David Brooks in today's NYT explains why he is Jewish and a Christian or Christian whle remaining Jewish (the faith he

[CTyankee]

was born into)

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/19/opinion/faith-god-christianity.html

It is interesting to me since my husband was born into a Congregational Church family of educators. In college, he converted to Judaism, and subsequently met and married his first wife. Their daughter is a rabbi today, on Long Island.

I think Brooks is sincere about his faith. But I often disagree with what I view as his excessive bothsideism. But I am a strong Democrat and I was brought up by parents who rejected the Christian faith of their parents (mostly my father since my maternal grandmother called herself a "theosophist" and detested Billy Graham).

I'd be interested in your take on David's piece.

[LeftInTX]

1. It's very long and it's about his personal opinion, experience. Sorry I'm not of much help.

I screams of his personal opinion....

[CTyankee]

4. I can relate to his "aha" moment since I had that kind of moment in an art museum with a painting by Van Gogh.

I just broke down and wept and couldn't stop. I attributed it to the atmospherics of the trip I took by retrofitted barge to Amsterdam, traveling the rivers of Holland.

The painting was "Wheatfields with Crows," btw. In case you were wondering. I don't think it was the painting as much as the whole experience, my sympathy for the artist in his tormented state, and the surpassing greatness of the work itself.

I've been in more museums than I can enumerate since then and seen some of the greatest artwork in western world, in Europe, the U.S. and North Africa. But this is the only art that actually brought me to tears. However, my experience is not so uncommon. I had one museum attendant and smile and say "All the time" when I asked if he had seen people in his museum break down in tears before paintings. Apparently, this is not uncommon.

[Abolishinist]

19. Talk about timing!

I've been going through some older things lying around the house and happened upon a notepad given us by La Nouvelle Etoile, the barge we were on in Holland. What great memories, sounds like a very similar trip to yours. So many interesting day trips, the Keukenhof, Delft. I'm still fascinated by the flower auction in Aalsmeer, 274 acres (the size of 200 football fields) where on a typical weekday 43 million flowers and 5 million plants changing hands.

I remember "Wheatfields with Crows" at the Van Gogh Museum, one of my favorites of his there is "The Potato Eaters".

After this we spent several days in Bruges, a fun place!

[lame54]

2. Does he believe in Jesus?

[CTyankee]

5. Yes, but he doesn't comment on the whole " risen from the dead, ascended to heaven, back down again to appear to Mary

Magdalen" thing. I think he appreciates the message of love, a kind of helpful "add-on" to his Jewish faith. I dunno. It's fine that he feels the way he does but I wonder why he had to get it all out. Maybe Trump's re-ascendance drives him nuts.

[lame54]

3. My favorite color is Red. Also Blue...

Don't get me started on Purple

[CTyankee]

6. Purple is complicated. Sometimes the blue wins out, sometimes the red does. Purple gets confused.

[Ocelot II]

7. He seems to be trying to describe his religious experiences

while trying to shoehorn them into both the Jewish and the Christian traditions. As far as theology goes, though, I don't think you can be both. Though Christianity and Judaism have the same roots, as I understand it a person is Jewish by birth for starters, but they can be Christian through belief alone, which means they have to believe that Jesus was both human and divine, that he died and was resurrected, and that he is the messiah who has come. If you are Jewish, however, you believe God is distinct from humanity and that the messiah has not come yet. A lot of people accept the traditional practices and rituals of both (celebrating both Hanukkah and Christmas, for example), but when you get into the theology they aren't compatible. I think Brooks was speaking of transcendency, which can come from any religious or spiritual tradition, but if he accepts the basic premise of Christianity, which is a belief in the divinity of Jesus, he's a Christian. Whether he specifically believes that wasn't clear.

[CTyankee]

8. Yes, he skirted that quandary that you so wisely point out. I wonder why he decided to write the piece at all...

my guess is that he feels uncomfortable with his situation and felt he needed to write about it and why not at Christmas, which this year happens at the same time.

[Intractable]

9. David Brooks was always uninteresting to me.

And continues to be.

[CTyankee]

11. well, he is not a committed Democrat as we are. Jeez, if ever there was a time to take a stand, it's NOW, with this

lunatic and his lunacy party ready to overthrow our democracy...

[Ping Tung]

10. Man is the only animal to have found the One True God.......several of them. Mark Twain

[displacedvermoter]

12. Apparently, whatever his religious beliefs,

he is perfectly comfortable looking the other way as the GOP and MAGA enact policies that are cruel and corrupt, and taking comfort for his seeming lack of a moral compass based on what he hears in airport cocktail bars and in taxis. He is the Tim Russert of David Broders with his "both sides aren't reaching out enough to each other" claptrap.

