NYT and their Anti-Christian Bias...

Some of you are probably old enough to remember that old BeeGees hit, "Stayin' Alive" and line talking about "The New York Times' effect on man..."

Well this past week I read a really biased article about a faith-based prison program in Iowa and the verdict by a judge in that state who is trying to shut it down. I have a good friend who works with Prison Fellowship who runs that program and I know from his accounts all the good these types of programs are doing for those who have run afoul of the law. Yet when I read the report, it was obvious to me that this article by the NYT was skewed in a terrible way.

Well Mark Early, the president of Prison Fellowship has put the record straight. Here is his side of the story...

All the News That's Fit to Print?

By Mark Earley

Regular “BreakPoint” listeners and readers know that a federal judge has ordered a highly successful program for prisoners called the InnerChange Freedom Initiative®, or IFI, to shut down because the judge felt it violated the separation of church and state.

Prison Fellowship strongly disagrees. So do the Justice Department, nine state attorneys general, and numerous faith-based organizations. That’s why Prison Fellowship is appealing the case and why the others I just mentioned have filed friend-of-the-court briefs with the appeals court on IFI’s behalf.

Not surprisingly, however, the New York Times agrees with the judge. On its front page last Sunday, the Times ran the following headline above the fold: “Religion for a Captive Audience, Paid for by Taxes.” The headline alone tells you the kind of picture the Times intended to—and, in fact, did—paint: inmates coerced into participating in a government-funded religious program.

But what did the Times not tell us in that article?

Click here to read more...

Balance

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"The Christian life, lived in the magnetic field between the two poles of the amazing grace of God and the appalling sin in which I share, has a corresponding synthesis of a godly confidence and a godly fear. The fear is lest I should put my trust in anything other than God's grace in Jesus Christ; the confidence is in the infinite abundance of his grace to me and to every one of his creatures." (p.178)

Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society.

The Blind Men and the Elephant

We've probably all heard the story of "The Blind Men and the Elephant." It has been used to appeal for greater toleration amongst religions and as a parable in the cause of pluralism. But what is the real point of the story?

In the famous story of the blind men and elephant, so often quoted in the interests of religious agnosticism, the real point of the story is constantly overlooked. The story is told from the point of view of the king and his courtiers, who are not blind but can see that the blind men are unable to grasp the full reality of the elephant and are only able to get hold of part of the truth. The story is constantly told in order to neutralize the affirmation of the great religions, to suggest that they learn humility and recognize that none of them can have more than one aspect of the truth. But of course, the real point of the story is exactly the opposite. If the king were also blind there would be no story. [emphasis mine] The story is told by the king, and it is the immensely arrogant claim of one who sees the full truth which all the world's religions are only groping after. It embodies the claim to know the full reality which relativizes all the claims of the religions and philosophies.

Lesslie Newbigin in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (pp. 9-10)

Singapore Takes on Crows; One Down, 34,999 to Go - New York Times

I'm always fascinated when Singapore makes news in papers around the world. However, this article from the New York Times on the culling of crows in our ultra-urban city state really tops them all for me!

"“Garbage bin! Garbage bin!”

The men with shotguns tumbled from the Land Rover in a crouch and trotted along beside it like marines taking cover behind a Humvee.

“Don’t let them see your gun, they know about guns!” whispered the leader, Dennis Lim, a 20-year veteran of this kind of thing.

He jumped from behind the van, whirled and fired, “pop!” But his prey — seven or eight crows sitting on a trash bin — were gone.

“They’re smart birds,” Mr. Lim said. “One of them saw us and alerted the others. He started flying and the others started flying.”

Mr. Lim, 54, is on the front lines of a battle for his country’s territorial integrity, a member of the Singapore Gun Club who has been enlisted to help reduce an infestation that at one point climbed to 150,000.

The club is one of the few places here that permits private weapons, though owners must lock them up before they leave. In 1982 the government asked the club to take on the crows, and Mr. Lim has been hunting them down almost from the start.

Now he is standing by for a new challenge, the possibility of bird flu and the need to secure Singapore against migrating birds, perhaps by shooting them out of the sky."

