By: Carolyn Napolitano,
on 11/5/2015
For more than forty years now, the Religious Right has been a powerful force in the United States, helping reshape the Republican Party and realign the nation’s politics and culture.
The post Six predictions for the future of the Religious Right appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Carolyn Napolitano,
on 11/21/2014
In her new book, Amy DeRogatis explores a relatively untouched topic: evangelicals and sexuality. While many may think that evangelicals are anti-sex, DeRogatis argues that this could not be further from the truth. We sat down with the author of Saving Sex: Sexuality and Salvation in American Evangelicalism to learn more about her research into the topic.
How did you become interested in this topic?
My interest in this topic began when I was asked a question by a student in my Religion and Gender class at Michigan State University (MSU). In the course we had been reading a book that discussed some ritual practices around marital sexuality in Orthodox Judaism. One student raised her hand and asked, “Where do Christians go to read about the proper ways to have sex?” Knowing the student, I understood that she didn’t mean all Christians; she was referring specifically to evangelicals. I made a quick reply about evangelicals publishing lots of material about how not to have sex and returned to the topic of discussion. The question stuck with me and after class I ran a few Internet searches for Christian sex manuals, and I found some Catholic writings. I then refined the search to evangelical sex manuals, and although I was unable to find any secondary material, such as a scholarly article that surveyed and analyzed the literature, I did eventually find lots of primary sources. I was astonished to discover that Special Collections in the Main Library at MSU had a large collection of these publications. Within a week of hearing the student’s question, I was in the library reading evangelical sex manuals, and I was hooked.
How do you define “evangelical” in this book?
That is a great question. There has been much debate among scholars about how to define evangelicalism and whether there is even a cohesive category under which we can talk about and study evangelicals. I adopt a very broad definition. I define evangelicals as Protestants who affirm the necessity of individual spiritual rebirth. Evangelicals emphasize personal conversion, the authority of Scripture, the imminent return of Christ, and the desire to spread the gospel. Evangelicals express their theological beliefs through daily practices such as prayer, Bible study, refraining from sinful behavior and furthering what is often called “their walk with Christ.”
Sexuality is a huge topic. Is there anything you planned to write about that you didn’t include in the book?
Yes, of course. The first question I usually am asked about is why I focus on heterosexuality in my book. Originally I had planned to write a chapter on prescriptive literature about same-sex desires and practices. There are a few recent books that do an excellent job of examining this issue (here I’ll just mention two: Tanya Erzen’s, Straight to Jesus and Lynne Gerber’s The Straight and Narrow) and I felt that I did not have much to add to or improve their excellent analyses. When I wrote the book proposal I was imagining a chapter on LGBTQ evangelicals and their writings about sexuality. But, as the project developed, I focused in on conservative evangelicals, and to me, what is one of the fascinating points that evangelical sex writers are deeply concerned with monitoring and regulating heterosexual sex.
What do you think is the biggest misconception about evangelicals and sexuality?
The biggest misconception is that evangelicals are anti-sex. They are not. Contrary to popular stereotypes that characterize conservative Christians as prudes, since the 1960s evangelicals have been engaged in an enterprise to claim and affirm the joys of sex for married born-again Christians. Rather than turning away from the sexual liberation movement, they have simply made it their own by publishing sex manuals, running sex workshops, and holding counseling sessions to aid married evangelicals achieve sexual satisfaction. The sex publications are distinct from secular sex manuals in their exclusive focus on heterosexuality, the assumption of virginity prior to marriage, the role of the Bible as a reliable guide for sexual pleasure, and the emphasis on understanding and maintaining traditional gender roles as a requirement for “true” sexual satisfaction. The authors go to great lengths to suggest techniques for sexual pleasure and argue that marital sexual pleasure is biblical and good marital sex is a sign of faithfulness and a testimony to others. It is true—evangelical publications do not promote all forms of human sexuality. It is also true that within heterosexual marriage, sexual pleasure, according to these manuals, is part of God’s plan for humanity. So, no, evangelicals are not anti-sex.
How do you think this work will influence your scholarly field?
First and foremost, I hope that my book will put the study of evangelical sexuality on the scholarly agenda. Before I began publishing my research on evangelicals and sexuality there were very few scholarly essays about evangelicals and sexuality. The most compelling writings were focused on evangelical responses to same-sex desires and practices, not on heterosexuality. There were some popular magazine articles and a couple of books written by scholars outside of the field of religious studies that primarily focused on gender or sexuality and discussed evangelical sexual writings and practices as part of a larger project. While there are numerous excellent monographs on American evangelicals and gender, I am not aware of anyone who has written a scholarly study of American evangelical popular prescriptive literature about heterosexual practices. The one exception would be a few monographs that examine adolescent sexuality and the purity movement. I hope that my book will influence future scholars to take up the topic and investigate areas that I do not consider in this book. I know that there are a few dissertations in the works that focus on social media, more controversial sexual practices, a specific figure (Mark Driscoll currently is a favorite), as well as a few sociological and anthropological studies that consider the effects of the prescriptive literature I examine on the lives of everyday believers. Beyond my topic, I hope my book will inspire other scholars who study religion to take seriously popular literature about embodied practices and the role of the senses in the construction and maintenance of religious identity.
What was the last book you read for pleasure that you would recommend to others?
Dear Committee Members: A Novel by Julie Schumacher.
Image credit: “Chastity Ring” by Rlmabie. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
The post Six questions with Amy DeRogatis appeared first on OUPblog.
