I believe Jeremiah Wright likes preaching to his own people, black people, embraced by the relative comfort of shared knowledge and practice within the African American church. I do not think he wanted to talk to white America or to try to bridge the painful, difficult, often personally brutalizing, racial divide. I believe that he has great and healing things to say to our nation, but that when called to do so he has resisted because he is angry about the evils of racism, imperialism, patriarchy and partisanship.
It's a good piece -- and there are few more insightful commenters on question of race in America than Professor Harris-Lacewell. Well worth your time.
Insightful? I doubt it.
ReplyDeleteFor a seminarian at the Union Theological Seminary Harris-Lacewell needs to go back to Sunday Bible class.
First Jonah did not throw himself into the sea to flee, he asked the sailors on the boat to throw him in to save themselves (an act they tried to avoid).
Second after he repented, while in the bowels of the whale, he was spit out at Ninevah and then directly did God's bidding, as instructed. No argument was forthcoming.
Third after Ninevah repented and given a reprieve Jonah became depressed because he knew his own people, the Jews, would be decimated by Assyrians due to their spiritual decline and they would not take the example of Ninevah and repent.
This story is told on Yom Kippur as a lesson in the power of repentence for everyone.
Further in the left hand column of the web page is an item called "down from the tower" about how Harris-Lacewell wishes Romney was in the race and so he could be forced to sweat about Mormonism and polygamy. Her "knowledge" about Mormonism stems from her mother, a lapsed Mormon and an ancestor who was a polygamist.
But is this person really a professor at Princeton? (And this is the school my son is entering this coming fall!) The Mormons banned polygamy in 1890 and anyone practicing it is subject to excommunication. The sect Harris-Lacewill refers to split from the Mormons and has nothing to do with the Mormons or Romney. This is a sheer delusion on her part in an attempt to deflect from Wright.
Jeremiah Wright is not a prophet but a bitter man (does he own a gun?) who preaches a separatist theology that is clearly resentful of America and whites, and not representative of most black churches. His theology, if anything, propagates black inferiority and dependency by blaming the problems of the black community on America and whites.
Harris-Lacewell does not demonstrate insight but in these two entries displays an agenda that has no regard to the reality of not only the written word of the bible but of the racism of Wright.
Cycle Cyril's account of Jonah is misleading in at least one respect. CC says Jonah became merely depressed, yet the the KJV, Jonah 4:1-3 says:
ReplyDelete"But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry. And he prayed unto the LORD, and said, 'I pray thee, O LORD, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil. Therefore now, O LORD, take, I beseech thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live.'"
The conclusion of the book is God saying to a pissed-off Jonah: "Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night. And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?"
The sect Harris-Lacewill refers to split from the Mormons and has nothing to do with the Mormons or Romney.
The sect refers to itself as "fundamentalist" because one of the fundamentals of Joseph Smith's teachings was polygamy. To say that it has *nothing* to do with Romney's Church is laughable. They have evolved along different lines in the last 100 years, but they both began with the same Latter-Day Saints. They use the same Book of Mormon and share a common origin. Mainstream Mormons renounced polygamy in order to achieve Utah statehood; cult Mormons believed their religious teachings were more important than political acceptance.
As for separatism, Rev. Wright welcomes whites into his congregation and is part of a denomination that always has had plenty of white ministers and members. Mormons, in contrast, did not allow blacks to enter the LDS priesthood until 1978.
I have several Mormon friends and have defended LDS from the false assertion by Noah Feldman that they are somehow "secretive" about their faith. But to claim that the West Texas sect has "nothing to do" with mainstream Mormonism is also erroneous.
"Angry" is the King James interpretation but another acceptable interpretation is "grieved". In the context of the various commentaries, not to mention his passivity and wish to die following the repentance of Ninevah, grieved or depression is probably more appropriate.
ReplyDeleteWhile the "fundamentalists" and the LDS share a common origin they have no common agreement in a primal tenet and thus little to do with each other. A Mormon has nothing to explain away or excuse away with regards the "fundamentalist" sect. It would be like you having to make excuses for your third cousin twice removed who lives two states over.
