“We have to end adolescence as a social experiment. We tried it. It failed. It's time to move on. Returning to an earlier, more successful model of children rapidly assuming the roles and responsibilities of adults would yield enormous benefit to society. . . . Early adulthood, early responsibility, and early achievement were the norm before the institution of adolescence emerged as a system for delaying adulthood and trapping young people into wasting years of their lives.” (Newt Gingrich, writing in Newsweek)
The Bible or the Bard: When famous quotes from Shakespeare's plays are listed beside lines from scripture, can you tell which is which? Take the quiz here. (Arg! I missed one, forgetting a phrase from Ecclesiastes 11:7. In my defense, though, it’s been a long time since I’ve read the Bible in King James English!)
“An intoxicated British college student badly damaged his new Mini Cooper by trying to replicate a stunt from the film The Italian Job. The student, whose parents had given him the car the day before, tried to drive down a set of church steps—unsuccessfully. By the time the Mini reached the bottom of the stairs, its radiator and two front tires had exploded and both front airbags had deployed.” [foxnews.com, 10/29/08] (HT: Culture Clips)
How to Make a Personal Chocolate Cake in a Mug in the Microwave
A top 10 of irritating expressions has been compiled by researchers at Oxford University
Paul Bloom in Slate grudgingly acknowledges, “There is evidence within the United States for a correlation between religion and what might broadly be called ‘niceness.’” But, he says, it’s because atheists aren’t included in the main form of building community in the U.S.—religious involvement. So, you see, it’s the fault of the faithful that the faithless aren’t better people. Got it?
“If just the ‘committed Christians’ (defined as those who attend church at least a few times a month or profess to be "strong" or "very strong" Christians) would tithe, there would be an extra 46 billion dollars a year available for kingdom work. To make that figure more concrete, the authors suggest dozens of different things that $46 billion would fund each year: for example, 150,000 new indigenous missionaries; 50,000 additional theological students in the developing world; 5 million more micro loans to poor entrepreneurs; the food, clothing and shelter for all 6,500,000 current refugees in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East; all the money for a global campaign to prevent and treat malaria; resources to sponsor 20 million needy children worldwide. Their conclusion is surely right: ‘Reasonably generous financial giving of ordinary American Christians would generate staggering amounts of money that could literally change the world.’” (Ron Sider, reviewing the book, Passing the Plate)
Post-Election Reaction and Reflection:
“Among democratic peoples each generation is a new people.” Alexis de Tocqueville
“Richard Cizik, vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals, said evangelicals have serious disagreements on certain issues with Obama, but thinks the president-elect understands evangelicals better than any Democrat since Jimmy Carter. ‘I have a strong confidence that evangelicals will find a willing ear here by this new president," Cizik said. ‘We need to respond.’” (ChristianityToday.com)
“Who will President-Elect Obama turn to when he wants to hear what the evangelical community is thinking?” (Rice sociologist Michael Lindsey asks—and attempts to answer. HT: Of Sacred and Secular)
Newsweek presents Joel Hunter as a key leader of the “New Evangelicals” who want a wider social agenda in addition to sanctity-of-life and defense of marriage. Hunter doesn’t think Obama will keep his promise to sign the “Freedom of Choice Act.” But this phrase caught my eye: David Van Biema of Newsweek describes the divisive Freedom of Choice Act as merely “a bill that could wipe out many of the inroads conservatives have made into strict interpretation of Roe v. Wade.” That’s just about the oddest phrase I’ve ever read. Conservatives are committed to “interpreting” Roe? I thought we were committed to wiping out this poorly-argued case. And I didn't know ours was a “strict” interpretation of the Supreme Court decision. Does that mean that President-elect Obama’s is middle-of-the-road to claim that the Roe decision means abortion should be legal at every stage of pregnancy, performed on a minor without parental involvment, and funded by the government?
I wrote my own reflections on Barack Obama’s election, but Michael Gerson did a much better job in the Washington Post: “This presidency in particular should be a source of pride even for those who do not share its priorities. An African American will take the oath of office blocks from where slaves were once housed in pens and sold for profit. He will sleep in a house built in part by slave labor, near the room where Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation with firm hand. He will host dinners where Teddy Roosevelt in 1901 entertained the first African American to be a formal dinner guest in the White House; command a military that was not officially integrated until 1948. Every event, every act, will complete a cycle of history. It will be the most dramatic possible demonstration that the promise of America — so long deferred — is not a lie. I suspect I will have many substantive criticisms of the new administration, beginning soon enough. Today I have only one message for Barack Obama, who will be our president, my president: Hail to the chief.”
Well, that was a short honeymoon. Peter Hitchens in London’s Daily Mail reacts to President-elect Obama’s election: “If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left-wing machine politician is a sort of secular saviour, then you can believe anything.” So, what does Hitchens believe the election signifies? That America has switched sides in the culture war: “The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world. Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique. These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America’s conservative party – the Republicans – to fight on the cultural and moral fronts. . . . How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?”
“The Republican Party retains a remarkably strong pulse, considering that McCain's often chaotic campaign earned 46 percent of the popular vote while tacking into terrible winds” (George Will). Charles Krauthammer said the same thing: “Even a Ronald Reagan could not have survived [in the economic uncertainty surrounding this election]. The fact that John McCain got 46 percent of the electorate when 75 percent said the country was going in the wrong direction is quite remarkable.”
Latinos and blacks who came out in record numbers for Obama in California were also in the ballot booth to defend marriage. Gays were hoping African-Americans would see gay marriage as a civil rights issue. But Derek McCoy, African American outreach director for the Protect Marriage Campaign, said, “The reason I feel they [African-Americans] came out so strong on the issue is one, for them, it's not a civil rights issue, it's a marriage issue. It's about marriage being between a man and a woman and it doesn't cut into the civil rights issue, about equality. The gay community was never considered a third of a person.’”
“Let those who deal with the world do it as though they had no dealings with it. Yes, we deal with the world. But there are unseen things that are vastly more precious than the world. The full passions of our heart are attached to something greater—God and His purposes. We will inherit the world soon enough. For now we deal with it to show that Christ, not the world, is our treasure.” (John Piper, reminding us of 1 Corinthians 7:29-31, a passage that seems to say “Don't flee the world. Marry. Cry. Rejoice. Buy. Deal. But then: Do it all as if you weren't doing it.”)
Finally, for your Veterans Day, here's the video I showed in last Sunday's service:
No comments:
Post a Comment