By: OwenK,
on 6/15/2014
Has the evangelical era of American politics run its course? Two terms into the Obama administration, and nearly four decades since George Gallup Jr. declared 1976 the “Year of the Evangelical,” it is tempting to say yes.
During the run-up to the 2008 election, Barack Obama went out of his way to court moderate and progressive evangelicals, such as Jim Wallis of Sojourners. Yet their role in his administration has not been remotely comparable to that of the Christian Right just ten years ago. Joshua DuBois and Melissa Rogers (respectively the previous and present heads of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships) are hardly talk show fodder in the manner of the Bush administration evangelical lightning rods John Ashcroft and Monica Goodling.
The Bush years sparked books like Chris Hedges’s American Fascists. The Obama years tend to inspire pieces with titles like “The Changing Face of Christian Politics.” The point, made by former Obama administration official Michael Wear, is that Christian politics has a new lease on life.
President Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan with Billy Graham, 1981. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
This new life comes at the expense of evangelical relevance, however. Evangelical political capital is quite scattered — useful for building fresh coalitions on immigration, while still holding the line on abortion. This configuration happens to resemble the world-view of Pope Francis. He is in the news a lot more than evangelist Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham.
Such is the view from on high, at least. In many statehouses, evangelical influence is alive and well. Even in red-state America, though, we see a defensive posture that spells retreat, if not outright defeat.
In a proliferating number of legislative initiatives, gay civil rights is cast as a threat to religious liberty. Rather than protesting excessive church-state separation, these efforts embrace an expansive interpretation of religious free exercise.
The contention, while not novel, is telling: conscience trumps open access. Here, conscience applies to commercial property, as in the case of caterers that refuse to serve gay weddings (as opposed to not inviting a couple over for Sunday dinner). This radical view of property rights does Kentucky Senator Rand Paul proud, even though he is often touted as the libertarian antidote to evangelical hegemony in the GOP.
At first glance, the religious liberty angle looks like a savvy strategy. After all, active Christians (including many Catholics and other non-evangelicals) far outnumber avowed secularists. But it is something of a leap of faith to believe that millions of Christian voters will prioritize religious liberty over, say, health care or education.
Thanks to former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed, religious freedom was a clarion rallying cry during the 2012 campaign. Yet it has always been a supplementary theme within the Christian Right. Back in the 1990s, Reed made waves by proclaiming that Christians should not be relegated to the “back of the bus.” Reed’s use of a Civil Rights Movement analogy (a habit that continues) turned critical attention away from his more important goal: electing social conservatives to office.
Another form of social conservative defense involves appeals to social science data. Several well-funded studies — most notoriously, one by University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus — are cited to suggest that children raised in heterosexual households fare better than those raised by gay parents.
Unsurprisingly, the research has sparked controversy. Touting the superiority of straight marriage for the purpose of keeping the playing field uneven seems the height of tautology. One can plausibly hypothesize that legalized gay marriage will lead to stronger same-sex households. Besides, in what universe are heterosexual households suddenly renowned for their stability?
Such strategic flailing does not mean that the Christian Right is over—far from it. Yet, as these defensive messages indicate, it has abandoned the pretense of being a moral majority. This is no small shift in a winner-takes-all democracy.
Social conservatives (evangelical or otherwise) are no longer only battling liberal elites. They are contending with a growing real majority of Americans who either vigorously disagree with them or do not see what the fuss is all about. These Americans have long separated their workplaces from their places of worship. They likewise assume the separation of church and health care (notwithstanding the names of their neighborhood hospitals). Some of them support increased access to contraception precisely because they are uncomfortable with abortion.
Many evangelicals affirm these common-sense approaches, of course. The Christian Right does not represent them; in most cases, it never did. Now, though, evangelical conservatives are having a harder time getting away with claiming to speak for all evangelicals, never mind for Christians as a whole.
We are witnessing the public de-coupling of “evangelical” from “Christian” when it comes to politics. Born-again Christianity is no longer the standard against which religion’s role in public life is measured. This is a pivot from forty years of Carter, Falwell, Robertson, and Dobson, and it seems unlikely to be reversed anytime soon.
Steven P. Miller, Ph.D., is the author of The Age of Evangelicalism: America’s Born-Again Years, which is published by Oxford University Press USA this month. His first book, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South, appeared in 2009. Miller lives in St. Louis, where he teaches History at Webster University and Washington University.
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The post The decline of evangelical politics appeared first on OUPblog.
By: admin,
on 5/28/2012
Hickem, Catherine. (2012). Heaven in Her Arms: Why God Chose Mary to Raise His Son and What It Means for You. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson. ISBN 978-1-4002-0036-8.
What do we know of Mary?
What we know of Mary’s family is that she is of the house of David; it is from her lineage Jesus fulfilled the prophecy. Given the archeological ruins of the various places thought to have been living quarters for their family, it is likely the home was a room out from which sleeping quarters (cells) branched. As Mary and her mother Anne would be busy maintaining the household, with young Mary working at her mother’s command, it is likely Anne would be nearby or in the same room during the Annunciation. Thus Mary would not have had a scandalous secret to later share with her parents but, rather, a miraculous supernatural experience, the salvific meaning of which her Holy parents would understand and possibly even witnessed.
Mary and Joseph were betrothed, not engaged. They were already married, likely in the form of a marriage contract, but the marriage had not yet been “consummated”. This is why he was going to divorce her when he learned of the pregnancy. If it were a mere engagement, he would have broken it off without too much scandal.
