Can Gays Raise Children?

A member at church clued me into this speech delivered by 19 year old Zach Wahls before the Iowa House of Representatives before it passed a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would ban same-sex marriage. I believe she told me that her daughter had the "misfortune" to testify after this speech. I am sure she did fine. But as I was just reading about it here I thought I would share this clip.

Holy Foreskin

I am currently reading Christopher Tyerman's Gods' War, an account of the crusades and find myself wondering whatever happened to these holy relics:

As a cardinal in Rome after 1079, Urban (Pope of the first crusade) had been surrounded by relics of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, especially the collection housed at the Lateran, then the pope's habitual Roman residence. These included Christ's umbilical chord, foreskin and some of His blood, pieces of the cross, numerous objects associated with His ministry and Passion (such as a loaf and thirteen beans from the Last Supper), relics of Holy Land saints and numerous physical specimens, such as rocks from Bethlehem, the Mount of Olives, the river Jordan, Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre itself.

I wonder if they are still housed somewhere at the Vatican.

Not So Typical Christmas Eve Activities

For most pastors Christmas Eve is a busy evening of preparation and services. This pastor had a slightly different kind of busy evening:

The Dallas pastor facing felony charges of burglarizing a church member's home on Christmas Eve said Monday she had no criminal intent.

Sandy McGriff, 52, said she was trying to protect valuables at the home of her longtime friend Serita Agnew and made a horrible mistake.

Police accuse McGriff of stealing more than $10,000 worth of fur coats, designer purses and electronics from a home in the 2200 block of Village Way near Kiest Boulevard and Lancaster Road. She was also charged with resisting arrest.

She claims she was in the neighborhood driving by the house when saw two men entering and leaving the victim's house and decided to take the valuables to protect them. She also claims that she had no need to steal valuables. This additional piece of information would seem to buttress her second claim:

She said she pulled her black Jaguar into the driveway and walked around the home. That's when she saw the broken kitchen window.

I can't say I have ever known a pastor who drives a Jaguar. In any case you can watch a video of the pastor in front of the fur coats telling her side of the story.

unChristian America

Ross Douthat surveys two recent sociology of religion books on the state of Christianity in American culture and comes to this conclusion:

...this month’s ubiquitous carols and crèches notwithstanding, believing Christians are no longer what they once were — an overwhelming majority in a self-consciously Christian nation. The question is whether they can become a creative and attractive minority in a different sort of culture, where they’re competing not only with rival faiths but with a host of pseudo-Christian spiritualities, and where the idea of a single religious truth seems increasingly passé.

Or to put it another way, Christians need to find a way to thrive in a society that looks less and less like any sort of Christendom — and more and more like the diverse and complicated Roman Empire where their religion had its beginning, 2,000 years ago this week.

This is an assessment I have shared with my congregation on numerous Sunday mornings and it is a common refrain in post-modern church circles as well as the anabaptist circles I have contact with (where the assessment is greeted by a rowdy cheer growing out of a belief that this is precisely where Christianity belongs).

It is worth pointing out, though, that there is at least one enormous difference for Christianity between now and then: then it was a new movement with a unique message about God and about how to live together in the world. It's organization, its member-care and its outreach were all revolutionary. As Rodney Stark has reminded us the Christians made a very real-world positive impact on the culture; the citizens of Rome had never seen anything quite like the Christians before.

In marked contrast, today, as we Christians find ourselves in the West increasingly marginalized and having to make the case for why anyone should participate in our communities, a large part of the challenge comes from carrying around 2000 years of baggage. It is one thing to to be a brand-spanking-new Christian and have to contrast yourself with the pagans and Jews everyone knows; it is another thing altogether to have to explain how you are different than thousands of different Christian sects and perhaps more importantly how you choose to account for the accretions of two thousand years of Christian culture, a culture that for all its accomplishments has at moments a shameful history on many issues.

Sometimes I wonder if a new religion might someday burst on the scene in the way Christianity did 2000 years ago and rock the world. Or perhaps it already has and is just waiting for its Paul. Or perhaps that new religion is science and technology and the manner in which we live, work and play in its world and accept its worldview.

In the meantime those of us in Christian communities must choose what to do with our baggage and how to respond and hopefully thrive in a challenging culture. I am sure it is my own particular heritage bleeding through, but I think the way forward is going to be found in communities that gather for food, stories, music, art, and ritual, that focus on serving others, and that teach and practice non-violence. There is nothing earth-shattering in this; it certainly isn't new news or coming from the latest marketing research, but it is faithful to Jesus and the best of our Christian culture, and when it is done well it just works.

