Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 520

Why the Rahm Story Matters

Rahm Emanuel, Chicago’s tough-talking mayor who was elected to a second term just last spring, is facing a snowballing political crisis that now threatens to derail his mayoralty. The Wall Street Journal reports on the way a series of high-profile police shootings have rattled Chicago politics and undercut the Democrat’s standing with Chicago’s leftwing activists, and, increasingly, with the city as a whole:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel cut short a holiday break in Cuba amid a wave of criticism at home that isn’t letting up more than a month after the release of a video showing a Chicago police officer shooting and killing a black teenager.

The mayor’s decision to return early, his administration said, came partly in the wake of a police shooting over the weekend that claimed the lives of two people—prompting calls for the city to improve how it responds to calls involving mentally ill people.Mr. Emanuel was already dealing with fallout from footage of Laquan McDonald being shot and killed in October 2014 that has left the mayor’s approval rating in the teens in a recent poll. Protests calling for his resignation have become commonplace.

But this is much more than a story about a politician’s career struggles. What’s happening in Chicago is an earthquake that points to the escalating crisis of governability for blue cities across the United States. There are at least six dimensions to this crisis.

First, the Windy City’s economic strength over the last generation was facilitated, in part, by a sharp decline in violent crime. Experts differ as to why crime fell, but aggressive policing probably played a role, just as it did in cities across the United States. Yet that aggressive policing also led to more confrontations between cops and civilians, and contributed to the development of a culture and ethos on the force that made civilian deaths more likely. It’s unclear how far Chicago (or any other American city) can go in dismantling the structure of aggressive law enforcement without seeing a resurgence of the crime levels that once ravaged urban communities across the country and sparked an intense political backlash.Second, the police problem is partly an offshoot of an even wider and more intractable problem: the consequences of public sector unions and life tenure for city employees. There is a harsh conflict of interest between the city’s employees and the city’s voters. The pension crisis, now forcing Chicago (and many other cities and states across the country) to raise pension contributions at the cost of reduced spending on vital city functions, is a big part of the problem. The city’s bloated pension obligations have already forced Emanuel to make severe education cuts. It will continue to force cuts in city services in various cities, making it harder and harder for mayors to govern, and increasing the antagonism among various constituencies.Third, there is a public sector quality problem as well. It is in the interests of public sector unions to shelter employees from oversight and threats to their job security, regardless of how well they perform. Teachers don’t want to be evaluated on the basis of student achievement and they don’t want subpar teachers to lose their jobs. The police feel the same way. So do sanitation workers, firefighters, and clerks in City Hall. While there are plenty of hard-working, committed people across the municipal workforce, the unions in which that workforce is organized have made it progressively more difficult for the city to manage its employees. That naturally leads to a decline in the quality of services rendered and to a corruption of the culture inside the workforce—again, despite the efforts of the many teachers, cops, and other public servants who continue to do their jobs with integrity.Fourth, cities today face entrenched cost problems that make economic growth both uneven and fragile. This is partly due to the rising cost of big city governance. It’s harder, for example, to repair the complex infrastructure on which a modern city depends than it is to keep the sewer and road systems running in a small town or a suburb. Those expensive services require high taxes and other costs, driving many kinds of employers away. Partly as a result, cities are losing their middle class populations. In many cities, inequality is rising, the middle class is shrinking, the power of public sector unions over the politics system is growing, and the population is becoming more divided by class antagonisms and ethnic identity politics without a strong middle class to anchor them.Fifth, native-born citizens, whatever their race, are moving out of many cities, as immigrants move in. This exacerbates income inequality, as in most cases first-generation immigrants (often without good English language skills or higher educational credentials) earn less than the native-born. It also exacerbates tensions between the unionized city work force that reflects the ethnic make-up of the previous generation and the more diverse incoming population. Immigration creates tension between the dominant ethnic groups in city politics (African-Americans in many cities) and newcomers, whether immigrants or highly-skilled affluent people drawn to the remaining dynamic, high-wage sectors of the local economy and to the richer cultural life that cities provide.Sixth, cities have long been ruled by political machines, defying the efforts of progressives earlier in the 20th century to tame them. These machines can make good governance difficult, as the cases of Detroit and New Orleans, show. But even in a city like Chicago, where the machine has attempted to govern the city with attention to the promotion of economic development (as opposed to the suicidal emphasis on short-term looting that long characterized cities like Detroit), the ethnic and economic polarization of the city is making it harder for the machine to function “intelligently.” The imperatives of good governance and urban development push in one direction, but the forces that push toward short-termism, ethnic demagoguery, and fiscal irresponsibility are getting stronger.It’s getting harder and harder, then, for American cities, even successful ones like Chicago and New York, to manage their affairs well. These are the fault lines beneath the surface of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago, and they aren’t going away. To the contrary, they are likely to produce more frequent and more destructive quakes over time.The increasing fragility of blue cities and states is the biggest problem the Democratic coalition faces. Those who hope that demographic change will create a “permanent Democratic majority” need to think about arithmetic as well as demography. The numbers don’t add up for blue cities. The governing model doesn’t produce the revenue that can sustain it long-term. Making cities work—enabling them to provide necessary services at sustainable cost levels while achieving economic development that rebuilds the urban middle class—is the biggest challenge the Democratic Party faces. As Mayor Emmanuel is learning, that is a daunting task.

Who Gets Abortions? Not Who You’d Think from Watching TV

Even as abortions in America are becoming increasingly concentrated among low-income women, especially African Americans and Hispanics (graph h/t Ross Douthat), TV shows tend to depict abortion as a choice made mostly by affluent whites, according to a new study. From NPR (h/t Reihan Salam):

Characters on television who consider or obtain abortions don’t reflect the demographics of American women who choose them or their reasons for doing so, according to a recent analysis from researchers at the University of California, San Francisco.

The group looked at all depictions of abortion on U.S. television shows from 2005 to 2014. This included both network television shows and other distributors, including Netflix and Showtime. They found that TV characters who had abortions were younger, whiter, wealthier and less likely to be raising children than the average American woman who has an abortion. […]Nearly 90 percent of the fictional characters were white, versus 36 percent in real life. About 30 percent of American women who choose abortions are black and about 25 percent are Latino. Fictional characters were also far less likely to be parents — about 15 percent versus more than 60 percent in real life.

