God evolves

It's good news, I suppose, that more and more pastors and theologians are finding scriptural sanction for gay marriage, as  Evan McMorris-Santoro reports -- a nice illustration of Robert Wright's thesis that God grows kinder and better as human society evolves socially and ethically.

The process involves obvious self-delusion, as interpretation of texts invested with supreme authority always does. Here, for example, is Obama ally and megachurch pastor Delman Coates putting his "flexibility" on display:

Coates is a Biblical scholar and said his own views on marriage equality came from studying his faith's holy book....He said his understanding of Christian faith has always required flexibility and open-mindedness.

"We are evolving. Not just in our understanding of civil marriage, but we're also evolving in our understanding of what the scripture is affirming and what it is condemning," Coates said. "I think as more reasoned Christians take a look at scripture, it's pretty clear."

A lawyerly second inaugural, or a piece of the president's heart? Or both?

I am generally chary of literary analysis that finds meaning in sound -- variations of rhythm and meter, assonance and alliteration, etc. But purely by accident, while reading Ronald C. White's little ode to Lincoln's Second Inaugural in today's Times (this by a man who I see in the bio line has written a whole book about the speech), I was struck by the beauty and, as it were, aural authority of the speech's final phrasing as White quoted it:

By contrast, Lincoln disappeared in his second inaugural. The speech contains the word “I” only once. Lincoln was pointing beyond himself to the future of the American democratic experiment, “to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves; and with all nations.”

Following the qualified, conditional assertion that the nation has endured God's wrath, and the injunction to "bind up the nation's wounds," this final phrasing does, it seems to me, deliver a kind of aural balm.  It chimes internally in multiple ways: in the alliteration of "achieve and cherish," the assonance of "achieve" and "peace," the double nail-down of just and lasting, lightly punctuating the soft susseration of "cherish...peace...ourselves, nations."