Culture Clips - November 29, 2005
What Happened after the Feast
Many of us tend to think of the first Thanksgiving feast as the official end to all the Pilgrims’ difficulties. Wrong: Their survival would remain in jeopardy for years to come. And yet, no matter how difficult things became, they never failed to offer thanks to God.
As every school child knows, the Pilgrims arrived in the New World in the winter of 1620. As the freezing weeks passed, nearly half their number died. It was a terrible time, but by spring, things began to improve. Friendly Indians helped the Pilgrims plant their crops. By October 1621, the fields yielded a harvest large enough to sustain the colony in the coming winter. The grateful Pilgrims invited their Indian friends to a three-day feast of thanksgiving to God.
That’s
where the story typically ends — for us. But for the Pilgrims,
the hardships went on. The next month, a ship arrived with thirty-five
new colonists. But to the Pilgrims’ dismay, they brought no
provisions. The entire colony was forced to go on half rations
that winter. At one point, with food running out, everyone was
forced onto a daily ration of just five kernels of corn. 
As my friend Barbara Rainey writes in her new book, Thanksgiving: A Time to Remember, by spring, the colony was weakened by hunger and sickness. While the bay and creeks were full of fish, the Pilgrims’ nets had rotted. Were it not for shellfish, which could be dug by hand, they would have perished. Despite the great difficulties, they thanked God for His provision.
Chuck Colson
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/chuckcolson/2005/11/24/176700.html
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He’s Such a Character
Harry Potter and moral education.
“There are dark days ahead, Harry," says Dumbledore, Harry's mentor and the avuncular headmaster of Hogwart's Academy at the end of the recently released film, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, "days when we will be forced to choose between what is right and what is easy." One of the most magical things about J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books and now films, the last two of which have been just splendid, is the way they subtly weave lessons about ethical choice and character into their gripping plots. Indeed, the plots themselves pivot on the crucial choices of the major characters for good or for evil, choices that at once form and reveal character.
Attention to moments of choice and to the development of character, for example, in the latest Potter film and in the wonderful film version of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, can help to educate the moral imagination of young and old alike. As Karen Bohlin, a senior scholar at the Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character at Boston University, urges in her new book Teaching Character Education Through Literature: Awakening the Moral Imagination in Secondary Classrooms the challenge for parents and educators is to "mitigate the range of negative narrative images and stimuli that feed the imaginations and aspirations of young people." The real danger in our culture is that many children grow up in a moral and spiritual vacuum into which the worst of Hollywood popular culture — film, music, and video — marches to set up its own pedagogy, which atrophies the moral imagination and deforms desire.
Now, it is true that as practice in many schools character education is no more than a fad, deployed as a quick fix for rising violence, promiscuity, drug use, and incivility that afflict our youth. A scholar and secondary-school administrator at the Boston's Montrose School, Bohlin is acutely aware that much that passes for character education never transcends "simplistic slogans." Schools promote virtues the way Baskin-Robbins sells its flavor of the week, with posters of nice kids being nice to other nice kids. This is the sort of insubstantial rot through which young people see very quickly.
Thomas
Hibbs
National Review
http://www.nationalreview.com/hibbs/hibbs200511280820.asp
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Review ― The Heritage Guide to the Constitution
It seems only natural that we should owe the first line-by-line exegesis of the Constitution to former Attorney General Edwin Meese. In 1986, when Meese first began championing “a jurisprudence of original intent,” most conservatives still adhered to the strict-constructionist view, which valued the literal words of the Constitution over the Framers’ intent behind them.
During the past twenty years, however, originalism has steadily gained currency among conservative jurists to the point of being the most formidable judicial philosophy of our time. And with the publication of The Heritage Guide to the Constitution, Meese has sought to make originalism accessible to the general public.
The format of The Heritage Guide is relatively straightforward. Meese and his fellow editors, Matthew Spalding and David Forte, have assigned each of the individual clauses of the Constitution to a group of more than 100 conservative legal scholars for explication. Each scholar has provided a mini-history of each clause, explaining how the Founders understood it and how it has subsequently been interpreted. A surprising number of clauses have remained virtually undisputed since their inception, while many others have been distorted beyond recognition.
The commerce clause, for instance, which grants Congress
the power to regulate trade among the states, remains by far
the most hotly contested clause in the Constitution. The Framers
seem to have intended that Congress should stop states from
unfairly burdening each other’s trade, but their language is
frustratingly vague. No one agrees on what the words “regulate,”
“commerce,” or “among several states” mean. As David Forte,
a professor at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, points out
in his explication, Justice Benjamin Cardozo greatly expanded Congress’s power in 1935 when he
broadly interpreted the clause to allow for the regulation of
anything that affected state commerce. As
it stands now, a whole host of far-flung issues--abortion to
gun control--could potentially hinge on how the Supreme Court
understands the regulation of interstate trade… 
Originalism may be a conservative methodology, but it does not always yield conservative results. Justice Antonin Scalia could cite numerous examples of cases ― Texas v. Johnson, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, etc. ― where his originalist interpretations have led to outcomes he personally deplored. As such, originalism is legally, not politically conservative ― an important distinction to note. If there’s one unfortunate thing about The Heritage Foundation’s imprimatur on The Guide, it’s that it may scare away some of the audience across the aisle.
Thomas
Meaney
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/books_entertainment/reviews/ThomasMeaney/176872.html
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Repetitive Choice
Close to half of the 1.3 million abortions performed in the
Asked about repeat abortions, a spokesman for NARAL Pro-Choice America declined several requests for comment.
The reluctance of liberals and pro-choice advocates to shine a spotlight on the troubling repeat-abortion phenomenon has obscured a growing public health issue. ... The sad fact is that ... abortion is no longer mainly a tool women use to shape their own destinies, but rather a symptom of larger social problems that ought to be addressed by policy-makers.
Realizing this may just mean accepting that there's some credibility to conservative views on abortion.
Garance
Franke-Ruta, writing on "Multiple Choice," in the
Dec. 5 issue of the New Republic
Reported in The
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/culture/culturebriefs.htm