These findings could be spun in several ways. Pro-choice advocates, for example, might argue that abortion rights are important precisely because they help protect vulnerable women from the economic shock of an unplanned pregnancy, and that the popular culture’s failure to convey this is harmful to the pro-choice cause. This appears to be more or less the interpretation of Gretchen Sisson, the study’s author, who suggests that if TV shows did a better job depicting “the reality of abortion care,” the public might be more skeptical of pro-life policies.

However, it’s also possible to imagine social conservatives making the opposite case. Pro-lifers have long maintained that America’s abortion regime has undertones of eugenics—that it is a kind of hidden violence with a disparate impact on poor and minority populations. TV’s depiction of abortion primarily as a selective practice undertaken by enlightened elites—rather than as an act of despair undertaken by people in vulnerable communities with few other options—might obscure some of the more uncomfortable implications of America’s abortion regime. And the way TV depicts abortion, the pro-lifers could argue, also unrealistically reinforces the “my body, my choice” framing of the abortion debate that is popular among pro-choice activists.Either way, the study highlights the fact that with abortion, as with so many other issues related to sex and love and family and religion, there is a significant gap between popular culture and social reality.

Why Russia and China Aren’t Friends

While Russia and China constantly toast their deep friendship, their ambitions and their interests—except for a common interest in seeing U.S. power checked—are not aligned. Here’s a big reason why: China’s attempt to build a “New Silk Road” will, if successful, vastly expand China’s influence across Central Asia. The Washington Post reports that China has been building infrastructure in the region, which Moscow considers its “back yard” and which is home to ex-Soviet states, some with large Russian populations:

Slowly but surely, a four-lane highway is beginning to take shape on the sparsely populated Central Asian steppe. Soviet-era cars, trucks and aging long-distance buses weave past modern yellow bulldozers, cranes and towering construction drills, laboring under Chinese supervision to build a road that could one day stretch from eastern Asia to Western Europe […]

Here the oil and gas pipelines, as well as the main roads and the railway lines, always pointed north to the heart of the old Soviet Union. Today, those links are beginning to point toward China.“This used to be Russia’s back yard,” said Raffaello Pantucci, director of International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London, “but it is increasingly coming into China’s thrall.”

Nor is this the only big question on which the two giant powers disagree. Perhaps the biggest: China likes oil prices low, and Russia desperately wants the price high. It’s worth recalling that even during the height of the Cold War, when China and Russia might have been allies on ideological grounds, they hugged only when necessary.

Vladimir Putin’s current course of hostility to the West actually involves him in a two-front geopolitical contest that he and Russia cannot win: The Kremlin is estranged from the West, and facing surging Chinese influence in the East and South.

How Cheap Oil Could Help America in 2016

A barrel of oil is nearly $80 cheaper today than it was 18 months ago, and that price plunge has produced some predictable winners and losers. Big energy importers like Japan are quite happy to snatch up cheap oil and gas in today’s oversupplied market, while petrostates like Russia or any of OPEC’s 13 member countries are unsurprisingly struggling with large budget deficits as they contend with the bearish market.

But for the United States, which in recent years has seen oil production boom thanks to upstart shale producers, the question is a little less straightforward. Cheap oil is obviously painful to the American oil industry, but outside of those companies extracting crude and the firms offering them support, bargain hydrocarbons are a welcome development. As the WSJ reports, the U.S. economy could start really seeing the positive effects of cheap oil in 2016:

The sharp decline in crude prices in the latter half of 2014, and its attendant drop in gasoline prices, was supposed to be a boon for the economy in 2015. Alas, it wasn’t. Instead, sharp declines in oil-patch investment cut into economic growth and people opted to hang onto much of the cash they were saving at the pump rather than spend it elsewhere. . . This time around, those drops in energy costs should provide more of an economic boost.

One reason is that the cuts in oil and gas industry investment spending have been so deep there isn’t nearly as much to trim.  […]There is likely more pain ahead for oil-industry-dependent workers, but as with oil and gas industry investment, the cuts in the year ahead may not be as deep as the ones in the year now coming to a close. Concurrently, more of the money other Americans have been saving on gasoline may flow through into spending.

When oil prices first started dipping in late summer last year, analysis suggested that it would be a net positive for the U.S. economy. Those gains have been somewhat slow to materialize, but the thinking now is that the oil industry doesn’t have as far to fall in the future. Therefore, there isn’t much more bargain crude can do to offset the boost either that consumers are getting from cheap gasoline or that many U.S. companies are getting from such low prices for such an important input.

There’s no evidence that the global glut in oil is going to go away next year, so it looks like 2016 will be year two of cheap oil. That’s causing headaches for producers around the world, but for the American economy, it could be a powerful, positive force.

Tokyo and Seoul Reach Agreement on “Comfort Women”

A huge step forward: Japan and South Korea have reached an agreement in the “comfort women” dispute, an issue no one expected them to resolve (ourselves included). The NYT:

The agreement, in which Japan made an apology and promised an $8.3 million payment, was intended to remove one of the most intractable logjams in relations between South Korea and Japan, both crucial allies to the United States. The so-called comfort women have been the most painful legacy of Japan’s colonial rule of Korea, which lasted from 1910 until Japan’s World War II defeat in 1945.

The Japanese and South Korean foreign ministers, announcing the agreement in Seoul, said each side considered it a “final and irrevocable resolution” of the issue.The deal won praise from the governing party of President Park Geun-hye of South Korea but was immediately criticized as insufficient by some of the surviving former sex slaves as well as opposition politicians in South Korea, where anti-Japanese sentiments run deep.

This is really good news, and a big win for the Obama administration, which has been pushing Tokyo and Seoul to put this issue behind them. Finances turned out to be the smallest part of the problem: Japan’s offer of one billion yen a year is less than $10 million. The bigger obstacles were around tangled questions of honor and law: Japan doesn’t want to open the door to endless litigation and large claims for other issues related to the conduct of Japanese forces and companies during the war. South Korea, for its part, wants evidence of sincere repentance for horrific war crimes and some kind of reckoning not only for the war but for a cruel colonial occupation up until the war.