Wright, as does many other ideologues, are always looking for useful idiots. It does not change his racism. Listen to his NAACP speech and you will hear Charles Murray talking about intelligence.
That reminds me of a (himself Republican) friend who remarked on how odd it is to see conservatives criticizing Rev. Wright for sounding like The Bell Curve, when National Review did a whole symposium issue in the book's defense, and many other prominent conservative/ neocon pundits favored it, including several of Murray's AEI colleagues (James Q. Wilson, Michael Ledeen, Michael Novak, Michael Barone).
ReplyDeleteThe difference between Wright and Murray is that Wright is preaching racism while Murray was trying to explore the differences between the races as he found them, rightly or wrongly. I used Murray as a sort of liberal code word for bigot.
ReplyDeleteI did not read NR's symposium on the book but I would support the book, first on first amendment grounds and second on exploring the reasons for the differences between the races that may or may not go beyond culture. This would be similar to exploring why there are more men in the abstract sciences/math than women. Though suggesting a biological reason got Larry Summer fired from Harvard, a bastion of political correctness and creeping Sharia.
So far as I know, no liberal public intellectual suggested that the government should restrict Charles Murray from writing whatever he wants. Saying one supports Bell Curve on "First Amendment grounds" is a straw-man.
ReplyDeleteSecond, if a university that supports a campus publication about sex that prominently features nude students in every issue is creeping toward sharia, sharia ain't as bad as I'd thought.
Concern about the First Amendment is less of a straw-man than you think considering that the McCain-Feingold bill effectively prohibits free speech in the time period prior to an election. This act may eventually be overturned but nonetheless it was voted into law.
ReplyDeleteCreeping Sharia, as I hope my usage implies, is not a complete and immediate conversion to Sharia. Recently Harvard restricted the use of their gym for woman only during certain hours to accommodate Moslem women. Under the guise of modesty Sharia is creeping in. Do you think they would do it for any other group? I don't.
WTF does McCain-Feingold have to do with The Bell Curve? Did someone bring a case against it as being a campaign contribution? Straw-man again.
ReplyDelete"Under the guise of modesty Sharia is creeping in."
Yes, clearly Muslim women are lying about their desire not to expose themselves to men, pretending it's just modesty when what they really want is to live under religious law.
How is it that when Christan women write long, dull columns about their sex lives (that they're not having any), conservatives support their getting university funding for a support group for more exhibitionism about their lack of sex lives; but when Muslim women quietly want to maintain their modesty, that's Sharia?
PG, you said that my use of the First Amendment to defend the book, the Bell Curve, was a straw-man since nobody was, in effect, was infringing on freedom of speech. I brought up McCain-Feingold since it IS an infringement on free speech as an example of why we need to vigorously defend the First Amendment.
ReplyDeleteI have no problem with any man or woman maintaining their modesty. However I have a problem when that maintainance limits others. Gym hours at Harvard have been curtailed for others due to this ruling. And while some may say it is an accommodation that infringes little to me it is a sign of creeping Sharia.
"no liberal public intellectual suggested that the government should restrict Charles Murray from writing whatever he wants."
ReplyDeleteThat's what I said. I did not say that nobody, in all of America, infringes on free speech -- on the contrary, I get regular email updates from the ACLU about governmental violations of the 1st Amendment. But this still has nothing to do with Charles Murray, who never has faced government infringement on his speech. Thus it is a straw-man to say in reference to the Bell Curve that one supports it on "First Amendment grounds." Tell me how McCain-Feingold has anything to do with the Bell Curve and I will agree that one sensibly can say that one defends the book on 1st Amendment grounds. Otherwise, your comment was a non-sequiter.
The "modesty" of some heterosexual men limits gay men from serving openly in the U.S. military. I hope you are opposed to that policy as well, instead of supporting a policy that, being a state-supported discrimination against homosexuals, is a lot more like genuine Sharia (which is LAW, not private behavior) than women-only hours at a private university gym are.