This isn’t a joke. A teenager of African ancestry in London was killed by his relatives because they believed him to be a witch. Writes Damian Thompson:

The Metropolitan Police waited until after the end of the court case to warn us that children are being abused and murdered in increasing numbers in Britain because their African relatives think they are “spirit children” – that is, witches.

Also, children’s charities and campaigners “urged communities to report abuse and said social workers must be firmer in confronting abuse in immigrant groups”.

Let’s deconstruct that. Campaigners are making this appeal because African communities in Britain have been too slow to report this abuse. And social workers have soft-pedalled on the subject, despite the shameful record of their colleagues in the case of Victoria Climbié, an eight-year-old girl from the Ivory Coast who was tortured to death in 2000 by family members who believed she was possessed by the devil.

More:

A contact working in this field told me yesterday: “Social workers from African backgrounds are scared. First, because they may have residual beliefs about witches themselves. Second, because they don’t want to confront church pastors who make a fortune out of ‘exorcising’ children – often at the request of their parents.”

Mind-boggling. Adds Thompson:

I don’t care if these Pentecostal congregations are thriving, and provide role models for black youths. If we can get worked up about secularists banning prayers, or the Islamist infiltration of mosques, why not this unspeakable scandal?

The other day I praised an Orthodox Jewish school in Texas for declining to continue its quest for a private-school basketball championship rather than play ball on the Jewish sabbath. I wish that Tapps, the private entity governing this league, had done the gracious thing — dare I say the decent Christian thing? — and rescheduled the game to make it possible for the observant Jewish players to compete. But Tapps had a point: the organization is voluntary, and Beren Academy knew the rules when they joined. The other day, I praised the school’s rabbi and headmaster for saying, “The sacred mission will trump excellence in the secular world.”

Well, the match did, in the end, get rescheduled, and Beren won its game. Congratulations, I guess. But the fact that some players’ parents forced the game to happen by filing a lawsuit makes me sad. They had an opportunity to make a strong countercultural statement about the primacy of faith, but instead chose to make a statement that’s all too common in American society: If you won’t bend the rules to accommodate us, we’ll sue you.

Beren could have been a terrific example about how fidelity to God is more important than sports or secular success. Now they’re just like all the rest of us.

Aliza Worthington of Catonsville, Md., has written an “open letter to pro-lifers” that probably should have remained closed. Why does she believe abortion should remain legal? Here is a list of things she believes pro-lifers are not taking into consideration:

My wishes to nourish myself, now that I finally have some time and something creative and productive to do with it?

My wishes to have two free hands and a clear mind as I prepare my daughter for college, my first son for high school and my youngest son for his first season of swim team?

My wishes that my days of volunteering in pre-school be over?

My wishes that one day soon I will be watching what I want on TV?

Can you look me in the eyes and tell me my wishes for all these things, and how hard I’ve worked for them, are less important than the potential clump of cells in my uterus?

Wow, powerful stuff. Who, indeed, could look into the eyes of Aliza Worthington and tell her that an unborn child’s right to life is more important than her desire to nourish herself by watching The View. Fluke Feminism has another powerful she-warrior. Maybe the President will telephone her to congratulate her on her courage.

Then again, if the eyes are the windows to the soul, I’m not entirely sure what, if anything, one would see by looking into Aliza Worthington’s.

Andrew Sullivan finds the Mormon practice of baptizing dead non-Mormons offensive:

 It’s deeply disrespectful to and invasive of other faiths to be posthumously coopted in this fashion.

Really? I’m not seeing it. I welcome Mormons baptizing my dead relatives. Why? Because not being Mormon, I believe it is an empty ritual that changes nothing in the world of the spirit. But if the Mormons are right — which, again, I don’t think they are — then they are doing my dead relations an extreme kindness. And that is the light in which I think the Mormon practice should be seen: as an act of generosity. I don’t think what they do has any effect whatsoever, but the fact that they believe it does, and are willing to perform a ritual they believe will make life easier for my kinfolks in the afterlife, is a gift.

Honestly, I don’t understand why anybody would care about this. If Mormons were engaged in an act that they believed would bring curses on the souls of my ancestors, or on the living, I would still believe them to be empty rituals, but they would also be overtly hostile acts. However misguided, the Mormons engaged in posthumous baptisms are trying to be kind, according to the dictates of their religion. Everybody chill.

