Lucas, who is seven, and his buddy have been playing in the backyard all day. I heard the words “we’re making a catapult,” but didn’t dare to go out and see what was going on. A short time ago, his pal went home, and Lucas presented himself to me. His sweatpants were as you see above. His hands were absolutely filthy. “I have at least five splinters!” he said, as if he were talking about gold doubloons.

“Did you have fun today?” I asked.

“Oh yeah!”

It’s nice to have a backyard again.

A friend passes along a selection of hymns for the religion of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. According to the e-mail:

Selection criteria include (1) minimal references to Jesus, (2) highly sentimental content, (3) emphasis on fulfillment and happiness, and (4) choruses with repeated refrains.

I can’t reproduce the hymns scanned in, but I’ve put in links to the lyrics. The first suggestion: Carry Your Cross With a Smile. Says the author:

Never let being put to death be unpleasant. Instead, try to “beguile others to gladness” by smiling as you think about all the coming rewards.

Another suggestion: There Shall Be Showers of Blessing, chosen because it urges the faithful to:

 Focus on asking God to shower us with blessings that “we need.”

A third suggestion? Help Somebody Today, which makes the MTD hymn canon because it encourages us to:

Live out MTD ethics by finding one person per day to whom to do “a little neighborly deed.”

Finally, there is God Will Take Care Of You, which should inspire the MTD faithful to:

 Be confident that God will take care of you in all your needs:

All of these selections come not from the happy-clappy, Kum-Ba-Yahoos of the 1960s, but from Zondervan’s “Inspiring Hymns” collection published in, get this, 1951, when Truman was president.

You have any MTD Hymnal suggestions? Tell us what, and why you chose it.

Robbie George and Jennifer Bryson, both conservative Christians and leaders at Princeton’s Witherspoon Institute, have issued an open letter to a Christian activist asking him to lay off the reality show “American Muslim.” Excerpt:

Please know that in our pro-life, pro-family, and pro-freedom work at the Witherspoon Institute, we have found strong partners and allies in many Muslims. They have joined with us in promoting respect for human life in all stages and conditions; in upholding the virtues of modesty and chastity; in fighting the plagues of pornography and marital infidelity; and in working to protect religious freedom and the rights of conscience both at home and abroad.

Of course, there are violent extremists and enemies of freedom who act in the name of Islam—no question about that. They preach anti-Semitism in its vilest forms and seek domination. They have no respect for the dignity and equality of women or for religious and civil liberty. One of us (Dr. Bryson) has first-hand experience in confronting them: she spent two years serving our country as a United States Department of Defense interrogator at Guantanamo. Like you, both of us believe that Islamist terrorists and radicals must be resolutely opposed and defeated. But it is important to recognize that this is a view we and you share with the overwhelming majority of American Muslims. It is certainly the view of those Muslims who have partnered with us in our pro-life, pro-family, and pro-freedom efforts. Their moral values are our moral values—and yours.

In our view, it is fundamentally unjust to tar all or most Muslims with the brush of extremism; and, as Christians and Americans, we must never countenance injustice. Moreover, effectively countering the threats posed by genuine extremists requires us to welcome as friends and allies Muslims who share our opposition to radicalism and violence, who value their American citizenship and American freedom just as we do, and who contribute constructively to their communities and the larger society. When we treat our Muslim fellow citizens justly, and when we welcome them as partners in our efforts on behalf of life, liberty, and human dignity, we are being true both to our Christian faith and to our American heritage.

True, and important to say. My complaint is and always has been that many US Muslim leaders pose as liberals (in the sense that all Americans are liberals), but in fact are Islamist theocrats backed by the Muslim Brotherhood. This is by no means every Muslim, or even most Muslims in this country. The fact that the mainstream news media doesn’t know the difference, and refuses to learn the difference, between Muslims and Islamists doesn’t mean that the rest of us should remain ignorant, and hostile towards Muslims who can be our friends and allies.

(BTW, I first heard this point of view from a non-Muslim who risked her life working as an undercover investigator among Muslim extremists. She was adamant that Americans must oppose Islamism, but also adamant that we must not treat all Muslims as the enemy. My understanding was that some of her best sources were faithful Muslims who couldn’t stand the militants running their American Muslim organizations.)