Married but not yet joined with her husband, her mother would prepare her by teaching her all that she needed to know. This is further reason to assume that Mary would be working diligently under her mother’s eye when the Annunciation took place.
We know that her cousin Elizabeth’s pregnancy was kept in secret for five months, and not made known until the sixth month when the Angel Gabriel proclaimed it to Mary. We know Mary then rushed to be at her elderly cousin’s side for three months (the remaining duration of Elizabeth’s pregnancy), and that this rushing appeared to be in response to Elizabeth’s pregnancy (to congratulate her), not an attempt to hide Mary’s pregnancy. Note how all of this is connected to Elizabeth’s pregnancy rather than Mary’s circumstances. As Mary was married to Joseph, he likely would have been informed of the trip. Had the intent been to hide Mary, she would have remained with Elizabeth until Jesus was born, not returned to her family after the first trimester, which is just about the time that her pregnancy was visible and obvious.
So we these misconceptions clarified, we can put Mary’s example within an even deeper context and more fully relate to her experience. We can imagine living in a faith-filled family who raises their child in strict accordance of God’s word. The extended family members may not understand, and certainly their community will not, so Mary, Anne and Joachim, and Joseph face extreme scandal as well as possible action from Jewish authorities. But they faced this together steep in conversation with God, providing a model for today’s family.
Although sometimes scriptural interpretations are flavored with modern-day eye, overall this book will be more than just a quick read for a young mother (or new bride, or teen aspiring to overcome the challenges of American culture, or single parent losing her mind). It is a heartwarming reflection with many examples that open up conversation with God. As an experienced psychotherapist, the author’s examples are spot on and easy to relate to. We do not need to have had the same experiences to empathize, reflect, and pursue meaning; we see it around us in everyday life. As such, a reflective look upon these examples can help one overcome an impasse in their own relationship with God and also open the reader up to self-knowledge as Hi
By: Lauren,
on 9/20/2011
By Corey Robin Ross Douthat, the conservative New York Times columnist, and Dan Savage, the liberal sex columnist, recently had a Bloggingheads conversation about sex, lies, and videotape. It’s a fascinating discussion, mostly because of what it reveals about the conservative mind and its attitude toward sex.
By: Lauren,
on 8/3/2011
By David Sehat On Aug. 6, Texas Gov. Rick Perry will lead a prayer rally in Houston despite criticism that his event violates the separation of church and state. Though Perry said recently that he felt “called” to run for the presidency, he also told a Christian radio show that the rally will not be political. “This is simply people calling out to God,” he said.
By: Lauren,
on 11/18/2010
In the spring of 2003, President George W. Bush launched an American military invasion of Iraq. From a psychological standpoint, why did he do it? Bush’s momentous decision resulted from a perfect psychological storm, wherein world events came to activate a set of dispositional traits and family goals that had long occupied key positions in Bush’s personality. At the center of the storm was a singularly redemptive story that, around the age of 40, George W. Bush began to construct to make sense of his life. After years of drinking and waywardness, Bush fashioned a story in his mind about how, though self-discipline and God’s guidance, he had triumphed over chaos, enabling him to recover the freedom, control, and goodness of his youth. In the days after 9/11, President Bush projected this very same narrative of redemption onto America and the world. Just as he had, with God’s help, overcome the internal demons that once threatened to destroy his own life, so too would America, God’s chosen nation, overcome the chaos and evil of Saddam and thereby restore freedom and the good life to the Iraqis. Because the redemptive story had played so well in his own life, the president knew in his heart that the mission would be accomplished and that there ultimately had to be a happy ending.
I have been thinking a lot about George W. Bush’s redemptive story these days as I follow the U. S. midterm elections. The big political story for the past few months, of course, has been the Republican surge and the rise of the Tea Party. One of the strategies of embattled Democratic candidates has been to frame the election as a contest between them and Bush. After all, the Democrats decisively beat the Bush legacy in 2008, and they would love to fight that fight again. But I wonder if they have picked the right enemy.
Like such Tea Party darlings as Sarah Palin and Rand Paul, George W. Bush was a died-in-the-wool conservative. Throughout his political career, he pushed for lower taxes, less government regulation, strong defense, and other favorites of the political right. Like Glenn Beck and many other social conservatives, furthermore, he was emotionally in tune with an evangelical Christian perspective on human life and social relationships. At a Tea Party rally in Anchorage, Alaska, Mr. Beck recently confessed: “If it weren’t for my wife and my faith, I don’t know if I would be alive today.” As governor and president, George W. Bush often expressed the very same sentiment.
But Bush was really different, too. In tone and sentiment, George W. Bush was less like the angry Republicans who are fighting to take over the House and Senate on November 2 and more like, well, President Obama. Both Bush and Obama embrace an unabashedly redemptive narrative about life and about America. Bush’s life story channels the well-known American story of second chances and personal recovery. Obama tells the quintessentially American tale of upward mobility and liberation, the black boy who grew up to defy all the odds and become president. In both narratives, the protagonist overcomes early suffering to reach the Promised Land in the end. Both men project the theme of redemption onto America, though in different ways. Bush wanted to restore small-town American goodness and spread democracy to the Iraqis. Obama wants to catalyze human potential and improve Americans’ lives through progressive government. Both appeal to the discourse of hope.