UPDATE: It’s interesting to contemplate that Andrew object to the Mormon practice of posthumous baptism “disrespectful to and invasive of other faiths,” yet believes the Catholic Church, of which he is a communicant, ought to be compelled by the US government to subsidize contraception. Hmm…

Sometimes the culture war turns into a spitball fight that diminishes everyone.

I have said that Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown Law student who testified before a Congressional panel that she’s being oppressed because the semi-Catholic university won’t subsidize her contracepted sex life, is a whiny privileged bourgeois feminist.  Her position on this is ridiculous. Watch her testimony below the jump, if you like.

Rush Limbaugh took up the story on his radio program, and made some decent points about it, e.g.:

But I finally asked myself, why go to a Catholic college?  You want to have all the sex you want all day long, no consequences, no responsibility for your behavior, why go to a Catholic college?  And therein lies the answer to all of this.  Washington Post:  “Fluke came to Georgetown University interested in contraceptive coverage.”  Now, stop and think of that for a moment.  Here you have a female student arriving on campus interested in contraceptive coverage.  When you are reviewing schools for your kids to attend, do you look around at contraception coverage?  Well, Fluke told the Washington Post that she did.  The Washington Post reports that Fluke “researched the Jesuit college’s health plans for students before enrolling, and found that birth control was not included.” And she enrolled anyway.  Why?  Quote, Fluke, “I decided I was absolutely not willing to compromise the quality of my education in exchange for my health care.”

In other words, Georgetown’s a great law school, I’m gonna go there even if they don’t have contraception. I’m gonna go there and I’m gonna make them give me my contraception.  So why did she have to go to Georgetown?  Why didn’t she go someplace else instead of trying to get them to change their religion?

This portion was the thing that got him into trouble:

What does it say about the college co-ed Susan (sic) Fluke who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex. What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? Makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We’re the pimps.

OK, that was trashy language. He shouldn’t have put it like that. His point is not a bad one — that Fluke is saying she and women like her can’t afford to have all the sex they’re having, unless the college pays for it — but he ought to have known that this was a bad way to express it. Look, I have very little use for Rush Limbaugh, who often shows himself to be a perfect boob, but this Fluke person really did go before Congress to complain about how unfair it was that women like her are being oppressed because her elite university won’t subsidize the pill that allows them to have consequence-free sex. Even if one sees nothing at all wrong with premarital sex, this is still a shameful thing, to have the nerve to complain to Congress that your university is doing you dirty by not subsidizing your sex life.

But now the President of the United States has taken time out of his busy schedule to call the pathetic Fluke to say how sorry he is that Rush Limbaugh was mean to her:

“He encouraged me and supported me and thanked me for speaking out about the concerns of American women,” Fluke told Mitchell of the call with Obama. “And what was really personal for me was that he said to tell my parents that they should be proud. And that meant a lot because Rush Limbaugh questioned whether or not my family would be proud of me. So, I just appreciated that very much.”

Note well: the President of the United States thinks Miss Fluke’s mother and father should be proud of her going to Congress to complain that her Catholic university will not underwrite her sex life. This has to be a new low.

I think everybody here looks bad.

UPDATE: Let me put it like this — the fact that Rush Limbaugh is a galloping jackass does not ennoble Sandra Fluke, or make her argument, or her character, any more credible or sympathetic. That Barack Obama stooped to involve himself in this controversy diminishes the presidency.

Charles Murray has pointed out — as have many social scientists — that the white working class is rapidly being lost to organized religion. In the US, the better educated you are, the more likely you participate in church. This doesn’t fit the culture-war story line, but it’s true.

In trying to figure out why this has happened among Catholics, Mark Stricherz considers whether or not the abandonment of the Baltimore Catechism has something to do with it. Excerpt:

As a rule, I am wary of heaping the Church’s woes after 1965 at the feet of Vatican II. The secularization of non-Catholic America was well underway in the 1950s, and Catholics were all but helpless to stop it. But to the extent that the reforms of Vatican II, and the liberal reaction to them, contributed to the decline in religious devotion, the behavior of a few dissident priests does not strike me as the main or sole reason. In my opinion, the institutional Church’s failure to appeal to ordinary Catholics was the bigger reason.