DADT Dead

It is finally done, thanks to Joe Lieberman, among others. With the military set to accept all without regard to sexual orientation, can the church be far behind? It will be interesting to see if this changes the conversation any, especially with God and country Christians. Including some who claim the COB label.

Our War Machine

The Cold War officially ended in 1989. Remember all that talk then about the peace dividend? We never saw it and, according to new book by Tom Englehardt reviewed by Brad Birzer at The American Conservative it doesn't matter who is President or in control of congress, we are now a nation perpetually at war:

The events of 1989 should have offered the West some breathing room, a time to rethink the purpose of our nation and reinvigorate republican ideals. Instead, the past two decades, under Republican and Democratic administrations alike, have revealed America and the West as morally and spiritually bankrupt. Plunder and torture best symbolize the bloated American Empire of the last 20 years, a force that exists merely for the sake of self-perpetuation. Our standing in the world has declined precipitously. At home, many are angry and want to change, organize, and harangue. Despite their best intentions, they stand impotent, comprehending neither the past nor the present, looking at the future—when not navel-gazing—with understandable dread.

When voters elected Barack Obama in 2008, his supporters acclaimed him higher than a prophet; he was messianic. As one fine and intelligent person—an expert in high tech as well as a farmer—wrote to me in immediate post-election euphoria, “Brad, why are you so upset, don’t you realize that we finally have a chance to end war and poverty, permanently?”

What the Obama administration has delivered, of course, is not only the continuation of the policies of the previous three administrations but a profound exaggeration of them. If anything, we suffer more violations of our privacy and civil liberties now than at any time during the Bush administration, all in the name of a national-security state that keeps the populace in its place while perpetuating war abroad.

In his soul-searching, illuminating, and often depressing look at the unholy ménage of Demos, Leviathan, and Mars, Tom Englehardt probes deeply into the war culture of Washington, D.C. He notes that only two positions have any real voice in contemporary public-policy debate: those who want more of this and those who want more of that. The key word is “more.” As Englehardt writes, when it comes to conflict overseas “however contentious the disputes in Washington, however dismally the public viewed the war, however much the president’s war coalition might threaten to crack open, the only choices were between more and more.” More drones, more troops, more nation-building.

So much for campaign promises and the new messiah who would end war and poverty permanently. The first military budget Obama submitted, Engelhardt notes, was larger than the last one tendered by the Bush administration. “Because the United States does not look like a militarized country, it’s hard for Americans to grasp that Washington is a war capital, that the United States is a war state, that it garrisons much of the planet, and that the norm for us is to be at war somewhere (usually, in fact, many places) at any moment.”

While I remain an Obama supporter and in many ways this about-to-end congressional session is going to go down in history as a historic one for progressives, Obama has deeply disappointed on the war front.

Epic Failure

Said Without Irony

Time's Swampland gives us this statement from Senator Jim DeMint:

"You can't jam a major arms control treaty right before Christmas," DeMint tells Politico. "What's going on here is just wrong. This is the most sacred holiday for Christians.

We certainly wouldn't want any kind of arms reduction treaty that promotes world peace signed on the eve of Christmas. Not when we have worked so hard to pass far more pressing and appropriate-to-the-holiday legislation like extending tax cuts for the rich. It is priorities like these that tell you all you need to know about what the Senator knows about Jesus and why he thinks that Christmas is the most sacred holiday for Christians.

Wings and Claws

It was a foregone conclusion after the recent election that the rich were going to get to keep their tax cuts. Under the circumstances I think Obama got the best bargain he could get, although I welcome the righteous anger coming from the left. I just wish they - congressional dems - had more spine when it really mattered last summer, but they never brought up the tax cut bill then.

In any case the most organized and influential group in Washington these days are the rich, which include a majority of our legislators. So it is no surprise that they got their tax cuts. But I came across this passage from Walter Rauschenbush's The Theology for the Social Gospel this morning and it seemed apropos:

Ordinary sin is an act of weakness and side-stepping, followed by shame the next day. But when it is a source of prolific income, it is no longer a shame-faced vagabond slinking through the dark, but an army with banners, entrenched and defiant. The bigger the dividends, the stiffer the resistance against anything that would cut them down. When fed with money, sin grows wings and claws. (p.66)

Happy Death Day Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy died 100 years ago today. Prospero at the Economist Blog tells the story of his death:

LEO TOLSTOY died one hundred years ago today, aged 82. His last days and hours succumbing to pneumonia in a railway master’s house were followed by the entire world. A special telegraphic wire was installed in Astapovo to transmit news about the state of his health, and newspapers carried reports from the Russian and foreign press. Tostoy was hardly aware of all the commotion.

