Quick Takes

-- Music. You know those "Pick of the Week" free songs for iTunes that you can pick up at Starbucks? Lori brought one home during the holidays that I set aside to download later. Finally, I got around to it -- Bob Dylan's "Must Be Santa" from his holiday albym "Christmas in the Heart" -- and I've gotta say it's pretty wretched. It's an upbeat, accordion-driven version that sounds like a cross between something you'd hear at a carnival and Lawrence Welk on crack. It's 2 minutes, 49 seconds of polka jam torture. What was he thinking?

-- Religion. Tom Krattenmaker has a piece in The Sunday Oregonian "Adamant atheist is a hard-core believer," in which he takes readers behind the scenes to a dinner where author Christopher Hitchens engaged with some of Portland's progressive religious leaders. I can respect Hitchens for his willingness to against the grain on a number of issues, but he sounds pretty closed-minded on the topic of faith. As in... religion is all bad, all the time.

-- Religion, Take Two. The latest survey by the Pew Center on Religion and Public Life ranks Oregon No. 40 on the list of states when it comes to "the significance of religion in people's lives." According to the study, 46 percent of Oregonians said religion was "very important in their lives," while 63 percent believe in God "with absolute certainty." Read Nancy Haught's brief report that includes a link to the national study.

-- Journalism and true crime. Christian Longo is one of Oregon's most notorious killers. He was alternately unemployed or underemployed when, in 2001, he murdered his wife and three young children, then fled to Mexico, where he was posing as a New York Times reporter when authorities caught up to him in Cancun. Longo popped into the news recently when he made it known that he wanted to donate his body parts when and if he's ever put to death. A couple days later, I was startled to see he was the subject of a riveting piece in Esquire by Michael Finkel, the very same reporter Longo had pretended to be. Turns out Finkel has met with him several times and, in their final meeting, coaxed the details of the hideous crime out of Longo. The piece begins like this: "When Christian Longo asked if I wanted to watch him die, I told him I did."

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/christian-longo-0110#ixzz0ctAjqQxG

God, faith and atheism

As a lapsed Catholic and someone who, for a long time, rolled his eyes at the very mention of religious faith or spirituality, I confess to a growing interest in the topic.

No, I'm not doing a 180-degree turn. Just sayin' that as I purposely try to branch out and read different material, I'm coming to grips with how ignorant I've been on matters of faith. In fact, the past couple of years might qualify as The Religious Education of George Rede. OK, that's a stretch. But, still...

The noted atheist, Christopher Hitchens, is speaking tonight in Portland and, to its great credit, Portland Monthly magazine offers a fascinating Q&A with recently retired Unitarian Universalist minister Marilyn Sewell in its January 2010 issue. Read it here, along with sidebars on local practitioners of "emerging Christianity," the term for a new movement in modern religion characterized by progressive theology and reading of the Bible as a historical-metaphorical document rather than a literal, infallible document.

(I learned of the Q&A from Tom Krattenmaker, a friend of mine who writes a religion column for USA Today and recently published his first book, "Onward Christian Athletes." It was at Tom's book release party last month that I met the Rev. Sewell, who proved every bit as intelligent and gracious as I'd imagined her to be, based on reading about her through the years.)

Anyway, I've never really considered myself a spiritual person or even had much of a vocabulary to discuss my beliefs or non-beliefs. If asked, I'd often say, well, I think most people practice their faith because it's what they were born into. I grew up Catholic because my parents were Catholic. If I'd had Jewish or Buddhist parents, no doubt I would have grown up with those traditions. In other words, organized religion seems to me more about the accident of birth than a conscious experimentation and selection of a certain denomination.

God, faith and atheism are topics way too broad to deal with in a single, short post so I'm sure I'll return to them from time to time. For now, let me just say these two passages from the Hitchens-Sewell exchange really resonated with me:

Hitchens: [S]how me what there is, ethically, in any religion that can't be duplicated by humanism. In other words, can you name me a single moral action performed or moral statement uttered by a person of faith that couldn't be just as well pronounced or undertaken by a civilian?

Sewell: God is a mystery to me. I choose to believe because -- and this is a very practical thing for me -- I seem to live with more integrity when I find myself accountable to something larger than myself. That thing larger than myself I call "God," but it's a metaphor.

I love the intelligence and logic in Hitchens' statement. Yet I understand what Sewell is saying and, dare I say, have even felt that same way from time to time. I, too, want to lead my life with integrity. Do we need God -- or any religious presence -- to do so?

"God's Politics"

Since when did believing in God and having moral values make you pro-war, pro-rich and pro-Republican? And since when did promoting and pursuing a progressive social agenda with a concern for economic security, health care, and educational opportunity mean you had to put faith in God aside?