And what about the Tea Party? It is difficult to generalize, but most conservative candidates who have won the backing of Tea Party activists in this election season do not seem to be telling a redemptive narrative about American life. Their political rhetoric instead has a harder edge. Let’s take the country back from the evil forces who ar
By: Rebecca,
on 4/8/2009
Stephen Spector, chairman of the English Department at Stony Brook
University, is the author of Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism which delves into the Christian Zionist movement, mining information from original interviews, websites, publications, news reports, survey research, worship services, and interfaith conferences, to provide a surprising look at the sources of evangelical support for Israel. In the original post below Specter looks at the contrast between Bush and Obama’s views on Israel and Islamic extremists.
President Obama’s staff recently removed a stern-looking bust of Winston Churchill that George W. Bush had kept in the Oval Office, replacing it with a bust of Lincoln. There could hardly have been a more compelling symbolic gesture to mark the change in presidential worldviews.
As Obama notes in The Audacity of Hope, Lincoln believed that there are times when we must pursue our own absolute truths, even if there is a terrible price to pay. But Obama also knows that Lincoln had a complicated view of world affairs: Lincoln knew that we must reach for common understandings and resist the temptation to demonize, since we’re all imperfect and can’t know with certainty that God is on our side.
Bush’s impulse, by contrast, is to value moral clarity. As a result, he took Churchill as his model in advocating an unambiguous and aggressive response to Iranian and Arab extremists. He did take pains to note that the battle is not with the “great religion” of Islam, which he called a religion of peace, but with terrorists. Yet in describing the goals of radical Islamists, Bush repeatedly evoked the fascist aggression in World War II. In 2005, for example, he warned that militants practicing a clear and focused ideology of Islamofascism seek to establish “a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.” Today’s terrorists, he said in 2006, are “successors to Fascists, to Nazis, to Communists and other totalitarians of the twentieth century.” They have a common ideology and vision for the world, Bush said, and against such an enemy the West can never accept anything less than complete victory. That echoed Churchill’s words rallying the British people against Hitler: “You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.”
Religious and political conservatives who made up much of Bush’s electoral base often view the world as he does. They particularly admire Churchill’s dogged determination in warning of the approaching Nazi danger in the 1930s. Like him, they name what they see as the coming fascist threat and they disdain attempts at appeasement. Many of them warn, as Bush did, that World War III has already begun.
Discussing a foiled terrorist plot in 2006, Gary Bauer, a leading conservative Christian, quoted one of Churchill’s classic lines: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” (A few days later, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld used the same quip, which was surely more than a coincidence.) And Bauer is far from the only evangelical who reveres Churchill. The devotion of James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, is so great that the largest painting in his Colorado Springs office is not of Christ, but of Sir Winston. (According to Dan Gilgoff in The Jesus Machine, Dobson’s wife didn’t want him to buy it because she was afraid that he would put it in their bedroom!)
John Hagee, the founder of the pro-Zionist evangelical lobbying group Christians United for Israel, is one of those who considers the Islamist threat today to be equivalent to the danger posed by the Nazis in the 1930s, and equally impossible to appease through compromise. In 2007 he received standing ovations at AIPAC’s annual policy conference in Washington when he said, “It is 1938; Iran is Germany and Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler.” Hagee warned that the “misguided souls of Europe…the political brothel that is now the United Nations, and sadly even our own State Department will try once again to turn Israel into crocodile food.”
Some Israeli and American officials and commentators also evoke the Nazi threat in describing the present conflict with Islamic radicals. Benjamin Netanyahu, the new Israeli prime minister, says that, in Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Israel is confronted by an enemy of the sort that the Jewish people have not faced since Hitler. The conflict is not about territory, but about Islam’s goal of eradicating the Jewish state, Netanyahu says, a statement that agrees perfectly with the warnings of Michael Evans and other Christian Zionists.
Jihadist Muslims intend to perpetrate a second Holocaust, says Netanyahu. He adds that Ahmadinejad presents an even more serious threat than Hitler did: Hitler lost the war because he could not develop nuclear weapons, but Ahmadinejad is on the verge of accomplishing that. General Moshe Ya’alon, a former Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, adds that when Ahmadinejad threatens to wipe Israel off of the map, he means to destroy the West, a charge that echoes those made by American Christian Zionists.
The Obama administration is hoping to achieve through diplomacy what confrontation against a supposed unified enemy did not. They’ve even dropped Bush’s signature phrase, the “War on Terror.” Meanwhile, Christian Zionist leaders are sending newsletters and prayer updates to hundreds of thousands of readers pointing out that Netanyahu called Iran’s leaders a messianic apocalyptic cult who must never be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. For them and many other religious and political conservatives, negotiation with Islamic fundamentalists is nothing other than the folly of appeasement, the same catastrophic mistake that Neville Chamberlain made in 1938.
By: Cassie,
on 9/10/2008
D. Michael Lindsay is a sociologist at Rice University and the author of Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite. With the announcement of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate, the Republicans seems to have gained some points in the polls (as we can see in Elvin Lim’s piece, here). In this essay, first posted on Beliefnet’s Casting Stones blog, Lindsay explains one probable reason for that gain.
Sarah Palin electrified the Republican National Convention last week. The Democrats are still smarting from her one-liners, and senior McCain advisors have to be concerned that, while she excites the party’s base, she also outshines the candidate. They will, no doubt, continue using her as the campaign’s “attack dog,” but there’s another aspect of her rhetoric worth thinking about. Consider the following section from her acceptance speech in St. Paul:
…Politics isn’t just a game of clashing parties and competing interests. The right reason [for political involvement] is to challenge the status quo, to serve the common good, and to leave this nation better than we found it. No one expects us all to agree on everything, but we are expected to govern with integrity, and goodwill, and clear convictions, and a servant’s heart.
