Links to Your World, Tuesday September 16

“If this is the way God made me, then this is the way I’m going to live. It’s not like God made me this way and he’ll send me to hell if I am who he created me to be … I really feel closer to God because I no longer hate myself.” (Ray Boltz, explaining why he left his wife last year and has now announced that he is gay. Boltz is the Christian musician known for songs like “Thank You,” “Watch the Lamb,” and “I Pledge Allegiance to the Lamb.”


“Babita Nayak was cooking lunch for her pregnant sister when a mob of Hindu extremists wielding swords, hammers and long sticks rampaged through their village, chanting ‘India is for Hindus! Convert or leave!’” (From the chilling Washington Post article on Hindu persecution of Christ-followers)


Read Andy Crouch’s critique of the four ways Christians react to culture: condemning, critiquing, copying, and consuming. “The problem is not with any of these gestures,” he says. “All of them can be appropriate responses to particular cultural goods. Indeed, each of them may be the only appropriate response to a particular cultural good. But the problem comes when these gestures become too familiar, become the only way we know how to respond to culture, become etched into our unconscious stance toward the world, and become postures.” We need to be known, he says, as cultivators and creators. This is an excerpt from his new book, Culture Making, which I’m reading right now.


“A 33-year-old woman stole her daughter's identity to attend high school and join the cheerleading squad, according to a criminal complaint filed against the woman.” (Yahoo News)


"Promoting a campaign to convert Jews away from their faith is a serious affront to the Jewish people and disrespectful to Judaism's own teachings," ADL national director Abraham H. Foxman and ADL director of interfaith policy Rabbi Eric J. Greenberg said in a statement. "To issue this declaration from Berlin, where the Nazis directed their Final Solution to exterminate the Jewish people, is the height of insensitivity." (Story here, about a formal declaration from the World Evangelical Alliance promoting Jewish evangelization.) How insecure do you have to be about your beliefs that you have to call for bans on people talking to you about them? And how much more insensitive can you get to victims of the Final Solution than to compare conversation about Jesus to what people endured in the Holocaust? Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League need to go after some real defamation.


“I've successfully taught awesomely bold leaders for years: When under pressure, under stress, you must breathe. You must inhale, then exhale, repeatedly. Patriots quarterback Tom Brady employs this "in-and-out" breathing method, as does NASCAR star Jimmie Johnson and the last five U.S. Presidents, except Ronald Reagan, who no longer employs this breathing method. What do they know that you don't?” (Rule #401 in The 417 Rules of Awesomely Bold Leadership: One for Each Day of the Year, Plus a Bunch of Days that Would Be in the Next Year After That)


“Medication is already been subtly used to improve ethical behaviour and we should prepare for a revolution in ‘moral pharmacology.’” (Vaughan at Mind Hacks. HT: Michael)


“In general, liberal political and media elites demonstrate a religious diversity that runs the spectrum from secularism to liberal Episcopalianism -- all the varied shades from violet to blue.” (Michael Gerson)


Election Updates:

Upon hearing ABC’s Charles Gibson ask Governor Palin her opinion of “the Bush Doctrine,” Timothy Noah of Slate (no fan of President Bush) admitted, “I searched my memory in vain to remember which of the various rigid nostrums articulated by President Bush over the past eight years had become enshrined as the defining principle of his foreign policy.” Noah even googled the phrase but couldn’t nail it down.


A good one for politics junkies: New York magazine has a lengthy article about the chief strategists behind the campaigns of McCain and Obama. Read about Steve Schmidt and David Axelrod in “The Sixty-Day War.”


“Can Mr McCain ride an energised evangelical base into the White House? He is certainly much better off now than he was a month ago, before the evangelical surge. But he nevertheless confronts two big problems. The first is that evangelical issues have less resonance with the general public than they did in 2004. There has been a decline in support for traditional morality, an uptick in hostility to the involvement of the church in politics, and an increase in support for social welfare. Catholics in particular are shifting back into the Democratic camp. The second is that Mrs Palin and her supporters may energise America’s secularists while also putting off swing voters (who are likely to be troubled by Mrs Palin’s hostility to abortion even in cases of rape and incest). The big problems now facing Mr McCain may not be too little enthusiasm among evangelicals, but too much.” (The Economist)


As you can see from the article above, a standard storyline has formed in the media that McCain has had to bring disaffected evangelicals to his side, and that's one reason he chose Governor Palin. But Frank Newport, USA Today’s “Gallup Guru,” says that McCain’s uptick in support is coming from voters who do not identify as evangelical. The “data do not allow us to support a hypothesis that McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate caused a significant shift of highly religious white voters to his support. We just don’t see it in the data. It looks like McCain managed to pick up support by drawing in voters from across the religious spectrum. ‘Secular gains’ we might call them.” (“No evidence that Sarah Palin converted religious whites to GOP ticket support”)

How to Have Civil Conversations about Civic Issues:

Joe Carter, managing editor of the new Culture 11, writes “An Open Letter to the ‘Religious Right.’” Excellent: Take 5 minutes with it, whether you’re a religious conservative or you tend to make shallow caricatures of them.


“Our founding fathers believed spirited public discourse was the crucible of democratic decision-making. [Yet] we have evidence that dialogue has all but ceased. The result is a public whose opinions are rarely tested and challenged.” Joseph Grenny, who suggested four ways to have political conversations that are both candid and respectful.


Anne Lamott shows us how to have the disrespectful kind in this Slate article. Lamott claims she left church Sunday because the sermon wasn't on how to deal with the depression brought on by the McCain-Palin ticket and then she said she called "my Jesuit friend, who I know hates these people, too." Lovely.


“Non-Christians are among the most repelled by the political activation of Christians. This should not discourage us from voting, but it should change how we talk about our voting. One of the most profound lessons I have learned is just how powerful careless words and ugly attitudes are in pushing people away from faith in Christ. I am not referring to the speech-making of professionals. Instead, I am thinking about the conversations that Christians--normal people like you and I--have with our friends, colleagues, neighbors, and acquaintances. My advice is do whatever possible to cultivate soft hearts among your church's attendees so that they will be 'wise as serpents and harmless as doves' over the next sixty days.” (From a Catalyst article by David Kinnaman, who gives “five research-based election realities you should grapple with as a church leader.”)