Tag Archives: cfm

Dec 22

Pass the hummus, please, and by the way: are you a fed?

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It seems that every day brings new rev­e­la­tions from main­stream media about gov­ern­men­tal spy­ing on Americans.

MS-NBC started the ball rolling on the 14th when they informed us that the Pen­ta­gon had a data­base of “pro­test­ers includ­ing the Rag­ing Grannies and a dozen or so Quak­ers in Florida”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10454316. This must have prompted the New York Times to pub­lish a story they had been sit­ting on for a year: the scoop that Bush had ordered the super-secret “National Secu­rity Agency to start eves­drop­ping on Americans”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/15/politics/15cnd-program.html fol­low­ing the 9/11 ter­ror attacks. It’s rev­e­la­tion was an FBI agent’s email com­plain­ing about “rad­i­cal mil­i­tant librar­i­ans [who] kick us around”:http://www.ala.org/al_onlineTemplate.cfm?Section=alonline&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=111469. Two days later we received the almost-humorous news that the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity was hard at work mon­i­tor­ing the “Massachusett’s inter-library loan sys­tem “:http://​www​.south​coast​to​day​.com/​d​a​i​l​y​/12 [UPDATE: this has been “revealed to be a hoax”:http://www.southcoasttoday.com/daily/12–05/12–24-05/a01lo719.htm by the stu­dent]. Try­ing to outdo the DHS in ridicu­lous, we learned on the 20th that “the FBI has been infil­trat­ing vegan potlucks”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/20/politics/20fbi.html. Today it turns out the “New York City Police Department”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/22/nyregion/22police.html has been doing its own exten­sive inves­ti­ga­tions into pro­test­ers. They even appar­ently staged mock arrests in an attempt to incite vio­lence (their con­tri­bu­tion to the self-parody has been to send offi­cers under­cover on bicy­cle protests).

Are we sur­prised by all this? Well, not really. The fears unleashed after 9/11 ignited a firestorm of para­noia in the ranks of spy­dom. Non​vi​o​lence​.org got a call from the U.S. Secret Ser­vice when Osama bin Laden posted to the board that he wanted to kill Pres­i­dent Bush (well, actu­ally we’re pretty cer­tain it was a acne-faced four­teen year old pro­cras­ti­nat­ing on his geom­e­try home­work). When I shot “shot pho­tos of a scuf­fle at a Biodemoc­racy protest a few months ago”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/2005/06/biodemocracy_pr.php a Philadel­phia police detec­tive was in my office an hour later want­ing to see it (the “melee” was harm­less except for a police­man with heart con­di­tions who took that moment to have a heart attack).

While some mon­i­tor­ing and pru­dence is indeed nec­es­sary, what ties together the string of sto­ries this week is the ran­dom­ness of the tar­gets. It’s as if the agen­cies had lost all sense of judge­ment. Any­one crit­i­cal of the war (or even main­stream cul­ture: wit­ness the veg­ans) was con­sid­ered a threat. All leads were inves­ti­gated, no mat­ter how silly.

While invad­ing American’s pri­vacy is upset­ting and unwar­ranted, the great­est dan­ger is the sheer mass of irrel­e­vant infor­ma­tion that’s been col­lected. What’s an agency to do with reams of data on bicy­cle rid­ers and Quak­ers? Who’s watch­ing the flight schools and fer­til­izer depots while Agent Nin­com­poop is trad­ing hum­mus recipes with the cute vegan with the nosering?

Mar 01

Evangelical Friend’s Take on the Postmodern Church

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I’ve long been curi­ous about whether any­one in the Evan­gel­i­cal branch of Friends has been fol­low­ing the “emer­gent church” move­ment. Now I find that Bruce Bishop , for­mer Youth Super­in­ten­dent of North­west Yearly Meet­ings, has writ­ten a primer called Post­mod­ernism: Taste and See that the Lord Is Good
bq. “Postmodernism”–we see that label bandied about quite a bit these days. And like the once-frequent phrase “Gen­er­a­tion X,” post­mod­ernism is often seen as anti-Christian and some­thing that the church needs to fight. I would beg to dif­fer.
I don’t par­tic­u­larly like the term “post­mod­ern,” as the philo­soph­i­cal and pop-culture def­i­n­i­tions almost com­pletely con­tra­dict one another, but he’s talk­ing phi­los­o­phy, so MTV watch­ers should lis­ten past the words. (Bishop is in good com­pany in his con­tin­ued use in the term: “Here’s Jor­dan Cooper”:http://www.jordoncooper.com/2004_03_01_archives.html#107896665936703076 and “Brian McLaren”:http://www.emergentvillage.com/index.cfm?PAGE_ID=797 talk­ing about the prob­lems with the term and their expla­na­tions of why they’re still using it).
I really _really_ hope Bruce Bishop writes a follow-up address­ing how Friends might relate to this move­ment (“see my thoughts here”:http://www.nonviolence.org/Quaker/emerging_church.php).

Jan 05

Swinging off the gallows and into the Glory

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Oh my gosh, TheOoze has an amaz­ing arti­cle on called “Ortho­dox Twenty-Somethings” (a review of “The New Faith­ful” and “The Younger Evan­gel­i­cals”, a great book I’ve rec­om­mended. Read this arti­cle if you want to under­stand why Julie’s at a tra­di­tional Catholic Church and why I’m plain dress­ing. This is a bona fide phe­nom­e­non, folks.

None of this is sup­posed to be hap­pen­ing because it’s not the project for which two gen­er­a­tions of Protes­tant and Catholic clergy have worked… The push for rel­a­tivist moral teach­ing, “sim­pli­fied” wor­ship, inter­change­able sex roles, and an utter sep­a­ra­tion of pri­vate belief from polit­i­cal expres­sion has come from the pul­pit as read­ily as it has been demanded by pseudo-intellectual elites. But against all odds, por­tions of a mod­ern Amer­i­can soci­ety, which groans to find itself sec­u­lar­ist, is return­ing in a quiet rev­o­lu­tion to the fun­da­men­tal truths of the Chris­t­ian religion.

Mean­while, no one should miss Melynda Huskey’s won­der­ful rant in the com­ments of my “Beyond Major­ity Rule” review. Warn­ing: it skew­ers a beloved Quaker institution!

Or maybe it was just the gen­eral whiff of the tomb–a really old tomb, all scent of decay long gone, and noth­ing left but dust and dead air. No Quak­ers here, pal. No George Fox rebuk­ing priests from the next aisle. No Isaac Pen­ning­ton seiz­ing the moment of the Restora­tion to make Quak­ers as unpop­u­lar with the King and Court as they had been with the Pro­tec­tor and the Com­mon­wealth. No Mary Dyer ready to swing off the gal­lows and into Glory for the sake of Light.