Daniel Larison watched the Doctor Who Christmas Special that a conservative Daily Telegraph writer found tritely left-wing, and judges it not so bad at all. More:

 Perhaps it was because I watched the special with Archer’s review in the back of the mind, but my first reactions to the story were generally favorable, and it occurred to me that the story reminded of nothing so much as that of the conflict between Saruman and the Ents in The Two Towers. By the standards of some writers at the Telegraph, there is a fair amount in Tolkien that could be criticized in similar terms. Tolkien was working in the Christian tradition that held that creation had been entrusted to the stewardship of man. The exploitative, resource-stripping characters encountered in the special are not noticeably different from Saruman and his destruction of the forests around Isengard, except that the devastation the former intend is more comprehensive and widespread than anything that Saruman attempts.

Conservatives, especially Christian conservatives, who valorize Tolkien sooner or later have to come to terms with the fact that his conservatism views with suspicion, even hostility, the cult of industrial progress and unfettered consumerism that is uncritically embraced by contemporary conservatism (see, for example, Will, George F.).

David Brooks has a good column today about Rick Santorum and his socially conservative campaign. In it, he makes an important and often overlooked point about the cultural differences between the GOP Establishment and the people who are their most loyal voters. Excerpt:

The Republican Party is the party of the white working class. This group — whites with high school degrees and maybe some college — is still the largest block in the electorate. They overwhelmingly favor Republicans.

It’s a diverse group, obviously, but its members generally share certain beliefs and experiences. The economy has been moving away from them. The ethnic makeup of the country is shifting away from them. They sense that the nation has gone astray: marriage is in crisis; the work ethic is eroding; living standards are in danger; the elites have failed; the news media sends out messages that make it harder to raise decent kids. They face greater challenges, and they’re on their own.

The Republicans harvest their votes but have done a poor job responding to their needs. The leading lights of the party tend to be former College Republicans who have a more individualistic and even Randian worldview than most members of the working class. Most Republican presidential candidates, from George H.W. Bush to John McCain to Mitt Romney, emerge from an entirely different set of experiences.

Rick Santorum, as Brooks says, really does come from a Catholic working class background — and it shows in his legislative record (Brooks says, “While in Congress, he was a leader in nearly every serious piece of antipoverty legislation”). The cultural left absolutely despises Santorum for his conservative beliefs on same-sex marriage, which he has, alas, poorly articulated in the past. Santorum has also been harsh on Wall Street culture. Unfortunately, he is a hyper-hawk, as TAC’s Daniel Larison has mercilessly but helpfully chronicled. 

Nevertheless, I do strongly agree with Brooks that Santorum “represents sensibility and a viewpoint that is being suppressed by the political system.” Back in 2005, the Pew political typology indicated that the least representative viewpoints on the American spectrum were those most people identify as generally “liberal” and generically “conservative.” The great center of American politics, according to Pew’s finding, is socially conservative but economically “liberal” in the sense of being more or less skeptical of laissez-faire capitalism, and more open to a role for government in public life. Why is it being “suppressed”? I think part of the explanation is that the people who give money to both parties, and those who are most active in partisan causes, come from the extremes. Another part of the explanation is that Republicans and Democrats have gerrymandered Congressional districts such that the kinds of candidates who come out of them have a built-in reason to hew to partisan orthodoxies.

Plus, our media discourage complex thought; a decade ago, when I used to be on cable news channels from time to time, it was deeply frustrating how unwilling those programs were to facilitate an actual exchange of ideas. You were not expected to listen to your opponent and respond thoughtfully; you were only expected to listen to your opponent for the cue that it was time to start talking, repeating your predetermined talking points. That’s the sort of thing that made for a good guest in the Crossfire-ization of cable news. In turn, this teaches viewers to see politics as tribal warfare, and to consider the other guy’s point of view only as something to be crushed.

So you get a guy like Santorum, or Huckabee, or Buchanan, and nobody really knows what to make of them. Remember how the GOP establishment media went after Huckabee as if he were some sort of hayseed, simply because he questioned the immaculate conception of finance and big business? Similarly with Buchanan. In a related way (though he’s a rather different case), this is what they’re doing with Ron Paul, who doesn’t fit neatly into the prepared categories.