Specifically, this:

In other words, the Baltimore Catechism was not elaborate, overly complex, or opaque. It didn’t require an advanced degree to read and understand. As a result, Catholicism was accessible to ordinary church-goers, including the working classes. It was the way of our people.

I would like to agree with this, but I think it’s wrong. It’s hard for me to imagine Catholicism more stripped down and basic than postconciliar parish Catholicism. For Stricherz’s hypothesis to be correct, one has to assume that the institutional Church replaced the simple, declarative, easy to grasp teaching of the Baltimore Catechism with an elaborate, complex, opaque catechism. Does this strike any Catholic as true to what happened? To the contrary, most Catholics I know complain that the rigor and complexity of Catholic thought and teaching has been radically dumbed down and denatured. Who needs an advanced degree to understand quotidian Catholicism today? Whatever is keeping the working classes away from mass, it’s not liturgies in Latin and sermons that are classes on Scholastic theology.

A few years back, my friend Leon Podles, who is Catholic, published a book called “The Church Impotent” — now available for free in PDF form — arguing that Western Christianity (Catholic and Protestant) has for centuries failed to appeal to men. Excerpt from the introduction: In reading about war, I realized that here was something that men took with deadly (both literally and metaphorically) earnestness. War, and the vicarious experience of war in literature and reenactments, as well as the analogues and substitutes for war in dangerous sports and avocations, provide the real center of the emotional, and I would even say

the spiritual, life of most men in the modern world. The ideology of masculinity has replaced Christianity as the true religion of men. We live in a society with a female religion and a male religion: Christianity, of various sorts, for women and non-masculine men; and masculinity, especially in the forms of competition and violence that culminate in war, for men.

My personal experience is limited to North America, and most sociological work on religion and men has been done in North America and France. Nevertheless, the comparative lack of masculine interest in Christianity is much the same throughout Western Christianity, Catholic and Protestant. South America is notorious. The church is for women; the bars are for men.

I suspect Lee’s onto something here. But it’s at best a partial explanation. Why aren’t working-class women going to church like they used to? It’s not because the working classes are becoming atheist. As the political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell wrote in their landmark book on contemporary American religious life, American Grace:

While atheism has recently gained prominence, particularly on the bestseller lists, self-identified atheists and agnostics comprise a vanishingly small proportion of the U.S. population. For instance, in the 2006 Faith Matters survey precisely five people out of 3,108 chose either label.

What Putnam and Campbell did find is a large and rising number of Americans who say they believe in God, but who decline to affiliate with a church or tradition (the “Nones,” they call them). My guess is that as religion in contemporary America has come to mean mostly a matter of emotion, and vague moralism (the dreaded MTD!), the idea of needing to participate in religious community and formal worship to establish a sufficient relationship to God makes very little sense to people. That, and the individualism in American life, which means that there is no longer any such thing as (to use Stricherz’s phrase) “the way of our people,” not when it comes to religion. Increasingly, “the way of our people” is to treat religion like we do everything else: as a matter of private, personal choice. I am one of the 40 percent of Americans who no longer belong to the church or religion into which I was born. I invite you to take a look at this meditation I posted on the decline of American religious life in an age of religious privatism. Notice especially the deeply felt, penetrating material from Peter Steinfels, a progressive Catholic, who says that we can argue over the role liberalism and conservatism has played in advancing the dissolution of American religious life, but the fact is nobody has yet come up with “a force to equal to the forces of dissolution.” I ended my essay like this:

One more thing: in my experience, too many churches see themselves and their communities, consciously or not, as an end in themselves, and not as a means to a higher end. I can’t tell you how many Catholic sermons I sat through over the years in which the pastor spoke of the community gathered there as the point of it all — this enjoying each other in community. Well, yes, you have to have community, but religion seen this way doesn’t point to anything beyond itself. The community has to have a mission beyond perpetuating itself, it seems to me. And this is where things break down, because to determine what that mission is, you have to have agreement on what the church stands for — what its principles are, and what it expects of its people. Bellah has pointed out that Americans want community, but they don’t want to make any sacrifices to get it. This is why MTD is so powerful: it allows you to enjoy the warm glow of religion without making any real demands on you. But the young are onto this nonsense. They well understand that if you can have God entirely on your own terms, then why put up with the community unless you really want to? I suspect that the biggest challenge facing all churches, whatever their orientation (liberal, conservative, etc.), is to convince a generation conditioned by radical individualism, consumerism, relativism and emotivism why churches of any sort are necessary at all.

