Why I'm Walking Away From Blogging and Facebook... At Least For Now

I started this blog almost exactly 10 years ago. By almost any measure, I've been at it longer, and have kept posting more consistently (at least for most of that time) than most others who have taken up blogging, either as a hobby or as a means of income. After a lengthy period of introspection, I believe that the time has come for me to officially give the blog a rest. This entry is my attempt to explain why.
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Owning Our Labels

OK. So we're knee-deep in Political Convention season, which itself is naturally knee-deep in presidential election season. This (naturally) leads to a higher proportion of politically-relevant blog posts than usual. Some of these are unapologetically partisan, but it seems to me that most of the posts I read fall more in the category of attempting to eschew labels altogether to define a position that is neither left nor right. While I've certainly written a few of this type of post, myself, I'm going to attempt something a bit more original this time around.
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Why Are We So Ready to Attack?

About a week ago, I posted the following paragraph from C.S. Lewis' famous work, Mere Christianity:

The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,” or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.

— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Chapter 7: Forgiveness)

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On Believing the Worst of One's Opponents

Perhaps you've seen this picture floating around Facebook lately. As one might expect, I myself found it when it was posted by a friend who leans conservative when it comes to issues of politics and religion. I was immediately suspicious, not only because I am disinclined to think of Obama as this stupid, but because I've seen this happen before.
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We Need to Offer Something the Secular World Doesn't

As part of her weekly "Sunday Superlatives" yesterday, Rachel Held Evans mentioned a New York Times editorial by Ross Douthat as "Most Likely to Start a Big Ole’ Argument on Your Facebook Page When You Share It." Since my Facebook account is one the primary venues whereby family and friends read my blog entries, I am probably therefore asking for trouble by commenting on it here. Arguments tend to flare pretty much whenever the labels "conservative" and "liberal" are tossed around, and although I try to be consistent about pointing out that the definitions of these terms depend on who's talking about what and in relation to what, they remain well-worn labels that convey some semblance of meaning in discussions about religion and politics. With that in mind, despite the fact that my positions tend to make liberals ill at ease whenever I try to claim to be one of them, and despite the reality that I'm increasingly suspect to certain circles within conservatism... here I go again.
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Why Don't We Expect Our Leaders to Prioritize Their Own Families?

A lot of folks in the blogosphere have been reading and commenting on the recent cover story from The Atlantic, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All," by former State Department director of policy planning Anne-Marie Slaughter, and I'm no doubt a bit behind the curve by having only taken the time to read it this past weekend. I was a bit concerned by the title, which conjured up messages I've heard all too often from evangelical leaders: "Women suffer when they abandon their God-given role of wife and housewife to seek other kinds of employment." I'm going to take it for granted that readers understand that I don't buy into that position. The point here is that I've heard statements quite similar to that repeated off and on through the years, and that I was pleasantly surprised to find that this was not Slaughter's position at all. Rather, she writes an honest account of the difficulties facing women in the workplace today while advocating for the kinds of fundamental changes that must take place before the situation can improve the way she (and those who agree with her basic position, including myself) believes that they can indeed improve over time.
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Politicians and Messiah Language

Obama isn't Superman, either.

About four years ago now, during the previous presidential election season, a number of Christian commentators tried to send a message to the American people. The message took many forms and used varying details, but one phrase kept popping up: “Obama is not the Messiah.” Now, I don’t want to make too much of the fact that Obama was the candidate being discussed here. This isn’t really about the fact that many Christians are opposed to Obama for ideological reasons. In theory, this accusation could have been made about anybody, provided that the candidate had the wellspring of popular support and of people placing their hopes in his candidacy that Obama had at the time.
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In a World Where Fire Chiefs Drive Lamborghinis...

When quintessential movie trailer voice Don LaFontaine passed away a few years ago, perhaps the single most common thing that was said about him was his penchant for beginning his narratives with the phrase "in a world...". Especially in the science fiction genre, such a phrase helps to set up the important differences between the world of the story and the world in which we all live.
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Money's Gotta Circulate!

For years and years, Scrooge McDuck—Donald Duck's uncle and well-established as "the richest duck in the world"—was strictly a comic book character. First introduced at the end of 1947, Scrooge didn't appear in animated form for twenty years (excepting a brief cameo in a crowd of characters as part of the opening of The Mickey Mouse Club in the '50s), until he was used in a 1967 educational short called Scrooge McDuck and Money. It took another 16 years after that for McDuck to to be used again, in 1983's Mickey's Christmas Carol. Finally, in 1987, McDuck showed up in Sport Goofy in Soccermania a few months before the beginning of DuckTales, after which McDuck was finally firmly established as a cartoon character, in addition to being a comic book icon.
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He Speaks French!