And not all of the obstacles have been completely resolved. As the quote above notes, the surviving women themselves are split on the issue, and reactions from South Korean NGOs associated with the surviving comfort women were harshly negative. Everything now depends on the ability of Korean government to sell the deal at home. It won’t be easy and the agreement may still fall apart if South Korean public opinion revolts.Better relations between key U.S. allies is a major goal, and both negotiators and the Obama administration deserve congratulation. Moreover, the deal will be causing some unhappiness in Beijing. But this story isn’t over. If the agreement fails to win over the South Korean public, the result could be deeper estrangement between the two countries. The Japanese will resent Korea and Korean politicians will fear making any further moves toward Japan.

The Hinge of Fate

Yesterday, we looked at why the Gospels make such a point of saying that Jesus was born of a virgin. But there is more to the story than the absence of a biological father. What kind of home was Jesus born into? Who were Mary and Joseph, this couple who go to Bethlehem, can’t get a room, have the baby, and “wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger.” What is that supposed to be about?

To begin with the actual scene, “manger” is the French word meaning “to eat”; a manger is a place where you put hay and similar things for the animals in a barn to eat. The swaddling clothes were used to wrap up the limbs of newborns so they wouldn’t injure themselves by moving too much. There are some today who believe there are benefits in this ancient and widespread practice, but it would be extremely unusual to hear contemporary Christians, even fundamentalists, arguing that this was the “biblical” way to treat infants and that every baby ought to get the same treatment. Compared to other world religions, Christianity is much less wedded to a set of cultural practices or ritual observances defined by its holy book; the “imitation of Christ” has almost always been understood as an imitation of His moral qualities rather than as a call to eat what He ate or wear what He wore.Jesus was born in a shed, not at home, not in a palace, not in a hospital. (Not that anyone was born in a hospital in those days, or that any mothers had anesthesia. Something we affluent moderns in societies often forget about history is that until the 19th century, childbirth everywhere was incredibly painful and incredibly dangerous. Women giving birth entered a dark and terrifying tunnel of danger and pain whose presence shaped the life of rich and poor alike in ways that people living in modern, technological society can never fully comprehend, though many women in poor countries understand it all too well.)At one level, the whole born in a manger thing is a message about the equality of everyone in God’s sight. He didn’t send Jesus into a palace. But when enthusiastic preachers talk about this scene as attesting to God’s identification with the poor, they get it wrong and they miss the real point of the story.Mary and Joseph weren’t staying in the stable because they were poor. Poor people didn’t travel. The problem was that the inn was all sold out; Mary and Joseph happened to turn up at a “peak travel” time without a reservation. The inn did the best it could by them, but with all the regular rooms committed, management could only offer the use of an outbuilding. There would have been plenty such in those days built to store supplies and house animals; between the animals that the inn would use for work or food and those accompanying travelers, the various sheds and barns attached to an inn would see a lot of use.If the Christmas story had taken place in the United States today, the story might read that the hotel was full, so management found Joseph and Mary a spot in the security office of the parking garage. When the baby was born, they would have wrapped it in Pampers and laid it on the desk.So far as we can tell, Jesus was born into something that corresponds, sort of, to the modern American concept of the “middle class”: more affluent than the average worker (and much better off than the poor), but not particularly fancy or polished. The Family had connections; Mary’s cousin Elizabeth was married to a priest who participated in the temple rituals. The Family had money to travel as far as Bethlehem and could have paid for a room if there had been one. Joseph was a carpenter, a skilled workman at a time when such work was more valued than it is now. No one would mistake this Family for a family of privilege or wealth, but in their home Jesus would be unlikely to go hungry and would have the chance to learn to read and get an education. This is a living standard well above that of most people of the day.And there was the whole house of David thing. The New Testament makes a big point of identifying Jesus with the line of the ancient Israelite king. David, the Goliath-killing shepherd of Jewish folk tales and Biblical narratives, was the great national hero. He was the long-ago ruler who established Jerusalem as the national capital and founded the dynasty of Jewish kings who would reign for about 400 years, before the city fell to Babylon around 600 years before Jesus’ birth. Joseph’s membership in the house of David didn’t mean he was a pretender to the throne. It certainly didn’t make him a member of Jewish nobility or give him any titles or estates. The house of David by then had been out of power longer than it had ever ruled Jerusalem, and when the Jews had risen in a successful revolt against the Greeks, it had been the house of the Maccabees, not the house of David, that had led the new revolutionary war. Being a member of the house of David might be like someone in America today who can trace the family tree back to some English king in the Wars of the Roses or before. It is more a conversation piece and bit of family lore than a fact of any day-to-day significance.It’s very hard to make comparisons between such different eras and societies, but one way for Americans to think about Jesus’ place in the life of His time would be to think of Joseph as something like Joe the Plumber. He’s a contractor with a small construction business from a town nobody has heard much about in a state conceited people look down on: Possum Holler, Arkansas, maybe, or Smallville, Kansas. There might be a family story about some kind of genealogical connection with George Washington through Martha. The town librarian is an amateur genealogist and actually thinks there is something in it, but nobody, including Joe the Plumber, much cares.Jesus came from a place in His society that gave Him the opportunities to learn about the cultural and intellectual history of His people and to acquire the basic intellectual skills of His milieu (though there is no evidence that He learned Latin or anything beyond at most a very basic Greek), but there’s no trust fund attached, no legacy at an Ivy League college, and there is not one word in the Bible that suggests that anyone anywhere was ever impressed with His background. He was a smart hick—not a tramp or a hobo, but He had a bad accent and the wrong friends.This doesn’t please the liberation theology folks, but Jesus doesn’t seem to have been one of the “truly” dispossessed. He was an outsider, but He wasn’t particularly poor.Given this perspective, some of the “poor baby Jesus” carols and sermons leave me cold. There’s a folk song that always rubs me the wrong way:

Jesus, Jesus rest your head

You have got a manger bed.

All the evil folks on earth

Sleep in feathers at their birth.

No: Christians think there is good and evil mixed up in all people, rich and poor. And while God has a special love and concern for the poor, He’s not a trust-fund liberal who simultaneously romanticizes the poor and condescends to them. He takes the poor and the marginalized seriously, and judges us all by how we treat them, but God’s idea of poverty is complex. We are all poor in His eyes, lacking things much more necessary than money, and God doesn’t sentimentalize anyone.