Could it be that the working classes are quicker to understand the logic of American religiosity, in which every man is not only his own pope, but his own cathedral as well?

Pictured here is a teardrop-shaped glass vase holding some sort of air fern. The vase is normally crystal clear. The dust you see on it is pollen. The vase does sit next to a window — hence the light — but the window has not been opened recently. Just that much pollen is in the air inside our house. We have not had windows or doors open all week. This is just in the air we breathe right now. The one little clear strip you see is where I ran my finger, just before taking this photo.

No wonder we’re all so damn sick around here this week. Not enough Zyrtec and Flonase in the world to combat this alien invader.

In Missouri, a family on the way home from the hospital with their newborn were hit head-on by a Toyota that crossed the center line. Mother, father, and the baby’s older brother were killed. Only the newborn survived.

I do believe in God, but stories like this are the best reason I can think of to disbelieve.

Poor, poor Washington, Oklahoma:

“I want my kids to grow up with values and ways of life that I had and my parents had,” he says, so his youngest son tools around the garage on a Big Wheel, and his oldest daughter keeps her riding horse at the family barn built in 1907, and they buy their drinking milk from Braun’s because he always has. “Why look for change?” he says. “I like to know that what you see is what you get.”

What you see is Sid’s Easy Shop opening downtown each morning at 6, where Sid will sell you gas, rent you a movie, make you a new set of keys or bring your soda to one of the classic red booths preserved from the 1950s. The post office, its roof painted red and white to reflect the stripes of the American flag, opens for business a few hours later. Next door to that, Casey operates her coffee shop with the help of her husband and five kids, who take turns working the register, Yes Sir and Yes Ma’am, and sell T-shirts imprinted with the phrase “Make God Famous.”

What you see is a parade of several dozen well-wishers lining the street and stretching out their hands to the bus every time one of the varsity high school teams leaves to play a road game, and a few hundred people gathering for community workdays to fix up the Little League field so Washington doesn’t waste money on parks and rec. Almost all of the houses in town are single-story ranchers, and more than 70 percent belong to married couples — few Hispanic, fewer black, none Muslim and none openly gay.

What you see are calves dropping in the spring, coyotes circling at night, shooting stars, roaring tornados and thick flocks of birds migrating across skies that round over the horizon.

“Is there anyplace else?” Tague wonders.

He looks more like a financier than a farmer, with wire-rimmed glasses, close-cropped hair and an iPhone he uses to check the per-pound prices for live cattle. He still travels every few weeks to Indianapolis or St. Louis for his job at a thriving mortgage industry start-up, but he dreams of expanding his herd and raising cattle full time.

If he can’t do it, maybe his children will.

“You want this place, Lily?” he asks.

She smiles and nods.

“Good,” he says, “ ’cause I’m going to make sure you get it.”

No gays, no Muslims? This sick hamlet, this slough of cultural deformation, doesn’t look like America. We should invade and liberate the place.

Ha ha! I kid. But seriously, the thing that strikes me about this portrait of a rural Oklahoma town is not how alien its way of life is to that of the rest of the country — though it is — but how the town, at least as depicted in this report, serves as a cultural Rohrshach test. To some, this town is a remnant and a redoubt of the Real America. To others, it is a vestige of an insular, closed-minded way of life, the passing of which is not to be mourned. What it made me think about was the anthropologist Wade Davis’s great book, “The Wayfinders,” a discussion and defense of the value of traditional cultures and communities the world over, and what humankind loses when they disappear. It is easy for us to stand up for the threatened mountain villages of faraway Diddywadiddy (even if we never rise from our armchairs), but much more difficult to feel the same sense of sympathy, much less urgency, about a place like Washington, Okla. Mind you, Davis writes, and writes beautifully, of the “ancient wisdom” of cultures disappearing in the face of modernity’s onslaught. But his insights could also be applied to places like this rural Oklahoma village. From “The Wayfinders”:

We too are culturally myopic and often forget that we represent not the absolute wave of history but merely a world view, and that modernity — whether you identify it by the monikers westernization, globalization, capitalism, democracy, or free trade — is but an expression of our cultural values. It is not some objective force removed from the constraints of culture. And it is certainly not the true and only pulse of history.

