Here and There #42

Jews and Christians and faith, Spotify, Jimmy Carter, Walmart, social media and kids, language, Merrick Garland, homelessness

I’ve let a month slip by.¹

Nonetheless, here are some pieces that I’ve read recently that might interest you.

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I’m going to start with David Brooks, the NY Times columnist, conservative, Canadian born Jew, who generates a lot of interest from both major sides of our cultural divide. Just before Christmas, he published an opinion piece in the Times entitled “The Shock of Faith” [link is a gift]. In it, he writes about his general movement toward Christianity; it’s quite interesting.² There was strong reaction to this piece especially from Jews but also from Christians. Mark Oppenheimer complained that Brooks should not keep referring to himself as a Jew, especially because he gets a lot wrong about Judaism (so says Oppenheimer; PDF here if needed). Then ARC magazine asked others to respond, including one Christian (Lauren F. Winner, a Jew who explicitly converted to Christianity) and several Jews (Shaul Magid, Susannah Heschel [that’s a famous last name!], Jay Michaelson, Josh Feigelson, and then, in response to all, Mark Oppenheimer, the original writer in response to Brooks. For many of you, I suspect that this is all way too much. If so, just read the Brooks essay (first link above) and then read Chris Gehrz’s reflection on all of this. Figuring out how Jews and Christians relate and how the two religions are alike—and different—remains a major discussion. [I’ve made PDFs for most of these links because the articles are not easy to access by themselves on the web.]

President Jimmy Carter just died; and his funeral is worth watching (easy to do), especially (if you get to nothing else) his grandson Jason’s eulogy. You might be able to keep an eye dry; I couldn’t. Famously, “Carter, whatever his shortcomings as president, redeemed the presidency from the culture of deceit so abundantly evident during the Nixon administration.” But this doesn’t mean Carter was welcomed by evangelicals; in fact, as Randall Balmar makes clear, he was demonized: among others, Billy Graham, Bill Bright, and Jerry Falwell explicitly worked against Carter’s presidency.³

Homelessness is a huge problem in the U.S., and the causes are various. One country, Finland, has managed to reduce homelessness nearly to zero. Unsurprisingly to those of us who follow this topic, the key is to provide housing—a “Housing First” policy, in which semi-permanent (not temporary) housing is provided as the first step in helping people. I wish we had the will to do this in the U.S.

On the occasion of a new Australian law that bans social media accounts for children 16 years of age or younger, Paul Krugman weighs in on the problem and what we might do in the U.S. “[W]hile most of us see social media addiction as a health crisis, for Meta it’s a business model.”

I’m a bit of a language nerd, so this article reviewing the current state of the debate about the linguist Benjamin Whorf’s theories is quite interesting to me. Whorf argued that the very structure of individual languages shape the way that people who speak that language think. This is commonly called “linguistic determinism.” Was he correct? wrong? or partly right? Why do Inuit have so many different words for “snow/ice” and how does it shape them? (Well, that’s a traditional example; there are better ones in the article, q.v.)

Here’s one that I’m not sure about but that is worth considering anyway. Will Bunch, the Philadelphia Inquirer columnist, published a screed against both Merrick Garland and, because he appointed Garland, Joe Biden, arguing that they handled the Insurrection of January 6, 2021 entirely too gently: the case called for a much more aggressive pursuit of the crimes committed. I have no idea whether that was possible; but it’s a moot point, in that, as everyone knows, DJT won. Everything.

There have long been debates about the effect of Big Box stores have on communities, and Walmart is something of a parade example. Frequently, it’s been argued that Walmart is a net gain for lower-income people, in that the lower prices make things much cheaper for them, even if the lower wages that some of those customers receive for working at Walmart harms them. On balance, they come out ahead: so runs the argument. Now, a couple of new studies show that this is not the case: wages actually decrease in many communities where Walmart launches a store, making the economic effect negative.

I don’t have a Spotify account; mostly, I listen to CDs that I’ve purchased or to a couple of online streaming “radio stations” (that’s anachronistic, I realize; but they have humans introducing music and so on, so they’re radio-station-like, at least). Spotify is now an extremely large company, in terms of revenue, and less than 15 years after its founding, its Swedish founder is a multi-billionaire. What about the artists? and what about the listeners finding new music? Lots of issues, and Hua Hsu gets at some of the issues when this much power and wealth is located in a single company [PDF, because article is paywalled].

1. This is a confession. Treat it as such.

2. Also interesting is that, somehow or other, Brooks ended up for one day this past September at the Nowhere Else Festival put on by Over the Rhine that Merna and I regularly attend. He mingled with the people more or less unnoticed or at least not drawing much attention.

3. Sadly, even after his death, I’ve read a fair number of social media comments from right-wing Christians claiming that, essentially, there is no way that Carter could have been a Christian. I find this bizarre in the extreme.