There is so much one could say about the political campaigning going on these days. Thankfully, here in California we're not targeted by the bulk of it just at the moment. I hope that holds true for just a while longer.
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Fear and Loathing in Marietta

A certain segment of the blogosphere lit up late last week in response to some anti-Mormon and anti-Muslim comments made by a local state representative from Georgia.  Here's the relevant bit, as reported in The Marietta Daily Journal:

"I think Mitt Romney is a nice man, but I’m afraid of his Mormon faith,” Manning said. “It’s better than a Muslim. Of course, every time you look at the TV these days you find an ad on there telling us how normal they are. So why do they have to put ads on the TV just to convince us that they’re normal if they are normal? … If the Mormon faith adhered to a past philosophy of pluralism, multi-wives, that doesn’t follow the Christian faith of one man and one woman, and that concerns me."

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Parish Politics

A recent conversation has got me thinking about politics in church.

No, I'm not talking about the recent Iowa caucuses, nor about how some preachers might tell people in their churches how to vote. Rather, I'm thinking about the ways in which different personalities play off of each other in getting the work of the church done.
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Parades and Positive Publicity

To hear the way that some people respond whenever they hear the name of Jesus Christ proclaimed in positive way public, you'd think they lived in a world in which he was never mentioned at all, and thus they're drinking up the mention of the name as though it were a drop of water after having spent the past month in the desert dying of thirst.
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The Myth of the Middle Way

"The Truth Lies Somewhere in the Middle." I've been trained to believe this mantra for most of my life. "Everything in Moderation." "Don't go to Extremes." It's certainly easy to understand the appeal of such a teaching, especially in a world where extremism seems to be the cause of so many of the world's ills. But as I've gotten older, I've come to realize that there are certain areas where "the middle" is not only not always the best solution, but it may actively be worse than either of the poles it seeks to bridge.
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Bumper Stickers, Divisiveness, and Dialogue

I'm often both fascinated and discouraged by the bumper stickers that I read when I'm traveling. Bumper stickers are fascinating because they have the advantage of communicating a message to the world in a concise manner. They can be discouraging because that conciseness often means that a message comes off either more blunt, or perhaps even less clear, than might be helpful.
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When "Personal Responsibility" Crosses the Line

A couple of days ago, shortly after the Republican debate scheduled for that evening, I found the following statement on Twitter:

In the last two debates, the GOP debate audience has cheered: 1. 234 executions, 2. Letting uninsured people die

I was already aware of the incident that point #1 refers to, and found Bruce Reyes-Chow's commentary on that incident to be a more than sufficient response.  I chose not to throw in "my two cents" at that time, except to share that post via Twitter and Facebook.
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Politics via Phineas and Ferb

I've been enjoying the Disney Channel cartoon Phineas and Ferb via my Netflix subscription recently. Now, so far as I can tell, this cartoon is pretty non-political, and I'm not out to expose any supposed "hidden messages" in the writing (which is always excellent). But while listening to some commentary on the recent Presidential debates (and, specifically, the current Republican front-runner), I got to thinking about how certain Phineas and Ferb catchphrases might be viewed in a different light if presumed to be talking about the candidates.

Consider, for example, the following:
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More on "Liking" and "Loving"

The other day, I posted some reflections after having read an interesting article at Christianity Today.  As you may recall, the article ended with these words:

We Christians are called to love people, and as I understand it, this includes loving people who believe differently than we do. I'm not sure how we can love atheists if we don't like them.

Now, these words are in direct contradiction to a mantra I heard quite a bit while I was in college: "You don't have to like someone to love them." I've always taken that mantra as recognizing at least a couple of different realities: 1) We can (and should!) exercise acts of love to people whom we don't know. 2) Perhaps in keeping with the command to "love our enemies," we can (and should!) seek God's best for even those whom we may personally dislike. The words of the Christianity Today article would seem to challenge some of that wisdom.
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Plumbing - Caring for the World's Most Important Invention

I spent a bit of my post on Monday suggesting that certain infrastructure needs should be given greater priority. At the time, I was thinking about roads and traffic. Today, recent events in my hometown of Louisville, KY have me thinking about water and plumbing.  I've heard it said that plumbing may well be the most important invention of all time, and while there's certainly room for debate on that statement, I think that a very strong case can be made.
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The Approaching Carmageddon

For those who don't live in the LA area, no, I didn't make up that particular pun (and those in the LA area already know what I'm talking about).

This weekend, a 10-mile stretch of the I-405 Freeway on the west side of LA--the entirety of the freeway between the US-101 and the I-10--will be shut down for improvements.  The signs along the highways (apparently everywhere from Bakersfield to San Diego) say "EXPECT BIG DELAY."  I don't think anyone actually disputes that the improvements are needed, nor that the drive along that stretch will be much easier after they're done.  But the sacrifice needed to make those improvements, if only for a weekend, looks to be pretty painful.
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