I find Santorum’s foreign policy views far too radical and wrongheaded for my taste, but I would be quite pleased if Santorum and Paul did well tonight, if only because I would very much like to see a kind of conservative politics that has more to do, broadly, with Catholic social teaching than with the College Republicans. Plus, as Brooks pithily puts it, referring to the likely November showdown between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney:

The country doesn’t want an election that is Harvard Law versus Harvard Law.

That’s what it’s almost certainly going to get. Why does it have to be that way?

New England’s economic decline is linked to Silicon Valley’s rise,all because of the outcome of an argument 50 years ago. More:

The present-day fate of New England goes back to an argument at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the ’50s about that material from which semiconductors, well understood locally from wartime work on radar, were to be manufactured in the years ahead. Dogma held that it would be germanium; silicon crystals would be too difficult to purify to the required degree.  Robert Noyce, an MIT-trained physicist, thought otherwise.

When MIT declined to tenure him, Noyce decamped, first to Philadelphia, then to the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, in Mountain View, California.  Silicon leadership went with him – to Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, each of which he co-founded, And eventually to Silicon Valley, centered around San Jose, which the two firms spawned. New England never developed a vigorous industry in silicon chips. By the end of the ’70s, savvy venture capitalists had begun migrating to Palo Alto’s Sand Hill Road.

(H/T: The Browser)

Patrick Deneen hits on one of the laziest aspects of what passes for conservative thinking in the US today: the assumption that opportunities to increase consumption are synonymous with conservatism and conservative goals. George Will has written a column celebrating how fracking is a turd in the punch bowl of progressives, who supposedly cannot stand American abundance. Deneen:

Will can barely contain his glee at news of poor sales forecasts for the all-electric car, the Volt, while jumping up and down inside at the news that sales of SUVs are up.

What Will does not really disclose is why these facts should spell a victory for “conservatism.” Yes, he does indeed claim that the waning prospect of tight energy supplies will deprive the “progressives” of their nefarious schemes to discourage American consumption. That may or may not be the case (i.e., I find it more questionable that “progressives” actually seek to discourage energy consumption, as much as I find it questionable that “conservatives” seek to discourage sexual consumption); but, granting him his claim for the moment, in what way does an energy-rich future bode well for conservative values?

If we were to chronologically chart the decline of “family values,” communal norms, educational attainment, religious standards, civility, along with the rise of a culture of consumption, rootlessness, anomie, relativism, a 24-hour culture of distraction, titillation, highly-sexualized and violent imagery, sexualized childhood and adolescent adulthood – and juxtapose such a chart tracking the rising consumption of fossil fuels in America (and the West) from the late 19th-century in a largely unbroken ascending line to today, we might have cause at least to wonder whether fossil fuels have contributed to something more worrisome even than global warming (such a thesis would infuriate the Left and Right alike, I wager). Moreover, if we were to place the latter chart alongside another chart tracing the growth of central government, we should not be surprised to discover a similar ascending rise in fossil fuel consumption and numbers of bureaucrats living in and around Washington D.C.

Correlation, of course, is not the same thing as causation, and I’m sure Deneen knows that. The point he’s making here is that it has apparently never occurred to Will to consider whether or not the centering of American economic life around oil consumption might have brought with it problems that ought to concern conservatives and the things they value, or ought to value. As we have recently discussed on this blog, the discovery of vast fields of natural gas in western Pennsylvania shale deposits might be both a blessing and a curse — a blessing, because it enables a region that has been economically depressed for a long time to enjoy prosperity, which includes being able to provide jobs so young generations don’t have to move away; and a curse insofar as the extraction of these gas deposits could poison water and the land. Will can only see wealth coming out of the ground, and the alleged ire of progressives; ergo, the fracking boom is unambiguously terrific.

Since when did conservatism come to associate itself with increasing abundance for its own sake, with no attention paid to the costs of our immoderation? Does Will see it as a victory for conservatism when a morbidly obese family piles food onto its plate at the cheap buffet? Was it a conservative triumph when Americans who didn’t have much savings got mortgages for big houses they couldn’t afford? That’s the logic of Will’s thinking in this column.