Jesus seems, then, to have come from an environment that gave Him the intellectual and social resources to argue on equal terms with the powerful and well-connected — but that also gave Him the ability to connect with the poor and the marginalized and to see them as real people. Not a bad mix, really.The Christmas story is one of those lilies people can’t help trying to gild. We’d like this to be pretty and sentimental tale. But today, the third day after the present orgy beneath the tree, is also the day that the traditional liturgical calendar tries to slap us into serious reflection on the meaning of the event, jolting us out of our turkey comas and eggnog overdoses with an unforgettably grim story.Church calendars mark December 28 as Holy Innocents’ Day, the day we remember the deaths of the babies in Bethlehem who were murdered at Herod’s command. Matthew is our source for the story (Matthew 2:1-18), and the Three Wise Men are the unwitting bearers of doom. The Three Kings or Wise Men who famously gifted the baby Jesus with gold, frankincense, and myrrh also set off a train of events that resulted in the most chilling story of mass murder in the New Testament.The Three Wise Men mentioned in the Bible seem to have been astrologers; it might be better to call them “astrologists” because astrology in their time combined elements that today we would call science with what today would be called balderdash. Keeping track of the tides, the seasons, and the calendar were all things wise men used to do. Keeping track of and learning to predict the movements of the sun and the moon helped early civilizations forecast tides and winds (especially because the seasonal trade winds and monsoons of the Indian and Arabian oceans were vital to trade). The wise men (and women) of old made a great intellectual leap when they realized that the movement of heavenly bodies influenced events on the earth. They may not have understood gravity, but they figured out that there was some kind of connection between the movement of the moon and the state of the tides. If they also believed that the same invisible rays from the stars and the planets that brought the changing seasons and raised the tides controlled the tides of human history too, they are not the only intellectuals in world history to have pressed a theory past its breaking point or to have assumed that correlation and causation are the same.In any case, the Wise Men are said to have been “following a star” that led them to the place where Jesus was born. There are many rival theories about what exactly the Wise Men were following and when, but based on what we know about astrological thinking, it’s possible to make some reasonable conjectures. The sun, the moon, and the five planets visible to the unaided human eye (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) appear to move in two basic ways. They move from east to west across the sky every day and night, but they also appear to move against the backdrop of the stars and constellations that make up the background of the night sky. The sun seems to move through the 12 signs of the zodiac over a year; the moon makes the same journey every month. The visible planets are more complicated and (due to the way their orbits around the sun affect their position as seen from earth) they seem to be moving erratically through the zodiac. Sometimes they go “forward” in the same direction as the sun and the moon, sometimes they seem to stand still, and sometimes they seem to move the other way.Additionally, because the sun, the moon, and the visible planets all seem to move at different speeds, they often form “conjunctions” and come very close together. The most dramatic is an eclipse in which the moon gets between the sun and the earth, but conjunctions involving two or more planets in the night sky can also be striking. Astrologers from ancient times saw a special significance in these conjunctions, and the “star” that the Wise Men were following is generally thought to have been a conjunction of planets associated with royalty and the Jewish nation that appeared to be moving westward through the night skies. The Wise Men followed this “star” on its westward journey until they reached the lands of the Jews, where they went to visit King Herod in hope of further information.Their arrival created a stir at court. In an age when astrology was seen as a prestigious branch of science, the news that the heavens were proclaiming the birth of a potential rival to the throne was not received well.  Herod was already the King of the Jews and he had every intention of being succeeded by members of his own family. The idea that another claimant was getting born in some corner of his dominions did not please him.  Herod asked the Wise Men to return to court when they found that baby so that “he might worship him too.”While it is impossible at this distance to be certain about what happened next, it would appear that the star the Wise Men were following stopped moving in the heavens as they reached Bethlehem. Either the conjunction began to break up as the planets separated or, more dramatically, the two or more planets in the conjunction stopped their apparent movement in the heavens so that the star itself appeared to become stationary. Taking this as a sign that they had reached their goal, the Wise Men looked around Bethlehem and found that Jesus had been born at the right time in the right place.Being warned by a dream, one perhaps reinforced by a belated attack of common sense, the Wise Men quietly slipped away after their visit to Bethlehem without stopping off to tell the king exactly which child they had found. This left Herod, whose agents presumably had kept track of the general movement of this caravan of conspicuous strangers as far as Bethlehem, with no simple way to get rid of the dangerous baby. In the absence of better information, he decided to kill every child in Bethlehem less than two years of age. Better safe than sorry, he reasoned.Joseph was also warned in a dream, we are told; he and Mary took the child to Egypt and so missed Herod’s attack. Herod’s goons arrived in Bethlehem and set about their work. Where the night had recently echoed with the songs of angels to the shepherds, the streets of Bethlehem filled with the cries of mothers as their children were taken and killed.This was, Matthew tells us, the fulfillment of an ancient prediction of the prophet Jeremiah, “Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled because they are no more.”People complain about the commercialization of Christmas; maybe we should think more about the way our culture sentimentalizes and trivializes this event. The holiday isn’t just about a red-nosed reindeer’s quest for social acceptance; it is about streets red with the blood of slaughtered innocents while the Holy Family flees into exile.Get away from Christmas card sentimentality and some troubling questions come up. What kind of a God would get his own kid out of harm’s way while leaving so many other children so exposed? Why didn’t God give all the parents dreams? Or, more elegantly, why didn’t he send Herod a nice heart attack? One of the most basic questions that people quite justifiably ask about God comes into play here: What kind of God could allow such evil and catastrophic things to happen? Why are innocents slaughtered and oppressed anywhere? If God is so powerful and He loves us so much, why are the historical records, and our daily newspapers, so full of violence, evil, and oppression?The classic Christian answer to this question, and here again standard Christianity makes a lot of sense to me personally, has two parts. The first is that God made us free; He did not want a universe of sock puppets praising and obeying Him. He wanted a world, not a computer simulation.God is serious. When He made us, He meant it. We are real, and what we do counts. He has given us the freedom to be co-creators with Him of the world we live in. But having given us real freedom, He is stuck with the consequences—and so are we. Our choices are real, and they have real consequences for ourselves and for those around us. If the Germans vote for Hitler, Hitler is who they and their neighbors will get. If God is serious about our freedom, He must abide by the choices we make.God could have made a world without Herods—if he had made a world without real moral actors and autonomous beings. He could have made a G-rated, namby pamby world like “Teletubbies” where nothing really bad ever happens. But it would be a toy world, not a real place with real people in it. God chose to make us real, we use our freedom as we do, and the result is the history we all read about and the cruelties, hypocrisies, and moral failures that we all see and know.But if God must take our choices seriously, He did not and does not have to let it end there. God, Christians believe, did not abandon us to the consequences of the choices that we and other human beings have made. Instead he determined to engage with us even more deeply, to enter history himself and to transform it from within. Christians believe that God launched a complex, multi-generational rescue operation, one that is still going on today. He will not renege on His commitment to make us free and intelligent co-creators of the world, but He will not let evil and ignorance have the last word. He will not allow our mistakes, our shortcomings, and even our crimes and our atrocities to separate us from His love if there is any way at all He can reach us.The Christmas story is the moment when the rescue operation shifts into high gear. God leaves his throne, leaves heaven, and enters the world as a baby, entering the historical process himself as a human being to be shaped by human culture with all its shortcomings and limits; to share the joys, sorrows, and temptations of human life in all their bewildering complexity; and to share the vulnerability of humans to betrayal, injustice, torment, and, finally, death.God gave up everything that He had to rescue us. He ran into the burning building to pull us out. He gave up His seat in the lifeboat to make room for someone else. He was so determined to make us real that when we got in trouble, He lost Himself to find us. That is what we are celebrating at Christmas, and that is what this story is about.From the very beginning, Jesus was subject to the same kind of contingencies that affect us all. His parents traveled in a peak season; He was born in a manger. And if He was rescued from Herod, it wasn’t to live happily ever after. Years later, as an adult, Jesus would walk, purposefully and with full knowledge of what He did, toward a fate as bloody and as cruel as the one that overtook the babies of Bethlehem at Herod’s command.Right at the beginning of His life on earth, Jesus was at the place where hope and death meet. That is what childbirth was in the bad old days when doctors and midwives alike weren’t able to do all that much at the crisis of birth; death and birth were intimately linked for all human babies, and not just the Christ. Jesus emerges into history, this stinking, reeking cesspit of blood and crime and oppression in which, somehow, human love and talent and striving never quite die. Before He was through, the whole weight of history would fall upon Him.God paid an obscene price in His determination to people the world with real people and autonomous moral actors rather than sock puppets. That is what we really celebrate at Christmas. Yes, the starstruck shepherds hear the angels and gather quietly around the baby in the manger. But then the soldiers—some, perhaps, the brothers or the cousins of the shepherds in the hills—will also come to Bethlehem and do their best to kill Him. Still God came, knowing that the soldiers would get Him in the end and do their worst.Holy Innocents’ Day strips the sentimentality of the season away. This is the shock of Christmas; God’s gifts aren’t like a pair of warm mittens or a toy choo-choo train. They shake the foundations of the world. On the one hand, God gives us the terrible power of moral freedom with which we have made a hell on earth. On the other, he gives us Himself as a willing sacrifice to redeem us and bring us into an ever closer and more intimate relationship with Him. It is an unbearable, unlimited love: a flame so hot and so passionate that we can’t look directly into it or abide its presence without help.“The hopes and fears of all the years/Are met in thee tonight,” says the famous carol about the little town of Bethlehem. That is about right. The silent night of Christmas Eve soon turns into the raging grief and horror of Holy Innocents’ Day. The Christmas season encompasses both events, birth and death, hope and murder; the event we remember at this time of year, the Incarnation of God in human flesh and human history, engages the full spectrum of human life.