Palin offered these same lines in Dayton, Ohio, on the day she was tapped to be McCain’s running mate. Why would a person seeking the country’s second most powerful office talk about governing with a “servant’s heart,” and more importantly, why would she repeat such an odd phrase in the biggest speech of her life?
Quite simply, it is one of her main assignments—to mobilize fellow evangelicals for the religiously unmusical John McCain. Up until two weeks ago, 2008 was looking an awful lot like 1996 for the Republicans. Most evangelicals were going to vote for McCain, but they weren’t that excited about it. Their support was tepid at best. That is no way to win the White House, especially with the Democrats’ surging enthusiasm over the Obama-Biden ticket.
John McCain has many advantages for a year when Republicans are so unpopular, but he has been plagued by not being able to connect with evangelical voters. No matter how many times he recounts the story of the cross on the ground in the Hanoi Hilton, the Episcopalian-turned-Baptist cannot speak the evangelical vernacular like a native.
If there is one political lesson McCain learned from George W. Bush, it is that a Republican has to signal his allegiance to evangelicals early and often. However, it must be done with a measure of subtlety. To be truly effective, the politician has to communicate to evangelicals “I’m one of you” without being explicit. Once you know what to look for, though, one can see that public figures broadcast these signals all the time. As I showed in my book, entertainers who are Christians signal their faith commitments as often as politicians. For example, the cover of U2’s album All That You Can’t Leave Behind features an airport sign with “J33-3,” alluding to Jeremiah 33:3. In his 2006 co-authored book, Bono explained the signal as a reference to the Bible: “That’s Jeremiah 33:3. The Scripture is ‘Call unto me, and I will answer you.’ It’s celestial telephony.”
When Sarah Palin referred to governing with a “servant’s heart,” the phrase resonated with millions of American evangelicals who have heard that phrase all of their lives. It is a shorthand for the humble leadership Jesus admonished in the Gospel of Mark, and the term is so prevalent among evangelicals that it has become a punch line for sermon jokes.
Politicians signal messages to all kinds of audiences when they are speaking to large, diverse crowds. Signaling allows the speaker to communicate certain messages subtly without risking full disclosure. When overt reference is inappropriate or might draw unwanted attention, evangelicals use signaling to reveal their faith allegiances without even mentioning God or Jesus. The effect is blunted when, as Barack Obama did in concluding his acceptance speech, the speaker explicitly states “in the words of scripture…”
And it happens not just with biblical allusions. Seemingly secular phrases can be endowed with religious significance for evangelical audiences. That is what made Sarah Palin’s reference to the “common good” even more intriguing. After John Kerry lost the 2004 election, Mara Vanderslice, Kerry’s religious outreach adviser, established Common Good Strategies, a political consulting firm for Democrats interested in connecting with people of faith. Within a few years, “common good” had become the mantra of left-of-center believers. The slogan for Faith in Public Life, an initiative housed at the Center for American Progress, is “a resource center for justice and the common good.” Bill Clinton lectured at Georgetown on the topic in 2006, and devout Democrats such as Senator Bob Casey regularly incorporate the rhetoric in speeches and on the campaign trail. In fact, BBC News noted in 2006 that Casey mentioned the phrase 29 times in a single talk.
Could it be that Sarah Palin’s use of the phrase is coincidental, that it was not intended to tap these religious sensibilities? Not likely. The same person who helped President George W. Bush master the art of signaling to the faithful—Matthew Scully—wrote most of Palin’s speech. Moreover, the was address vetted extremely carefully; it was, after all, her national introduction before 37 million Americans. McCain advisers knew enough to realize she was far more fluent in the evangelical vernacular than the Arizona senator.
Critics may claim these are only rhetorical flourishes. Nothing guarantees that signals translate into votes. That may be so, but politics is largely about symbols. Political symbols mobilize the masses. No Republican has won the White House in modern history without the staunch support of evangelical voters. When John McCain began his bid for the Oval Office, observers thought he didn’t have a prayer of winning their support. With this “Hail Mary pass” of enlisting the Alaskan governor as his running mate, John McCain’s political savior may just turn out to be a pit bull with lipstick.
By: Minh Le,
on 2/5/2008
Author/Illustrator: David Wiesner
That's right, it's Tuesday. But not just any Tuesday... it's SUPER TUESDAY. And Wiesner's masterpiece, which features a night of flying frogs, is oddly appropriate on this day. How so? Not just because the title is Tuesday, but because Wiesner's surrealist vision asks us to challenge the boundaries of what we believe is possible. And isn't that kind of the point of this whole process? It's Tuesday, a chance to imagine the world as you would like to see it and to cast your vote accordingly.
For a minute, allow yourself to imagine a world that has finally woken from the nightmare that is the Bush Administration and consider where we go from here. So, if you are in one of the 24 states participating in this political royal rumble, determine which candidate's policies, vision, and leadership speaks to you and most closely matches your hopes and dreams for this country... and then whether by car, bike, foot, or lily pad, get yourself to the polls and cast your vote.
Because it's Tuesday, and anything is possible.
By: Minh Le,
on 2/3/2008
For someone who loves picture books and used bookstores, I actually spend very little timein the children's sections of used bookstores. I guess this is because they are usually crammed in a neglected corner of the store, and usually nothing more than a mountain of chaos.
But this weekend while roaming the city on a unexpectedly beautiful day, I decide to brave the kid's section for a few minutes. I look over and the spine of one book pops out at me right away. It was a beautiful brand new hard copy of The Three Golden Keys by Peter Sis.