Nine days earlier he had left his estate in Yasnaya Polyana in secret before dawn, accompanied by his doctor. Having contemplated leaving home several times before, he decided it was finally time to break away from his family life, from the rows over his literary heritage, from the battles between his wife and his secretary. On the night of his escape he wrote that he was doing what people of his age do: leaving the worldly life to spend his last days in quiet and solitude.

On the way to the station he stopped at Shemardino convent to see his sister. He stayed the night in a hotel by a monastery, and again left at four in the morning, heading south. He did not get very far, reaching Astapovo with a high fever.

Prospero also notes that Tolstoy's death is hardly noticed in today's Russia:

Devastatingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the 100th anniversary of Tolstoy’s death is hardly marked in Russia. Tolstoy was a man who opposed state violence, who considered the Church’s union with the state as blasphemous, who denounced pseudo-patriotism, and who wrote to Alexander III asking him to pardon those who assassinated his father. These principles are firmly out of fashion in today’s Russia. By turning Tolstoy into an icon, the Soviets ultimately hollowed him out.

A recent political manifesto published by Nikita Mikhalkov, one of Russia’s most odious, wealthy and Kremlin-favoured film directors, is a good example of the country’s dreary move away from Tolstoy’s ideals. Called “Right and Truth”, the 10,000-word call for “enlightened conservatism” draws on the ideas of Konstantin Pobedonostsev, one of Russia’s most reactionary thinkers, who viewed Tolstoy as one of his most dangerous enemies. (He once denounced democracy as "the insupportable dictatorship of vulgar crowd", and saw Tolstoy’s non-violent resistance as a real threat.) As a senior figure in the Church, Pobedonostsev helped to initiate Tolstoy’s excommunication. In 1899 the Holy Synod banned all prayers in Tolstoy’s memory after his death.

I would just note that while all of our religious traditions have flawed histories, I remain grateful that mine never had the opportunity to wed its religious views with political power. It is a particularly pernicious flaw.

No Roached Hair?

Over at Brethren Cultural Landscapes Carl Bowman posted notes from an 1880's Annual Meeting of the Brethren. Same-sex marriage was not yet on the list of unbiblical and forbidden activities:

It is a dangerous and alarming evil for members to conform to this world, in fashionable dressing, building and ornamenting houses in the style of those high in the world, and ought not to be among the humble followers of the lowly Jesus. And to specify more fully what is regarded as fashionable, the following is named:

wearing of gold or jewelry of any kind,
female hats, hoops,
vain superfluities,
ruffled and costly garments,
and brethren should not get costly and fine burial cases,
and expensive tombstones,
carriages and harness of fancy styles,
and the use of sleigh-bells, except circumstances require them,
neither should brethren wear a fashionable beard or mustache only,
and it is not granted to members to have their likenesses taken,
nor to get and use musical instruments,
nor to teach instrumental music.
Neither should members attend places of amusement, such as…
State and county fairs, celebrations, shows, mass meetings, and political meetings, etc.
And members who will indulge in any of the above named things, and thus cause offense, and who will not be admonished to put them away, must be held as disturbing the peace of the church, and be dealt with as not hearing the church, according to Matt. 18.
And brethren are admonished, and urged to wear our time-honored round breast coat with standing collar,
the hair plainly, not fashionable, or roached,
and in case a brother is conscientious in wearing a full beard, others should bear with him.
And according to 1 Cor. 11: 10-13, sisters should wear as the covering there recommended, a plain cap, whether married or unmarried, in the time of worship, and should likewise wear plain and suitable dresses- See 1 Tim. 2:9. 1 Pet. 3:3,4.
And elders, ministers and lay members should cultivate a conformity with the recognized forms and usages of the church as the best method of guarding against the temptation and danger of being drawn into the everchanging fashions of the world.

No roached hair?

