Death Penalty Revisited

I have had much to say about the death penalty, but this was too much to pass up commenting on. It was almost as if I was able to write my own case study regarding the realtionship between Christianity and our legal system. Read about what happened here. It seems that a Colorado court overturned a death penalty sentence because a juror consulted the book of Leviticus.

How about that? Maybe I was not being too crazy when I suggested that the legal system was overstepping its grounds by dealing out life and death. What resources are jurors expected to draw from when dispensing capital punishment? The latest episode of Oprah? Sports Illustrated's swimsuit edition? What could be more relevant to life and death than the Bible? If the jury is not allowed to draw from such texts, what is it that they are doing in the first place? My hunch is that they fall back to garden variety fears, common bias, or emotional response. The end result is little more than a more civilized, but just as angry, lynch mob.

If reason and rational discourse could lead us to believe that taking a human life is necessary, then I doubt we could prosecute anyone for murder. The penalty phase, therefore, is a discussion of "how bad" a crime was. What could be more subjective? I once heard a wise(?) man say that we should always error on the side of life. I still can't believe he said it, either.

Calling Former (and Current) Bison

OBU grads scattered about, get ready for the next scandalous chapter in our alma mater's history. I am still sorting it all out, but it looks kinda bad.

It all started here. The public relations guy (who helped re-make the alumni mag) wrote a somewhat scathing letter to the editor of the Shawnee newspaper. Immanuel Baptist is moving from Main Street to a larger, more expensive building. Whether or not you agree with Mr. Kincaid's analysis, what happened next is outrageous.

According to blogs in the area, Mr. Kincaid has been asked to resign and has done so. Comments on this blog entry include a public response from the pastor if Immanuel and a counter from Mr. Kincaid.

It seems that alumni have been sounding off for a long time now to no avail. So let's brainstorm about what we could do to be heard. Any suggestions, leave a comment.

Let's Get Maundy

Not much to say this week. So I am going to have an informal poll:

Can you watch an NCAA tournament game after a Maundy Thursday service?

I am a Protestant, so I am new to all of this liturgical stuff.

C'mon, now is your chance to sound off...

GWB and J-Lo

Enough theology for awhile, let's get back to politics for at least a day or two...

My new thesis is that W is the J-Lo of the political world. I cannot remember a time when J-Lo was actually famous for something other than being famous. Everything she has touched has turned to caca, from movies to music to marriages to her "performance" at the Grammys. (Did she just learn Spanish that day?) Yet she acts like we should all support her and care about what she is doing as a "talented artist". The only people who think she is worth all the attention must be the people who tell her to keep dancing and singing and acting long after it is obvious she can only do the first one. When your world is encapsulated in your entourage, you are asking for trouble. After J-Lo's career is over, what are we going to remember her for? Two things: Ben and Gigli. Neither is a fond memory.

Last time I checked, W had not done much well either. I appreciated the way he rallied the country after 9-11, but then came Afghanistan and Iraq. Neither worked out as planned (if planned). Isn't the economy supposed to have taken off? And what about the record budget deficits? And the WMD in Iraq debacle? It seems that he, like J-Lo, has shown some promise at times only to be a tremendous disappointment later. But for some reason, we keep giving GWB and J-Lo the capital necessary to keep going. Do either of them learn from their mistakes? No. Just as J-Lo had "Shall We Dance", GWB is acting like he was the perfect first-term president.

His recent appointments of a new ambassador to the U.N. and a president of the World Bank are indicative of a man who has become captivated by his own entourage. John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz represent the most controversial foreign policy views of his administration. And now they are in key positions to dictate US foreign policy for the next few years. I would not ask W to make drastic changes. He did win the election, after all. But if he does not show me that he can operate and think independently of his neo-conservative entourage, his legacy is going to die with them. And if you do think that the neo-con legacy is going to be short-lived, just watch the Middle East carefully and see how much gratitude we get for our "liberation" after our troops leave.

How to Win Your NCAA Tourney Pool

As you hurriedly fill out those March Madness brackets, I want to share a few recent theological musings . . .

I am suddenly fascinated with the statement: "God does not care who wins the NCAA tournament. God has more important things to worry about." I am sure that at one time or another I myself have made just such an utterance. Surely in a world seemingly full of war, terror, starvation, and disaster, God should be attending to the sufferings of the people and not some ridiculous game, right?

But doesn't that statement imply a limitation on God's providential abilities? We surely do not believe that if God is busy watching a basketball game things go on behind God's back. It cannot be the case that God can only handle one thing at a time, or else all hell would break lose. Rather, perhaps God does care who wins the tourney. What we may be trying to express when we deride God's providential hold over sports is that God will most likely not cater to our personal emotional attachments to specific teams. God surely has a larger purpose in mind for basketball.