Sis is one of the modern giants of children's literature, who truly elevates the medium to the level of high art. His books bring to mind the fiction of Borges, Italo Calvino, and Orhan Pahmuk... but with the added bonus of beautifully intricate illustrations.
After reading through the book, I flip back to the front and find this inscription:
"REACH FOR THE BEST--PETER SIS"
I plopped over the $15 for the book and after a quick google search it turns out that this is an autographed first edition which currently sells for $150!
So I guess I did "reach for the best" when I bent down to pluck this treasure off the store's bottom shelf. Thank you, Mr. Sis! Or should I say, thank you whoever was foolish enough to let go of the book in the first place!
By: Minh Le,
on 9/17/2007
Author: Ann McGovern
Illustrator: Simms Taback
Peter thinks his house is too noisy, so he goes to the local wise man to complain. The wise man suggests that he get a cow. Predictably, the cow makes things even noisier. Peter continues to go back to the wise man, who continues to suggest that he get yet another animal. Soon Peter's house is filled with noisy beasts and is louder than ever.
Peter makes one final visit to this so-called wise man. This time, the wise man suggests that Peter get rid of all the animals. Peters does so and suddenly his house seems peaceful and quiet.
Aha! The wise man's tactic is revealed: Instead of decreasing the noise level, he recommended a temporary sonic escalation so that when the house is returned to its original noise level, it will seem quiet... and Peter will quit his whining and be content with the status quo.
Does this sound at all familiar?
It should, because the Bush administration employed the exact same strategy in an attempt to quiet a disgruntled Congress.
Last November, a newly elected Democratic Congress was clamoring for troop withdrawals in Iraq. How did the President respond? Instead of reducing troops, he called for a surge in troops. Wha?!
Then just last week, following the highly-anticipated testimony of General David Patraeus, Bush made an announcement to the county. He was finally going to begin withdrawing troops in Iraq. This would restore troop numbers to (you guessed it) pre-surge levels.
Tricky bastard! Not only that, but he was bold enough to add that "the way forward I have described tonight makes it possible for the first time in years, for people who have been on opposite sides of this difficult debate to come together."
Nice try, but it will take a lot more than this political sleight-of-hand to fool anyone. Congress saw right through this ploy. Senator Carl Levin immediately made a statement saying that "[President Bush's Plan] creates and provides an illusion of change in an effort to take the wind out of the sails of those of us who want to truly change course in Iraq."
Bush's Too Much Noise strategy isn't going to work because unlike him, we are not idiots. Also, Washington D.C. is gearing up for a presidential election. Which means Karl Rove will win Miss Teen USA before Bush gets members of Congress to stop talking.
If there's one lesson we can all take with us to the grave, it's that in our nation's capital there there will always be too Much NOISE!
The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were famously the age of “Bardolatry,” Shakespeare-worship that permeated artistic, social, civic, and political life. As Victorian scientific advances including Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, published in On the Origin of Species (1859), destabilised Christianity as ultimate arbiter of truth, rhetoricians invoked Shakespeare’s plots and characters to support their arguments.
The post Shakespeare and the suffragettes appeared first on OUPblog.
Another week, another great staff member to get to know. When you think of the world of publishing, the work of videos, podcasts, photography, and animated GIFs doesn’t immediately come to mind. But here at Oxford University Press we have Jack Campbell-Smith, who joined the Social Media team as a Multimedia Producer just last year.
The post Catching up with Jack Campbell-Smith, Multimedia Producer appeared first on OUPblog.
This year’s International Law Weekend (ILW) will take place in New York City, from November 5th through 7th. Organized by the American Branch of the International Law Association and the International Law Students Association, this annual event attracts over 800 attendees including practitioners, diplomats, academics, and law students.
The post Preparing for International Law Weekend 2015 appeared first on OUPblog.
“Western clerical celibacy is in an unprecedented crisis,” says the conservative Catholic canon lawyer Edward Peters. The reason? Since the 1960s, the Catholic Church has permitted married men to be ordained as deacons, an order of clergy just below that of priests; and in the past 35 years about 100 married converts, all former Episcopal priests, have been ordained to the Catholic priesthood."
The post The future of married priests appeared first on OUPblog.
As a long-time student of politics I have often found myself assessing various kinds of attempts to create new democratic processes or arenas. From citizens’ juries through to mini-publics and from area panels to lottery-based procedures the scope of these experiments with ‘new’ ways of doing politics has taken me from the local ward level right up to the international level.
The post Raw politics: devolution, democracy and deliberation appeared first on OUPblog.
In a widely quoted interview with USA Today, Ben Bernanke said that ‘It would have been my preference to have more investigations of individual actions because obviously everything that went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm.’ He makes it clear that he thought some Wall Street executives should have gone to jail.
The post Ben Bernanke and Wall Street Executives appeared first on OUPblog.
What role does international law play in addressing global problems? How can international lawyers innovate to provide solutions? How can they learn new approaches from different legal systems? Which fields require greater research and expertise?
The post What are the biggest challenges facing international lawyers today? appeared first on OUPblog.
It is said in the domestic practice of law that the facts are sometimes more important than the law. Advocates often win and lose cases on their facts, despite the perception that the law’s formalism and abstraction are to blame for its failures with regards to delivering justice.
The post The killing of Osama bin Laden: the facts are hard to come by, and where is the law? appeared first on OUPblog.
The term fragile state originated as an alternative to “failed state” – a worldview predominated by assertions about “weak” or “strong” states, with very weak states referred to as “failures”, “failed states", etc. A lot of critics rightly pointed out the naivete of a single dimension in conceptualizing the myriad ways in which states and societies can go wrong.