Preaching Submission While Not Quite Living It

The New York Times Magazine has an interesting feature article Housewives of God about Priscilla Shirer, daughter of mega-church pastor Tony Evans. Shirer is a former Zig Ziglar motivational speaker who graduated from Dallas Theological Seminary and is now motivating evangelical women to find and live out their Christian calling, which includes submission to their husbands and male pastors. As the article points out Shirer's lived life with her husband Jerry doesn't look much like a traditional marriage. It appears in many respects that her career and her decisions are the driving force in their marriage. When asked to account for the perception that her life isn't consistent with the message she delivers she gave this example of how she submits to her husband:

Despite this routine, Priscilla insists that she submits to Jerry — especially in the family’s bigger decisions. “If I will follow him as he’s following the Lord, then the responsibility for navigating our family well falls on him, not me,” she said. “Gratefully, I’m married to a husband that values my opinion and values my ideas. . . . We have lots of discussions, there are times of discontent.” She recalled their fierce debate over what to name their youngest son, Jude. When they couldn’t agree, Jerry asked the advice of male mentors he calls his “accountability guys,” “strong Christian guys who I’ve put in my life.” (Promise Keepers and other “biblical manhood” ministries encourage men to form and submit to “accountability groups” to keep one another on a godly path.) When the men ruled in Jerry’s favor, Priscilla relented. “It was a tough pill for me to swallow for a minute,” she said. “But when he told me why, and told me he’d talked to several different people about it that we both trust, then I was able to just relinquish and not be upset. . . . What made all the difference in the world is he cared about what I was feeling.”

The article gives this bit of history about the role of women in evangelicalism:

In centuries past, evangelical women were not meek about their role in church. Early Baptists allowed women to preach during the Great Awakening, and women were among the most influential revivalists during the rise of Pentecostalism at the turn of the 20th century (though gender roles usually remained in force in the home). But many women lost their voice as these sects solidified into male-run denominations. Outside the pulpit, women took the lead in the great Victorian moral crusades and volunteered in droves for foreign missions. During the battles between fundamentalists and liberal-minded modernists in the early 20th century, however, conservative mission boards cracked down on the freedom of female missionaries. Denominations took control of service societies that women had run for decades. Evangelical women could teach children’s Sunday school — as unpaid volunteers — but not adult co-educational classes. They might run bake sales, but men usually decided how the church spent the money they earned.

In the 1970s, liberal organizations like the Evangelical Women’s Caucus embraced much of women’s and gay liberation, but most evangelicals joined a rear-guard action in defense of traditional sexual mores. They argued that “women’s liberation” was a myth: on the contrary, secular feminism enslaves. Women learn to worship the false idols of careerism and independence, brainwashed by propaganda techniques that the Christian author Mary Kassian, in her book “The Feminist Mistake,” compares with those used by Chairman Mao. Submission alone brings true freedom and empowerment. A “submitted woman” can quit struggling to do things God never intended her to do and focus on her feminine gifts. Her gifts might mean a career, as long as she has her husband’s blessing: evangelicals often cite the “Wife of Noble Character” mentioned in Proverbs 31, who “considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings she plants a vineyard.”

In reality, conservative evangelicals turn a blind eye to “submitted wives” who split household duties with their husbands and hire baby sitters, as long as they recite the slogans of biblical womanhood...

Reading this article I find myself in agreement with KJ Dell'Antonia at Slate:

Shirer's lip service to the idea of male dominance enables marriages that are far less egalitarian than hers. Her message, as Jocelyn Anderson, author and Christian domestic violence victim would say, is "submission, submission, submission." But submission as an option—as Worthen puts it "embrac[ing] the submitted life"—is not truly submission. Deference, perhaps. But calling voluntary deference "submission" is like calling consensual sex "rape" just because there are handcuffs involved. It muddies the waters for everyone, and makes it more difficult for women who face demands for real submission to see things as they really are.

If Shirer's compromise works for her, that's fine. But she should be honest within her ministry and tell the women who flock to her appearances that a "complementarian" marriage works only if it's based on egalitarian beliefs. She's clearly chosen her role. She should use it to ensure that other women know that they also have a choice.

Snowy Day

Winter has arrived in our back yard:

I Want to Kill People in this War, Not That One

The New York Times reports on an effort to expand the definition of conscientious objection to allow for soldiers to opt out of certain wars:

But today, Nov. 10, a coalition of around 60 mostly left-leaning religious, veterans and anti-war groups are calling on Congress to expand the definition of conscientious objection to allow opposition to a particular war. Leaders of the coalition, the Truth Commission on Conscience in War, assert that broadening the definition would probably lead to more troops applying to become conscientious objectors. But it would also allow for greater religious freedom in the military and improve morale among the troops, they say.

