Rick Santorum’s It Takes a Family 1

I started Rick Santorum’s It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good.

So why am I reading and blogging about this book, when Rick Santorum is out of the race for the Republican nomination for President?  First of all, I think that Santorum has valuable insights, whether or not I agree with all that he has to say.  Second, I’ve been wanting to read this book ever since I first saw Santorum talk about it on C-Span, and that was long before he ran for President.  In fact, he was still a Senator at the time!  Santorum in that interview was criticizing individualistic conservatism and promoting a communitarian sort of conservatism, and (even though I was not yet disenchanted with conservatism) I admired that kind of outside-of-the-box thinking. 

And, third, while I respect Santorum’s belief that the nuclear family and moral values are good for society, I wonder how exactly he thinks that government policy can uphold those things.  When he was running for President, Santorum said that Republicans should not only focus on tax cuts, but should also support strong families.  But how exactly does he think that Republicans in power can support strong families?  Can they seriously turn back the clock to the 1950′s?  I wanted to read this book to see where Santorum believes that the government can help families, and where he believes that the government is harming the family.  I also wanted to see if his family policy encompasses more than opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.

In my post here, I will feature and comment on three passages that stood out to me.

1.  On pages ix-x, Santorum states: “I came to the uncomfortable realization that conservatives were not only reluctant to spend government dollars on the poor: they hadn’t even thought much about what might work better.  I often described my conservative colleagues during that time as simply ‘cheap liberals.’  My own economically modest personal background and my faith had taught me to care for those less fortunate…”

I think that the sub-text here is that strong families can help the poor.  At the same time, things that Santorum says elsewhere in my reading of this book thus far add nuance to Santorum’s argument.  Santorum appears to think that strong families are good for society, period, whether or not they make people financially well-off, and the reason is that healthy families teach moral values and provide children with emotional security.  Santorum acknowledges that there are rich families that are not good families, for the father is so busy that he fails to spend time with his children.  And Santorum also compares immigrant Latino teens with Latino teens born in the U.S., stating that, although the immigrant Latino families are poorer, their families and moral values are stronger, and so they are less likely to engage in violence.  Santorum believes that a strong economy can help families, but he does not think that money is where everything is at.  (UPDATE: On page 422, Santorum states: “Poor families, after all, will most likely be healthier if they are wealthier.”)

2.  On page x, Santorum states: “My district and [the welfare-reform] bill started me down the road to building up a conservative philosophy within which we could use government policies and dollars as a catalyst to renew and re-form the poor families and communities in our country.”

This passage reminded me of how some people have characterized neo-conservatism: as a belief system that holds that the government should encourage and incentivize doing the right thing, such as getting married. To some, that sort of sentiment can sound pretty patronizing and condescending!

In my reading of the book so far, I have not encountered Santorum’s policy proposals for strong families, but my impression is definitely that he wants for people to live in a certain way.  He believes that couples should get married rather than live together apart from marriage, for many couples who live together end up getting a divorce.  (Santorum even says that the shotgun marriages of the old days were sometimes a good thing, and that made me think of Little House on the Prairie, in which Nellie and Percival marry each other, without having known each other that long.  And that turned out all right!)  Santorum laments that, in inner cities, social service agencies do not encourage young couples to get married, but they simply require the father of the baby to sign a paternity establishment paper so that the authorities can come after him for child support; for Santorum, that demonstrates the agencies’ low expectations of people in the inner city.  Santorum also dislikes No-Fault divorce, and he believes that two-parent families are preferable to single-parent families—-although he acknowledges that there are single-parent families that are healthy, and two-parent families that are unhealthy.

Santorum appears to want for the government to encourage marriage.  At the same time, when he acknowledges that there are two-parent families that are not healthy, that makes me think that there are limits to what the government can do.  The government can encourage people to get married, but can it make the couples good parents?

3.  On page 16, Santorum states the following: “Liberal social policy has never put an emphasis on the family because the village elders, frankly, don’t believe in the importance of strong, traditional families…They think of society as fundamentally made up of individuals guided by elite and ‘expert’ organizations like government, not the antiquated, perhaps uneducated, independent family.  The village elders want society to be individualistic, because a society composed only of individuals responds better to ‘expert’ command and control.  Your father or your grandmother (or your priest or rabbi) may give you advice that contradicts the latest ‘expert’ wisdom.  The village elders just don’t want such competition.”