So, I guess that if any of us were intelligent enough to see what God intended to accomplish through March Madness, that person would be able to fill out a flawless bracket. Of course, that person would then be as smart as God, not to mention very rich.

PS> If anybody calls me a Calvinist in a comment, I am going to vomit.

Faith Explained

It is good to hear what old friends are saying and thinking via blog. An old friend of mine recently posted a few thoughts about faith. Basically, Adam said what I have been trying to say on a few of my posts, but he put it far more eloquently. I have been addressing the theo-political issues: my friend addresses the soul. Read it here.

While at least one of his commenters has attacked him for (supposedly) tending towards an Abelardian "moral example" idea of the atonement of Jesus, I disagree. The importance of Christ's divinity is not limited to his penal-substitutionary atonement. The sacrificial death is only half of the story. It is the life of Jesus that reveals God to us. And since we believe that Jesus was God, we can trust that what we saw in Jesus was what we can expect of God.

Confession, Law & Order

I was up way too late last night. I was researching a paper, then watching the Daily Show, then I caught the end of an episode of Law and Order... or maybe it was L&O SVU... no wait, it might have been CSI... or CSI Miami, or CSI NY even... I could have been NYPD Blue... oh well, what difference does it really make? Anyway, I have been pondering the reason these shows and their spin-off and knock-offs are on about 140 hours a week. And I think I got it. Maybe. Here goes my theory:

I have commented before on the ever blurry lines between what we expect of lawyers and what we (used to) expect of priests. Our legal system, in my opinion, is far overstepping the boudaries of "blind justice" and beginning to take a role in more priestly functions, specifically the authority over life and death. Asking juries to speculate on a person's right to live under the guidance of lawyers and judges seems to me to be beyond the realm of reason and evidence. But, if you disagree, read my blog post on it at least.

It also seems that the general public is becoming more and more interested in the entire judicial process. And not just the trial itself, but the investigation and even the incarceration and its aftermath (see Martha Stewart). In the absence of real-world examples, it seems that a well-scripted and artificial substitute does the trick as well. People love Law & Order not for the characters but for the events. We watch these "cases" proceed from the detectives to the lawyers to a verdict. What are wanting to see? What is it about an otherwise mundane and predictable progression that makes it so compelling? Perhaps the same thing that used to make the church and its Gospel compelling to so many: truth and confession.

The drama these shows produce almost always surrounds the one moment when a victim or an accused party is confronted with the truth about a situation. The lawyers and detectives spend their time trying to uncover the deep and hidden thing that could not be spoken of. The guilty party tries to evade but rarely is able to do so. When the confession comes, time stops in the room. Sometimes we are shocked or outraged, other times we pity. But regardless of our reaction, we feel better once we know what a person has done. Before the truth is known, the accused is an alien to us. When we know the truth about a person, we can then choose to forgive or condemn. The truth allows the accused to re-enter the community, whether in guilt or innocence. The confession is the centerpiece of every show. No matter if the detectives discover it, the lawyers elicit it, or the guilty offers it. It is the moment when we can see that which is true in the other that compels us to watch such a formulaic show.

The church used to be a place of confession. Even Protestants once featured a confession in their churches. But the church has not been allowed to pursue confession of guilt in our modern society. To force someone to label themselves as sinful is seen as oppressive, self-righteous, and hypocritical. But this is not the point of confession at all. The reason we confess is because we know ourselves to be guilty, of something at the very least. We all know of something terrible we once did that has become our deepest secret. We cannot bear to tell anyone, so we must separate ever so slightly from those around us. Our hidden guilt alienates us. Confession is not how we condemn ourselves before our neighbors, rather it is how we reunite ourselves with our community. How can anyone feel forgiven and accepted unless they have confessed? When the church gives up its confession of guilt, it will be pursued elsewhere. Television will fill the void and teach us that the truth does indeed set us free.

Hey, It's a Start

The Supreme Court recently struck down perhaps the worst part of our criminal justice system's reliance on revenge and retribution. No more killing of people who cannot even vote. But if it is "cruel and unusual for an 18 year old, how is it any different for a 30 year old? All well, I will excuse the Supremes for now. One good thing a year may be almost too much for our legal system. I commend them for being reasonable and maybe even merciful, but most of all I commend them for being right. Let's hope they get this 10 Commandments thing right, too.

But I still agree with Stanley Hauerwas. If we really believe in the death penalty as a means of discouraging criminals, why don't we put a guillotine on Wall Street? That would be very discouraging to the next Enron perps, wouldn't it?