Richard Land's second radio program, For Faith and Family, recently broadcast a two-part interview with Stanton Jones, co-author with Mark Yarhouse of Ex-Gays? : A Longitudinal Study of Religiously Mediated Change in Sexual Orientation.
I found the second part (December 5) of the interview fascinating: Jones, who is among other things Provost of Wheaton College (the first part of the interview is devoted mostly to establishing his evangelical and academic bona fides) takes a rather more nuanced tack on the question of homosexuality as a sin/lifestyle/choice/identity/etc. than I expected from a guest on Richard Land's show.
I guess all I'd say about all of this is that it seems really foreign to me as a mathematician/scientist; the whole discussion of homosexuality seems much more like a social construct than a dispassionate discussion of e.g. lab results.
Oh and: I'll predict that Stanton and Yarhouse's book will more or less vanish without a trace.
Image via WikipediaI'm listening to an old episode of Richard Land Live! in which he discusses the bailout bill; the first rhetorical question he asks himself is "if I were in Congress would I vote for this bill?" and I have to admit it makes me shudder.
Richard Land is a former pastor, and is currently (as he has been for the last twenty years) president of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, and when he takes the rhetorical position of being a Congressman I wonder how much of what he's saying is evidence of ambition and how much is just a rhetorical device anyone is entitled to.
Ed Dobson, formerly of Moral Majority, is one of my spiritual heroes, and in Blinded By Might, a book he co-authored with columnist Cal Thomas he describes the moment he decided to leave that organization: he was on his way back from taping an episode of Donahue where he defended the Boy Scouts against some special-interest group when he met Harold Wilmington in the Charlotte airport. He enthused to Wilmington about how he was fighting the good fight, etc. and Wilmington told him in no uncertain terms that if he had been called by God to be a pastor he had no business, as Wilmington put it, casting pearls before swine.
I don't entirely understand what Jesus meant when he said "don't give what is holy to dogs, and don't cast pearls before swine," as part of the Sermon on the Mount, but Wilmington interpreted it to mean that getting involved in the so-called culture war, Dobson was getting off-track and was seconding his calling to something not worthwhile.
That one little anecdote did a lot to frame how I think about pastors in politics: they've got a calling already, and they really should be tending to it, rather than helping one politician or another aggregate and exercise power, much less coveting power themselves.
Image via WikipediaWork's been crazy, and last week doubly so: I don't know about you, but I'm a lot less secure, financially speaking, than I was a month ago. I've been rearranging my media consumption, too, adding the NPR Planet Money podcast and both (for the moment) Richard Land podcasts.
I do not like Richard Land. I blame him for the Iraq War.
Well, it's not really that simple: Land is the author of the Land Letter, a document that made one of the big mistakes conservative Christians make in confusing the authority to do something and the rightness of doing it. Yes, a head of state has the authority to declare war, and yes, a head of state holds the power of life and death, but Land, along with Bill Bright, Chuck Colson, Carl Herbster, and D. James Kennedy should not have jumped on the bandwagon for the current Iraq war. Their reading of "just war theory" is responsible (not to say primarily responsible) for the deaths of thousands of Iraqis, many of them Christians.
I'm listening to Land anyway; I've ignored the mechanics of the relationship between conservative Christians and whatever Land is selling (the Republican Party? the American Way of Life? who knows?) for too long. I honestly believe Land is intentionally repackaging Republican talking points for consumption by Southern Baptists for the purpose of making conservative Christians a captive constituency of the Republican Party. I'm listening to him primarily because I "know" this stinks, but I can't yet put exactly what's wrong into words I can stand behind.
(For the record that's a picture of Kennedy, not Land; Zemanta can't seem to find a good picture of Land. I blame his name.)
This is a terrible book, chock-full of the sort of profiteering nonsense celebrity Christians perpetrate against their fellow believers. It merits a post of its own, though, and I'll get back to it later.
I'm partway through Bill McKibben's book The Age of Missing Information now. It's a fixed experiment, and I'm waiting to see if McKibben owns up. It reminds me of Nickel and Dimed in terms of its unfair comparisons: short on facts and full of comparisons between real unpleasant things and unreal pleasant things. Frankly he reminds me of the sort of people I grew up with who compared the homes they grew up in to Ozzie and Harriet and from that perspective condemned All In The Family for being vile and slanderous (as opposed to just vile).
Anyway, work is crazy busy still, and most of my words are going into work-related documents; I love reading and writing, but most of the reading and writing I should be doing is work-related right now.
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