By “village elders”, Santorum essentially means the liberal elite, which includes government, the media, academia, and other institutions.  He distinguishes this elite from your liberal neighbor down the street, who may be a really good parent, and he states that there are many village elders who don’t have families of their own.  Santorum also observes that even some liberals agree that the decline of the family is a serious problem, for he refers to a conversation that he had with staff at a college newspaper in which liberal students identified the breakup of the family as the greatest problem in society today.  But Santorum still believes that a liberal elite is part of the problem in American society.  I agree and disagree with this view.  Where I agree is that I think that the entertainment industry perpetuates a cheap attitude towards sex, and I believe that this is deleterious to society.  Where I disagree is that I do not accept Santorum’s characterization of the liberal elite as amoral, for I think that the liberal elite is guided by a morality, which includes helping the poor and the disadvantaged.

Where do I stand on Santorum’s statement that the village elders do not want competition from the family?  I think that there is a place for expert wisdom and also for family wisdom, and yet both experts and families are flawed.  Experts are not always right, as we can see from the changes in expert opinion over the years.  Yet, there is something valuable in looking to studies for guidance, something that Santorum himself does in this book.  And families can be repositories of prejudice, yet they can also be places to draw from the common sense and experience of one’s elders.

Faith Healer

I watched the Little House on the Prairie episode “Faith Healer” last night.  See here if you want to watch it on YouTube.  What’s ironic is that Nick Norelli had a post this morning about how he used to judge people as not having enough faith if they were not healed of their sickness.

The pieces of the episode’s plot that I want to highlight went like this: A charismatic faith healer named Reverend Danforth has come to Walnut Grove, and he has been conducting tent-meetings in which he heals people.  A woman gets out of her wheelchair at his first service, for example.  A resident of Walnut Grove, Matthew Dobbs, has a son named Timothy, who has problems with his appendix.  Doc Baker tells Matthew to take his son to Mankato to see a surgeon as soon as possible, but Matthew instead opts to take his son to Reverend Danforth.  Reverend Danforth does a ritual in which he pulls the pain out of Timothy’s body, and Timothy then feels better.

Later on, however, Timothy dies of a ruptured appendix, and so Matthew and Doc Baker interrupt Reverend Danforth’s meeting.  Doc Baker accuses Reverend Danforth of taking away Timothy’s pain, which could have saved Timothy’s life by warning Timothy to get medical help.  Reverend Danforth responds that he cannot circumvent the will of God—-that God wanted Timothy to be with God in heaven, and Timothy is happy right now in the presence of his maker.

Charles takes a trip to Sleepy Eye, and he notices that Reverend Danforth is conducting a prayer meeting there.  Charles goes into the tent and notices that Reverend Danforth is “healing” the same woman in the wheelchair whom he healed in Walnut Grove!  Charles then realizes that Reverend Danforth is a fraud and that the suspicions he has had about him are correct.  Charles does not want to interrupt that particular service, however, but he wants to show Mrs. Oleson—-who has supported Reverend Danforth in Walnut Grove—-that the guy is a fake, allowing her to see that with her own eyes.  Charles learns where Reverend Danforth’s next appearance will be.

Charles talks with Reverend Alden, the pastor in Walnut Grove, whom Reverend Danforth is about to replace.  Charles asks Reverend Alden why a faith healer would conduct fake healings.  Reverend Alden responds that the faith healer was probably trying to boost people’s confidence by showing them fake healings, and then they would have enough faith to be truly healed themselves.  Reverend Alden says that belief is powerful, whether God is behind the healing or not.  Reverend Alden also states that he has observed healings at the hands of faith healers (which, by the way, contradicts what he said in a later episode, “He Was Only Twelve, Part 2″, where Reverend Alden tells Charles that he never saw a miracle in all his years of ministry).

Charles takes the Olesons and Matthew to Reverend Danforth’s tent meeting, and, sure enough, Reverend Danforth is “healing” the same woman of paralysis!  Charles confronts Reverend Danforth, as he shows that the man with crutches does not really need them and that the “blind” woman is not actually blind.  As the people walk out of the meeting, Reverend Danforth pleads with them to return, telling them that he only used fake healings to build up their faith so that they could be truly healed.

I sympathized somewhat with Reverend Danforth.  I used to think that he was a fraud who was conducting fake healings to get money, but some questions lingered in my mind: if he was a fraud, why did he believe that he could heal people who were actually sick, such as Timothy?  Why would he invite anyone to come forward at his meetings and be healed?  Wouldn’t he be afraid that someone would randomly come forward, and he would not be able to heal that person, since he was a fraud?  I doubt it.  I think that he believed that he could heal, and that his fake healings could build people’s faith and set the stage for them to come forward for true healing.

