“Sadly, compassionate conservatism is now dead as a political label,” writes Marvin Olasky in the latest WORLD. Marvin adds that the label is “dead among liberals because of the war in Iraq: They equate the term with hypocrisy. And it’s mostly dead among conservatives because of President Bush’s refusal to veto any domestic spending bills for six years: They equate the term with big government.” But as Marvin reports, the concept isn’t dead. It just may need a new name … like “social justice.”

Read his entire column on the concept here.

A professor once told me that when you give a test, if 10% of the class flunks, it’s their fault. If 90% of the class flunks, it’s the teacher’s fault.

Yesterday’s blog post is definitely my fault. See, I wasn’t making fun of the hymn “Victory in Jesus.” I was making fun of people like me who used to be too “sophisticated” for a joyful hymn about Christ’s transforming power.

(In the ’60s, Narragansett Beer had a TV commercial where this guy walks into a bar and talks to the nasal-voiced bartender lady in a nasal voice. Then a woman with a sultry voice slinks in and the man talks to her in Charlton Heston sonority. The bartender lady is indignant: “Hey, you were making fun of me!” He replies, “No, I was making fun of her.”)

Second misunderstanding: You’re right that America’s Keswick’s Colony of Mercy isn’t a “step program.” Or rather, it is a one-step program. There’s one problem, the addiction. And there’s one solution, Jesus.

But Jesus has to be laid hold of every minute of every day. So in a sense, it’s a thousand-step program. Or, in more conventional terms—a process. (This is no “instant perfectionist” theology.) The process is learning to trust and obey Jesus, and all that that entails:  prayer, worship, repentance, forgiveness, and hard work, and learning new habits.

That’s what they do at America’s Keswick, where the thinking is that all addictions are a worship disorder, not a disease (a much more hopeful diagnosis)—and that all of us have a bit of a worship disorder.

The media, left and right, try so very hard to twist the facts into a story that confirms their views of the world.  Heather MacDonald explains in City Journal how the New York Times is so convinced that gender bias exists in math and science education (against females) that it ignores the salient facts.  One of those facts is that males saturate both ends of the bell curve, not just the high end.

A new study has “found that girls perform as well as boys on standardized math tests,” claims a July 25 [Times] article by Tamar Lewin-thus, the underrepresentation of women on science faculties must result from bias. Actually, the study, summarized in the July 25 issue of Science, shows something quite different: while boys’ and girls’ average scores are similar, boys outnumber girls among students in both the highest and the lowest score ranges.

MacDonald reminds us that feminists don’t seem to complain about the “gender bias” that results in males outnumbering females in the lowest score range.  But hey, let’s not let the facts get in the way of an interesting worldview.

Former Washington lobbyist Stephen L. Joseph must like a good challenge because he’s certainly found one in his latest endeavor to save the plastic grocery bag. It may seem like an unlikely cause in an increasingly environmentally conscious culture, but where environmentalists see a symbol of waste and excess and the incremental destruction of nature, Joseph sees a challenge to improve the image of a throwaway product. As head of the Save the Plastic Bag campaign, Joseph is working to keep plastic bag manufacturers in business.

How can a former anti-litter activist support plastic bags? Joseph points out, and some environmentalists agree, that in many ways paper bags are just as bad for the environment as plastic ones. While paper bags decompose, they also release methane while doing so. While plastic bags are sometimes made with petrochemicals, paper bags require more energy to be made and recycled. The evidence that plastic bags kill marine life is not conclusive, and it’s generally acknowledged that the detritus from commercial fishing is much more damaging. “My research into this issue has proved to me that something funny is going on,” says Joseph. “The anti-plastic-bag campaigners are not being challenged. It’s like a court case where nobody’s representing the other side.”

I admire his tenacity, but it seems to me that plastic grocery bags are a lost cause. Nearly every grocery store I frequent now has its own version of the environmentally friendly, reusable shopping bag–and I’m seeing more and more people actually using them. Can the plastic versions really survive?

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) latest report on homelessness indicates it dropped 12 percent from 2005 to 2007, with chronic homelessness almost 30 percent lower than in 2005. Good news, right? Perhaps, but it depends in large part on how you define homeless.

While in past years the count included families who were living in RVs or two families to an apartment, this year HUD only tallied those who were actually in shelters or on the streets–the official HUD definition of a homeless person. Why the change?

The number crunchers leading the federal fight believe that as long as Americans continue to perceive homelessness as an implacable problem, they’ll never muster the will to help. But if the government can show that the numbers are actually relatively small–like the 125,000 chronic homeless they are now counting–then the public might just be up for tackling the issue.

While critics believe HUD should return to its prior method of tabulating homelessness, report co-author Dennis Culhane says limited funding means an expanded definition of homelessness “isn’t going to make a hill of beans of difference. It’s only going to dilute what we’re doing.” What do you think?

There is a movie my husband and I have seen at least 30 times: Tombstone. I’m not sure why we like it so much — it’s definitely not the best movie ever made. Still, we can nearly quote the whole script, saying what Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, Johnny Ringo, and Curly Bill Brocious say before they say it (again.)

I suspect it’s Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday who makes the film. Also, the script features some of the best movie lines ever, many of them for Doc.

Example: Near a wooded creek, after a vicious gunfight in which Earp (Kurt Russell) kills head bad guy Curly Bill, a minor character asks Doc why he’s involved at all in hunting down the notorious gang, the Cowboys, who murdered Earp’s younger brother.

Turkey Creek Jack Johnson: Why you doin’ this, Doc?
Holliday: ‘Cause Wyatt Earp is my friend.
Turkey Creek Jack Johnson: Friend?…I got lots of friends.
Holliday: I don’t.