The face and mindset of the NY Times, and journalism in general.

[CTyankee]

14. I am old enough to remember the anti-Vietnam war era when we sang "Whose side are you on?" to our detractors.

[displacedvermoter]

15. I know what side Mr. Brooks is on, he just tries to keep it on the down low.

[Paladin]

13. Sorry, can't help you.

I stopped reading Brooks' drivel, some time ago. Same goes for the rest of the sorry Democrat-bashing trump pimps at the NYT opinion section; life is too short to cede any time and thought to such assholes.

[CTyankee]

16. I think Brooks is an interesting character but whenever I hear him debate with Capehart I can see Jonathan smirk a

little when David gets pompous and then alluva sudden kinda collapse into confused nonsense. J. seems to regard him as a sadly confused doofus.

[Paladin]

17. "Sadly confused doofus" is far too charitable. (nt)

[Noel Kums]

20. Was this a question ANYONE was asking or gives two about?

News must be really slow.

[hatrack]

21. Wow. Can't wait.

One of my least favorite "public intellectuals" pontificating on one of my least favorite topics . . .

[Johonny]

22. Brooks is of the generation of conservatives that paved

The road Trump ran them over on and he now rests squished like a bug wondering how being an immoral asshole that pretended free money in politics, unequal media access, and demonizing liberals as Godless fools, led to the GOP being taken over by a conman and his cult of lack of personality. He is as clumsy as he is stupid , and should be put to bed. His day is over. He was wrong about everything and doesn't even like the world he helped create. Fuck him.

[Kid Berwyn]

23. I thought Brooks was a Moonie.

Sometimes the Truth is Friggin' Bizarre

by Scoobie Davis

May 8, 2006—SAN DIEGO (scoobiedavis.blogspot.com)—In David Brooks's latest column, titled "The Paranoid Style," (read it free here ) he writes:

Needless to say, (Kevin) Phillips's book (American Theocracy) is rife with bizarre assertions. (Phillips) writes that "many Orthodox Jewish females cannot even study the Torah," that the Rev. Sun Myung Moon "has been close to the Bush family," that the American Revolution was "in many ways a religious war."

Brooks's flippant treatment of Phillips' claim about the Bush family and Sun Myung Moon illustrates how dysfunctional Washington culture is and how clueless the nation's press corps and punditocracy are about how Moon has become a huge power player in Washington.

For those of you reading this unfamiliar with Moon, here's a brief tutorial: Sun Myung Moon established the Unification Church in 1954 because he claimed that Jesus appeared to him and authorized him to do the work left unaccomplished after His crucifixion (Moon has since claimed that his messiahship was endorsed by Buddha, Muhammad, and every dead U.S. president). Moon's church grew rapidly in membership and funds even though Moon was arrested by South Korean authorities who were suspicious about Moon's rather convenient claim that God endowed his penis with the authority to "bless the wombs" of young women in his flock. In 1971, after amassing a fortune from the labors of his devotees and establishing close connections with Park Chung Hee's authoritarian regime in South Korea, Moon decided he had bigger fish to fry and moved to the United States. Throughout the 1970's, Moon courted the powerful (such as President Nixon) and the church spent millions spreading Moon's message of world unity to Americans. As a result, the Unification Church experienced a (small) influx of upper-middle class college students in its ranks.

However, by the end of the 1970's, Moon's effort to convert America to Moonie principles was a dismal failure; in a 1979 survey of American attitudes of 155 well-known people, Moon was ranked 154th--the only person ranked behind Moon was Charles Manson. The reason: Most Americans are sane people; the more they learned about Moon, the less they liked him. They didn't like the idea of a self-proclaimed messiah calling for the destruction of American democracy (which he calls "Satan's Harvest&quot and the establishment of a one-world theocracy in which Moon rules and dissenters are "digested." I suspect it also rankled many Americans that a messiah who had unleashed his divine blessing rod on the lotus blossoms of naive female devotees would claim that American women were descended from "a line of prostitutes." They didn't like the idea of their children being recruited to spend long hours hawking flowers and trinkets so that Moon could live like a king.

CONTINUED...

Original URL: http://www.americanpolitics.com/20060508Scoobie.html

Internet Archive / Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20061027202954/http://www.americanpolitics.com/20060508Scoobie.html