Belief can be powerful.  The power of suggestion can make a person’s pain go away.  That’s why placebos are so effective.  But there is a difference between “mind-over-matter” and actual healing.  Timothy’s pain may have gone away, but his appendix was still rupturing, and so, technically-speaking, he was not healed.  He should have seen a doctor.

I found Reverend Danforth’s explanation for Timothy’s death to be intriguing, though I fully understand why many would consider it to be a cop-out: Reverend Danforth claims that God heals through him, and, when God doesn’t do so, he chalks that up to God’s will.  That is a cop-out, but could there be something to it?  In my opinion, if I am sick, I should have faith in God’s love and goodness, and I should hold on to hope that God will heal me.  But if God doesn’t, God doesn’t.  What more can one do?

The Rabbis and the Cancellation of Debt

I finished Louis Newman’s The Sanctity of the Seventh Year: A Study of Mishnah Tractate Shebiit.

A topic in my reading today was the cancellation of debts every seven years (Deuteronomy 15:1-3).  The rabbinic policy was that this applied to money that was loaned out to people who needed it, but not to commercial credit, since the rabbis didn’t want to run business-owners out of business.  As Harriet Oleson repeatedly said on Little House on the Prairie, her mercantile cannot afford to be a charity, since it has bills to pay, too!  (Some rabbinic views applied the cancellation of debts to commercial credit, however.)  Loans that were backed by collateral also were not cancelled, for they were technically not outstanding loans (the types that were cancelled), as they were being temporarily repaid by the collateral until the borrower actually paid back what he owed.  And fines from court cases are not cancelled.

The Mishnah tractate also talks about Hillel’s innovation of the prozbul.  This was an agreement between debtor and creditor to make a court responsible for the collection of the debt, thereby circumventing Deuteronomy 15:2, which required the creditor to cancel a debt.  The Bible says that a creditor must cancel the debt; it doesn’t say that a court must do so.  In the prozbul, there was the requirement that the debtor have at least a sliver of land.  This might have been to help secure the loan; at the same time, a sliver of land does not make good security, so perhaps what we see here is a “legal fiction” (page 209).

True Love

In Stephen King’s IT, Ben Hanscom has a crush on Beverly Marsh, but, while she likes Ben as a friend, she loves Bill Denbrough.  After the Losers’ Club gives IT a temporary setback in an old house, Ben observes that Bill is starting to feel the same way about Beverly that she feels about him.  Here are some of Ben’s thoughts on pages 875-876:

“Good luck, Big Bill…If that’s the way it is.  But you’ll never love her the way I do.  Never…I love you, Beverly…just let me have that.  You can have Bill, or the world, or whatever you need.  Just let me have that, let me go on loving you, and I guess it’ll be enough.”

The Losers are kids in that part of the book, but, when they become adults and reunite in Derry, Ben starts to feel the same jealousy when he notices that Beverly and Bill are gravitating towards each other.  On page 902, Bill thinks the following:

“If he had been able to send Ben a thought, Bill would have sent this one: It doesn’t matter, Ben.  The love is what matters, the caring…it’s always the desire, never the time.  Maybe that’s all we get to take with us when we go out of the blue and into the black.  Cold comfort, maybe, but better than no comfort at all.”

What Bill may mean is something like “It is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all”, only, here, Ben did not love and lose because he and Beverly were never a romantic couple.  But Bill’s point is probably that Ben should find some degree of comfort (even if it is cold comfort) in loving Beverly, even if he never has the opportunity to have a romantic relationship with her.  There are times when our love is what defines our character, even if we may not have an opportunity to act on that love.

What I admire about Ben is that he loves Beverly, even though he knows that she loves somebody else.  I do not totally know on what basis he loves her.  Part of the attraction is physical because he writes her that poem about her red hair, but he may also like her because she is a nice person, and she has courage and spirit.  His love for her is more than lust because he is protective of her, which indicates true love.  At some point in the book, Beverly thinks to herself that Ben would be willing to die for her, and she is probably right about that.

For some reason, I can identify with Ben, and I am not sure why.  I have had a number of crushes over the course of my life, but I can’t say that I felt about any of them the way that Ben feels about Beverly Marsh—loving them, whether or not they loved me back in a romantic fashion.  I cannot say that I am utterly self-absorbed, for I have rooted for the success of other people.  But I also cannot say that my attitude towards women I like is similar to Patrick’s on the Little House on the Prairie episode, “Meet Me At the Fair”—Patrick crossed his fingers, hoping that Mary would win the quilting contest, even though she was not with him but with his dashing, charming boss.  Maybe it’s good that I don’t get so attached.  But Bill and Ben would say that the reward is actually in loving somebody else—in caring.

