God and Green Mountains: The taciturn spirituality of Howard Dean's home state.

The Wall Street Journal ^ | January 9, 2004 | Geoffrey Norman

[ScottL.]

"He fought against self-righteousness of people who had everything. . . . He was a person who set an extraordinary example that has lasted 2,000 years, which is pretty inspiring when you think about it."

This is a fair example of the way people in New England talk--and think--about Jesus, and you will hear a variation on that theme from the pulpit of any Congregational church in Vermont this Sunday.

[ScottL.]

The lack of religious passion Mr. Norman detects when Mr. Dean addresses religion explicitly in his role as a candidate is the logical Newtonian counterpart to the passion-in-abundance of the political sort (displaced religious feeling, as seen so instructively throughout the century past) on display among the angry insurgents swelling the ranks of the Dean Movement in their quest to redeem the land from the Babylonian exile into which it had been cast by the Pharisees on the Supreme Court in their installation of the Texan Pharaoh (hey, if Mr. Dean can ascribe Job to the New Testament, we lesser folk may mix Biblical metaphor).

Still in Vermont, one saw the displacement of ecclesiastical fire on display in the self-fashioning of Sen. Jim Jeffords, who after his epiphanic break with the GOP, played the "courageous" martyr shtick with Borscht Belt brilliance when hawking his book via personal appearances among the latte set. And who cannot detect the brimstone wafting from the ears of Sen. Pat Leahy, as he strives mightily to play, for our post-theological age, that old crowd-pleaser Pontius Pilate? It may not be old-time religion as we know it, Jim, but given that materialism and its handmaiden the modern total state (one-stop shopping for whatever ails you, 24-7) have virtually colonized in the public square the psychic space once inhabited by belief, what receptacle was left for the energies enlisted for self-serving redemptive mythmaking, for the agony and the ecstasy, than that of partisan warfare?

But modern comfort, soulless or not, has its secular reward: unlike the hapless avatars of the original medieval Children's Crusade of 1212, who ended up either sold as slaves by unscrupulous skippers, or dead from hunger or disease, their descendants in the Dean Movement will pick themselves up, finish school and get an education (and in that order), and eventually sell their body jewelry and Ani DiFranco CDs on eBay, the better to make their Volvo payments and tuition bills. - Scott Lahti

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[billorites]

The Conversion of St. Howard on the Bike Path to Burlington

[.cnI redruM]

Dean is addressing religion the way I used to address having to put that itchy suit on every Sunday in August to go to church. I didn't want to wear the dumb thing,. but I knew it was trouble if I didn't put it on.

[Red Boots]

Ethan Allen wasn't a Christian ? Then what the heck did he mean when claiming Fort Ticonderoga, " in the name of the Continential Congress AND THE GREAT JEHOVAH"?

[Conservateacher]

As I understand it, Ethan Allen was also a traitor to the US. When he petitioned the Continental congress for Vermont statehood and was refused, he began negotiating with the British to make Vermont a British rovince.

[Conservateacher]

rovince=province

[presidio9]

Scott, periods are our friends...