Religious News Blog
Filed under: Ecumenical, worldreligions | Tags: blogging, houston, news, religion
Leave a Comment I stumbled on Kate Shellnutt’s Believe It Or Not blog at the Houston Chronicle. She’s doing a good job of curating interesting articles, albeit with a Texas emphasis.
Piano Man
Filed under: music, video | Tags: autism, billy joel, piano, piano man, song, video, youtube
Leave a Comment Here’s something pretty special:
I also like Ethan’s rendition of the pipe wrench song. (Via Forward Progress.)
Youcef Nadarkhani Update
Filed under: islam, Uncategorized | Tags: apostasy, crusades, inquisition, iran, islam, martyr, yousef nadarkhani
Leave a Comment I’ve written before about Youcef Nadarkhani, the Iranian Christian whose life is in jeopardy because of a (apparently fictitious) charge of apostasy. In Iran, it is a capital crime for a Muslim to have a change of heart about their faith. (Really!) Which in any event is not the case with Nadarkhani, who was never a Muslim.
Anyway, Nadarkhani is still in prison, with an execution order hanging over him. But now his lawyer is being persecuted as well. Mohammad Ali Dadkhah, the lawyer, who has represented several dissidents, has been sentenced to nine years in jail:
“I have been convicted of acting against the national security, spreading propaganda against the regime and keeping banned books at home,” Dadkhah told the Guardian from Tehran.
The next time someone tells how bad Christians were during the Crusades or Inquisition, fine. Tell them you’re sorry. Then ask them how they feel about religions that are still doing those things today.
Secular Wisdom ≠ the Prosperity Gospel
Filed under: theology | Tags: osteen, prosperity gospel, ross douthat, warren
Leave a Comment Is this the kind of thinking that gets you a berth at the New York Times? Ross Douthat apparently can’t distinguish between “Prosperity Theology” and the use of secular tools in promoting religious faith:
I should say that I’m an admirer of Rick Warren and I do quote him in the book specifically condemning prosperity theology. But, I think what you see a lot of in American religion, even in areas of American Christianity that don’t go all the way with Osteen to the idea that God wants you to have this big house and so on, the nature of American religion right now, the fact that it is so non-denominational and post-denominational, the most successful churches have to be run more like businesses than ever before. I think that just exposes Christians to a constant temptation to think about the ministry more as a business than they sometimes should.
Of course he’s right to reject prosperity theology. But that doesn’t mean he can’t use secular wisdom to promote his faith. This is an old debate. Tertullian said that Christians had no use for secular ideas (“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”). Augustine, by contrast, argued that Christians should use the (secular) discipline of Rhetoric to persuade their opponents (On Christian Doctrine).
On the one hand, we have the purists, who insist that God will provide us everything we need. On the other hand, those who agree, and say that God, not uncommonly, provides what we need by secular means.
Calvin, who believed the age of extraordinary miracles had ceased, thought that God gave us brains so we wouldn’t need miracles. Instead we had science:
It is also from the true science of astrology that doctors draw their judgments concerning the appropriate time to order blood-lettings, infusions, pills, or other medical necessities. Therefore we must admit that there is some correspondence between the stars and the planets and the dispositions of human bodies. All of this, as I have said, is included in the science of natural astrology.—from his “Warning Against Judicial Astronomy.”
We can smile at the idea of using the moon to time a blood-letting, but the point is legitimate. If you use your brains to develop medicine or provide food for the hungry, can’t you use them to spread your faith? Or does God’s providence only work on the horizontal dimension?
Church and State
Filed under: Politics | Tags: church, golden rule, government, leviticus 19, luke 10, matthew 25, politics, public policy, state
Leave a Comment When I hear Christians talking about something “we” ought to do, it often disturbs me how easily they confuse what “we” should do as individual Christians, as the church, and as citizens of a secular state.
Christians from the ideological right often ask the state to base its policies on a Christian understanding of marriage, or sexuality, or the point at which life begins. Christians from the left ask the state to base its policies on a Christian understanding of generosity and responsibility to help one’s neighbors.
Take this article about Republican Paul Ryan, who was chastised by (his) Catholic Bishops. (The article summarizes and critiques an original article in the Washington Post.)
I’m not saying that Christians shouldn’t help their less fortunate neighbors. Anyone who’s read Matthew 25 should tremble at the responsibility Christ lays on we who are his disciples. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that Christians have the responsibility to help their neighbors by implementing a welfare state, any more than they have a responsibility to help their neighbors by providing for prayer in public schools.
We should do good for several reasons: because Jesus told us he credits good done to others as if it were done to him, or the golden rule (Leviticus 19/Luke 10). We do good as a way of “putting on Christ” — of stretching ourselves, or more accurately, allowing ourselves to be conformed to the likeness of Christ. And we do good to exhibit the Kingdom of Heaven to the world. It’s not at all clear to me that there is a role for the state in any of that.
To be sure, people can take off their Christian hats. Then they can argue in their capacity as citizens that the state should do something or other for reasons of state. We should help the poor to reduce crime, or to build a solid middle class, or whatever. But it’s not obvious to me that Christians are expected to do any of those things. (We may do them, of course, but there is no obligation to reduce crime.)