Bonanza: A Dream to Dream

I just watched the Little House on the Prairie episode from Season 5, “Someone Please Love Me”, and I read that it is similar to a Bonanza episode that Michael Landon wrote, “A Dream to Dream.” I am watching the Bonanza episode right now, and, so far, they are VERY similar! I put it on my blogger blog here.  Enjoy!

Psalm 30

For my weekly quiet time today, I will blog about Psalm 30 and its interpreters.  I have three points:

1.  The Psalm is about God delivering the Psalmist from death.  There are different ideas about the setting of this Psalm.  Christian preacher Jon Courson interpreted the Psalm in light of the events in II Samuel 6: David is celebrating God, but he is proud when he marches the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem on a cart, in violation of God’s command that certain Levites carry it using the Ark’s poles.  David is then humbled and saddened after Uzzah touches the Ark and dies.  But there is joy in the morning, and David dances before the LORD, to the consternation of his wife, Michal.  The Psalm talks about the Psalmist boldly declaring that he shall never be moved, which many interpret as pride, as well as the Psalmist putting off his sackcloth and dancing before the LORD.

Others have maintained that the Psalm has been used for Hanukkah, and that it was utilized as far back as the re-dedication of the Temple in 164 B.C.E.  Nowadays, it is used on Hanukkah, which is not surprising, considering that the superscription has the word, which means “dedication.”  The Babylonian Talmud relates the Psalm to Hanukkah, and the medieval Midrash on the Psalms applies the Psalm to events in 164 B.C.E.  But Jews also use the Psalm in daily services, Sabbath services, and services on festival mornings.  Psalm 30 contains ideas that can apply to any day of the year: God’s deliverance of people from death and sadness, and God’s holy ones singing to God and remembering his holiness.  It is understandable, therefore, that Jewish interpreters have posited other reference-points for Psalm 30.  Rashi, for example, states that the rabbis believe that Psalm 30 refers to Esther and Mordecai.

Others have proposed alternative historical reference-points.  As he does with other Psalms, the fourth century Antiochian Christian exegete Theodore of Mopsuestia prefers the deliverance of Jerusalem under Sennacherib as the reference-point for Psalm 30.  According to Theodore, David the Psalmist is foreseeing that Hezekiah will become proud after God delivers Jerusalem (II Chronicles 32:23), and so God will humble Hezekiah with sickness.  But God will deliver Hezekiah from his disease and from death.

The superscription affirms that Psalm 30 is a song of dedication of the house of David.  Does this mean the dedication of the Temple?  Many would say “no” because David did not build the Temple, but others would point out that, according to I Chronicles, David dedicated the Temple in all but name!  E.W. Bullinger argues that Psalm 30 concerns David’s dedication of his own house, not the Temple, for Deuteronomy 20:5 refers to the dedication of houses, which shows that other places besides the Temple could be dedicated.  In this scenario, perhaps David was celebrating God’s goodness in bringing him to the point where he could live in a house, or palace.

Peter Craigie locates the Psalm in the cult, as he speculates that Psalm 30:11 concerns a ceremony of taking off sackcloth.  But Craigie acknowledges that there isn’t much about the cult in this particular Psalm: there is nothing about sacrifices or the payment of vows (cp. Psalm 66:13-14), or a banquet (Psalm 22:27).  At the same time, the Psalm does appear to acknowledge the presence of fellow worshipers (Psalm 30:4).  Is Psalm 30 an exilic or post-exilic Psalm, which was used by small assemblies of Jewish worshipers?

2.  The Orthodox Jewish Artscroll commentary had some good items.  You have probably heard people say that hell is a state of mind on earth—that we create our own hell.  Traditional Judaism certainly acknowledges that Gehinnom is a place where many people go after their death, but there is also a notion that one can experience hell in this life.  The Babylonian Talmud, in Nedarim 22a, affirms that those who are angry are subjected to all kinds of Gehinnom.  The Artscroll concludes from this: “The flames of frustration, anguish, and melancholy are the equivalent of the fires of Gehinnom.  Throughout the Book of Psalms, most references to ‘falling into the lower world’ refer to this type of emotional inferno.”