The post Fragile systems and development appeared first on OUPblog.
No issue in Mormonism has made more headlines than the faith's distinctive approach to sex and gender. From its polygamous nineteenth-century past to its twentieth-century stand against the Equal Rights Amendment and its twenty-first-century fight against same-sex marriage, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) has consistently positioned itself on the frontlines of battles over gender-related identities, roles, and rights.
The post How much do you know about Mormon feminists? appeared first on OUPblog.
We are a weird species. Like other species, we have a culture. But by comparison with other species, we are strangely unstable: human cultures self-transform, diverge, and multiply with bewildering speed. They vary, radically and rapidly, from time to time and place to place. And the way we live - our manners, morals, habits, experiences, relationships, technology, values - seems to be changing at an ever accelerating pace. The effects can be dislocating, baffling, sometimes terrifying. Why is this?
The post “Challenging change” – extract from A Foot in the River appeared first on OUPblog.
S.B. 185, recently signed into law by California Governor Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown, Jr., requires California’s public employee pension plans to divest their investments in publicly-traded companies that derive half or more of their revenue from “the mining of thermal coal.”
The post California’s S.B. 185, thermal coal, and the fallacies of social investing appeared first on OUPblog.
Our legal history stretches back well over eight centuries. But however long this history may be, it is not one of which we can be universally proud, and the freedoms which we enjoy today have had to be hard won over the centuries.
The post The right to a fair trial: part one appeared first on OUPblog.
Depending on your tastes, bagpipes are primal and evocative, or crude and abrasive. Adore or despise them, they are ubiquitous across the city centers of Scotland (for tourists or locals?). In anticipation of St Andrews Day, and your Robert Burns poetry readings with a certain woodwind accompaniment, here are 10 facts you may not have known about the history of the bagpipes.
The post Ten fun facts about the bagpipes appeared first on OUPblog.
The conspirators in what we now know as the Gunpowder Plot failed in their aspiration to blow up the House of Lords on the occasion of the state opening of parliament in the hope of killing the King and a multitude of peers. Why do we continue to remember the plot? The bonfires no longer articulate anti-Roman Catholicism, though this attitude formally survived until 2013 in the prohibition against the monarch or the heir to the throne marrying a Catholic.
The post The literary fortunes of the Gunpowder Plot appeared first on OUPblog.
A debate over whether to remove lymph nodes from the neck during surgical treatment of early oral cancer has gone on for decades. Now findings from a randomized control trial reported last June at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s (ASCO) annual meeting, in Chicago may finally put that controversy to rest.
The post Elective Neck Dissection in Early Oral Cancer: Debate Resolved appeared first on OUPblog.
The durable Bond is back once more in Spectre. Little has changed and there has even been reversion. M has back-morphed into a man, Judi Dench giving way to Ralph Fiennes. 007 still works miracles, and not the least of these is financial – Pinewood Studios hope for another blockbuster movie. Hollywood roll over and die.
The post Spectre and Bond do the damage appeared first on OUPblog.
What have the Romans ever done for us? Ancient Rome is well known for its contribution to the modern world in areas such as sanitation, aqueducts, and roads, but the extent to which it has shaped modern thinking about sexual identity is not nearly so widely recognized.
The post What have the Romans ever done for us? LGBT identities and ancient Rome appeared first on OUPblog.
With elections just about a year away, Americans can expect to hear a lot about regulation during the next twelve months—most of it from Republicans and most of it scathing. Republican frontrunner Donald Trump typifies the GOP’s attitude toward regulation.
The post Clean air… hot air appeared first on OUPblog.
His books are famous around the world, but their author struggles to get by – two themes that quickly become familiar to any reader. Martial has an eye for fabric. He habitually ranks himself and judges others by the price and quality of their clothing and accessories (e.g. 2.29, 2.57), a quick index in the face-to-face street life of the crammed metropolis.
The post Distinctive dress: Martial’s index to life in a crammed metropolis appeared first on OUPblog.
For a long time I have been dealing with the words bad, bed, bud, body, bodkin, butt, bottom, and their likes. The readers who have followed the discussion will probably guess from today’s title that now the time of path has come round.
The post Pathfinders appeared first on OUPblog.
It is hard to quantify the impact of ‘role-model’ celebrities on the acceptance and uptake of genetic testing and bio-literacy, but it is surely significant. Angelina Jolie is an Oscar-winning actress, Brad Pitt’s other half, mother, humanitarian, and now a “DNA celebrity”. She propelled the topic of familial breast cancer, female prophylactic surgery, and DNA testing to the fore.
The post The Angelina Jolie effect appeared first on OUPblog.
For more than forty years now, the Religious Right has been a powerful force in the United States, helping reshape the Republican Party and realign the nation’s politics and culture.
The post Six predictions for the future of the Religious Right appeared first on OUPblog.
Thank you to those of you who participated in the voting period for our Place of the Year 2015 longlist. The top five contenders have moved on to the next round into our shortlist, and we need your help again. If you're interested about each place and why each has been nominated for Place of the Year 2015, read back on our previous blog post. Vote for your pick in this year's shortlist by 30 November. The Place of the Year 2015 will be announced 3 December.
The post Announcing the Place of the Year 2015 shortlist: vote for your pick appeared first on OUPblog.
Long excluded from serious consideration within psychology and the neurosciences, consciousness is back in business. A new journal Neuroscience of Consciousness will catalyse this new understanding by publishing the best new research, review, and opinion on how our "inner universe" comes to be.