Iraqi Troops Retake Ramadi

The Iraqi army announced yesterday that it had successfully driven ISIS out of Ramadi, the same city where it experienced an embarrassing rout at the hands of Islamic militants only 18 months ago. Aided by U.S. air strikes, Iraqi special forces had surrounded a final set of government buildings that were being held by a handful of holdout ISIS fighters, and were clearing the area of booby traps.

The Iraqi forces successfully coordinated with coalition air power, and also showed that they had internalized months of training by U.S. advisors: The army crossed the Euphrates using pontoon bridges, and then surprised ISIS with a flanking maneuver rather than driving headlong into the city. “The enemy never thought we would do it this way,” an Iraqi army spokesman told reporters. “The enemy couldn’t contain their surprise and fell in complete confusion.”This story shows that the American-assisted war of attrition against ISIS is showing results. Good.But the real target in the campaign against ISIS isn’t the geographical territory the group controls—it’s the power of the myth of the caliphate and the radical jihadi ideology that needs to be broken. Hammering away at ISIS on the ground helps to diminish its appeal and undermines the myth at its core, but the jihadis have been beaten before and bounced back. This is going to be a long process, and there’s a lot more fight ahead.The most serious challenge ISIS may present in the future may be what happens as the “caliphate” shrinks and then ultimately, one hopes, falls—and tens of thousands of trained fighters scurry away to continue the struggle in other places. The time to be thinking about the endgame is now. The defeat of ISIS needs to be total and crushing, and its fighters need to be captured and dealt with. Fanatical hate-crazed rapists, looters, and murderers cannot be unleashed on the world when this is done. Guantanamo isn’t big enough to hold them: What’s the plan?Additionally, the core strategic dilemma isn’t resolved. The fall of Ramadi strengthens the Shi’a government in Iraq and the Russia-Iran-Assad axis whose growing strength is the root cause of the current sectarian war. The fall of Ramadi is a setback for ISIS, but unless the U.S. and the West more generally develop a coherent regional strategy, this development makes a deepening of the sectarian war more, not less, likely.

Israel Strikes Hizballah in Syria?

Syrian news outlets reported that Israel struck Hezbollah positions around Qalamoun on Saturday, according to the Times of Israel. More:

The Israel Defense Forces declined to comment on the alleged airstrikes. Hezbollah denied Israeli raids had targeted their positions, according to Channel 2.

According to Channel 2, the IDF released a statement before the reports emerged warning that, “in the coming hours sounds of explosions may be heard in the Upper Galilee. These are initiated and controlled explosions that were planned in advance and not a security incident.”The reported strikes came less than a week after Hezbollah-allied terrorist Samir Kuntar was killed in an explosion in his Damascus home, which has been attributed to Israel. Kuntar’s death was followed within hours by rocket strikes from Lebanon on the northern Israeli city of Nahariya.Israel has warned Hezbollah not to respond to Kuntar’s death.