This reminds me of how C.S. Lewis portrays hell: as a place where stinkin’ thinkin’ basically takes a person over!  Personally, I don’t worship a God who kicks people when they are down, just because they have a problem with resentment, or unforgiveness, or a generally bad attitude.  I worship a God whose love is bigger than any resentment we may have, and who offers us hope.  Speaking for myself, I do not know if I will ever be free of resentment, or depression, or worry—and I take refuge in the notion that God loves me, even when I have those things.  But I will be thankful to God for the times when I do have a sound mind—when those things do not dominate me.  And I would like to think that God’s compassion extends even to people in hell—assuming that C.S. Lewis’ portrayal is the correct one—and that there is hope that even they can be delivered from their own personal torments.

Another item in the Artscroll that interested me was its comment on Psalm 30:9, where the Psalmist tries to convince God to save his life by saying that he cannot praise God and declare God’s truth when he is dead.  Many historical-critics argues that verses like these show that the Psalmist did not have a rigorous conception of the afterlife, for, if the Psalmist did have such a conception, he would recognize that death was no barrier to his praise of God.  The Artscroll acknowledges that the soul continues to exist in an afterlife, but it maintains that the Psalmist’s concern is still valid, for, even if the Psalmist’s soul survives his death, he cannot spread the knowledge of God among human beings when he is deceased!  That reminds me somewhat of Paul’s statement in Philippians 1:21 that to live is Christ but to die is gain: Paul’s point is that he desires to be with Christ after his death, but that he can still do a lot of good on earth while he is still alive.

3.  In Psalm 30:6-7, the Psalmist declares that, in his prosperity, he thought that he would never be moved.  The Psalmist believes that God was the source of his prosperity, for God, by God’s favor, made the Psalmist into a strong mountain.  But the Psalmist was devastated when God hid his face, and suffering resulted.  Many interpreters contend that the Psalmist was proud, and God humbled him.  Maybe that’s what Psalm 30 is about.  But perhaps the Psalmist was not proud in his prosperity.  I’ve been watching Little House on the Prairie, and I’m in Season 4 right now.  On a couple of episodes, there is a particular plot-line: a farmer is thanking God for his harvest, and, soon thereafter, a disaster causes the farmer to lose his crop.  You’d think that thanking God would influence God to keep disaster from hitting God’s blessings, but, in these particular episodes, it does not.

Different people on Little House have their explanations for the disasters.  Caroline Ingalls says that perhaps God is testing her husband to see if he deserves God’s love.  (I find this notion appalling, for why should I assume that God’s love is something that should be deserved?  It just is.)  The pastor tells his congregation that God may not insulate them from problems, but God promises to be with them through the problems and to give them strength.  Whether these explanations are adequate or not probably depends on if they give comfort to the person who is suffering.

I’m also reminded of Brian Peckham’s view on Joel in History and Prophecy.  Peckham states that Joel did not believe that the Babylonian conquest of Judah was God’s punishment for Judah’s sin.  Rather, Joel blamed the Babylonians for the catastrophe, not God.  But Joel still encouraged the Judahites to ask God for deliverance from their problems.  Many are tempted to think that the existence of problems shows that God is inactive in the world, if God even exists at all, and so there is no point to asking God to intervene in a situation.  But, in my opinion, it doesn’t hurt to try.

Never Alone

At church this morning, the sermon was good. It was about loneliness, and how Jesus Christ lives inside of us. As the hymn by the Gaithers goes: “Because he lives, I can face tomorrow. Because he lives, all fear is gone. Because I know he holds the future. And life is worth the living just because he lives.” But the pastor told us the back story about the Gaithers’ writing of this hymn. He said that they were living during the “God is dead” trend as well as the upheavals of the 1960′s, and they wondered if they should have a child in that kind of environment. But they were comforted by their belief in Jesus’ resurrection and God’s presence with them, and so they had the faith to face the future.

The pastor told other stories as well. One story he told was about special education students who were using computers at their school, which helped them to improve their academic skills. The principal did not have faith in them, and so he excluded them from an experimental program that involved the computers. But their teacher did have faith in them, which is why she had them use the computers. One special education student named Raymond, who was from a dysfunctional family and who showed hardly any academic promise, demonstrated a remarkable amount of academic progress as he used the computer. When he was asked why, he replied, “Everybody calls me a retard, but the computer calls me Raymond.”

This story was meaningful to me because it reminded me of the importance of using people’s names. As social skills coach Deb Fine has said, people love the sounds of their own names! I think that the purpose of this story within the sermon was that, as an analogy, the story can illustrate that God loves us, values us, and knows us by name, even though we may be a blip on the radar of the rest of the world—or even if others scorn us. The pastor talked about these sorts of themes in his sermon.