Read the rest here...

The Way I See It

On the way back from a meeting at a church in Monroeville (which is about an hour away from Ambridge), my professor and I stopped at a nearby Starbucks for a quick coffee. I picked up a mocha latte and was quite surprised to read a little theology on the side of the cup. It was part of a series that the coffee giants call "The Way I See It" and is intended to spark conversations. The quote was from a musician named Mike Doughty, who as far as I can tell isn't a Christian. This is what he said:

It’s tragic that extremists co-opt the notion of God, and that hipsters and artists reject spirituality out of hand. I don’t have a fixed idea of God. But I feel that it’s us – the messed-up, the half-crazy, the burning, the questing – that need God, a lot more than the goody-two-shoes do.

A Tragedy of News

The horrific carnage that fell upon the Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, has made the news all around the world. The gruesome details have been repeated ad nauseum in news reports in print, over the air and on the internet. But one place that won't happen is in the main newspaper that serves that strict religious community.

The Los Angeles Times reports: "Although the Oct. 16 paper will reflect the loss of life in Nickel Mines, where a man burst into a one-room schoolhouse on Monday and shot 10 Amish girls, killing five, Lapp (the editor of the Amish paper) hopes not to devote too many column inches to the incident. Long-standing policy at Die Botschaft prohibits the publication of stories about murder, as well as stories about war, love or religion."

When I was trained as a journalist, on of the ways in which I was taught to evaluate the newsworthiness of an event was by the level of conflict or controversy it manifest. What happened in Lancaster county certainly qualifies. And what is interesting is that this same element was also an essential ingredient in my scriptwriting class. I was told that conflict was an important tool that help a story's entertainment value. There in lies the rub. Is news meant to be for our entertainment or information?

Can we really make this distinction? In many ways, since the newsmedia is a business, it will always seek to give the public what it wants. It has to if it hopes to attract the eyeballs which sponsors demand and pay for. It has to cater to the same instinct which manifests itself in our tendency to slow down as we pass a car wreck to see if we can catch a glance of a mangled body, or a pool of blood. It horrifies us, but we can't look away.

The only problem though is how much do the details of such incidents actually inspire others to imitate the example. Malcom Gladwell in his hugely popular tome, The Tipping Point, highlighted the influence the few can have. He cited the example of how reports of a suicide had often resulted in a sudden uptick of imitators. The "permission" was given and others who harbored similar inclinations somehow felt that the door had been opened for them to do likewise.

The Amish schoolhouse incident is the 3rd school shooting that has occurred in the space of a week here in the US. Everyone of them highly publicized events. Is there a connection? Schools around the country worry about it. Some may consider the Amish paper's decision to not report the tragedy quaint and out-moded. But do they have a point?

The sad truth of the matter is that people don't need "permission" to act in atrocious and despicable ways. As saddened and appalled as I was by the incident, I only saw it as another example of how the whole issue of original sin continues to plague the human condition. We are not "evolving." Civilization is not progressing. The more we know, the more we discover that the sin in our hearts continues to rule and reign. No amount of "civilization" can eradicate it!

I don't condone the way in which the news outlets have continued to feed the public hunger for all the gory details. Yet I know that even if they didn't, the innate depravity that every human being carries withinin will come out, and will provide yet another story to be covered.

Our Part

"The only thing of my very own which I contribute to redemption
is the sin from which I need to be redeemed"

Archbishop William Temple

Lost in the Noise

The recent furore over the Pope's speech in the Muslim world has caused many (if not most) to lose sight of what he was really trying to say. As is typically the case, the noise often drowns out the real message. In essence, what the pope was trying to tell his audience, who were mainly a group of secular university elite, was that if there was going to be a "genuine dialogue of cultures and religions," the relationship between reason and faith had to be re-examined. He concluded his address by saying:

In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.

