A Living Text

TypeOff.

 Typography

In the New Mormon Challenge, Craig Bloomberg takes a stab at defining what he thinks the “five most objectionable Mormon doctrines” are. He says:

(1) a finite theism in which God at some point in eternity past was merely a man and not divine;

(2) a view of the universe as not eternally contingent on the will or being of God;

(3) the denial of the necessity of prevenient grace to overcome humanity’s sinful disposition in the process of conversion or regeneration;

(4) the denial of Trinitarian monotheism; and

(5) the denial of the classic Christian understanding of the relationship of the two natures of Christ.

At times I really enjoyed Keillor’s wit and insight, since I am half-Norwegian and from Minnesota. He is good at painting a picture of Lutherans and the un-emotional makeup of the Nordics who settled Minnesota. However, this book as a whole has a lot wanting. The plot meanders and goes nowhere in the end, it seems that the books is just a semi-autobiographical vehicle for Keillor to stick episodes from his life and observations of the world around him. I think it would have worked better as a series of essays or perhaps short stories.

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The characters in the book all describe other people using a ridiculous amount of detail that make them seem totally unrealistic. We are to believe that a small-town, back-woods farmer describes his ancestors using a novelists eye for detail. The descriptions of appearances and clothing are uniformly from Keillor and the characters function as puppets in his world. The voice throughout is his, he has pasted episodes together that allow him to unload his commentary on the world, the episodes themselves don’t mesh well. It seems as if the plots of books he never finished are dropped into this book as episodes from the past, narrated unbelievably by these Minnesotans. His obsession with sex is typically modern and liberal, and lessens the impact of the work.

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It is fun to see how he skewers modern public radio, I don’t know if these are his true thoughts or if he is playing the antagonist. He is quite insightful in his constant observations of a small town Midwestern mentality that is perhaps fading in our day, although I don’t know since I don’t live there anymore. But as a book, I think this effort fails.

I became fully persuaded that there is neither in me or in any Man else any natural Faculty by which we may discover Truth with a full and certain assurance and that the Cause of all our Errors is the too hasty Propensity of our Minds which makes us too easily believe what ever Notions are proposed to us

- from A Philosophical Treatise Concerning the Weakness of Human Understanding By Pierre-Daniel Huet

I tell you, a Midwesterner pays a high price for good manners. As a child, you’re taught not to interrupt, but interruption is a necessary skill in any negotiation. When someone tries to lead you down the garden path, you have to say Whoa, or else he will steal the shoes off your feet. Midwesterners don’t interrupt, and they are brought up to eschew craven self-interest and to sacrifice for the common good. So they get rooked. Politeness is their undoing. There comes a point in every negotiation when you have to set the pistol on the table and say, “Stop lying to me and tell me what this will really cost.”

LDS studies are gaining momentum at mainstream universities. This article again emphasizes the need for Christians to step up the level of their scholarship on Mormons and quit relying on hack jobs that don’t engage in modern Mormon thought.

I read this today:

Exxon paid $30 billion in corporate taxes in 2007, a tax rate of more than 40%. In fact, Exxon paid more in income taxes than the bottom 50% of individual taxpayers!
According to Tax Foundation data cited in Investor’s Business Daily,
from 1977 to 2004, U.S. oil companies’ average corporate income tax rate
(federal and state) was 45%. The remaining after-tax profits of companies like Exxon Mobil are distributed among their shareholders, and that’s just about everyone with a pension, IRA, 401k, or any equity mutual fund investment.

Philip Bess sums up the tradition on the good life:

the good life for individual human beings is the life of individual moral and intellectual virtue (or excellence) lived with others in communities. Aristotle himself characterized the four components of the good life as good health, sufficient wealth to satisfy our bodily needs, good habits, and good fortune.

Also:

the city (is) the foremost community that exists for the sake of the good life.

Well, Frank Rich is saying what I fear we will hear a lot more of in the next 9 months, and what I said last week:

 Mr. McCain could get lucky, especially if Mrs. Clinton gets the Democratic nomination and unites the G.O.P., and definitely if she tosses her party into civil war by grabbing ghost delegates from Michigan and Florida. But those odds are dwindling. More likely, the Republican Party will face Mr. Obama with a candidate who reeks even more of the past and less of change than Mrs. Clinton does. I was startled to hear last week from a friend in California, a staunch anti-Clinton Republican businessman, that he was wavering. Though he regards Mr. McCain as a hero, he wrote me: “I am tired of fighting the Vietnam war. I have drifted toward Obama.”

Similarly, Mark McKinnon, the Bush media maven who has played a comparable role for Mr. McCain in this campaign, reaffirmed to Evan Smith of Texas Monthly weeks ago that he would not work for his own candidate in a race with Mr. Obama. Elaborating to NPR last week, Mr. McKinnon said that while he is “100 percent” for Mr. McCain and disagrees with Mr. Obama “on very fundamental issues,” he likes Mr. Obama and what he’s doing for the country enough to stay on the sidelines rather than fire off attack ads.

As some Republicans drift away in a McCain-Obama race, who fills the vacuum? Among the white guys flanking Mr. McCain at his victory celebration on Tuesday, revealingly enough, was the once-golden George Allen, the Virginia Republican who lost his Senate seat and presidential hopes in 2006 after being caught on YouTube calling a young Indian-American Democratic campaign worker “macaca.”

In that incident, Mr. Allen added insult to injury by also telling the young man, “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia.” As election results confirmed both in 2006 and last week, it is Mr. Allen who is the foreigner in 21st century America, Mr. Allen who is in the minority in the real world of Virginia. A national rout in 2008 just may be that Republican Party’s last stand.