“For many of us, it is a religious freedom issue,” said Rita N. Brock, one of the main organizers of the commission. “The only religious conscience protected now is for pacifists. But the majority of people are not pacifists. I’m not a pacifist. We have a relative view of when violence is appropriate and not appropriate.”

Ms. Brock, a former professor of religion and women’s studies whose stepfather fought in World War II and Vietnam, said one of the commission’s goals is to allow service members who oppose certain wars to remain in the military, serving either in noncombat roles or in conflicts they can support.

“We want to make it easier for them to follow their moral conscience and serve in the military,” she said. “We want to forestall moral injury, which is a Veterans Administration category of treatment.”

An obvious response to this is that these days the military is a volunteer organization. There is no draft. If you enlist you can reasonably expect in our current environment to be fighting in a war somewhere. If you can imagine a kind of conflict that you would find morally objectionable then you shouldn't enlist. If you are a Muslim you have to know going in that you will almost certainly be fighting in a conflict where fellow Muslims will be on the receiving end of your bullets.

On the other hand there ought to be some provision for a soldier whose thinking evolves to get out of the military or move into a non-combatant position.

I can't imagine this proposal will receive much support from the military or the new Republican-controlled Congress.

The Company We Keep

Gallup finds support continues to be high in the US for the death penalty:

Bottom Line

The use of the death penalty has been declining worldwide, with most of the known executions now carried out in five countries -- China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. Anti-death penalty groups in the U.S. continue to fight the use of the death penalty, particularly when there are high-profile instances of its use, such as this year's execution in Virginia of Teresa Lewis, the first woman to be executed in that state in almost 100 years. Despite this, Gallup's latest update in October shows no diminution in the strong majority level of support for the death penalty in cases of murder within the U.S. (end quote)

Can you guess which one of these countries is known as the Christian one? I can't.

Disgrace Speech

Our denomination's resident sociologist of religion Carl Bowman has recently suggested that he desires to see an end to "disgrace speech" in our denomination Disgrace speech is speech that summarily dismisses those we disagree with as somehow being less that worthy. Two of three examples he gives are:

1. “Homophobe.” Some progressives can’t conceive that a tradition-derived ordering of things might be central to the sacred understandings of others, so they reduce conservative commitments to psychological pathology, calling them “homophobes.” The label, and all references to homophobia, should be stricken from Brethren discourse. Even if cases exist where homophobia might be clinically diagnosed, those who invoke the label are rarely clinicians; instead they are progressive partisans who use the term casually and dismissively. The outcome is typically to reduce conservative convictions to irrational pathology. It disgraces them in this fashion.

2. “Biblical morality.” On the issue of homosexuality, conservatives typically invoke this term as an oblique counterpoint to its opposite, which is either “un-Biblical morality,” or “Biblical immorality.” Either way, applauding oneself for one’s “Biblical morality” transparently classifies as “un-Christian” the opposing view. Even if one believes deeply that the progressive view on an issue is indeed un-Christian, furthering one’s position publicly by trumpeting one’s “Biblical morality” has the primary consequence of disgracing others whose convictions and reading of the Bible are different. “Bibical morality” should be the substance of small group study and discussion, not a weapon to be brandished against others.

I agree. While I think that some of the conservative opposition to homosexuality stems from fear some of it also stems from sharp disagreement about biblical interpretation. I think they are wrong, but I don't think it is fair or helpful to just dismiss opposition as homophobic. In fact I am tempted to suggest that many conservatives are more guilty of un-Biblical morality than homophobia. I think they read the Bible far too selectively as they define what is moral or immoral. But in either case I agree that dismissive labeling isn't helpful.

Religion in American Life

I haven't yet read American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, but Peter Steinfels summarizes some of its key points in the recent American Prospect:

The evangelical wave has been ebbing for some time now and it is being replaced by the "nones":

The book's story is one of a religious earthquake and two aftershocks. The earthquake was the disaffection from religion occurring in "the long Sixties." Church attendance plummeted. So did the percentage of Americans saying that religion was "very important" in their life. At every stage of their life, boomers would always lag behind their parents by 25 percent to 30 percent in regular churchgoing. The authors know well that these were the years of the civil-rights, anti-war, and women's liberation movements, of pot, acid, the pill, Roe v. Wade, and Watergate. But with a refreshing directness and only a bit of embarrassment, they emphasize sex. Between 1969 and 1973, the fraction of Americans stating that premarital sex was "only sometimes wrong" or "not wrong at all" doubled, from 24 percent to 47 percent, a startling change in four years -- and then drifted up, never to decline. Attitudes toward premarital sex turn out to be one of the strongest predictors of a host of other political and religious changes, including that of the first great aftershock, the evangelical upsurge of the 1970s and 1980s.