At the beginning of his sermon, the pastor told us a story about actor Martin Sheen. During the making of the movie Apocalypse Now, Martin Sheen was in the hospital, and he was worried that he might not be able to fulfill his obligations for the movie. When his wife told him that it was just a movie, however, he became more relaxed, and he quickly recovered.

The pastor asked us if we ever wished that life would be just a movie. When we are young, we want to fast-forward to a life of independence. There are times when we may want to pause life so we can keep the good times. When we are old, we may desire to slow down life so that we can live it a little longer. And then there are things that we may want to redo things—and so we wish life had a “rewind” button. I think that the lesson here was that, wherever we may be in life, we can take comfort that Jesus Christ lives inside of us.

The pastor also talked about soldiers in war who found comfort in their faith. I have heard that there are no atheists in foxholes—but I doubt that’s this is completely accurate, for I have read of atheists in foxholes, and their lack of belief in an afterlife motivated them to stay alive during battle. But faith does give strength and comfortable to people in the heat of battle.

But I wonder something: What kind of faith? Is it faith in a God who sends most of the world to hell for not being Christian, or is it a more generic kind of faith—a faith in a loving, benevolent, and wise higher power—the sort of faith that I see on such shows as Little House on the Prairie? Speaking for myself, I’d have a hard time deriving comfort from the critical, wrathful God who is in certain passages of the Bible and also in some conservative Christian circles. But I can gain some comfort from a more generic sort of God—one who does not send people to hell for holding the wrong beliefs, or refuse to hear some people’s prayers because they are not living a particular sort of way. I think of Ronald Reagan’s conception of God. His daughter, Patti, said that her father told her that she can always talk to God, however she may be living her life. I seriously doubt that Reagan was telling his daughter that how she lived did not matter to him or to God. Rather, he was saying that God is always there—as a loving and compassionate friend.

I believe that God loves each of us, even if we’re not living the right way. But God wants us to live the right way because that’s what is best for us. But he won’t shun us until we get our acts together. It would be impossible for me to have faith in any other kind of God, for, if God will have nothing to do with me until I get my act together, or “repent”, then God will never have anything to do with me, for my act will never be totally together!

I’ll be taking my Hebrew Bible comprehensive exam this week, and I appreciated my pastor’s prayer for me. He asked that I might read the questions and know how to answer them. I like how he phrased that. The first time that I took this exam, I read the questions, and then my reaction was “duh.” I didn’t know what exactly to say, and so I wrote all over the place. This time around, I hope that I can write cogent, organized, and well-informed essays. I’ve been asking God to help me to pass my exams, for I don’t want to pay another $1,200 for the candidacy fee this coming semester. But I wonder: Why I should trust that God will answer my prayer—when there are tornadoes in America taking away people’s lives and property? Still, in my opinion, when it comes to prayer—for myself or for others—it doesn’t hurt to try.

Father Murphy: In God’s Arms

I’ve been watching Father Murphy, a show in the 1980′s that was created by Michael Landon. The following episode is entitled “In God’s Arms”, and it is my favorite episode thus far. It’s about a priest named Joe, who loses his faith because of the harshness and evils of life, and he finds his faith again, as he works in a saloon and reaches out to the people around him who need help. Even while he is an unbeliever, God uses him to help others, and God teaches him that the way of Christ is the way to go. Before Joe lost his faith, he believed because that was how he was brought up. But he lost that faith to gain a deeper faith, one that was not naive about the evils of life. Although the world remained the same harsh place that drove him to despair at the beginning of the episode, at the end, he resolves to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

There’s one thing that bothers me: at the end of the episode, he returns to the priesthood. The priesthood was where he had a hard time reaching out to others, for, as he said, people came to him confessing the same sins over and over, and he didn’t feel he was reaching them or making a difference in their lives. He was apart from the people. It was when he was in a saloon—among people—that he could make a difference. I hope that, even though he returns to the priesthood, he will not be cloistered and away from others.

I don’t want to use this episode to beat people over the head on the need to reach out to others, for people have beaten me over the head with that, and that’s really tough for me, an introvert. But I like how Joe’s reaching out to others in the saloon was pretty simple: a man was lonely, and so Joe listened to his story and played chess with him. A woman was getting beaten on, and so Joe stood up for her and affirmed her dignity as a person of worth. He also was there for her when she was sad. Joe wasn’t the life of the party, but he reached out to others in his own humble way.

