Evangelical Bioethics and the Web - washingtonpost.com
That's the title of today's story in the Washington Post about Joe Carter, evangelical blogger read by zillions, and his role on in bioethics debates. The blog is lauded by mainstream religious blog beliefnet.com and ranks up there among awards for blogdom. Conservative bioethics folks are out in force in the piece (as usual) to support absolutely anyone who isn't liberal, and I get spun as loving the site for its window to the evangelical "world:""When you read it, you get the sense that this is someone who has thought this out," said Matthew Eppinette, assistant director of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, an evangelical bioethics think tank in Illinois that hired Carter in 2005. At the time, Carter was based in Fort Worth, repairing computer systems on fighter jets by day and blogging by night. Eppinette read the blog and called Carter in for an interview.
Glenn McGee, director of the Alden March Bioethics Institute in Albany, N.Y., and editor of the mainstream American Journal of Bioethics, said he checks Carter's blog not for scholarly reasons -- "most people in this field don't read blogs and are incredibly luddite" -- but more as cultural research.
"I'll go to his site to see, 'What are evangelicals saying about [the sexually transmitted human papilloma virus]?' I think he's a good mirror of what people are saying; he's plugged in," McGee said.
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That's quite the spin.
...I did a triple take when I first saw the article. The guy looks creepily like Kevin Bacon in his "I will be intense and scary" movie days.
- by Kelly on Mar 17, 2007 at 5:45 PM | link
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- by homestyle on Mar 18, 2007 at 6:46 AM | link
Joe's an interesting guy. I've been following his blog for a couple of years, and he is a good bellwether, both of the evangelical community and their mode of thinking on ethical issues.
He came out of the Marine Corps as an electronics technician with no formal background in ethics, and began to educate himself assiduously, but with mixed results. He frequently winds up with staggeringly bizarre interpretations of doctrines he half-understands (his tout court dismissal of materialism on the grounds that it - as he notes, absurdly - includes the doctrine that rocks can think, is a must-read). But he wholeheartedly endorses any that flatter his religious beliefs, and offhandedly dismisses any that do not - often with convoluted arguments that resemble the "philosophy cafe" sketch from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. He makes frequent forays into evolution theory, atheism, sexual politics, education, government, and all the other evangelical hot-button issues, all of which he settles definitively in a few paragraphs of self-taught gibberish.
At the same time, he's a great blogger and has largely earned his audience. Aside from the flocking tendency of evangelicals who quickly imprint on anyone who tells them what they already believe, he has introduced a lot of clever and often entertaining or fascinating elements to his blog, and keeps the content varied, intriguing, and meaty; his blog can be a lot of fun to read even if much of the content is rather questionable.
In private correspondence, he's actually a very charming and generous person. It's my impression that he's gotten much more aggressively right-wing since he started working for groups like the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity (home of the notorious Dr. William Cheshire, who testified to the presence of speech, coordinated movement, and directed gaze in Terri Schiavo) and the Family Research Council. He's also begun taking speaking engagements through them - I suppose he's no worse than most of their other speakers - making him a not-inconsiderable player on the "social conservative" circuit.
- by Kevin T. Keith on Mar 23, 2007 at 6:17 PM | link