Red in the ice storm… 19 December 2008

Mickey Patel sent us this photograph from Hanover, New Hampshire. “The storm made everything plenty depressing, but the trees and plants looked stunning”, he says. [BBC]

If the Warren story is worn out for you or was always boring and one dimensional… employ the eyelids or allow the seasonal haze to insert itself and scroll on by…

None other than Sully’s nookery served up this remarkable email (among his 25 or so posts on Warren) from a reader of his… who, as a young and confused pastor at a church near Warren’s,  put himself thru the Warren ministry that seeks to heal the gay (bold is mine)…

[S]o when I send emails to my otherwise liberal friends telling them to send an email expressing their disapproval of the choice of Warren, and they send me emails back acknowledging the political symbolism of why Obama did what he did, please understand my frustration.

It’s obvious what Obama is trying to do by having Warren give the convocation at his inauguration, and it is understandable – but for me as a human being who was personally damaged by Warren’s theology and his church specifically, it is unforgivable. 

And to cover it over with vague rhetoric about a politics of inclusion and unity is similarly unforgivable.

Some friends have told me that my “personal issues” make me too emotionally involved with this issue, and of course they do – but perhaps that is precisely what gives me the right to be upset about this decision.  […]

Why is it so few care when the so called religious do great harm?

It affected Sully for a bit, but soon he was back to:

Dish readers will know my own conflicted feelings about the selection of Rick Warren for the Inaugural Invocation. But feelings must at some point cede to reason. And I sense an understandable but, the more I think about it, misjudged response on the part of my fellow gays and lesbians. In our hurt, we may be pushing away from a real opportunity to engage and win hearts and minds. […]

I think the earnestness and sincerity of his campaign, and its generational force, have given us a chance for something new, and I fear that in responding too viscerally to the Warren choice, we may be throwing something very valuable away far too prematurely.

He ends up referring to the selection of Warren as nothing more than a  “symbolic slight”

But we should also understand Obama’s attempt to bridge some gaps in America that the Clintons, with their boomer baggage and Dick Morris cynicism, couldn’t and didn’t. This is what matters. Do gays and lesbians want to be a part of this – or sit fuming on the sidelines at symbolic slights?

And lobs this whopper – someone inform him he is ONE GAY, he does not speak for all, no more than I speak for all women (italics are mine)…

The greatest distortion of our politics in this respect is the notion that gays are in some way opposed to faith and in some way that our cause is a function solely of the left. Neither is true.

****

Malcolm Gladwell goes rather too ga-ga (imo) for Warren’s “cellular” approach… who effing cares?  I am as interested in the way all manner of  things sort themselves out and arrange themselves as most are… but that is NOT really what Warren is up to… some cellular building block launch pad to Jesus (fly me to the moon!)…  In light of another article today in the Guardian, this from the 2005 Gladwell New Yorker piece is revealing:

[W]arren has made repeated trips to Africa. He has sent out volunteers to forty-seven countries around the world, test-piloting experiments in microfinance and H.I.V. prevention and medical education. He decided to take the same networks he had built to train pastors and spread the purpose-driven life and put them to work on social problems.

“There is only one thing big enough to handle the world’s problems, and that is the millions and millions of churches spread out around the world,” he says. “I can take you to thousands of villages where they don’t have a school. They don’t have a grocery store, don’t have a fire department. But they have a church. They have a pastor. They have volunteers. The problem today is distribution. In the tsunami, millions of dollars of foodstuffs piled up on the shores and people couldn’t get it into the places that needed it, because they didn’t have a network. Well, the biggest distribution network in the world is local churches. There are millions of them, far more than all the franchises in the world. Put together, they could be a force for good.”  …snip…

Spare me.

[A]t the Anaheim stadium service, Warren laid out his plan for attacking poverty and disease. He didn’t talk about governments, though, or the United Nations, or structures, or laws. He talked about the pastors he had met in his travels around the world. He brought out the President of Rwanda, who stood up at the microphone—a short, slender man in an immaculate black suit—and spoke in halting English about how Warren was helping him rebuild his country. When he was finished, the crowd erupted in applause, and Rick Warren walked across the stage and enfolded him in his long arms. ♦

Have a  hug from Jesus…

Reminds me of how Bill C trots out his usual mouthpieces at his annual CGI in Manhattan.. one of which is Sirleaf, the woman president from Liberia.  The Johnsons, together or apart, of BET fame, Rania of Lebanon… and so on.  Mannequins.

Gladwell was utterly uncritical.  Again I think, The New Yorker is all too often the Sears Roebuck catalogue of this century.  Hang it in the outhouse.

Madman sent me this today, from the Guardian… and I think in this passage the author, Michelle Goldberg, gets to the nut of what should be happening, if a different party than the national Dems were to reach out to organised religious leaders (bold is mine)…

Recently, Democrats have been much concerned with wooing religious voters, and with pushing back against the conservative calumny that they are a party hostile to faith.

But the way for a progressive party to do that should be to enlarge the scope of discussion about morality in American life, not to pander to the same prejudices as the religious right. Democrats could foreground religious leaders who articulate the moral imperative of fighting poverty, torture and inequality.

They don’t need to get religion by becoming more hostile to gay people and to reproductive rights. Rather, they need to empower the many religious voices who support both.

There’ s a thought!

Here  Goldberg gets to what is happening in Uganda in the wake of Rick Warren (and Bush and PEPFAR and all the movie stars and Democrats and religious who slobber for the great good Bush has done…):

Warren is sometimes credited with broadening evangelical activism to transcend religious right preoccupations, but that’s a bit deceptive. Much has been made of his work on HIV/Aids in Africa. In fact, though, Warren has taken the standard Christian conservative approach to the epidemic, which favours abstinence and prayer over condoms and sex education.

I once attended Sunday services at the church of Martin Ssempa, one of Warren’s protégés in Uganda and a major force in that country’s devastating move away from safe-sex campaigns. It is a heartbreaking thing to watch a tongue-speaking faith-healer promise a room full of sobbing people – many of them poor, many infected with HIV – that Jesus can cure them, if only they believe in him unconditionally (belief demonstrated, of course, in part by tithing generously).

Obster and Warren, imo, are marketeers – and whatever else…  And, as Moss who followed Wright at  TUCC refers to the business, pulpiteers.  What a shame.