While the Right in America has hijacked the language of faith to prop up its political agenda -- an agenda not all people of faith support -- the Left hasn't done much better, largely ignoring faith and continually separating moral discourse and personal ethics from public policy. While the Right argues that God's way is their way, the Left pursues an unrealistic separation of religious values from morally grounded political leadership. The consequence is a false choice between ideological religion and soulless politics.

With liner notes like that, I couldn't resist picking up Jim Wallis' book, "God's Politics," when I went to trade in some books a few weeks ago. It's been a bit of a slog since then, but I managed to finally finish it last week. Shame on me, too, for not getting to it much earlier. It came out in 2005, shortly after GWB had begun his second term, and so, it features a scathing critique of Bush's decision to go to war as well as the me-first economic and tax policies of those times.

Wallis, for the uninitiated, is a Washington, D.C.,-based evangelical who founded Sojourners, a nationwide network of progressive Christians working for economic justice and peace. He's a prolific author and lecturer and, judging from this book, at times too self-promoting.

Nevertheless, his message -- that there is ample room for a middle ground at the intersection of religious and political life in America -- is a sound one. Wallis spares no mercy ripping into the Religious Right (and politicians who cater to them) for pushing a morals-based agenda on abortion and gay rights while ignoring broader concerns like poverty and the growing gap between rich and poor. At the same time, he scolds the Secular Left -- that would be me -- for insisting on an absolute separation between church and state when there are opportunities to join together for the common good.

I've seen in my own community how people motivated by their religious values can put their beliefs into practice. The best example: the Season of Service organized by the Luis Palau Association that has created partnerships between Portland metro area churches and public schools with high concentrations of poverty. See Tom Krattenmaker's essay, published earlier this year in The Oregonian, to read about West Linn's SouthLake Foursquare Church and its involvement at North Portland's Roosevelt High School.

This being a Sunday morning, I'm here at my computer, not in a church. I don't think that's going to change. But I can say Wallis has opened my mind on these issues of religion and public policy. Dozens of dog-eared pages attest to various passages that resonated with me. I especially appreciated how he ended the book with a chapter on "The Critical Choice: Hope Versus Cynicism."

The choice between cynicism and hope is ultimately a spiritual choice, one that has enormous political consequences, he writes.

Cynicism does protect you in many ways. It protects you from seeming foolish to believe that things could and will change. It protects you from disappointment. It protects you from insecurity because now you are free to pursue your own security instead of sacrificing it for a social engagement that won't work anyway.

Ultimately, cynicism protects you from commitment. If things are not really going to change, why try so hard to make a difference? Why become and stay so involved? Why take the risks, make the sacrifices, open yourself to the vulnerablities?

But, he argues:

More than just a moral issue, hope is a spiritual and even religious choice. Hope is not a feeling; it is a decision. And the decision for hope is based on what you believe at the deepest levels -- what your most basic convictions are about about the world and what the future holds -- all based on your faith. You choose hope, not as a naive wish, but as a choice, with your eyes wide open to the reality of the world -- just like the cynics who have not made the decision for hope.

I've always thought of myself more as a skeptic than an outright cynic. Even so, as a lapsed Catholic, Wallis has given me plenty to think about. More important, he's given me plenty of cause to re-examine my values and choices, and ample reason to more often choose hope.

Book release party

Saturday night brought an opportunity to do something different...

Lori and I attended a book release party for Tom Krattenmaker, an energetic guy who somehow manages to freelance for USA Today, The Oregonian and the Los Angeles Times while making time to write a book and tend to his day job as an associate vice president for public affairs and communication at Portland's Lewis & Clark College.

Tom writes a lot about religion in American public life and his first book, "Onward Christian Athletes," questions the appropriateness of using pro sports to promote conservative Christian doctrine. (Read an interview with Tom here, published in Lewis & Clark's daily online news magazine.)

I've worked with Tom myself on a handful of occasions where he's pitched very thoughtful pieces for The Oregonian's Sunday Opinion section. For instance:

"Seeing beyond the hijab" Aug. 23, 2009
"Evangelicals walk a fine line in public schools," March 7, 2009
"Torture and evangelicals: Faith takes a back seat," Oct. 18, 2008

I credit him for introducing me to the notion that members of progressive faiths and denominations -- Judaism, Unitarianism, Congregationalists, etc. -- can be a positive force in American public life and for indirectly steering me to the book I'm reading now, "God's Politics," by evangelist Jim Wallis.

Lori won one of five books that were given in a raffle last night. So that's pretty cool, that we've already got a signed copy. We met Tom's wife, Carolyn Gretton, who confirmed that Tom's incredible work ethic -- rising at 6 a.m. and sometimes earlier to write every day before going to work -- is what allowed him to complete the manuscript in the midst of so many things on his plate.

As a new friend and his occasional editor, I congratulate Tom and wish him the best with sales and reviews of the book.