BETWEEN VIOLENCE AND WHATEVERISM: “Religious Tolerance: Karma, Christ, Whatever?”

Is there not a better way for all of us to take religion more seriously without descending into sectarian conflict? That is one of the most important questions of our day.

I think we need to reject both sectarian conflict and liberal whateverism and commit ourselves instead to an authentic pluralism. Genuine pluralism fosters a culture that honors rather than isolates and disparages religious difference. It affirms the right of others to believe and practice their faith, not only in their private lives but also in the public square — while expecting them to allow still others to do the same. Authentic pluralism does not minimize religious differences by saying that “all religions are ultimately the same.” That is false and insipid. Pluralism encourages good conversations and arguments across differences, taking them seriously precisely because they are understood to be about important truths, not merely private “opinions.” It is possible, authentic pluralism insists, to profoundly disagree with others while at the same time respecting, honoring, and perhaps even loving them. Genuine pluralism suspects the multi-cultural regime’s too-easy blanket affirmations of “tolerance” of being patronizing and dismissive. Pluralism, however, also counts atheist Americans as deserving equal public respect, since their beliefs are based as much on a considered faith as are religious views and so should not be automatically denigrated.

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THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT AND THE ECONOMY: “Study: For ardent believers, economic issues are a matter of faith.”

People who believe God is very engaged in their everyday life tend to see conservative economic policy as an article of faith, according to a study published Tuesday by Baylor University.

Paul Froese, co-author of the Baylor Religious Survey, says that those who believe in a more hands-off God tend to believe in more than one way to fix America’s economic woes. But those who believe in a more active God tend to believe there is “one truth” when it comes to fixing the economy.

Forty percent of those surveyed said they “strongly agree” that God has a plan for them. Among that group, 53% believe the government does too much, with 44% believing “able bodied-people who are out of work shouldn’t receive unemployment checks.”

Compare that to the 15% percent of those surveyed who said they “strongly disagree” that God has a plan for them. Just 21% of those Americans said the government does too much, while only 24% said able-bodied people shouldn’t receive unemployment checks.

Froese, a sociology professor at Baylor, said conservatives “have so conjoined their religious faith with economic conservatism that economic conservatism has become a matter of faith. It is very hard to sway those people with a counter argument.”

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THE RELIGIOUS LEFT AND THE ECONOMY: “Clergy Lobby Super Committee To Increase Taxes On Wealthy.”

As a Congressional super committee meets to put together a plan to cut at least $1.2 trillion from the federal deficit in the next decade, a coalition of dozens of religious voices sent a letter to members of the committee on Tuesday, urging them to consider increasing taxes on wealthy Americans.

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BUMMER: “A rough decade for congregations.”

A new decade-long survey of American congregations shows religious health and vitality are weaker than they were 10 years ago.  While the survey showed that many congregations are adopting new technologies and innovative worship, there were steep drops in financial health and attendance at weekly worship services.

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TO ARGUE, OR NOT TO ARGUE: “Gospel Polemics, Part 1.”

Polemics is medicine, not food. Without medicine we will surely die—we can’t live without it. This is why polemical theology must be a required part of every theological curriculum. Yet we cannot live on medicine. If you engage in polemics with relish and joy—if polemics takes up a significant percentage or even a majority of your time and energy—it is like trying to live on medicine alone. It won’t work for the church or for you.

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CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: “Let’s Talk about Abortion: A Response to Dennis O’Brien.”

If morality and law are related in roughly this way, then abortion—understood here as the intentional killing of a human being prior to birth—is not merely a moral fault that deserves legal tolerance. Rather, fetal killing imposes a serious bodily harm on an innocent human being; the law, in its role of protecting the innocent from serious harms imposed by others without due process of law, should prohibit abortion just as it does other serious harms to the well-being of persons, such as assault, rape, kidnapping, and theft.

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WHY I HATE ROLLER COASTERS: “Suicide by Roller Coaster.”

The three-minute ride involves a long, slow, climb — nearly a third of a mile long — that lifts one up to a height of more than 1,600 feet, followed by a massive fall and seven strategically sized and placed loops. The final descent and series of loops take all of one minute. But the gravitational force — 10 Gs — from the spinning loops at 223 miles per hour in that single minute is lethal.

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GOP AND ISRAEL: “Will the GOP push for Jewish votes pay off?”

Some political observers say Republican overtures to Israel and to Jewish leaders are aimed more at American evangelical voters, a key part of the GOP base, than they are at Jews.

Support for Israel has become a key issue for American evangelicals, some of whom believe the country plays a key role in end times and others who believe there’s a biblical mandate to honor the Jewish state.

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 “YOU’LL SHOOT YOUR EYE OUT!” “First Prize for a Child in Somalia: An AK-47.”

Over the weekend, a Somali radio station run by the Shabab, the most powerful Islamist militant group in the war-ravaged country, held an awards ceremony to honor children who were experts at Shabab trivia and at reciting the Koran. The prizes? Fully automatic assault rifles and live hand grenades.

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ABOUT TIME! “Rethinking Chesterton.”

Chesterton’s ideal critic was an oppositional, even quarrelsome figure, one who tore down false idols and found value in unexpected places; he argued frequently that criticism does not exist to say what authors already understood about themselves. Rather, “it exists to say the things about them which they did not know themselves.”

In that spirit, far from being a defender of conventionality, Chesterton was a natural anarchist, a beery supporter of small-scale government (he rejected the notion of socialism, calling himself a Distributist, which he defined as “Man standing on two legs and requiring two boots … his own boots”). In his essays (and the Father Brown stories), he mounted an attack on capitalism and the class system. And he abhorred Britain’s class society, which he believed was dominated, in the modern age, by soulless materialism. As for the aristocracy: “The typical aristocrat was the typical upstart” whose family was “founded on stealing” and whose “family was stealing still.”

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FROM MY MAGAZINE: “From Creation to Creativity: Where Are God’s Big Ideas in Your Ministry?” by Cal LeMon.