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We're beginning a series about the Psalms. I'll be working my way through the Psalter with Martin Luther as my companion. I hope you'll join us.From Rod Dreher at Crunchy Concomes a quote from political philosophy John Gray. It expresses quite nicely my own frustration with what passes for conservatism in today’s United States.
Conservative thought, in this new historical circumstance, is likely to be a mixture of fashionable techno-utopianism — such as the proposition, recently seriously advanced, that the virtual communities of the Internet can replace the local communities that free markets have desolated — and opportunistic fundamentalism. This is not a form of thought from which enlightenment or guidance can reasonably be expected. The enduring human needs which conservative philosophy once acknowledged are not now addressed by conservatives, partly because meeting them entails radical and — for today’s conservatives — unwelcome changes in current economic institutions. Meeting these human needs — for deep and strong forms of common life, fulfilling work and a rich public environment — demands re-embedding the market processes which neo-liberal policy has emancipated from any kind of political control or accountability in the cultures and communities they exist to serve. And this is a project, little short of revolutionary in its implications, that no form of conservative thought today is willing to contemplate.
Rod Dreher at Cruncy Con links to a fascinating piece from the New Republic. Read it here.
In it, Nordhaus & Shellenberger (two environmentalists) explore why environmentalism seems to have real difficulty gaining popular traction. Their conclusion is that environmentalism is essentially a movement in and of cultural elites (like many other important movements like, for example, civil rights):
The problem is not that most greens are elites, per se, but rather that too few of them acknowledge the material basis for their ecological concern and that too many reject the modern project of expanding prosperity altogether.
More:
…[T]he truth is that, while we often talk of our desire for greater community and interconnectedness, we choose ever more privacy, autonomy, and personal freedom. Few of even the most ardent greens could seriously imagine subsuming their individual identities to a pre-agrarian tribe, or abandoning their office jobs for a life of hard agricultural labor. The retreat from older forms of community, and the move toward greater individuation, is universal and largely positive. Colin Beavan and Michael Pollan lament, respectively, the loss of community and the loss of connection between humans and the land. But both choose to live alone with their families in cities, not on agricultural communes, and both express themselves as unique thinkers and writers.
I watched a clip of Brennan Manning yesterday, which has been reverberating in my heart for the last 24 hours. Here is is:
The question that I keep coming back to is this: what if the only question Jesus asks me at the Judgment is, “did you really believe that I love you just as you are, not as you should be?”
If this question is, as Brennan suggests, the one essential question that divides the true Christian from the cultural Christian, then I’m afraid to answer it. So often God’s love and acceptance of my seems to theoretical, so contingent upon my performance.
Lord, have mercy.
I had been wanting to watch Steven Spielberg’s Munich since it came out in 2005. I was vaguely aware of the events of Munich 1972, but not in any particular detail. It was three years before I was born, after all.
I basically knew that some or all of the Israeli Olympic team had been taken hostage by Palestinians. I knew that there was a rescue of some sort, that failed. And I knew that the Mossad (Israeli’s CIA, basically) had tracked down and assassinated many of those who had played a part in the planning of the Munich attack.
Talking to my father over the phone recently, I told him we had seen the movie and asked him whether he had. He hadn’t.
However, he told me that in 1972 he and my mother were living near Dusseldorf (about 5 hours from Munich) in, then, West Germany. They watched the news while they ate dinner on the small patio of their flat and, presumably with much of the rest of the world, watched with horror as the gruesome events played out.
For more information on Munich 1972, there is a well-written wikipedia article.
By way of summary. Several members of the Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage in September 1972 by operatives of a group named Black September. This group was known to have ties to Yasser Arafat’s fatah movement. 
The hostage-takers demanded the release and safe passage to Egypt of over 200 members of various terrorist groups who were in prison in Israel (two were in prison in Germany).
The German government devised a rescue plan. However, owing to several strategic and tactical plunders, the attempt caused the death of all save three of the terrorists (by sniper) and all eleven of the hostages (at the hands of the terrorists).
The three captured terrorists were later released after Black September hijacked a Lufthansa jet in October 1972. These released terrorists flew to Libya where they were treated as heroes and gave media interviews.
The response of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was swift and determined. She vowed that those responsible for planning and financing the attack. Operation Wrath of God was the Israeli mission to identify, locate, and execute those responsible for Munich who were living in Europe. A similar mission, Operation Spring of Youth (1973), focused on Beirut.
Operation Wrath of God is thought to have lasted as long as twenty years.
Reproducing here Chuck Colson’s latest Breakpoint Commentary. You may access it online here.
Blessings in Tough Times
Rediscovering Community
March 30, 2009
For years I have prayed that God would do whatever it took to get our attention—to turn us from false idols and back to Him. If the current economic meltdown is an answer to prayer, God is certainly getting our attention.
Like everybody else, I find myself squirming. My personal retirement plan has taken a hit and our ministry, like so many others, has to cut its budget.
As bad as things are, I’ve also seen good things emerge. Christian friends tell me unsaved acquaintances are increasingly asking about their beliefs. Many Christians themselves are rethinking their priorities. Americans, maybe, are relearning important lessons: the need to lean on God, depend on one another, and to create a sense of community—the kind we forget about in our affluence, but which I remember from my childhood.
I grew up during the Great Depression. Few complained about hardships; we were too busy helping worse-off neighbors. And we’re seeing the same attitudes develop today. For instance, when a Texas woman recently lost her home to foreclosure, she cried as she watched it auctioned off. Observing her, another woman impulsively bid on the house, won, and then gave it back to its original owner—a total stranger.
Why did she do it? Her answer was, “People need to help each other, and that’s all there is to it.”
Other Americans—newly on tight budgets—are discovering that it’s much nicer to eat a home-cooked meal as a family than to grab a burger somewhere. Others are opening their homes to adult children who can no longer afford their own apartments—and enjoying family life once more.
Another surprising benefit of renewed community spirit is that history tells us crime rates will go down. An extensive study by Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and the Kaiser Institute, found only one reliable predictor of crime rates in a community: whether it had, or lacked, a strong sense of community values and a willingness to impose those values on public space—what researchers called “community cohesion.” Crime was low in neighborhoods where people felt free to discipline neighborhood kids caught skipping school or scrawling graffiti on walls.
Sociologist James Q. Wilson found that, contrary to conventional wisdom, crime always drops in hard times. “The Depression pulled families together, and this cohesion inhibited crime,” he writes.
It also lessened divorce, as Mike Gerson noted in the Washington Post. Many Americans “adopted a set of moral and economic habits such as thrift, family commitment, savings and modest consumption that lasted through their lifetimes—and that have decayed in our own,” Gerson writes.
Finally, a 2007 study by professor David Beckworth shows evidence that the church grows in hard times.
While I did not wish for this economic collapse, we can at least be glad to see some lessening of our moral decay and signs of renewed spiritual interest.
As the recession plays out, Christians should be looking with confidence to God, living radically holy lives, truly loving God and our neighbors—and letting a fearful world watch us. That would be a powerful witness.