(You can find a pdf of the pope's full speech on the BBC website here)

Ironically, his very call for dialogue brought the heart of the problem he was trying to address to the fore. The Western media guided by their positivistic reason demonstrated its problems by the way they reported the speech. They lifted a quote from the address that was sure to generate maximum conflict, regardless of the fact that it was used totally out of context and totally contrary to the gist of what Pope Benedict was trying to say. Conversely, the response from the Muslim world similarly showed once again how faith divorced from reason can lead to unruly behaviours.

One of my professors, the Revd Dr. Leander Harding, has written a brilliant analysis of the Pope's address. He compares what the pope said with Michael Polyani's concept of "moral inversion" and points out that reason without faith or faith without reason both lead to perversions of morality. And when carried to its logical (or illogical) extreme, results in violence.

If we read Polanyi and the Pope together we can see that the apocalyptic violence of the totalitarian movements of the secular West in the 20th century and the violence of Islamic Jihadism have a strong family resemblance. The both reject in the name of utopian visions the concept of universal moral principles to which as St. Thomas says, “even the Jew and Muslim must agree.” Both European totalitarianism and Jihadism reject any reasoned critique of their utopian project. Both Polanyi and the Pope argue that there is no way out of this impasse without a rehabilitation of the role of reason and a redefinition of the relationship between faith and reason. If the choice is between an unreasoning faith and an unreasonably skeptical secular reason which brings in its train nihilism, the world is presented with a choice between moral despair and utopian fanaticism in both secular and religious forms, with no possibility of a mediating dialogue. This is not the way forward for reason or faith or the human race.

(Click here to read the rest of his blog...)

Sad but True

The notorious Jerry Fallwell made a quip that conservative voters (who are of his ilk) fear Hilary Clinton more than they do the devil himself. He meant it to be a humorous quote in a closed door meeting, but unfortunately I fear that he is more right than he probably cares to admit.

"'I certainly hope that Hillary is the (2008 Presidential) candidate, she has $300 million so far. But I hope she's the candidate. Because nothing will energize my [constituency] like Hillary Clinton.'

Cheers and laughter filled the room as Falwell continued: 'If Lucifer ran, he wouldn't.'"

What does this say about the state of Christianity (esp. amongst Evangelicals here in America)? I am more saddened by the fact that most people here in America don't take Satan seriously enough and that any person (even those you disagree with) should be so "demonized".

"For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places." Ephesians 6:12

Read the whole article here...:

A Crisis of Trust Takes a Toll on Chinese Society

This article from the Los Angeles Times puts a spotlight on the reality of living in a fallen world. This is yet another example of the depravity of man and the effects of original sin...

Crisis of Trust Takes a Toll on Chinese Society:
"Talk about swimming with sharks.

Zhang Xingshui, an attorney with the Beijing Kingdom law firm, knows that like people everywhere else in the world, the Chinese don't always trust lawyers, who often promise things they can't deliver. But in China, he says, lawyers don't trust their clients, who like to skip out without paying. And neither trusts judges, who routinely disregard the law in favor of politics when rendering decisions.

'Living in such a society is tiring for everyone,' Zhang said. 'You're forced to be vigilant so you don't fall into pits, which are everywhere. Everybody is a victim and at the same time an offender.'"

Click here to read the rest of the article...

Hinduism no barrier to job as priest in Church of England -- Times Online

If you had any doubt that the Anglican church is facing a major crisis, read this...

Hinduism no barrier to job as priest in Church of England

"A PRIEST with the Church of England who converted to Hinduism has been allowed to continue to officiate as a cleric.

The Rev David Hart’s diocese renewed his licence this summer even though he had moved to India, changed his name to Ananda and daily blesses a congregation of Hindus with fire previously offered up to Nagar, the snake god. He also “recites Gayatri Mantram with the same devotion with which he celebrates the Eucharist”, according to The Hindu, India’s national newspaper.

The Hindu this week pictures him offering prayers to an idol of the elephant god Ganesh in front of his house. However, he still believes he is fit to celebrate as an Anglican priest and plans to do so when he returns to Britain..."

To read the rest, click here.

The God of China

I came across this article about how the late Mao Zedong has been turned into a deity in communist (and previously aetheist) China. Some villagers in a rural province even claim that 3 miracles happened in their village on the 100th anniversary of his birth in 1993.

