Wednesday, January 28, 2009

A Great Line That Says it All

At the end of short post on Barack Obama's famous "That is above my pay grade" line at Saddleback, Scott Klusendorf has this absolutely fabulous commentary:

"That's what's wrong with liberalism. While it pretends not to preach, it quietly decides who lives and dies."

Brief, pungent, memorable, profound, incisive, pregnant - now that is great writing!

Read his post here: http://lti-blog.blogspot.com/2009/01/is-hope-enough-sk.html
(HT - Francis Beckwith at "What's Wrong With the World")

1 comment:

Amy said...

Speaking of liberalism & ethical issues...
If you didn't see it, last night TVO - The Agenda had a Episode called "The Debate: Politics in the Classroom | The role of professors: transmitters of knowledge or drivers of social change?" The debate was between Stanley Fish, Clifford Orwin (my U of T prof :) and a number of others. I didn't watch the whole thing carefully, but it seemed like Fish was pulling the liberalism trick - insisting that profs have to be 'neutral' which in itself isn't a neutral position... (as he himself admitted in the article we read for C&C). That's just the whole "pretending not to preach" thing. ..whereas some of the other panelists were pointing out the need to sometimes take a visible stand on issues of ethics and truth.
If you're interested, you can listen to the podcast here:
http://www.tvo.org/cfmx/tvoorg/theagenda/index.cfm?page_id=7&bpn=779423&ts=2009-01-29%2020:00:35.0

Btw, a friend of mine is looking for useful readings on Theocons- basically how and why religiously-motivated issues have become so politically central in the US particularly. If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Hope you're doing well~