Higher Powers, In And Out Of The Newsroom

David Carr is media columnist for the New York Times and author of a harrowing drug addiction memoir, Night Of The Gun. On Dec. 28 NPR rebroadcast an October Carr interview by "Fresh Air"'s Terry Gross. Re-listening to a Carr interview is almost as good as a repeat of "Dexter." While his voice, injured by smoking, radiation treatments, and possibly exposure to toxins while he covered the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, is a little rough, he speaks about my parents' beloved business in smooth, graceful cadences. Transcript here, podcast here.

Excerpt one, on the omniscient and indispensable elite editorial intelligence behind daily newspapers:

When I wake up in the morning and the gun goes off, I'm checking Twitter. I'm checking RSS feeds, and I get four newspapers at my house every day. I get the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Star Ledger - because I live in New Jersey - and, of course, the New York Times.

And the reason I do is because the day before this, all this stuff has gone whizzing past me, and I seem to know a lot. But I don't really know what part of it is important. And I used to think it was so silly that newspapers would - like, I'd go to our page one meeting, and they'd be organizing the hierarchy of the six or seven most important stories in Western civilization. Meanwhile, the Web is above them, pivoting and eliding, and all these stories are morphing and changing. And I thought: Well, how silly is this?

But you know what? I came to want that resting place, where someone yelled "stop" and decided, "Look, this is stuff you need to know about going forward." Newspapers have become a kind of magazine experience for me, where they're - where it's a way to look back at what has happened.

And on his faith life and the great mystery of altruism:

I am a churchgoing Catholic, and I do that as a matter of - it's good to stand with my family. It's good that I didn't have to come up with my own creation myth for my children.

It's a wonderful group of people that I go to church with, and it's community. It's not really where I find God. And sort of what the accommodation I've reached is a very jerry-rigged one, which is: All along the way, in recovery, I've been helped - without getting into the names of specific groups - by all of these strangers, you know, who get in a room and do a form of group-talk therapy and live by certain rules in their life.

And one of the rules is that you help everyone who needs help. And I think to myself: Well, that seems remarkable. And not only is that not a general human impulse, but it's not an impulse of mine. And yet I found myself doing that over and over again.

So, am I underneath all things, just a really wonderful, giving person? Or is there a force greater than myself that is leading me to act in ways that are altruistic and not self-interested and lead to the greater good?

And so that's - that's sort of as far as I've gotten with a higher power thing, is I'm - you know, I'm kind of a pirate, kind of a thug. I mean, I've done a bunch of terrible things, and yet I'm able to, for the most part, be a decent person. How is that? Do I have some inner strength of character? I think not. I think something else is working on me.

You know, I think it's okay to sort of like have a superstitious belief in God and not really have thought it through. I think it's okay to just - I think there's freedom in allowing for the possibility of it. Like, I don't have a presence. I don't have some idea in my mind of a woman or a man figure or anything like that.

But I find the spaces between people, whether I'm making a newspaper with them or in recovery or living with them as family or friends or - I find something really godly in that. I don't have trouble acknowledging that.

You Don't Get To Decide, Unless You Must

Some excerpts from Hugh Hewitt's radio interview with George W. Bush about his memoir, Decision Points:

On faith and leadership: I think the first thing...is to understand you’re not God, and that you don’t get to decide. Secondly, I believe a faithful person is someone who fully understands his or her own inadequacies, and therefore relies upon a loving, redemptive Savior. And so it was, in one way, it was easy not to be judgmental when I’m trying to strengthen my own faith. And in the other way, though, it was easy to be judgmental when it came time to the practicalities of protecting the country. And I was very judgmental. I said these people are evil, and we will bring them to justice, because the most important job of the president is to protect the homeland.

On faith and power: [I]f you allow power to become your god, then it is corrupting. If you allow fame to become your god, it is corrupting. If you allow money to become your god, it is corrupting. And what religion helped me was to understand that that was those truths. And so power can be used effectively to help people, or it can be intoxicating, in which case it is difficult to have a proper relationship, if you’re a Christian, with Christ....

[For] American presidents...it’s hard to become so totally intoxicated with power when you’re responsive to the people. But the people that became intoxicated by power that affected me were like those idealistic souls that convinced others that their vision for the future was the right one, whether it be the folks who led the French revolution, or those who bought into Mao, or those who corrupted the Leninist movement in Russia. These are people that became so intoxicated with power that they ended up being murderers.

On meeting with grieving families: What was interesting...because we have a volunteer army, and because many of the folks who lost their life signed up after 9/11 and knew exactly what they were getting into, the parents really wanted to tell me how much that the sacrifice, how much their child really wanted to do what they were doing. And frankly, in many instances, they were there to determine whether or not I was going to make decisions based upon my own personal standing, or whether or not I was going to make decisions so that sacrifice would not go in vain. And it’s hard for people to understand this, but often times, or most of the time I met with families of the fallen, I became the comforted one. I was supposed to comfort them, and they comforted me.