A couple of weeks ago, a conservative writer wrote critically of Newt Gingrich, saying that “He disdains the central conservative virtue, prudence… .” That conservative writer was George F. Will, whose respect for prudence is apparently inconstant and circumstantial.

In Atlanta, there’s some fierce criticism over a blunt new ad campaign targeting childhood obesity. From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Using tools such as television commercials and billboards late this year, the campaign has offered stark black-and-white images of overweight children sharing bold and often uncomfortable messages. In one, a child named Bobby sadly asks his obese mother, “Mom, why am I fat?” His mother simply sighs heavily and the commercial fades out.

Some public health experts, however, say the approach could be counterproductive when it comes to childhood obesity. The commercials and billboards do not give families the tools they need to attack the problem, some critics say. Others say the images will simply further stigmatize obesity and make it even less likely for parents and children to acknowledge that their weight is unhealthy and should be addressed.

Children’s Healthcare decided on the approach after finding in research that 50 percent of people surveyed did not recognize childhood obesity as a problem and 75 percent of parents with overweight or obese kids did not see their children as having a weight issue. Across Georgia, which ranks second nationally for childhood obesity, about 1 million children are overweight or obese, according to data compiled by the campaign

Think about that: half the people surveyed don’t think childhood obesity is a problem, and three out of four parents with fat kids don’t think their kids have weight problems. That’s stunning. Children’s Healthcare tells the AJC that they decided they had to do something radical because they’re seeing children with heart problems, diabetes, and — get this — even needing knee replacements because they are so obese.

You can’t blame kids for this. You blame the adults — parents and caretakers — who are not doing their jobs. But it’s the kids who have to live with the stigma, and not just the stigma, but the chronic health problems that come with obesity. As someone who was an obese child, the ads make me uncomfortable. Fat kids don’t need to have the fact of their fatness pointed out to them; they know every single minute of every single day that they’re fat. But childhood obesity is a huge crisis, and we adults are not doing right by our children. What’s it going to take to wake us up? More from the story:

Gayla Prestage Grubbs, whose 15-year-old son is working hard to address a weight problem, said she supports the tone of the advertisements.

“They are in your face,” she said. “But I know, for me, I was not offended by it. I was more like — oh, my gosh, that’s right.”

Children getting knee replacements. That’s sick. Childhood obesity rates have tripled over the last 30 years, and the rate of chronic childhood illnesses is almost four times the rate it was a generation ago. This is not just one of those things, nor is it a crisis that can be addressed by everyone pretending that it’s merely an aesthetic issue. I don’t want my kids to suffer through what I did as a fat kid, nor do I want them to have to be like me now, constantly battling my weight. As we’ve been talking about on this site, not everybody has full control over their weight, especially after reaching a certain age in life. But children? Really?

Law professor Chad Oldfeather ruminates on the meaning of his tiny Minnesota hometown, which is slowly dying. Excerpt:

The school building and the still-open theatre are now owned by nonprofits created by community members – who still care about the town – but that are struggling to find the money to keep them going.  The lone remaining grocery store has been through a couple periods of municipal ownership to keep it going.  (Some might call that socialism.  I think the folks back home would call it doing what needs to be done.)  Cindy sees how things have become and is not optimistic: “So my tears roll and my heart sinks and there goes the theatre and the school and only the Lord knows what else.”

I hope that she is wrong.  I am encouraged by the trend toward agriculture that is more local and more sustainable, and can make a persuasive case to myself that a place like Kiester that’s maintained itself through the past few decades could with just a little luck and a spot of marketing find rejuvenation.   But maybe it is just easy for me to see what I’d like to see.

Too often, in the circles I now tend to find myself in, I am part of conversations in which I hear a casual disdain for rural people.  I find the prejudice inherent in these comments every bit as misguided as the prejudices the speakers seem to imagine all rural people harbor.  No doubt there are small places where many or even most – it is never all – of the people hold views that we should rightly condemn.  But I can assure you they are not all that way, and I am skeptical of the suggestion that there are even all that many that are that way.