What are some of your favorite movie lines ever? (Remember to give us context!)

Dr. Bjørn Lomborg, author of Cool It! The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming, says that we all need to think a little more dispassionately about climate change.

We should take action on climate change, but we need to be realistic. The U.K has arguably engaged in the most aggressive rhetoric about climate change. Since the Labour government promised in 1997 to cut emissions by a further 15 percent by 2010, emissions have increased 3 percent. American emissions during the Clinton/Gore administration increased 28 percent.

And he reminds us of some other inconvenient truths, like how sea levels have risen a foot in the last century, but that didn’t seem to ruin too many days at the beach, and how rising sea levels in the future won’t bring calamity.  Or how the use of fossil fuels to grow more vegetables has increased nutrition and thus decreased cancer rates.  He offers a few more counterintuitive insights, but I suggest his books for a broader and more balanced approach to the issue.

Good day to y’all!

Today’s quote is from a philosopher: “I know what I can know, and am not troubled about what I cannot know.”

The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday issued an apology to black Americans for the wrongs committed against us and our ancestors who suffered under slavery and Jim Crow segregation laws.

“Today represents a milestone in our nation’s efforts to remedy the ills of our past,” said Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, D-Mich., chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Tennessee Democrat Steve Cohen, who is facing a tough black challenger in a re-election primary next week, was the principal sponsor of the resolution. I wonder if Cohen will win re-election now in his mostly black district back in Tennessee?

In the resolution, the House “apologizes to African-Americans on behalf of the people of the United States, for the wrongs committed against them and their ancestors who suffered under slavery and Jim Crow.”

“Slavery and Jim Crow are stains upon what is the greatest nation on the face of the earth,” Cohen laments. It is important for our nation’s healing that we have “a resolution as we have before us today where we face up to our mistakes and apologize as anyone should apologize for things that were done in the past that were wrong.”

The House also committed to “rectifying the lingering consequences of slavery and Jim Crow and to stopping future human rights violations.” What does it mean by “rectify?” What are the “lingering consequences” of slavery and Jim Crow? How long are the lingering consequences expected to linger?

One section of House Resolution 194 laments:

Whereas the system of slavery and the visceral racism against persons of African descent upon which it depended became entrenched in the Nation’s social fabric;

Whereas slavery was not officially abolished until the passage of the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865 after the end of the Civil War;

Whereas after emancipation from 246 years of slavery, African-Americans soon saw the fleeting political, social, and economic gains they made during Reconstruction eviscerated by virulent racism, lynchings, disenfranchisement, Black Codes, and racial segregation laws that imposed a rigid system of officially sanctioned racial segregation in virtually all areas of life;

Whereas the system of de jure racial segregation known as `Jim Crow,’ which arose in certain parts of the Nation following the Civil War to create separate and unequal societies for whites and African-Americans, was a direct result of the racism against persons of African descent engendered by slavery;

Ok, so now what? Now that those who object that government never apologized for slavery got their wish, will we be able to move on? The resolution did not mention reparations but I’m sure that some will soon push for that because the resolution used the word “rectify.” Some have argued that this type of apology reminds of Nehemiah 9:2, ”Those of Israelite descent had separated themselves from all foreigners. They stood in their places and confessed their sins and the wickedness of their fathers.” My guess is that for many black activists and guilt-ridden whites this resolution will still not be enough.

In a practical world with a practical people, we demand a practical education.  So goes the thinking of most Americans, even if they mean different things when they suggest it.  And so goes the sad state of the humanities.  We’ve blogged much before on this much maligned human endeavor, and we will again, after reading this nice essay in The Wilson Quarterly titled “The Burden of the Humanities.”  First, the author explains how the humanities, these days, are like the “Ottoman Empire of the academy”:

[...] a sprawling, incoherent, and steadily declining congeries of disparate communities, each formed around one or another credal principle of ideology and identity, and each with its own complement of local sultans, khedives, and potentates.

So that’s one reason they struggle, because there’s no uniformity to them, no guarantee that what one means or professes in this humanities department (say, English) has any unity with something to do in another humanities department (say, Law or History).  Humanities used to mean one thing.  Now it means many things.  Who can wonder at why their study is failing?  It’s important to note that study of the humanities doesn’t preclude study of the more immediate arts of engineering, applied science, etc.  To support the humanities isn’t to spit in the face of physics.  Finally, the essay closes with suggesting a very practical, although not immediate, use of the humanities:

One of the ways that the humanities can indeed save ­us-­if they can recover their ­nerve-­is by reminding us that the ancients knew things about humankind that modernity has failed to repeal, even if it has managed to forget them. One of the most powerful witnesses to that fact was Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World (1932) continues to grow in stature as our world comes increasingly to resemble the one depicted in its pages. In that world, as one character says, “everybody’s happy,” thanks to endless sex, endless consumer goods, endless youth, ­mood-­altering drugs, and ­all-­consuming entertainment. But the novel’s hero, who is named the Savage, stubbornly proclaims “the right to be unhappy,” and dares to believe that there might be more to life than pleasure: “I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” In the end, the Savage is put on display as if he were a rare zoo animal: the Nietzschean “Last Man.”

And I suppose you could suggest that the humanities are nothing but history’s collection of stories about and by the human race, telling of what it means to be human.  And if the humanities are stories, then they will never die, no matter how impractical they may seem, no matter how much funding they lose.  Stories are free, after all, but of course it doesn’t hurt to throw a little money at those who write them down for us.