There is a lot of battle smoke in the Middle East these days, and it can be hard to separate the rumors from the news. But if there was an actual strike, an interesting dynamic appears to be playing out here: Israel’s strikes on Hizballah win it points in most of the Sunni world, where Hizballah is hated as stalwart Iranian ally and a participant in the atrocities of the Assad regime. And as for Hizballah, it is in a dilemma: If it fails to retaliate against the Israeli strikes, it looks weak. But if it retaliates, it gives Israel a perfect opportunity to unleash a serious series of attacks at a time when the war in Syria makes the organization stretched, exposed and vulnerable.

It’s too soon to tell what’s going on here, but this is one sideshow to the Syrian Civil War to watch closely. Israel doesn’t get many chances to attack its enemies while basking in the approval of the Sunni Arab world. 

Born of a WHAT???

It is not quite the most controversial verse in the Bible, but Luke 1:35 comes close. Mary has just replied to the angel Gabriel’s statement that she will be the mother of the Messiah with a question of her own: “How shall this be,” she says in the words of the King James Version, “seeing I know not a man?”

Don’t worry about that, says the angel. “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.”In other words, Jesus would be born of a virgin, a woman who had not, in the biblical sense, known a man.I only say this is not the most controversial verse in the Bible because the Virgin Birth of Jesus is one of the points on which most Muslims and Christians agree. In verse 21 of Sura 19 in the Quran, the angel tells Mary that although she has not known a man (verse 18) yet God will give her a child. A 2012 Pew Forum poll found that 32 percent of the world’s population is Christian and 23 percent is Muslim, so there are an awful lot of people who believe this—although of course not all Christians nor all Muslims accept the idea that their respective scriptures are literally true.  Still, since both Christianity and Islam are strongest in developing countries where more literal views of scripture are widely accepted, close to one half of the world’s population probably believes that the mother of Jesus was a virgin at the time of his birth. There aren’t many more propositions that are more widely believed than this; more people believe that Jesus was born of a virgin than believe that free markets work, that life arose through a process of biological evolution, or that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.Even if both the Quran and the New Testament agree on this point, they emphatically disagree on the theological meaning of Mary’s virginity. The specifically Christian idea of the Virgin Birth is one of the most controversial and confusing theological concepts around, and a Yuletide blog which didn’t take on the topic wouldn’t be doing its job. So: what does this concept mean, and why do Christians care that it’s true?Judging by the responses of some of my students to these ideas, the first point to clear up is this: the Virgin Birth and the Immaculate Conception are not the same thing. The Virgin Birth is the idea that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was born and that Jesus had no earthly father. The Immaculate Conception is the idea that by a special blessing from God Mary herself was born without original sin. Until the last three more skeptical centuries, the doctrine of the Virgin Birth had been accepted by virtually all Christian churches and theologians going back to Biblical times; the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, widely discussed and debated for many centuries, was officially proclaimed to be a doctrine of the Catholic Church by Pope Pius IX in 1854. Other major denominations do not accept this idea as official doctrine, although the Eastern Orthodox and some Anglicans hold the Virgin Mary in such high regard that the difference is more theoretical than practical.Some argue that the idea of the Virgin Birth reflects a lack of scientific awareness in ancient times. That seems unlikely. Although the ancient Roman world was ignorant of many scientific truths, the basic facts of life were already well known and the claim that an actual historical personage (as opposed to legendary heroes in days gone by) had been conceived without a human father met with exactly the skepticism one would expect. From the earliest times people have raised the obvious questions about the Virgin Birth. A claim that Jesus was the son of Mary and a Roman soldier Pantherus has been making the rounds since at least 180 AD; it has recently been revived by the film director Paul Verhoeven. I’m not holding my breath for a ‘scientific’ resolution of this question; I am not sure in any case how you would check for God’s DNA in a paternity test even if you could find some of Jesus’ fingernail clippings or beard trimmings to take to the lab. People have to make their own decisions about what to believe based on the evidence that already exists. I would only observe that if you believe (as I do) that God made the universe and everything in it, and if you believe that he upholds the universe and cares passionately about the well being of each individual person on earth, then to reject the Virgin Birth as a physical impossibility seems a little forced. Swallowing camels and choking on gnats, as Jesus might put it. But that’s me: this is exactly the kind of question that everyone needs to face on his or her own.In any case, for convinced Christians and curious non-Christians alike the question at hand isn’t really can we prove that the Virgin Birth did or did not occur; the question is what does the doctrine mean to those who hold it? Why do Christians think this is an important idea?Some theorize that the early Christians made up the story as a cover up. It would be scandalous to have a love child as the prophet of your religion; early Christians tried to cover up the scandal by concocting a story about the Holy Spirit. This seems weak. Inventing a story about a virgin birth in order to hush up a scandal about a sexual escapade seems a little far-fetched. Mary wasn’t an ancient movie star whose private life was the subject of widespread gossip in the tabloid press. She hadn’t posted any selfies of her pregnant, unmarried self on Facebook. Nazareth was a small town in the boondocks, and the world at large knew little and cared less about what went on there. Mary wasn’t a single mother raising her child alone; her betrothed married her in the usual way and accepted the child as his. The early church wasn’t facing a sea of rumors about Mary’s prenuptial behavior, and if it had been there are more convincing ways of scotching rumors than proclaiming a miraculous virgin birth. Saying that she and Joseph had been secretly married a few months earlier than the official date of the wedding would have been a much easier approach than to claim a unique divine miracle. If sweeping inconvenient facts about Jesus’ birth was the goal, the story about a virgin birth was the worst method ever. It’s like a student saying that her term paper is late is because she was swallowed by a whale for three days and couldn’t get wireless reception for her laptop from inside its belly.No, the story wasn’t concocted to squelch ugly rumors. The story caused the ugly rumors to circulate in the first place. The early church’s insistence on proclaiming the unique nature of Jesus’ birth more or less forced skeptics to suspect Mary’s virtue. The Church proclaimed a stark improbability as undeniable fact, and that naturally led people to ask the questions they still ask today and to develop alternative explanations for something that they well understood was, absent divine intervention, a biological impossibility.Some see the idea of the Virgin Birth as part of a wider Christian discomfort with human sexuality.  Believing that the baby Jesus didn’t get started in the usual way, in this view, is the result of wanting to keep the holy separated from the sexual.  Self-consciously ‘enlightened’ people who find it comforting to suppose that other people are much stupider than in fact they are often find this view a comforting one. Those silly Christians and their absurd sexual hang-ups!No doubt there are and always have been people whose attachment to the doctrine is rooted in feelings of anxiety or guilt about sexuality, but historically the idea of the Virgin Birth hasn’t been seen this way. In fact, the opposite is the case. The Virgin Birth doesn’t separate the holy realm of divine things from the ‘unworthy’ world of flesh and blood human beings with their messy lives. The Virgin Birth proclaims the union of human flesh and the divine; God is breaking the barriers between the divine and the human.The Virgin Birth has always been connected with two other ideas:  one about Jesus as being both God and man, and one about Mary as an individual and more broadly about the place women in the world. The early Christians thought these points were so important that they ignored the snickers and wisecracks of their unbelieving neighbors to insist on something that non-Christians thought was absurd.In the first place, they were making a statement about Jesus. By making the outrageous and inherently doubtful claim that Jesus’ mother was a virgin, the gospels are less interested in affirming Mary’s virtue than in stressing that this particular baby was unique. He wasn’t like all the other babies; he had a special relationship with God from the start.At various points during his life, Jesus would talk about this unique relationship and later theologians would make it a centerpiece of their reflection on the meaning of Jesus’ life and career. But the gospels go out of their way from the beginning to make the assertion that Jesus was not just another baby in just another manger. Jesus isn’t important just because he had a special message, the gospels are telling us. He is important because he is a special person.The gospels say nothing about what Jesus looked like; we don’t know anything at all about how tall he was, what color his hair and his eyes were, whether he looked more like James Dean or Chris Farley or, for that matter, like Yasser Arafat or Malcolm X.  