, relates that his wife grew up in a Dutch Reformed household, that in their eyes any recognition of Saints or Icons was Catholic, and they were not Catholic. My wife's situation is similar. The difference is that the Forest's wife has apparently decided nonetheless to become Orthodox. Our situation will not allow that. Mary's family, as long as they're around (may they be around for many years), will always be low-church Protestants, more particularly Campbellites. That means her parents. That means her uncle and cousins. That certainly means her brothers and sister. And although I have my doubts sometimes, I still think that means her neices and nephews. But I think I've come to the point that I'm alright with that. After all, I've been a Campbellite myself for a decade--as long as I've been Christian. And although I have a fascination with things Orthodox, I don't think I'll ever see the need to become Orthodox. Perhaps it's "bloom where you're planted." Perhaps it's keeping the peace with the family. But at any rate, I've been Campbellite, I am Campbellite, and I don't see any compelling reason to become other than Campbellite. The tradition is still alive enough that people like Dr. Norris and Wes Arblaster can emerge from it and remain alive--why should I think that I'm more delicate than those two?

Missing Weekdays Already

Well, I had to take the dog to the groomers' Friday morning, so I didn't take my standard time to make an entry on the blog. So it goes. I probably won't post tomorrow either, seeing as it's Labor Day (the day when only the working poor have to go to work).

I wonder sometimes about history, about whether what I do is going to be seen as one of those Enlightenment steps forward or one of those post-colonial complicit-in-violence things. Or whether history as a means of telling stories is going to change so radically in two hundred years that I've just got no idea what they're going to say about what I do. At any rate, there's no way of telling here and now what's going to be said then and there, so I suppose that's where my speculations on that end.

Mad as Zell

Weird one last night--I dreamed that I was receiving instructions from a future employee about someone the future employee wanted investigated. The weird thing was, all the flash-forwards were about studying to be a private investigator, not about the case itself. And I had no idea who the employer was. The alarm clock was especially weird after all the temporal bending...

I hate to dwell on national politics, and I imagine that once the defend-the-indefensible convention in New York is over, I'll chill out some, but Zell Miller just bugs me. I'm no Democrat, so his flip-flopping has no particular bearing on me. But his "Good ol' Southern Boy" schtick has never seemed so fake. Moreover, his selection of "good" moments in U.S. relations abroad is, to put it bluntly, horrifying.

He wants us to remember fondly the U.S.'s Cold War treatment of Greece. I wonder whether he's most proud that the U.S. backed the fascists in the thirties or the military coup in the sixties. Of course, he was adamant that soldiers, not protestors, give us freedom of to protest. I suppose that's why he likes military dictatorships--so many soldiers around all the time, there must be lots of freedom. I wonder if he's ever been to North Korea. He's also pleased as can be about our history in Iran--I guess up until the people's revolution in the seventies that overthrew America's puppet dictatorship there. Iran is another proud moment Zell would have us remember. The Shah had some wicked secret police, and they weren't hamstrung by any whiny liberals--I guess the people just didn't like that kind of freedom, because it got so bad that they preferred Ayatollah Khomeini to the freedom that the U.S. wanted to give them. Some pepole just don't appreciate a liberator.

He also wished that we had funded SDI more fully; I don't suppose anyone's told ol' Zell that the cold war is over and that no missiles actually got launched that would require Star Wars satellites.

Bless his heart.

I think I'll stay away from the RNC broadcast tonight--it makes me grumpy. Look for more positive posts in the near future.

Very little dream recollection this morning beyond the fact that my dream involved stinging insects. Beyond that, I can't remember a thing. And of course, I had tasks I had to complete quickly this morning rather than coming straight in to the computer room--that seems to be the variable that determines things.

The Bush twins. What is there to say, really? Twelve years ago, their grandpa wouldn't be caught on MTV and criticized Clinton for disregarding the "dignity of the office." Now his granddaughters have basically brought MTV's level of intellect to the RNC along with some of the least amusingly timed pop culture references (including Sex and the City, a show I'm sure Jim Dobson and Jerry Falwell just love to watch together while they plot new ways to persecute gays) I've ever heard. Of course, they were following the third heavy-hitting pro-abortion Republican speaker of the week, so why should I be surprised?

You might wonder why I back Ralph Nader, who's openly pro-abortion, while criticizing the Republicans for trotting out their pro-abortion politicians on TV. For years (I'd say up into the nineties) I was an increasingly conflicted single-issue Republican. I found their stances on guns, capital punishment, corporate regulations, the environment, and persecuting gays and lesbians unstomachable, but abortion was a bad enough thing that I figured that biting the bullet on the rest of that stuff at least might pave the way for some real reform when it comes to our treatment of the not-yet-born.

Now I realize that abortion is a product of late capitalism, that the rich would simply find ways around any anti-abortion law just as they find ways around tax law, criminal law, and just about anything else. The underground phenomenon would be immense--after thirty years of legalized abortion, there's no way any law would be enforced consistently. For an analogy, consider whom the IRS spends most of its time auditing.

So now I call myself anti-abortion rather than pro-life; I'm in no way a part of the Republican effort to repeal Roe v. Wade; I simply view abortion a part of the culture of death, alongside capital punishment and unrestricted corporate capitalism and the war industry, that Christians are to renounce prophetically but not necessarily smite with Caesar's sword (the category of "evils that should be smitten with Caesar's sword" has shrunk considerably over the last ten years for me). And with the prophetic renunciation should come, as always, caritas that invites those involved to repent and believe, to become part of the movement that threatens their industry as it threatened gladitorial combat in Rome and as it threatened idol-making in Ephesus (I think it was Ephesus).

So I'm no longer a single-issue Republican because I think that the Republicans are misguided on that issue and flat out wrong on most others. Being no lover of John Kerry either, I'll likely cast my vote sixty-three days from now for Ralph Nader.