Stumbled upon the Politopia political quiz, which asks an array of (rather leading) questions and then places you on an idealized political map. I turn out to be right on the main stream (shown on the map as an actual stream) and near the town of . . .

Centerville-You would feel most at home in Centerville, which means that you are more or less pleased the status quo-you think the US government has just about the right amount of control over your economic and personal decisions. Your neighbors include democratic and republican party leaders and others who call themselves "moderates" and "centrists."

Although I'm just getting started on this site, I've been blogging elsewhere for a full two years and am reasonably conversant with the blogosphere. I seldom read religious blogs--most of them seem little different from the ubiquitous political blogs--but since a blogroll is pretty much de rigueur I created one as soon as I began this blog, basing it on two criteria: recommendations from Belief.net (for the most part), and a broad spectrum of coverage. Doesn't mean the current selections will last for very long. I've checked them regularly and so far most have made little impression on me.

Blogs4God, "a semi-definitive list of Christians who blog"--I think they must really mean Red State Christians who blog--is a well established blog and, as they are happy to tell you, a finalist in the Best Religious Blog category of the 2005 Weblog Awards. It's competing against fourteen other blogs in this category and it occurred to me that a perusal of them ought to be a good, practical reconnaissance of the religious blogosphere. Here's the complete list, with links to the blogs in question:

Pursuing Holiness
Evangelical Outpost
Generous Orthodoxy Think Tank
Ales Rarus
Wandering Jew
The Thinklings
Blogs4God
Transforming Sermons
Internet Monk
Rome of the West
Flos Carmeli
Leadership Blog: Out of Ur
Another Think
Jay Adkins
Mere-Orthodoxy

I've as yet taken only the briefest of glances at most of these, but over the next few days I'll go through each of them and report what I find.

UPDATE, Dec. 11, 9:33 a.m. - I've posted on Pursuing Holiness and cast a vote for Best Religious Blog, which enables me to see the vote count at present (balloting is open through Dec.15, and a person--actually an IP address--can cast one ballot every 24 hours until then). The top five contenders at the moment are Evangelical Outpost (419 votes), Jay Adkins (411), Wandering Jew (197), Generous Orthodoxy (155), and Internet Monk (134).

UPDATE, Dec. 13, 4:31 p.m. - I now have profiles of two more contenders: Evangelical Outpost and Ales Rarus.

Seventy years ago today my mother was born in Norfolk, Virginia. I cannot say she led a happy life. Her childhood home was drenched in anger and abuse. Her troubled 23-year marriage ended in divorce. At age 29 she was institutionalized for several months with a mental illness diagnosed first, erroneously, as schizophrenia and later, correctly, as bipolar disorder. Ten years later she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The disease finally killed her a few weeks after her forty-seventh birthday.

My mother was part of the last generation of American women raised to embrace what Betty Friedan would call "the feminine mystique": the idea that a woman's highest calling was to be a wife and mother. She usually described herself as a "professional homemaker." She never read The Feminine Mystique. She didn't have to. She lived Friedan's critique of it day to day. She would like to have escaped, but hampered by her bipolar disorder in addition to the usual difficulties of women of her age and station, she stayed in the trap. But she never stopped trying to get out. She immersed herself in self-help books. She drowned herself in religion. Once or twice a year she overdosed on sleeping pills. Through it all she composed short, didactic essays on how to live life and wrote a lot of clumsy poems.

I seldom think of her without recalling these lines from Spoon River Anthology:

I AM Minerva, the village poetess,
Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street
For my heavy body, cock-eye, and rolling walk,
And all the more when “Butch” Weldy
Captured me after a brutal hunt.
He left me to my fate with Doctor Meyers;
And I sank into death, growing numb from the feet up,
Like one stepping deeper and deeper into a stream of ice.
Will some one go to the village newspaper,
And gather into a book the verses I wrote?—
I thirsted so for love!
I hungered so for life!

Jerry Orbach and Martin Landau in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)

In The Body: Being Light in Darkness (1992), Charles Colson talks about the difficulty of doing Christian evangelism in what he calls "a post-Christian culture":

The prevailing world-view denies the existence of absolute truth. The existential, not the historical, conditions the American view of life. So when the Christian message, which is essentially historical and propositional, is proclaimed, modern listeners hear what they interpret as simply one person's preference. . . . Thus, even sharing your personal testimony may not necessarily be convicting. (330)

To drive home this point, Colson described a recent dinner conversation with an acquaintance who happened also to be a prominent journalist. They had met because the acquaintance was "intrigued" by Colson's born again Christian faith and wanted to learn more about it. But Colson found that the usual evangelical approaches did not work: the man believed in neither the Bible nor eternal life, so arguments that used these as points of departure failed to move him. And as for Colson's personal testimony that a relationship with Christ had given him a sense of deep peace and fulfillment--well, the acquaintance was happy for Colson, but he had other friends who had found the same things in the New Age movement.

Colson, temporarily flummoxed, had a sudden thought. "Have you seen Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors?" he asked.

The acquaintance had indeed seen the film and they discussed it for several minutes.

Then, catching him off guard, I asked, "Are you Judah Benjamin?" [the film's central character, a well to do opthamologist who, to protect his comfortable life, commits a monstrous crime and then is wracked by guilt]

He laughed, but it was a nervous laugh.

"You may think this life is all there is," I said, "but if so, then there is still an issue at hand--how do you live with yourself while you're here? I know you have a conscience. So how do you deal with that when you know you do wrong?"

He picked at his food and told me that very issue gave him a lot of problems. Then somehow we moved into a discussion of Leo Tolstoy's novel, War and Peace, in which Pierre, the central character, cries out, Why is it that I know what is right but do what is wrong? That in turn led us to C. S. Lewis's concept of the natural law ingrained in all of us, and then to the central point of Romans 1: That we are all imbued with a conscience, run from it though we might, and that conscience itself points to questions which can only be answered outside ourselves. (331)

Colson concluded the story by saying that he thought his friend would eventually become a Christian. "But I know one thing, without Woody Allen, Leo Tolstoy, and C. S. Lewis, I wouldn't have found a common ground or language with which to discuss the spiritual realm. . . . [T]o evangelize today we must address the human condition at its point of felt need--conscience, guilt, dealing with others, finding a purpose for staying alive. Talking about the abundant life or life everlasting or Bible promises often just won't do it." (332)

These test results are more or less on target:

You are a Social Liberal (80% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (35% permissive) You are best described as a: Strong Democrat Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test