By their fruits ye shall know them ...

An excellent blogger and commentator from the Christian point of view is public theologian. He also contributes to Christian Alliance for Progress.

His most recent essay anticipates "Justice" Sunday II in the light of Abu Ghraib. The contradictions and moral poverty of the "Christian" right are summarized in this paragraph:

These [fundamentalists] are the people that want to outlaw a couple of lesbians living together quietly in suburbia but can’t find their voices to criticize the sodomizing of children at Abu Ghraib, according to Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, the videos of which the Pentagon is keeping from the American people under the guise of “national security.” They will sue every government body in the land in order to see to it that a high school valedictorian can preach a sermon rather than give an address at his high school graduation, but they don’t have anything to say about the muzzling of prisoners who have been held now for years without an attorney or any contact with their families. They complain about the smut in our culture but had no comment when it was revealed to the world that female US interrogators were questioning devout Muslim prisoners clad in bras and panties, during which they would smear fake menstrual blood on detainees’ faces. The fundamentalists are outraged over the mistreatment of Christians in nations around the world, and rightly so I might add, but don’t seem to have much of a problem with the beatings and murders of Muslims in our own care, such as the murder of an Iraqi General detailed in the Washington Post last week, who was zipped up inside a sleeping bag and beaten to death.

Comes to mind what anyone with reasonable Southern Baptist Sunday School experience is familiar: "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are ... Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. ... You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel."

Hendrik Hertzberg

I saw a book signing on CSpan2 last night with HH. He's an editor with The New Yorker Magazine, and he appears maybe 30% of the issues in "Talk of the Town". His columns are consistently stimulating. Hertzberg is, as nearly as I can tell, a secular kind of guy; however, he worked in the White House during the Carter administration, and at one point during the program he responded to a question about Carter by saying that he was always impressed by the integrity of Carter, but partcularly by him in the years following the Carter administration.

At another point he was commenting on the general state of affairs in the country, and whether the United States could retrieve what it has lost during the Bush years so far. He was hopeful, I think, but on the other hand he was also pessimistic. Then he said something which I found particularly striking -- it was something like he was most discouraged about what he felt was a "moral collapse" of the country (he definitely used those two words). This collapse, he said, was epitomized in three ways: first, by the acceptance of a fraudulent or stolen 2000 election (I'm not sure which of those words he used or if he used another word to describe the election, but I remember the intent of his statement); second, by the war in Iraq; and third, by the economic changes in the U.S., notably the subsidies of the rich as epitomized by the movement to eliminate the inheritance tax.

It is refreshing to me to hear someone talk about real "values" -- at least the values that are most relevant to the life of the country as such.