More:

An anthropologist from a distant planet landing in the United States would see many wondrous things. But he or she or it would also encounter a culture that reveres marriage, yet allows half of its marriages to end in divorce; that admires its elderly, yet has grandparents living with grandchildren in only 6 percent of its households; that loves its children, yet embraces a slogan — “24/7″ — that implies total devotion to the workplace at the expense of family. By the age of 18, the average American youth has spent two years watching television. One in five Americans is clinically obese and 60 percent are overweight, in part because 20 percent of all meals are consumed in automobiles and a third of children eat fast food every day. The country manufactures 200 million tons of industrial chemicals each year, while its people consume two-thirds of the world’s production of antidepressant drugs. The four hundred most prosperous American control more wealth than 2.5 billion people in the poorest eighty-one nations with whom they share the planet. The nation spends more money on armaments and war than the collective military budgets of its seventeen closest rivals. The state of California spends more money on prisons than on universities. Technological wizardry is balanced by the embrace of an economic model of production and consumption that compromises the life supports of the planet. Extreme would be one word for a civilization that contaminates with its waste the air, water, and soil; that drives plants and animals to extinction on a scale not seen on earth since the disappearance of the dinosaurs; that dams the rivers, tears down the ancient forests, empties the seas of fish, and does little to curtail industrial processes that threaten to transform the chemistry and physics of the atmosphere.

Davis goes on to say that if the measure of success is technological mastery and material gain, then ours is clearly a superior civilization.

But if the criteria of excellence shifted, for example to the capacity to thrive in a truly sustainable manner, with a true reverence and appreciation for the earth, the Western paradigm would fail. If the imperatives driving the highest aspirations of our species were to be the power of faith, the reach of spiritual intuition, the philosophical generosity to recognize the varieties of religious longing, then our dogmatic conclusions would again be found wanting.

When we project modernity, as we define it, as the inevitable destiny of all human societies, we are being disingenuous in the extreme. … In reality, development for the vast majority of peoples of the world has been a process in which the individual is torn from his past, propelled into an uncertain future, only to secure a place on the bottom rung of an economic ladder that goes nowhere.

To be sure, the people of Washington, Okla., live in modernity in ways that Kenyan tribesmen do not. Still, what you don’t see in this story, and can’t see, because you have to live in a place like this for a while to discern it, is how the social network provides for the common good, in a way that’s harder to manage in bigger, more modern, and, frankly, more diverse places. I do live in a place that’s more ethnically diverse than Washington — if half black, and half white, with a smattering of Asians and Hispanics counts as more diverse — but culturally fairly rural and Christian. (I went to a meeting of a local governmental body a couple of months ago, and was pleasantly startled and when the meeting began with the Pledge of Allegiance and the Our Father.) As I’ve been reporting this book on my sister, I’ve run across people telling me about her uncanny ability to keep straight who is related to whom. One of her friends and colleagues at the middle school said that when they would be having trouble with a particular student, Ruthie would draw on her knowledge of that child’s extended family, and all their travails, to help school officials better understand the social context for that child’s difficulties. More prosaically, Ruthie knew the families of everyone, from her students, to her colleagues, to the cafeteria workers, and everyone else, and could and would ask about how your Aunt Frances was feeling these days, and if your cousin Johnny had gotten married, like he said he would. After Ruthie was diagnosed with cancer, her school had a voluntary after-school staff and faculty meeting for people to pray for her, if they wanted to. I’m told that every single teacher, administrator, janitor, cook, and staffer showed up. And every single one spoke a word of prayer for her.

True, Ruthie was extraordinary in that way, but most people here can do that to a certain degree, because they’re from here, and this is how you live in rural America. I would expect that people in that Oklahoma town live the same way. For all the faults and challenges of rural life, this is a strength that I’ve not seen anywhere else. It is more fruitful, I think, to set aside the culture-war paradigm, and think of places like Washington, Okla., as Wendell Berry does. From a Berry essay in The Progressive (!):

That, I think, is true, but another reason that needs to be considered is modern society’s widespread prejudice against country people. This prejudice is not easy to explain, in view of modern society’s continuing dependence upon rural sustenance, but its existence also is indisputable.

