In the World

Last week I joined the chorus of those who wished for a bit more from the president's endorsement of same-sex marriage. Among those who were more unambiguously enthusiastic, I found E. J. Graff's later post pretty compelling.

Early this week, the same video kept popping up on my Facebook wall. It's from a press conference in Greensboro, at which North Carolina NAACP president William Barber (whom the Century profiled here) made a crucial point: "How do you feel, personally, about same-sex marriage?" is the wrong question. The right question is about equal rights under the U.S. Constitution and federal law. By midweek, my Facebook wall was overwhelmed with comments (and links) about President Obama's decision to give the right answer to the wrong question.

I probably shouldn't be surprised if I learned that, when N. T. Wright isn't busy exegeting, episcopating or writing best-sellers, he throws 100-mph fast balls and makes award-winning beer. But for some reason I was a bit startled to find out that he's not only a Dylan fan but a pretty decent singer, too.

Here are some things I read recently but didn't get around to blogging about.

"Between now and Election Day," writes Peter Beinart, "anti-Mormonism is going to be the Democratic Party’s constant temptation for one simple reason: there are votes in it." I'm not sure I'd call it the party's "constant temptation," but Beinart is certainly right that bigotry against Mormons remains a politically potent force in the U.S., and that the Democrats aren't above exploiting it. But is Beinart right that the Democrats have a bigger religious bigotry problem here than the Republicans do?

For the last couple years, congressional Republicans have often acted as if the only point of governing is to do less of it. Not so with the Senate minority leadership this week.

Still haven't read Ross Douthat's book, which I anticipate having some problems with. I have, however, been following with interest his conversation with William Saletan. Saletan, skeptical about some but not all of Douthat's views, asks good questions, and Douthat gives thoughtful replies. I think this comment from Douthat is generally a wise one: A quick word on your “if it feels good, don’t do it” distillation of my message. We can dig into this more as we go, but for now I’d just point out that at various times, Christianity—and particularly my own Catholicism, the faith of carousing Irishmen, hedonistic Italians, and “give me chastity, Lord, but Lord not yet” sinners in every time and place—has been scolded for being altogether too worldly, too pleasure-loving, too forgiving of the weaknesses of the flesh.

Have you filed your tax return yet? If you prepared it yourself, congratulations on navigating that complex web of forms and instructions, an ongoing complexity brought to you by a strange lobby comprised of tax-preparation companies and antitax activists. Senate Republicans blocked the Buffett Rule yesterday, a sad moved surpassed in sadness perhaps only by the smallness of the proposed minimum tax itself.

Here are some things I read recently but didn't get around to blogging about.

On Wednesday, the Catholic bishops' ad hoc committee issued a strongly worded statement on religious liberty. It includes a number of specific examples of "religious liberty under attack." Over at U.S Catholic, Meghan Murphy-Gill responds to these one by one.

So it turns out that the president and first lady's tax burden for last year was only 20.5 percent. Does this make Obama a hypocrite for criticizing Mitt Romney's low tax rate? Only if he blames Romney personally for not voluntarily paying more. As I said in Romney's defense a while back, the problem isn't that presidential candidates with plenty of money aren't willing to pay their taxes. The problem is that their taxes are too low.

Skimming the NYT over the weekend, I read the following in Ross Douthat's summary of his new book: Our president embodies [America's] uncentered spiritual landscape in three ways. First, like a growing share of Americans (44 percent), President Obama changed his religion as an adult, joining Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ in his 20s after a conversion experience brought him out of agnosticism into faith. Second, he was converted by a pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose highly politicized theology was self-consciously at odds with much of historic Christian practice and belief. Finally, since breaking with that pastor, Obama has become a believer without a denomination or a church, which makes him part of one of the country’s fastest-growing religious groups — what the Barna Group calls the “unchurched Christian” bloc, consisting of Americans who accept some tenets of Christian faith without participating in any specific religious community. The third point annoyed me.

Here's an impressive and heartwarming little stunt, pulled off by filmmaker Nirvan Mullick with a big assist from the internets. But the coolest part is the creativity of the nine-year-old whose day Mullick was determined to make.

The Century's sort-by-lectionary-day tool exists primarily as a way of organizing past Living by the Word columns and Blogging toward Sunday posts in a useful way. But we also put other content there--anything from the magazine or blogs that happens to deal with a given lection in a way that could plausibly be useful to a preacher or worship planner. So, while our lectionary columnists and bloggers mostly focus on Sundays, the lectionary pages have also collected a good bit of content related to the additional holy days of the (weekly) lectionary.

Here are some things I read recently but didn't get around to blogging about: An anti-bullying session for fifth-graders, a guide for avoiding sexist campaign coverage, more.