#94 Which Church Father Are You?

You’re St. Melito of Sardis! You have a great love of history and liturgy. You’re attached to the traditions of the ancients, yet you recognize that the old world — great as it was — is passing away. You are loyal to the customs of your family, though you do not hesitate to call family members to account for their sins. Find out which Church Father you are at The Way of the Fathers!

#93 Interesting Links X

The World's Healthiest Foods from WHFoods - I was looking for easy recipes and came across this website. On the front page you can see they have three meals that they recommend to you each day. But the best part about this website is what you find when you click on the getting started link at the top of the page. They've got everything from recipes to nutrition information on each of the "world's healthiest foods". This is the best website I've seen for eating healthy and simple recipes all in one.

Christiantoday.com from ChristianToday - No not Christianity Today, rather the UK based Christian Today. This is a pretty good website I found that provides an alternative to the liberal mainline magazine/website Christian Century and the evangelical conservative website Christianity Today. The site focuses mainly on news and has a broad range of it from all different denominations and countries.

Embracing the Challenge of Free Trade from Ben Bernanke - Here's a link for all of you anti-Lou Dobbs types out there. Lou just doesn't seem to get it. On the other hand, it's exciting to see that Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal
Bank does get it. This is a great overview of the free trade: what it is, what is means for us, what it means for the world, and the benefits and challenges involved. I think Bernanke does a good job of outlining what our approach should be.

The Level and Distribution of Economic Well Being from Ben Bernanke - And since Bernanke seems to get what it's all about so well and also write so well, here's yet another quality article from him. He outlines three principles in the article related to opportunity, outcomes, and insurance. First, that economic opportunity should be as widely distributed and as equal as possible. Second, that economic outcomes need not be equal but should be linked to the contributions each person makes to the economy. And Third, that people should receive some insurance against the most adverse economic outcomes, especially those arising from events largely outside of the person's control.

Globalization and Financial Development from Fredric Mishkin - Here is one of Ben's colleagues with a speech on financial development in developing countries. While Miskin doesn't capture the whole picture of what is required for development, he does a decent job of highlighting some key issues.

#92 Two Hymns

Here is an extended quote from Mark Noll's book, which I highly recommend, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind:

"Two lovely hymns, separated by only two generations, bespeak the momentous influence of fundamentalism. Both are, in their own terms, entirely appropriate expressions of piety. Both can be sung with a clear conscience. But the use of metaphor is revealing. Shortly before he died in 1860, George Croly penned the prayer "Spirit of God, Descend upon My Heart." In its second stanza Croly described what he felt would happen if he were to experience a deeper walk with the Spirit:

I ask no dream, no prophet ecstasies,
No sudden rending of the veil of clay,
No angel visitant, no opening skies;
But take the dimness of my soul away.

For Croly, to know God better would make our vision of the world clearer.

In 1922, Helen H. Lemmel wrote the words and music to a gospel song that is as moving as it is characteristic of the fundamentalist-Holiness outlook:

Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of his glory and grace.

While the essentially Christian motivation of this song is clear, its ironic meaning can be understood better now than when it was written -- under the influence of fundamentalism, evangelicals turned their eyes to Jesus, and the world grew very dim indeed."

#91 The Va Tech Massacre

By now, everyone has had there say on the Virginia Tech shootings. But since I'm a little slow and thus have yet to have mine, I will write here belatedly, though my wife got the immediate requisite earful of my opinions to which she graciously listened and nodded.

And boy was I pissed. I was/am pissed because we just don't get it. Society and the talking heads on the news jump quickly to their instant analysis and just don't get it.

When are we going to learn that what happened at Virginia Tech is a naturally recurring consequence of human action? What happened on April 16th did not happen in a vacuum. We are so shocked that anyone could possibly resort to such lows. We can't imagine anyone wanting to do this to our peaceful loving kids. We want to get guns off the streets so this can't happen again.

What do all school shooters have in common? What is the one thing that is consistent across the board in all the media covered school shootings over the last 10 years or so? Each of the kids grew being treated as less than human.

Wake up parents! You may be a deacon at church, a valuable member of the PTA, or in the church choir, but your son/daughter is an asshole and is destroying someone's soul at school while your not watching. And somebody somewhere will have to reap the whirlwind.

In extreme cases, it may be innocent victims who don't take part in the early childhood ridicule like at Virginia Tech but nonetheless bear the brunt of the aggression. In other cases, it may be future spouses and children of nerds, geeks, and outcasts whose families are torn apart by psychological damage sustained while the loser is young. In some cases the child buries it inside, bites the bullet, despises himself and is thus blinded to his or her status as one made in the image of God.

Here is a quote from his final diatribe that he sent to NBC news:

"You loved crucifying me. You loved inducing cancer in my head and terror in my heart... You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul, and tortured my conscience. I die, like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people."

Here was a man who spent a lifetime being shit on, made fun of, and outcast and Brian Williams, host of the NBC nightly news, has the audacity to call him a narcissist. A cold-blooded killer, yes. An evil-doer, yes. A narcissist? Great analysis Brian. Way to really think about the underlying issues and then disseminate what you've discovered as you sit with your perfect greased-back hair in front of the biggest narcissistic pond of all, the prime time camera.

When we fail, as individuals, to see people as God sees them, somebody, somewhere, will pay. So just as surely as Spring follows Winter and Summer follows Spring, animalistic behavior will follow animalistic treatment. Am I shocked at the Va. Tech shootings? Not at all. It is what humans do when faced with such crushing psychological blows. In fact, we should expect it to happen again and again and again.

I think it's funny how both extremist camps on the right and left came up with very similar responses to what happened. The Right's best response was to call for more guns to put them in teachers hands. The Left's best response was to renew calls to ban guns entirely. Both have completely missed the underlying issue. Va. Tech is not some unique event that would be solved if we just put guns in the hands of teachers or alternately took guns out the hands of everyone. On the contrary, April 16th was completely and utterly unsurprising as the natural outworking of the society we have chosen to tolerate. Peace is the exception not the rule. Be ready for more and don't be surprised. Instead, say along with me, "Well duh!

Here is a quote by Schleiermacher that I got from D.W. Congdon's great blog The Fire and The Rose:

"No one can be viewed as the exclusive transgressor in regard to what is done. Rather, the more a person’s action seems to call for condemnation, the easier it is in most cases to show how the agent has in various ways been tempted and provoked and to show for how long the evil in that person has been nourished by the sin of others. Consequently, in all sinful actions a shared work and a shared guilt are involved."

—Friedrich Schleiermacher, “On the Sacrifice of Christ That Makes Perfect,” in Reformed But Ever Reforming, trans. Iain G. Nicol (Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), 88.

Nourishing evil... now there's a concept to think about.

#90 Quotes VI

"...the greatest damage from the assumption that linked Christian faith and republicanism was its very character as an assumption. If the Christian truth about politics was so clear, there was no need to think about politics at all."

- Mark Noll in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. He is referring to late 18th century America, but it's a quote which I think could be applied to fundamentalism today.