Less than the Least

The response to “An Evangelical Manifesto”-- which was released a week ago, with the endorsement of many prominent evangelicals, and is designed to “address the confusions and corruptions that attend the term Evangelical in the United States” and to describe the proper role of evangelicals in public life– seems to be a collective yawn. There have been yawns in the media (see Alan Jacobs’ excellent Wall Street Journal op-ed) and everyone I have queried personally has responded with an electronic yawn. But is everyone yawning for the same reason? I don’t think they are.

Many of those who would not call themselves evangelicals are likely to read the manifesto, if they do read it, to try to understand just who evangelicals are. The most obvious ways to define evangelical would be to develop a single theological definition that includes most of this jelly-like group, to attempt to identify the major subgroups of evangelicals, or both. “An Evangelical Manifesto” seems to adopt the first approach, providing a list of seven beliefs that evangelicals hold. Seven is already a bit on the cumbersome side– the best known definition, which is discussed in the first footnote of this article, has four.

Continue reading "An Evangelical Manifesto--Skeel" »

Two final stray thoughts on the Nicolas Poussin exhibit at the Met (now over, alas), without the attempt to link the art to current events:

1) According to the wall text, “Poussin studied nature less to imitate its surface effects than to understand its laws.” In the landscapes featured in the show, Poussin seems to take nature apart and reconstruct it. The landscapes and still-lifes of the post-impressionist French artist Paul Cezanne have a somewhat similar architectonic qualify, though he omits the mythological narratives. I wonder if this is part of what Cezanne meant when he said, more than two centuries after Poussin, that he intended “to do Poussin all over again from nature.”

2) In my view, the single most moving image in the entire exhibit was one of the smallest, one of Poussin’s late drawings (catalogue no.64). As Poussin’s health declined, he found it more and more difficult to hold his brush, pen or pencil steady. The drawing is a maze of vibrating lines, with two vibrating figures at the center. It’s difficult to determine who the figures are– although the drawing is called “Two Hermits in a Landscape,” I imagined them as Jesus and the woman at the well from the Bible– but somehow the entire drawing seems to move and stand still at the same time. I saw this drawing one day and Bill's most recent post (“Living Weak”) the next: they seem to me to have come from the same place.

“Live strong” is a common slogan among cancer patients. I think I understand the slogan’s appeal, and I admire the spirit that lies behind it. But it doesn’t fit my experience, and I suspect I’m not alone.

Reduced life expectancy aside, the chief consequence of stage 4 cancers—even more, the chief consequence of their treatment—is weakness, not strength. Cancer and chemotherapy, taken together, are exhausting. Walking up a flight of stairs feels to me like running a couple of miles would feel to a typical out-of-shape 50-year-old, which is what I would be if I were healthy. All mental exercises are several times harder than they used to be. Concentrating takes real effort, and most of the time, I can’t pull it off—I have to read things twice (at least) in order to understand them once. My mind is two steps behind whatever conversation I’m in; I have to scramble to keep up. I feel half dead, as though a large fraction of whatever I was is gone, never to return.

In short, I can’t live strong, because there isn’t much strength left in me. But I can live weak.

Continue reading "Living Weak--Stuntz" »

Making my way through the splendid “Poussin and Nature” exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York yesterday, I kept thinking about a comment Jed Perl, the New Republic’s art critic, had made in his review of the show. “At a time when the world around us, political or economic or cultural, seems more disheartening than it has been in at least a generation,” he wrote, “there is something thrilling about Poussin’s conviction that the discipline of painting can make life a little easier to bear.” This statement stayed with me, for two reasons: I couldn’t disagree more about the current political environment, and I never would have thought of Poussin as a painter who would speak to our current condition. Having seen the paintings, I too found them oddly relevant, but I’m still inclined to see the political glass as half full.

Continue reading "Nicolas Poussin and the New Morning in American Politics--Skeel" »

I’m not an economist and don’t even play one on TV, so I didn’t get quite as worked up as my economist friends on Sunday when Hillary Clinton said, in defense of the gas tax holiday first dreamed up by John McCain, that there’s no need to listen to all of the economists who think it’s a wretched idea. But the fact that two of the three remaining candidates have endorsed the idea is depressing, to say the least. As the economists point out (see the succinct explanation on Brad DeLong’s blog here), because the short term supply of oil is essentially fixed, and the suspension of the tax would increase demand, gas prices might well stay right where they are. And even if they dropped a little, encouraging people to buy gas is just about the last thing we need to be doing right now.

In my view, Barack Obama deserves the kudos he’s received for declining to pander on this issue, but his proposal (also endorsed by Clinton) to tax the oil companies’ on their “excess” profits isn’t the answer either.

Continue reading "Oil Politics--Skeel" »

Three follow-up comments about evangelicals and climate change, inspired in large part by the comments to the earlier post:

1) Perhaps the biggest point of disagreement among evangelicals, which shows up in spades in the comments, can be traced to differing perceptions of the implications of accepting scientists’ warnings about climate change. For skeptics, the science is a Trojan horse paving the way for massive governmental intervention. Most envangelical environmentalists seem less worried that socialism is right around the corner. Mike Vandenbergh, a leading environmental law scholar and co-organizer of the Vanderbilt conference mentioned in the earlier post, pointed out to me that the divide among evangelicals echoes a fault-line among Americans generally: work by Dan Kahan at Yale suggests that people’s perception of the importance of climate change is closely tied to whether they think the societal response will be more governmental regulation. Those who believe that accepting the science is likely to mean lots more regulation are much less likely to credit the science.

Continue reading "More on Evangelicals and Climate Change--Skeel" »

Thanks for the kind post, David.

Many of the comments to my last post took issue with the claim that America’s enormous prison is a serious social problem, and that “pretty much everyone familiar with the justice system” agrees with that sentiment. I shouldn’t have used those words; obviously, there are reasonable and decent people who disagree with that claim.

Here’s what I should have said in that opening paragraph.

Continue reading "More on the Prison Population--Stuntz" »

I learned through the grapevine yesterday that Bill is one of a small handful of law fellows (the others are Justice Stevens and six law professors) who have just been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. This is an incredibly high honor, and couldn't have been more deserved. Congratulations, Bill.

Pretty much everyone—Republican or Democrat, right or left—familiar with America’s criminal justice system agrees that our prison population is far too large. The data are familiar: Adjusted for population, imprisonment has quintupled in the last thirty-five years. As of 2001 (America’s prison population has grown since then), the average incarceration rate in EU countries was 87 per 100,000 population. In the U.S., the comparable figure was nearly 700. (Link here) The black incarceration rate is several times higher than that.

Those numbers represent a social catastrophe. Who made it so? Who is responsible for the now-famous “punitive turn” in American criminal justice?

Continue reading "Who is Responsible for America's Swollen Prison Population?--Stuntz" »

Almost a year into the subprime crisis, we still haven’t seen any major reforms. The Enron and WorldCom scandals six years ago, by contrast, prompted sweeping reforms in Congress and on Wall Street. Why the difference?

I increasingly think the most important difference is the lack of a clear villain– a person and company that serve as a posterchild for everything that is wrong and needs to be fixed with American finance.

Continue reading "Where's a Real Villain When You Need One--Skeel" »