Imagine that... he could even become a candidate for beatification and eventual canonization if only China would recognize the Vatican!

It's as the great reformer, John Calvin said, "The human heart is a factory of idols...Everyone of us is, from his mother’s womb, expert in inventing idols."

A Taste of Home

Came across a blog that had quite a number of recipes from home. The author is a free lance journalist and photographer from Malaysia. What really got my stomach juices going were the pictures that accompanied her recipes!

She has taken such good pictures of some of the dishes that I can almost smell the food! Of course for those of you who have never been to South East Asia, some of the stuff will be a little too exotic for your palates!

I can't wait for the season to start

I was just reading the American columnist for Fox Soccer Channel, Nick Webster and he predicted that Liverpool will win the premiership this season. He was right in predicting that Chelsea would win last season... but of course that wasn't rocket science considering how much they spent on building their team!

However I think that Liverpool's win over Chelsea in the Community Shield this last Sunday has really got the fans hopes up! We will see how things turn out, but what is important is that they start the season well. Last season, after the Oct 2nd game in which LFC lost to Chelsea 4-1, Liverpool amassed 75 points to Chelsea's 67 for the rest of the season. The title was essentially lost in the first month when Liverpool only earned 7 points to Chelsea's 21. So with Mourinho (some call him Moanin-ho) claiming that his team are only 50% ready, the tables may well be turned!

Like I said, I just can't wait for the season to begin!

Against the Flow

Being here in America, I have often felt discomfort at the level of politicization of the church. The following is an excerpt of a New York Times article about a pastor who felt the same way. Unfortunately the very fact that he made the news shows how prevalent this is in Evangelical circles here...

"Like most pastors who lead thriving evangelical megachurches, the Rev. Gregory A. Boyd was asked frequently to give his blessing — and the church’s — to conservative political candidates and causes.

The requests came from church members and visitors alike: Would he please announce a rally against gay marriage during services? Would he introduce a politician from the pulpit? Could members set up a table in the lobby promoting their anti-abortion work? Would the church distribute “voters’ guides” that all but endorsed Republican candidates? And with the country at war, please couldn’t the church hang an American flag in the sanctuary?

After refusing each time, Mr. Boyd finally became fed up, he said. Before the last presidential election, he preached six sermons called “The Cross and the Sword” in which he said the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a “Christian nation” and stop glorifying American military campaigns.

“When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses,” Mr. Boyd preached. “When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.”

Mr. Boyd says he is no liberal. He is opposed to abortion and thinks homosexuality is not God’s ideal. The response from his congregation at Woodland Hills Church here in suburban St. Paul — packed mostly with politically and theologically conservative, middle-class evangelicals — was passionate. Some members walked out of a sermon and never returned. By the time the dust had settled, Woodland Hills, which Mr. Boyd founded in 1992, had lost about 1,000 of its 5,000 members..."

To read more, click here.

The sound of silence

I was asked today why I haven't updated my blog in such a long time. There are several reasons for this.

1. The World Cup is over and the new season of the English Premier League hasn't started yet
2. I have been busy studying Biblical Hebrew in an intensive eight week course through the summer. As such I have had very little going on in my life worth blogging about.
   
3. There has very little time to do much reading this summer since most of my time has been taken up with trying to memorise vocabulary, verbal stems, and other grammatical idiosyncrasies of a strange and wonderful language. (the upside of this is that I can actually read portions of Judges 3 and actually understand some of what it says in my Hebrew Bible!)
   
4. ...and ultimately, the truth is... I'm just too lazy to keep up with it!
   

Don't worry folks... I have only 4 more classes to go and a final. So I should be back in a couple of weeks. (Is this ok with you, Janelle?)