(If it did, that would lead to another discussion, which is whether or not a government program is the best, or even an effective, means to do something. After all, Jesus was unmoved by the argument that nobody realized it was him they were seeing hungry, naked, in prison, etc. How much less will he be impressed with an argument that we voted for a program, but didn’t bother to ensure it was doing what it was supposed to?)
So there may be a “marriage of convenience” where the work we do as Christians, and the policies we favor as citizens, reinforce and support one another. But we should be very cautious about tying the knot. The history of Church-State interaction is fraught with peril.
Administrative Note
Filed under: blogging | Tags: administration, blogging, hacked
Leave a Comment Well, I haven’t blogged very much here lately. I’ve been awfully busy coming up to speed on things over at the church. (I posted a picture here of my new computer at work.) I hope to begin posting a little more frequently here, but the reason I’m posting today is to make sure everything is back to normal after the Event.
I won’t bore you with the details, but I will point out two useful pages. One tells you how to restore your WordPress blog. The other tells you if Google’s afraid of your site.
Church Web Site Up
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: church, jewel lake parish, outreach, scp, web, website
Leave a Comment Hey cool! Soon after I got here I asked the people who do that stuff to migrate us from the old web hosting service to the new one. And now, here you go: the new web site of Jewel Lake Parish. Yay!
For the technically inclined, here’s why. First, it’s marginally less expensive. That’s not a super-important factor, but we want to be good stewards.
Second, it lets us run the CMS software we want, and that software integrates with my blogging toolchain. The current website is essentially a blog. I hope to begin podcasting again soon, and that will be another blog.
There are other minor technical considerations. The email is (IMHO) better, and I like the domain registrar. But the really big win is that the hosting company provides shell accounts, so whenever I need to, I can just scp over there get things sorted.
Alaska
Filed under: Alaska, living | Tags: alaska, moving, transportation, upack
Leave a Comment We buttoned up our U-Pack trailer on Wednesday, March 7, expecting it to arrive in Anchorage around March 21, or perhaps a little later. Instead it was here a week later, on March 14. It went by road to Seattle, where it was then shipped to Alaska. The world is not only flat, it’s small.
Children dying of exposure
Filed under: society | Tags: abortion, alaska, barrow, death, drinking, endangerment, infanticide, neglect, parenting
Leave a Comment I read two terrible news stories today, and I can’t help but play connect-the-dots with them.
A 3-year-old girl from America’s northernmost community died and her younger sister suffered hypothermia after their mother and the mother’s boyfriend left them in a locked bedroom with a window open to a temperature of minus 30 degrees to air out the room because the girls wet their beds, authorities said. More here.
The mom and her boyfriend were just horribly neglectful, and they are facing 2nd-degree murder charges. (Locking kids in a bedroom?)
But are those parents just bad parents? Probably. I don’t think they meant to hurt anyone.
I do wonder, however, how much of their neglectful attitude is absorbed from their culture, which has become if not hostile then at least indifferent to the idea that the custody of children is a sacred trust. Death, increasingly, is seen as only one of several equally valid options.
Consider this article, from England. Experts are telling us that this sort of thing—the death of one’s children—should be a parent’s prerogative:
Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are “morally irrelevant” and ending their lives is no different to abortion, a group of medical ethicists linked to Oxford University has argued.
I find it grimly amusing that these “experts” are now willing to affirm what the right-to-life movement has been arguing for 40 years: that abortion is no different than killing babies.
Now, I know that slippery-slope arguments are weak. People can always say you’re taking something too far. But this is why the slippery-slope argument can’t be ruled out. If abortion becomes a legitimate form of family planning, then it can and eventually will be used to justify infanticide. In four decades, it has become safe, at least for these experts, to demand expanded abortion opportunities: not only in the 2nd and 3rd trimester, but, hey, why not the 4th and 5th as well!
“Politics is downstream of culture.” The culture is what allows people to argue in favor of infanticide. But if they are not resisted at this point, then, ultimately it will become a political issue. If history is any guide, then in about 40 years, the government will pass a law stating that people who work in hospitals will have to kill babies, regardless of their private ethical or religious convictions, in order to “safeguard the mother’s reproductive freedoms.”
Dawkins is Agnostic, Not Atheist
Filed under: apologetics | Tags: agnosticism, atheism, belief, books, dawkins, interviews, postmodernism, rowan williams
Leave a Comment “New Atheist” Richard Dawkins describes himself in this interview (which includes a brief video snippet) as an agnostic, rather than an atheist. Interesting, coming from the author of The God Delusion. And fair enough. Atheism is a belief every bit as much as faith in God. Dawkins is smart enough to realize that claiming a faith in God’s non-existence undermines his arguments against those who claim a faith in God’s existence.
I haven’t read much Dawkins, but I saw he also wrote a book called The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True. I’d be more interested in reading that than The God Delusion. I wonder, as well, if you replaced Rowan Williams in that interview with a postmodernist thinker, how he’d react to the idea that reality is just a social construct.