I also like the soundtrack of this episode. It reminds me of the soundtrack of the Little House episode, “The Preacher Takes a Wife.” I’ve noticed that Michael Landon sometimes used the same soundtracks for shows. On the episode after this one, “The Dream Day” (which has Tina Yothers of Family Ties fame), I heard what became the theme song for Highway to Heaven.

This is a beautiful episode, and it reminds me that I’m in God’s arms, wherever I might be.

Patricia Neal

Actress Patricia Neal passed away.  Her first movie was with Ronald Reagan.  She was also in Face in the Crowd, alongside Andy Griffith and Martin Landau.  (One line I vaguely remember from that, from a conservative politician whom Andy Griffith was teaching to be “woodsy”: “Daniel Boone didn’t need no Social Security.  All he needed was his ax!”)  She was also in the movie of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, looking at Howard Roark’s bulging, individualist muscles. 

But I most appreciate her from an episode of Little House on the Prairie, in which she played the dying mother of three children, whom Mr. Edwards and his wife, Grace, adopted.   Sawyer watched that particular episode on an episode of Lost this last season, in the flash sideways. 

R.I.P., Patricia Neal.

The Union’s Dark Side; Culture and the Bible; Ecology; Cutting Corners; Destiny; Philonic Midrash; Lena Horne

1. Samuel C. Hyde, Jr., Pistols and Politics: The Dilemma of Democracy in Louisiana’s Florida Parishes, 1810-1899, page 112:

Hoping to exploit the demoralized condition of the local residents and the few Confederate troops in the area, the Federals moved rapidly to apply irresistible pressure on the Florida parishes…During the summer of 1862, [Union General Thomas] Williams launched a series of probing raids into the interior to test Confederate strength and to intimidate the population…The raiders failed in their effort to capture any Confederate forces, but they did lay waste several plantations belonging to prominent Confederate sympathizers.  At each plantation all buildings and fences, excepting the slave quarters, were burned, the livestalk stolen, and ornamental trees cut down.  The commanding officer reported on the success of his endeavor: “I burnt every building on the estate of these once beautiful plantations, except such as were required to cover the negroes left behind…In fact I left nothing but the blackened chimneys as a monument to the folly and villainy of its guerrilla owner.”

Shows and movies that cover the Civil War tend to sympathize with the North, for slavery existed in the South, and slavery is considered to be wrong.  But, interestingly, these shows and movies are also honest about the brutality that Union soldiers inflicted on the South.  Mary Ingalls did a paper on this in the episode of Little House on the Prairie, the one with Frank and Jesse James, who gave Mary the Confederate side of the story.  In Alex Haley’s Queen, granted, the slaves are rejoicing when the Union forces are coming, for they believe that their time of liberation is nigh.  But the Union forces burn the plantation, and one Union soldier tries to force Queen to kiss him, and kills Queen’s grandfather when he tries to stop him.  Glory depicts Union forces wrecking havoc on a Southern town.   

Why do these shows and movies do this?  There are movies, such as the Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which depict the Union soldiers as noble and benevolent liberators.  But why don’t many movies on the Civil War go this route?  Or, more accurately, these movies may present the Union soldiers as champions of the slaves (though Glory highlights notorious exceptions), but they acknowledge that the Union was far from saintly, for it could be heartless and self-serving.  Are these movies trying to be balanced, or seeking to appease their Southern viewers, or conveying the message that war is hell, for all involved? 

2. Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land, page 50:

Secretary General:…You say Smith understands English.

Nelson:  Well, yes and no, Your Excellency.  He knows quite a number of words, but, as Mahmoud says, he doesn’t have any cultural context to hang the words on.  It can be rather confusing.

As I read this, I wondered how we can understand the Bible, which is in different languages and comes from cultures that are unlike ours.  We’re not in these cultures—or, let me say, we in the West are not.  Africans, Native-Americans, Arabs, some Jews, and others may understand the Bible better than Westerners do, for they overlap culturally with the environments that produced the Bible (in terms of their emphasis on community, or their tribalism, or other factors).  My impression is, however, that people in the West don’t need to understand the customs of biblical times to follow the stories in the Bible—at least on a certain level, for Westerners are familiar with stories—with characters, plots, etc.  In some cases, a knowledge of culture may help them out, or provide them with a deeper understanding of the Bible.  I think of the Sermon on the Mount, which appears more reasonable when we understand the culture behind it (see Michael Westmoreland-White’s A Biblical Case for Christian Pacifism: The Sermon on the Mount II).