The World Cup, General Convention 2006 and Learning Biblical Hebrew

Ruth Gledhill in her Times piece "Anglicans look south for unity in diversity" drew a parallel between World Cup Football (aka soccer) and what is going on in the Anglican Communion. (I was drawn to her piece especially because the centerpiece of the article was an interview with my Archbishop, John Chew)

I have been reflecting on that metaphor as I follow both the World Cup and the proceedings of the Episcopal Church's General Convention (GC06) in Columbus, Ohio at the same time. It has been interesting to see how frenzied the proceedings became on the penultimate day of the convention and it reminds me of one of the traditional "powerhouses" of football frantically trying to get another goal (or two) so that they can ensure survival on the world stage.

As we have seen in this World Cup, too often the favorite underestimates the resolve, passion and preparation of the underdog, and they end up paying the price for that oversight. This is where the parallels between WC06 and GC06 seem very apparent to me...

The Windsor Report was released in 2004, almost 2 years before the Convention that is going on right now. And yet there are so many in the leadership of the Episcopal Church that seem to be surprised by how clearly the report called for certain actions on the part of ECUSA. The quibbling over words and the attempts to fudge a response show how very unprepared most of the leadership was. It appears that they have finally realized that their decisions at this convention will determine whether they remain on the World stage or get booted out of the tournament prematurely.

Many of those who backed the decisions of GC03 were painfully out of touch with how their actions had seriously impaired their relationship with the rest of the Communion, in particular the "poorer" and "less developed" brethren in the Global South. I can remember a number of Episcopal leaders remarking that the reaction of the orthodox conservative Anglicans would eventually blow over, and that they will eventually come to see the "wisdom" of what ECUSA has done.


A fine example of this misunderstanding of what is at stake come from the mouth of the Presiding Bishop-elect Katharine Jefferts Schori (which rhymes with "sorry"). On being asked what she could do to heal the rift between ECUSA and the rest of the communion, she related an anecdote from her days as a marine biologist. She tells of a ship captain who initially snubbed her, but was won over in 15 minutes. "He got over it," she said.

Unfortunately she would be incredibly naive to think that the rest of the primates will "get over it" after GC06 has essentially "thumbed their collective nose" (some others have been less polite in describing their actions) at the requests of the Windsor Report and the Primates of the Communion.

The whole exercise of what I have been observing has been interestingly juxtaposed with my intensive Summer Hebrew course. In class last week we were taught about a Masoretic device in Hebrew Bibles known as Kethibh-Qere. This feature arose because of the Masoretes' high regard for the text of Scripture. Whenever they were copying the Hebrew Bible and came across a recognized error in the text, they chose to make corrections in the margin. This was so that they could leave the original text that was handed down intact, both as an act of extreme reverence and also as a safeguard against tampering with Scripture. If only the leadership of the Episcopal Church were as scrupulous over God's word as they were in manipulating the text of their endless (and ultimately meaningless) resolutions in Columbus.

Here as some links to first hand observations of GC06:

Rev John Burwell,
Deputy from Diocese of South Carolina

Ruth Gledhill,
London Times Religion Correspondent

Bishop James Stanton,
Diocesan of Dallas

Kendall Harmon
of the titusonenine fame

And of course from the Archbishop of Canterbury
who technically wasn't there but must have been
following the events closely from across the pond

What if the Medium really is the Message?

An article by Shane Hipps on Out of Ur:

"Whenever we in the church debate new methods of communicating the gospel, or alternative ways of doing church it ends in a predictable turn. There is a point in these conversations when a person, hoping to end the debate once and for all, says “The methods must change as long as the message stays the same.” So it would seem as long as we preserve the unchanging message, any method is fair game. This serves as a kind of evangelical rally cry for methodological innovation.

If they are feeling particularly sophisticated, they may go on to explain that, “Our methods, in and of themselves, are neither good nor evil, it is how we use them that determines their value.”

Meaning, if we pipe pornography through the Internet it’s bad, but if we post the Four Spiritual Laws there the Internet is good. We assume that any medium is simply a neutral conduit for information, like the plumbing in our house. The tubes are of little consequence unless they spring a leak. So as long as we are communicating the unchanging message of the gospel, every technology or method can be good. This tends to be our most nuanced conclusion.