But the gospel writers do tell us, in the strongest, most expressive way possible, that while Jesus was a human baby with a human Mom, he was also something more, something else.One of the most common mistakes people make about the role of Jesus in Christianity is to think that, for Christians, the most important thing about Jesus is his role as a teacher. Moses was the lawgiver of the ancient Hebrews; Confucius taught the ancient Chinese how to live; the Buddha taught his disciples how to walk a path toward enlightenment; Muhammed through revelation and example showed his followers how to submit to God’s will. Non-Christians often think that Christians think of Jesus along similar lines: as the Great Teacher who pointed out the True Way.For Christians, Jesus’ role as a teacher — significant and inspiring as his teachings may be — is the least important thing about him. Not to denigrate an important vocation, but moral teachers are anything but rare. Humanity has many inspiring teachers and prophets.  As a species, we have a talent for giving good advice and at our best, the advice that we give is very good indeed.  Love your neighbor as yourself.  Put God first.  Duty before pleasure. Don’t use people as things. Judge by realities, not superficial appearances. Be generous and merciful to the weak and the poor. Act like a parent to orphans. Treat strangers well. Don’t steal. Don’t lie. Honor your parents.It is all extremely good advice and we would all be much better off if we took it.  And the way that Jesus restated many of these eternal truths was astonishing; he has a way of coming at an old truth from a new angle that challenges even the casual student to rethink some important ideas. But, and I hate to break this to you, very often people ignore the good advice and sound counsel that is echoing in their ears. And when we do the wrong thing, it usually isn’t because we didn’t know the difference between right and wrong. Not many murderers, adulterers and thieves are acting in ignorance of simple moral truths. Very few people abuse their elderly parents and steal their money only because nobody ever took the time to explain to them that such behavior was wrong. Very few kleptocratic politicians and international narco-traffickers don’t know that their behavior is shameful. Even the nine year old bully stealing the eight year old’s lunch money knows that this is the wrong thing to do.Those who see Jesus as a moral teacher or even a prophet see him as one, perhaps the greatest, perhaps one of many, in the long line of teachers and counselors who have tried to show humanity the right path and encouraged us to walk on it.But for the gospel writers, Jesus was something much more than this.  Saying that Jesus was a moral teacher is like calling Winston Churchill a landscape painter; both statements are true (and Jesus was a much better moralist than Churchill was a painter) but in neither case does the description capture the true greatness of the person.The gospel writers believed that Jesus came here on another mission. He didn’t come here to be one more cosmic wise man telling us the right thing to do.  He came here to do something about the real problem our species faces: our failure to take up the good advice we so readily dish out.  He came to deal with the gap that opens up between a God who demands moral excellence and a human race that is simply incapable of living right.This is a shocking concept for many religious people, and perhaps even more shocking for idealistic secular intellectuals and members of newspaper editorial boards, but morally earnest lectures  have almost nothing to do with what humanity really needs. After all, the world’s libraries are full of books giving sage and profound moral advice.  They are also full of histories that document our failure as a species to follow it.  Massacres, aggressions, oppressions, abuses, tyrannies, crimes and injustice: without these, the world’s history books would be much shorter than they are.Jesus didn’t come because humans had somehow missed the point of moral teaching and needed to be set right on a few points and given some inspirational coaching.  He didn’t come to do TED talks. He came, the gospel writers believed, because history revealed the failure of the ‘moral approach’ to the problem of evil, and God decided that something more and something different needed to be done.The declaration that Jesus was born of a virgin wasn’t intended to enshrine Jesus as the greatest in a succession of moral teachers; it was to set Jesus off from the other prophets and the teachers of the moral law. Something bigger was afoot; something new had come into the world. Jesus wasn’t the latest in a long line of Hebrew prophets; he wasn’t a figure in the procession of prophets from Adam to Mohammed as Muslims believe. He was the Son of God and the Savior, and he didn’t come so much to teach morality as to transcend it.The Christian claim about the Virgin Birth is meant as a radical announcement that Christianity is different. Christianity is not another ‘how-to’ manual telling people how to act vis-à-vis the Creator. It’s not about what kinds of foods are holy and what kinds are impure. It’s not about how to wash your hands or which way you should face when you pray.Christianity is much more than a group of people trying to fulfill the teaching of a revered founder; it is a community of people gathered around a world changing hero. Jesus came to save and not just to teach. He did not fulfill his mission by giving the Sermon on the Mount; he fulfilled it by dying on the cross and by rising from the dead.More, Jesus could not have fulfilled this mission if he was simply a heroic man. The human race has many heroes and history is filled with the examples of people who gave their lives for others. You can to go the Normandy beaches and see row upon row of graves of people who gave their lives that others might live and be free. Jesus accomplished more through his death because he was more than just another human being; the gospel writers and the Christians who accept their testimony believe that Jesus was also the Son of God. It was God who died upon that cross, God who took the responsibility for human sin, God who drank the cup of human suffering to the bottom.The story of the Virgin Birth isn’t there to set up the Sermon on the Mount as the Greatest Moral Lecture in the History of Mankind. It is there because it communicates the deepest, most important truth about Jesus: that he was a human being, but more than a human being as well. It is not an accidental detail or an embellishment; it is not an awkward defense against an embarrassing rumor. It is not the result of scientific ignorance about how babies are made; it is a statement about how this particular baby was different from all the rest.That is the main theological point that Luke’s account makes. But he had another end in view, and this is also something to remember as we think Christmas through. The story of the Virgin Birth isn’t just a story about Jesus.  The gospels are also making a point about Mary and through her about women in general. Ancient Christian writers frequently referred to Mary as the Second Eve. The first Eve, as just about everyone knows even today, was Adam’s wife. According to the first book of the Bible (Genesis), she yielded to the temptation of the serpent in the Garden of Eden to disobey God and taste the forbidden fruit. Adam went on and tasted it for himself; ever since then men have been blaming women for all the trouble in the world. For millennia men have used the Biblical story and similar stories and folk tales to justify the second-class status to which women have been historically relegated in much of the world. (In some parts of the world, poorly behaved and uneducated young men call their vicious harassment of women “Eve-teasing.”)The figure of the Virgin Mary marks a turning point. She is the Second Eve, the one who said ‘yes’ to God when he asked her to be the mother of his son. When God really needed help, the Bible teaches, he went to a woman, not to a man. And the woman said ‘yes,’ and out of her faith and obedience came the salvation of the world.Seen from this angle, the biblical insistence on Mary’s virginity highlights her autonomy and underlines the vital role she played. If the gospels portrayed Mary as the partner of a man in bringing this new baby into the world, the human father would displace her at the center of the story. How the young hero surmounted the obstacles to be chosen worthy to father Jesus and win Mary’s love would be at the center of the Christmas story.But the Bible gives us something different. Mary was the decider. Mary was the free agent whose choice opened the door for us all. At this critical moment in world history, she didn’t act with a man or through a man. She didn’t stand by her man; she wasn’t a ‘helpmeet.’ Joseph is the helpmeet in the gospel story; Joseph stands passively by and loyally supports Mary and her child.The message is or ought to be clear. I will come back to the Virgin Mary later; she’s one of the great enigmas of the Christian religion for many contemporary Americans and it’s hard for many of us to see just what she means or can mean to people today. But for now, on this the third day of Christmas, it’s enough to understand that when Christians say that Jesus was born of a virgin, there are two main points they are making: that Jesus is the son of God, connected to the author of the universe in a unique and special way with a mission that is fundamentally different from that of all the prophets and teachers who came before, and that the free choice of a strong and faithful woman opened the door to salvation for the whole human race. Jesus is unique, and women are free and equal in God’s sight: that is what we should take away from this story.Christianity like many world religions has often been less than fair in its treatment of women.  But at the heart of historic Christianity there has always been the idea that one young single woman’s faithful choice gave God the opening he used to save the whole human race.  Christmas is a feminist holiday, a feast that celebrates the free choice of an autonomous woman.  As Christianity has risen to become the largest and most widespread religion in the world, women are coming into their own.  It cannot be otherwise; Christianity of all the world’s great religions owes its origin to the choice of a woman to cooperate with God.God didn’t send Jesus into the world because he was satisfied with the status quo. God sent him here because things needed to change — and right at the top of the list of the things God wanted to change was the position of women. The change didn’t happen overnight, and even today we haven’t seen the full consequences of giving half the world its rightful due, but from the day that Mary answered Gabriel a new force has been at work in the world, and what we see today is the blossoming of a tree that was planted a very long time ago.