On politically motivated CIA leaks in 2004: I was convinced there were some, and very few, I’m talking about a handful versus the thousands that are dedicated patriots, but they were leaking information that kept getting into the New York Times, for example, that seemed to me, and was trying to make it difficult for me to be reelected. It’s like the same thing about the leaks on some of our security programs that emanated, perhaps, out of that agency. And to me, that’s unacceptable behavior. When people get into the CIA, they have sworn to secrecy, and that their job is to provide the president with the information necessary to make tough decisions, not to try to undermine the process.

In The Beginning, There Was Evil

Paul Pillar is a former high-ranking CIA analyst who believes "the more that religion is infused into public life, the more that mankind suffers." Newly provoked by the State of Kentucky's financial support for a Bible-based theme park and the latest trendsetting comments by Sarah Palin, Pillar, blogging at "The National Interest," writes:

Religious beliefs inherently contain the seeds of intolerance, and thus of conflict and extremism, in ways that most secular belief systems do not. If one believes one's dogma comes from divine will and providence, it can less readily be compromised in good conscience than beliefs of more mundane origin. And those on the other side of a conflict can be seen not just as in opposition but as evil.

Religious belief, because it deals with the unknown and unknowable, must quite literally be a matter of faith. And questions of faith, because they cannot be resolved through public debate, appropriately dwell in the realm of the personal and the private. Once injected into the public realm and more specifically into matters of state, then they become one more form of the tyranny over the mind of man against which the deist Thomas Jefferson swore eternal hostility upon the altar of God.

Well, except for the secular belief systems of communism and National Socialism, which mass-produced intolerance and extremism in a magnitude of which al-Qaeda and the Taliban can only dream. Closer to home, just this week, the secular left seems pretty intolerant of President Obama's idea that rich people should be allowed to keep a little more of their own money so they can goose the economy for the next two years. Their rage is palpable, and while I don't hear them saying those who disagree with them are necessarily evil, I sometimes hear them coming pretty close.

It seems to me that intolerance and extremism are inescapable expressions of human nature, the natural byproducts of pain, fear, pride, or, usually, some mixture of the three. Far from being the root cause of these inclinations, faith practice at its best helps people notice and control them. If instead religion reinforces or encourages what is worst about people, it means that religious leaders and institutions aren't doing their jobs. They've let their own pride and certitude (or fear and pain) prevent them from appreciating the awe and humility with which any sane person approaches the altar of the Almighty.

Around the world, there are all too many such religionists. That religion must do better is an axiom that many of its practitioners readily accept. But the idea that humanity is safe when it ignores the Creator's judgement perished in the death camps and gulag, in Cambodia and Rwanda. Of course that prideful idea has perished many times in the many thousands of years of human history that preceded all those modern savageries, but the idea keeps being resurrected. Even when people betray God by wreaking havoc and pretending it's for his glory instead of their own, there's a certain deviousness involved in saying that the crime was committed by God or even by religion, when the blame really belongs to the human creature acting as it has since before anyone could even mouth God's name.

Reasonable Faith

Turns out 51% of scientists believe in God.

Wearing Green On Sundays

What constitutes genuine religious belief? An English judge applies a five-fold test and decides that being environmentally minded qualifies.

Drifting, Not Driven, Away From Church

A Pew study reveals that while half the people in the U.S. have left the religion they were born in, it's not necessarily because of the big issues:

"The reasons people change religions are as diverse as the religious landscape itself," [researcher Gregory Smith] told CNN by phone.

Some factors that might be expected to drive people away from religion -- such as sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, or a belief that science "disproves" religion -- actually play a very small role, the study suggests.

"I've been struck by the very large number across all the different groups who say they just gradually drifted away. Not all of this is the product of carefully considered, conscious decision-making that happens at a specific point in time," Smith said.

No Episcopalians Yet, But We're Working On It!

Who's praying with the President? A circle of five, says the New York Times:

None of these pastors are [sic] affiliated with the religious right, though several are quite conservative theologically. One of them, the Rev. Joel C. Hunter, the pastor of a conservative megachurch in Florida, was branded a turncoat by some leaders of the Christian right when he began to speak out on the need to stop global warming.

But as a group they can hardly be characterized as part of the religious left either. Most, like [Sojourners' Jim] Wallis, do not take traditionally liberal positions on abortion or homosexuality. What most say they share with the president is the conviction that faith is the foundation in the fight against economic inequality and social injustice.

“These are all centrist, social justice guys,” said the Rev. Eugene F. Rivers, a politically active pastor of Azusa Community Church in Boston, who knows all of them but is not part of the president’s prayer caucus. “Obama genuinely comes out of the social justice wing of the church. That’s real. The community organizing stuff is real.”

The Faith Of Evolution?

Writing in "Discover" to mark the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, Karen Wright says belief in God gives a body a distinct advantage in the natural selection derby. Besides:

Harnessed to a supernatural dimension, the belief in evolution could itself evolve into a kind of religion. Witness the case of one Michael Dowd, an itinerant minister who calls himself an "evolutionary evangelist" and preaches the "holy trajectory" of evolution. "I thank God for the entire 14-billion-year epic of cosmic, biological, and human emergence," he notes on his web site. "Ironically, evolution gives us a more intimate and personal relationship with God because God is no longer far off, unnatural, and impotent..."