Unfortunately, it fails to account for what our media and methods truly have the capacity to do and undo. And so we encounter them with the proverbial slip on the banana peel. We remain quite oblivious to the ways our message and our minds are being shaped by our methods and media.

The reality is, our methods are in no way “neutral,” they have a staggering, yet hidden power to shape us regardless of their content. This is what Marshall McLuhan meant when he observed “The medium is the message.” And it stands in direct contradiction to our evangelical rally cry. In other words, our media and methods have an inherent bias and a message of their own that has little or nothing to do with their content..."

Click here to read the rest of the article.

What did Luther say?

An excerpt from the article by Matthew Becker in this month's "The Christian Century":

"A recent New Yorker article on Mary Magdalene, obviously written with an eye on her role as Jesus' paramour in Dan Brown's best-selling The Da Vinci Code, began by noting that 'Brown is by no means the first to have suggested that Christ had a sex life—Martin Luther said it' (February 13-20). Bruce Chilton, an Episcopal scholar from Bard College, also makes this claim about Luther in Mary Magdalene: A Biography (2005). And a 2003 story in Time magazine declared that 'Martin Luther believed that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married.' Did Luther really make these assertions?

... Seemingly problematic is a small notation from John Schlagenhaufen, one of Luther's close friends, which contains a recollection of something Luther supposedly said informally at his Wittenberg dinner table in 1532:

Christ [as] adulterer. In the first instance Jesus became an adulterer with the woman at the well in John 4, because they say (no one understands), 'What is he doing with her?' In the same way with Magdalena; in the same way with the adulteress of John 8, whom he let off so easily. In that way the godly Christ first of all must also become an adulterer before he died. (WA TR 6, 107, sec. 1472; cf. LW 54:154)

No one knows if Luther actually said this. The critical apparatus in the Weimar Ausgabe reveals the textual and grammatical problems in this supposed quotation. Schlagenhaufen recorded only a portion of what he remembered Luther to have said that day (and after how many beers?). No context is given.

Scholars know how difficult, if not impossible, it is to link the lapidary 'table notations' of Luther's friends to Luther's own views. The editors of the American Edition speculate in a footnote that the 'probable context is suggested in a sermon of 1536 (WA 41, 647) in which Luther asserted that Christ was reproached by the world as a glutton, a winebibber, and even an adulterer' (LW 54:154).

A more probable context is Luther's account of the atonement. One of his basic assertions is that our sins become Christ's and Christ's perfect righteousness becomes ours by faith. This idea of 'the happy exchange' is found in many Luther texts. Given his central soteriological and christological concern, the theological irony in Schlagenhaufen's remembered notation becomes clearer: The 'godly' Christ becomes or is made a sinner through his solidarity with sinners, even to the point of dying as a God-forsaken criminal on the cross. This is how Luther understood Paul's statement, 'God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God' (2 Cor. 5:21).

So Christ 'becomes' an adulterer, though he does not actually commit adultery with Mary or anyone else. He puts mercy front and center, and rejects the legalism which demanded that the woman caught in adultery be killed and the woman at the well and Mary Magdalene be shunned. The holy one becomes the sinner by putting himself into the situation of sinners, by loving and forgiving them, and ultimately by taking their sins on himself. For this gospel reason, Luther could also remark that God made Jesus 'the worst sinner of the whole world,' even though he also acknowledged that the sinless, righteous Christ actually committed no sin himself.

Trapped in a literalistic approach to Schlagenhaufen's contextless note, some readers have missed the metaphorical character of the remark, which Luther may have made, if he made it at all, with a twinkle in his eye. I'm confident that Luther would not be a fan of The Da Vinci Code—except perhaps with a beer in hand and that twinkle in his eye."

What a victory...

Photo was taken by Tan Teck Meng, Singapore.

The rugby team from my alma mater, St Andrew's Junior College beat our longtime rivals, Raffles JC 15-10 in the national competition in Singapore. This was especially sweet since it was a massive come from behind victory as heavy underdogs. The picture is of the winning touchdown having fought back from a 3-10 deficit in the 2nd half of the game. It has been 18 years since we last won the title.