“Comfort Women” Issue to be Settled?

Big news out of Asia yesterday:

The Japanese and South Korean governments are considering holding a meeting of their leaders in March in Washington to endorse settling the “comfort women” issue, sources said Saturday.

Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se are on Monday to discuss the issue of women who were procured to work at wartime Japanese military brothels.If they agree on steps to solve the issue, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean President Park Geun-hye may meet in Washington on the sidelines of a two-day nuclear security summit starting March 31 and then issue a joint statement to confirm the settlement of the dispute, the sources said.

Agreement on this issue is much harder than it looks, in part because both in Korea and Japan this problem has gotten entangled with many other questions. Both governments, however, understand the benefits of moving past the issue, so they are trying. The biggest problem is that just getting to a place where both governments sign a piece of paper saying the issue is now settled will probably not be enough to lower the simmering anger in Korean society as a whole. From Japan’s point of view, then, what is the point of paying money and taking blame if it still will not be getting the reconciliation and closing of the books that it wants?

The U.S. would like nothing better than to see this obstacle to closer Korea-Japan ties removed. American diplomats under a whole series of U.S. Presidents have been quietly nudging the two countries toward some kind of a deal. Reducing tensions between South Korea and Japan would greatly simplify the task of American diplomacy in a troubled region. But this remains an uncracked nut. The ‘raison d’etat’ that is pushing nationalist and conservative Japanese politicians toward a settlement, and that continues to push South Korean leaders to engage with Japan is, basically, fear of North Korea and China. But public opinion in South Korea is still not quite sure that the situation is grave enough to justify letting a century of grievance and bitterness against Japan fall away. It will be difficult for any South Korean government to lead one of the world’s most nationalistic publics toward a new relationship with Japan.It’s particularly difficult now. President Park Geun-hye is the daughter of President Park Chung-hee. The first President Park was not only a military dictator who ruled South Korea from 1961 until he was assassinated in 1979. As a young man he also took a Japanese name and fought in the Japanese Imperial Army late in World War Two. Many of the activists who campaign on issues like Japanese treatment of the ‘comfort women’ were also involved in the democracy movement that considered her father the arch-enemy of South Korean freedom.President Park who, like most people who study South Korean national strategy closely, probably sees the importance of good relations with Japan, would probably like to find some way to reach a solution. But it won’t be easy, and her own standing in Korea could be seriously undermined if critics were able to claim that she was selling out to the Japanese.