That reaction to "the long Sixties" has been extensively analyzed. Less so the second great aftershock, the rise of the "nones" after 1990 when young people, in particular, began rejecting identification with any religion, though not necessarily with a variety of religious beliefs and practices. More and more young Americans, according to polls, came to view religion as "judgmental, homophobic, hypocritical, and too political," overly focused on rules rather than spirituality. "The Richter rating of this second aftershock is greater than that of the first aftershock and rivals that of the powerful original quake of the Sixties," Putnam and Campbell write.

People who go to church contribute more money and time to both religious and secular charities and tend to be more civically engaged:

Churchgoing Americans, it turns out, are twice as likely as their demographically matched secular neighbors to volunteer to help the needy and to be civically active. Not only do those in the most religious fifth of Americans give four times as high a proportion of their annual income to charity as those in the least religious fifth, but they give a higher proportion even to specifically secular causes. Neither this generosity nor this activism has to do with ideology. Cross-checking with other surveys, Putnam and Campbell conclude that on measures of generosity and civic engagement, religious liberals rank as high or higher than religious conservatives and higher than secular liberals.

It is not unusual for Americans to change their religious affiliation. Putnam offers himself as an example:

He and his sister were raised as Methodists. At marriage, he converted to Judaism. His children were raised as Jews; one married a Catholic who is now secular, and the other's spouse was secular but converted to Judaism. Putnam's sister married a Catholic and converted to Catholicism. Her three children became evangelicals! No wonder that so many Americans refuse to believe, regardless of the tenets of their religion, that those of differing conviction are bereft either of spiritual truth or hope of salvation.

Although the jury is still out on whether this will be true as we increasing have interactions with Muslims in America.

I'm Not a Witch, I'm You

Elvira is much more believable than Christine O'Donnell:

Don't Ask, Don't Tell Undone by Judge

Judge Virginia Phillips, a federal district court judge sitting in California's central district in Riverside, ruled Tuesday that she will not reverse a decision she ordered last week barring the U.S. military from enforcing the 1993 law signed by President Clinton known as Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

The Pentagon has told recruiters that for now they must comply. The Obama Administration says it will appeal. (Hopefully not with much gusto.) But once again an "activist" judge has moved the civil rights agenda forward. Thank God for activist judges who think that racial and sexual discrimination violate constitutional protections.

Mark Thompson at Time.com's political blog notes that Phillips was appointed by Clinton:

And that's just one of the strange twists about the coming collapse of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." While the ban was a compromise Clinton didn't want to make, it was a judge he appointed who apparently finally has undone it. And she did it in response to a lawsuit filed by a group calling itself the Log Cabin Republicans. Not only did Republicans file the suit that's likely to end in the law's demise, the organization itself was created following a successful 1978 effort by gay California conservatives to defeat a ban on gay teachers in the state's public schools. Their most important ally in that fight? A former governor named Ronald Reagan.

My Kind of Book

Whatever happened to Thomas Covenant? I read and enjoyed all Stephen R. Donaldson's chronicles of the unbeliever and white-gold wielder Thomas Covenant as he found himself transported into another world where his leprosy was healed and he suddenly found himself with power and feelings and that he didn't want, and faced with the reality that choosing to not use his power or come to grips with his feelings was even more dangerous than claiming his new reality.

And then Covenant disappeared. The last book, the second in what was to be another trilogy, came out in 2007. Today via a blog post by Loren Rosson III I discovered that Covenant was finally back for one last time. So I went out on Amazon to download the book to my Kindle - done - and also took a moment to read the published reviews. This was the last sentence of the Publisher's Weekly review:

While an introductory plot summary does yeoman service bringing new readers up to speed, it may be hard for them to keep so many characters straight--or care about them--when most of their development took place in previous volumes published decades ago. The focus is on Linden rather than Covenant, whose passive and distracted presence mostly gives others something to react to, but that won't matter to Covenant's large and loyal following, for whom Donaldson delivers all the self-loathing, despair, guilt, pain, and stubborn determination they could ask for.

Self-loathing, despair, guilt, pain, and stubborn determination. Now that's my kind of book.