The post Can neuroscience explain consciousness? appeared first on OUPblog.
The October Revolution was probably the determining event of the twentieth century in Europe, and indeed in much of the world. The Communist ideology and the Communist paradigm of governance aroused messianic hopes and apocalyptic fears almost everywhere.
The post The day that changed the 20th century: Russia’s October Revolution appeared first on OUPblog.
The following extract is excerpted from Urban Legends: Gang Identity in the Post-Industrial City. The chapter, titled ‘Learning to Leisure’ traces the leisure lives of a group of young men from Langview, a deindustrialised working-class community in Glasgow.
The post (Getting a) Malling: Youth, consumption and leisure in the ‘new Glasgow’ appeared first on OUPblog.
Mormon feminism may seem to some a recent phenomenon, but events and writings in the history of Mormon feminism date back to the early 1970s. Here we have compiled these key moments in when Mormon women have engaged with question about gender in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in a timeline of the pre-history and history of the Mormon feminist movement.
The post Key events and writings in contemporary Mormon feminism appeared first on OUPblog.
At the dawn of the children’s hospital movement in Europe and the West (best epitomised and exemplified by the opening of London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children (GOSH) on 14 February 1852), the plight of sick children was precarious at all levels of society. After a long campaign by Dr Charles West, Great Ormond Street hospital was the first establishment to provide in-patient beds specifically for children in England.
The post Charles West and Florence Nightingale: Children’s healthcare in context appeared first on OUPblog.
Listen closely and you’ll hear the squeak of sneakers on AstroTurf, the crack of a batter’s first hit, and the shrill sound of whistles signaling Game on! Yes, it’s that time of year again. As fall deepens, painted faces and packed stadiums abound, with sports aficionados all over the country (and world) preparing for a spectacle that is more than just entertainment. Which leads us to the following questions: What is the place of sports in our modern lives? And how should we understand it as part of our history?
In this month’s episode, Sara Levine, Multimedia Producer for Oxford University Press, sat down to discuss the evolution of our favorite pastimes with Chuck Fountain, author of The Betrayal: The 1919 World Series and the Birth of Modern Baseball, Julie Des Jardins, author of Walter Camp: Football and the Modern Man, Dr. Munro Cullum, a Clinical Neuropsychologist who specializes in the assessment of cognitive disorders, and Paul Rouse, author of Sport and Ireland: A History.
Image Credit: “Baseball” by Anne Ruthmann. CC BY NC 2.0 via Flickr.
The post Game on – Episode 28 – The Oxford Comment appeared first on OUPblog.
But what’s the right term, really? After all, much of the political disagreement and legal wrangling over this issue is rooted in this fundamental conceptual question, is “physician-assisted suicide” really suicide? Let’s see if we can figure it out.
The post ‘Death with Dignity': is it suicide? appeared first on OUPblog.
The traditional view of Shakespeare is that he was a natural genius who had no need of art or reading. That tradition grew from origins which should make us suspect it. Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson famously declared that Shakespeare had ‘small Latin and less Greek’.
The post Shakespeare the Classicist appeared first on OUPblog.
Psychologist Stephen P. Hinshaw, along with Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and author Katherine Ellison, authors of ADHD: What Everyone Needs to Know, answered a few questions for us in hopes of decluttering some information about ADHD.
The post Debunking ADHD myths: an author Q&A appeared first on OUPblog.
What is the future of academic publishing? We’re celebrating University Press Week (8-14 November 2015) and Academic Book Week (9-16 November) with a series of blog posts on scholarly publishing from staff and partner presses. Today, we present Oxford's list of ten academic books that changed the world.
The post 10 academic books that changed the world appeared first on OUPblog.
According to philosophical lore many sentences are self-evident. A self-evident sentence wears its semantic status on its sleeve: a self-evident truth is a true sentence whose truth strikes us immediately, without the need for any argument or evidence, once we understand what the sentence means.
The post Paradox and self-evident sentences appeared first on OUPblog.
We're getting ready for the annual American Musicological Society Conference, beginning 11 November 2015 in Louisville, Kentucky. From panels to performances, there's a lot to look forward to. We asked our past and present attendees to tell us what make AMS and Louisville such exciting places to be this month.
The post Preparing for AMS Louisville appeared first on OUPblog.
For over two centuries, newspapers were the dominant news medium. Yet today “dead tree” media-like stamp collecting is, well, so twentieth century. Now that millions of Americans get their news from social media on-line, newspapers have been in free-fall, prompting many pundits to wonder aloud if journalism has a future.
The post Does news have a future? appeared first on OUPblog.
What was happening in the world last year? Events such as the the devastating protest-turned-conflict in Ukraine, or the maritime disputes between states in the South China Sea, have wide-reaching repercussions - from the amount a country spends on its military, to the direction of foreign policies whole regions take.
The post International security and foreign affairs in 2014 [interactive map] appeared first on OUPblog.
What distinguishes good writing from bad writing? How can people transform their writing to make it more powerful and more effective? Are universities teaching students how to become better writers? In order to answer these questions and others, we sat down with Geoffrey Huck, an associate professor of the Professional Writing Program at York University.
The post What defines good writing? appeared first on OUPblog.
Many word games—Scrabble, Words with Friends, Scribbage, Quiddler and more, involve anagrams, or unscrambling letters to make a word. This month, we take a look at how to do that unscrambling, so here is an anagram for you to solve: naitp.
The post How to solve an anagram appeared first on OUPblog.