Some Noted Things ...
At Historiblogography, Chris Bray reveals that Victor Davis Hanson is a Marxist.
E. J. Dionne's"Assault on the Media," Washington Post, 27 May, nails it. The attack on Newsweek by the administration and the right-wing was so ferocious – not because Newsweek's story was false – but because it was true.
Jeff Sharlet,"Soldiers of Christ: Inside America's Most Powerful Megachurch," Harpers, May."Bizarre" is the word that comes to mind and it isn't because the article appears in Harpers. It's because I can't see how the message of the megachurch's free market theology and American civil religion has anything much to do with historic Christianity or what claim it has to calling itself"evangelical." I asked a colleague at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs about Sharlet's article."I have lots of students who attend New Life, as you may imagine," he replied.
I don't find them to be like what is described here; they always seem to me not unlike the kinds of people I was familiar with growing up, sort of clean-cut and full of fairly vapid but mostly harmless Jesus talk. Actually in my religious history class I had students visit various religious services, and one of my more cynical atheist students went to New Life. She did a pretty funny presentation not unlike this article (she made a big deal out of the fog machines), but ended by more or less saying that mostly what she saw there was suburbanites seeking community, many of whom were not really true believers in some of Pastor Ted's more far-out visionary things. Anyway, I liked the article but found it somewhat overblown and overwritten (I've never met anyone or heard of anyone, church member or not, who"avoids" downtown, which is just a few blocks of cutesy small stores and Starbuck's and stuff like that). Basically, Colorado Springs is Oklahoma City or Omaha except with a big mountain next to it and the weather is a hell of a lot better than either of the other two.You may have seen the story of a man who climbed to the top of a 25 story crane at a busy and fashionable intersection here in Atlanta and threatened to commit suicide. He is suspected of having murdered his former girlfriend in Florida. For 2½ days, he brought business and traffic to a halt as local officials tried to figure out a way to get him down safely from the crane. Finally, he was stunned with a taser by a police officer and life returns to normal in Buckhead. At Horizon, Alan Allport cites that and three other stories about the use of tasers, suggesting that all four of them should be taken into account in our judgment about the use of tasers.
John Bruce at In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood has a series of posts about the inadequacy of our credentialing processes for college and university teachers. It began as an attack on the contributors to John Holbo's group blog The Valve, as exemplars of what is wrong with the process and its products. They often lack essential information in their fields and often write poorly, says Bruce, who advocates a national qualifying examination. Our colleague, Miriam Burstein, is one of the contributors to The Valve, but another colleague, Tim Burke disputed Bruce's analysis in comments at ISMT and at Easily Distracted. John's replies at ISMH are, ah, sort of uncivil.