3. Erhard Gerstenberger, Psalms, Part I with an Introduction to Cultic Poetry, page 155:

[In Psalm 36, i]n a striking ecological confession, God “helps man and beast” (v. 7c).

This isn’t overly surprising, since God preserved the animals on the ark.  Speaking of ecology, see Michael Westmoreland-White’s post, Of Oil, Eschatology and Creation Care. 

4. Richard Sarason, A History of the Mishnaic Law of Agriculture: A Study of Tractate Demai, page 161:

An [am ha-aretz] agent who is given general instructions to purchase produce from someone who is deemed trustworthy with regard to tithing is not believed, since to begin with we do not trust him, and we have no way of verifying his statement…But if we instruct him to purchase produce from a specific person, he is believed.  Since he knows that we can now contact that person to verify his statement, he will be careful to follow our instructions…

I guess this is saying that, if a meticulously observant Jew sends a lax Jew to purchase tithed produce, the meticulous one should tell the lax one to buy it from a specific person, so that the meticulous person can contact the seller to see if it’s tithed.  Or at least the threat of contacting the seller would frighten the lax Jew to buy tithed produce.  If the lax Jew is simply told to go to the market and buy some tithed produce, however, there’s no accountability.  The lax Jew could simply buy any produce—even when it’s untithed—and say that it’s tithed, and there’s no way of knowing if he’s telling the truth.  Maybe he wanted to get the task over with as soon as possible, so he didn’t worry about whether it was tithed or not. 

Here, the Mishnah has a “guilty until proven innocent” approach to the lax Jew, the am ha-aretz.  At other times, however, it assumes that the am ha-aretz wouldn’t deliberately cause his observant brother to stumble.  Maybe not, but there are times when people want to save time, get things done quickly, and cut corners.  For the Mishnah, that should be factored into the equation.   

5. Baruch Levine, Numbers 1-20, page 64:

Still another theme of note in the JE materials is the notion that God had prepared the Israelites for their future life in the Promised Land; that they brought their way of life with them.

I don’t entirely understand what this means.  Is this saying that the Israelites were shepherds and herders in the wilderness, and that prepared them to be such in the Promised Land?  Is it saying that God humbled the Israelites in the wilderness so that they’d remember where they came from in the Promised Land, rather than becoming spiritually proud?

This quote reminds me of an episode of the Dead Zone that I watched recently: “Destiny”.  Johnny Smith (played by Anthony Michael Hall) experienced an intensification of his latent psychic powers after he was in a coma for a few years.  His guardian, Rev. Gene Purdy (played by David Ogden Stiers), asks Johnny is he ever sees visions of ordinary things, such as people taking a nap or mowing the lawn.  Johnny replies “no”; rather, Johnny sees visions about events in the future that can help him to save people’s lives.  Rev. Purdy concludes that Johnny has a special mission from God, or fate, or whatever, for which Johnny has been prepared all of his life.

That’s an interesting thought.  Are we being prepared for a mission?  Are we learning compassion so that we can perform responsibilities in a morally conscious manner?  If so, what would we say about the people who died before they got to perform any great mission?  Or maybe their ordinary life of compassion was great, in its own way. 

6.  I read the Encyclopedia Judaica article on “Midrash”.  It tied Jewish midrash to Hellenistic exegesis of Homer, which I know a little bit about from my studies for my Greco-Roman Judaism comp.  Essentially, there were exegetes who viewed Homer as allegorical for the spiritual life.  They were like Philo, who did this with the Torah.  But was Philo a practitioner of midrash?  I usually don’t hear his hermeneutical approach classified as such.  Is there a difference between midrash and allegory?  Or is allegory a sub-species of midrash, which could possibly be defined as any approach to the biblical text that seeks to uncover hidden meaning underneath its literal surface?

7.  Lena Horne has passed away.  I know Lena Horne from three places.  First and second, she played herself on The Cosby Show and Sanford and Son.  Second, in Roots: The Next Generation, Alex Haley’s girlfriend laments that white society considers Lena Horne to be an attractive African-American woman because she has lighter skin—she looks white. 

The AP article about Lena Horne was interesting: Barrier-breaking jazz star Lena Horne dies at 92 – Yahoo! News.  Apparently, she herself was deeply disturbed by the existence of racial discrimination in the United States.  I especially appreciated the last line of the article: “I wouldn’t trade my life for anything,” she said, “because being black made me understand.”  Her experience as an African-American woman taught her to empathize with people in society who were victims of suffering and injustice, and she also learned to enjoy life rather than become consumed with bitterness.