Lewontin’s condescension to country people and their problems is not an aberration either in our society or in The New York Review of Books. On June 29, 2000, that magazine published this sentence: “At worst, [Rebecca West] had a mind that was closed and cold, like a small town lawyer’s, prizing facts but estranged from imaginative truth.” And on December 20, 2001, it published this: “The Gridiron dinner, as the affair is known, drags on for about five hours, enlivened mainly by the speeches of the politicians, whose ghostwriters in recent years have consistently outdone the journalists in the sharpness and grace of their wit (leaving journalists from the provinces with a strong impulse to follow the groundhogs back into their holes).”

It is possible to imagine that some readers will ascribe my indignation at those sentences to the paranoia of an advocate for the losing side. But I would ask those readers to imagine a reputable journal nowadays that would attribute closed, cold minds to Jewish lawyers, or speak of black journalists wanting to follow the groundhogs into their holes. This, it seems to me, would pretty effectively dissipate the ha-ha.

Disparagements of farmers, of small towns, of anything identifiable as “provincial” can be found everywhere: in comic strips, TV shows, newspaper editorials, literary magazines, and so on. A few years ago, The New Republic affirmed the necessity of the decline of family farms in a cover article entitled “The Idiocy of Rural Life.” And I remember a Kentucky high school basketball cheer that instructed the opposing team:

Go back, go back, go back to the woods.
Your coach is a farmer and your team’s no good.

I believe it is a fact, proven by their rapidly diminishing numbers and economic power, that the world’s small farmers and other “provincial” people have about the same status now as enemy civilians in wartime. They are the objects of small, “humane” consideration, but if they are damaged or destroyed “collaterally,” then “we very much regret it,” but they were in the way–and, by implication, not quite as human as “we” are. The industrial and corporate powers, abetted and excused by their many dependents in government and the universities, are perpetrating a sort of economic genocide–less bloody than military genocide, to be sure, but just as arrogant, foolish, and ruthless, and perhaps more effective in ridding the world of a kind of human life. The small farmers and the people of small towns are understood as occupying the bottom step of the economic stairway and deservedly falling from it because they are rural, which is to say not metropolitan or cosmopolitan, which is to say socially, intellectually, and culturally inferior to “us.”

Am I trying to argue that all small farmers are superior or that they are all good farmers or that they live the “idyllic life”? I certainly am not. And that is my point. The sentimental stereotype is just as damaging as the negative one. The image of the farmer as the salt of the earth, independent son of the soil, and child of nature is a sort of lantern slide projected over the image of the farmer as simpleton, hick, or redneck. Both images serve to obliterate any concept of farming as an ancient, useful, honorable vocation, requiring admirable intelligence and skill, a complex local culture, great patience and endurance, and moral responsibilities of the gravest kind.

I am not trying to attribute any virtues or characteristics to farmers or rural people as a category. I am only saying what black people, Jews, and others have said many times before: These stereotypes don’t fit. They don’t work. Of course, some small town lawyers have minds that are “closed and cold,” but some, too, have minds that are open and warm. And some “provincial” journalists may be comparable to groundhogs, I suppose, though I know of none to whom that simile exactly applies, but some too are brilliant and brave and eminently useful. I am thinking, for example, of Tom and Pat Gish, publishers of The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Kentucky, who for many decades have opposed the coal companies whenever necessary and have unflinchingly suffered the penalties, including arson. Do I think the Gishes would be intimidated by the frivolous wit of ghostwriters at the Gridiron dinner? I do not.

Yes, he’s talking about farmers, but also about country people in general. More sharply, he has defined “tolerance and multiculturalism” thus: “Quit talking bad about women, homosexuals, and preferred social minorities, and you can say anything you want about people who haven’t been to college, manual workers, country people, peasants, religious people, unmodern people, old people, and so on.” My point is that if you take off your culture war glasses and regard a place like Washington, Okla., with more anthropological eyes, it looks different.

“I want my kids to grow up with values and ways of life that I had and my parents had,” he says…“Why look for change?”

This is a normal, universal human sentiment. Is there a difference between this as expressed by a peasant of the Bolivian highlands, and as expressed by a rural Oklahoma farmer? Why or why not? Are we prepared to recognize the dignity of ways of life that are alien to our own, and indeed based on values opposed to our own? Where do we draw the line?