Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa's biggest problem

An eye-opening article from the Times of London about the necessity of Christianinty--from an atheist. Some snipettes:

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good...

...Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

...Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

Merry Christmas. Get ready for Mad Max

Daniel Henninger writes in his November 20th "Wonder Land" column about the link between Christmas (or the lack of it) and the current economic meltdown:

What really went missing through the subprime mortgage years were the three Rs: responsibility, restraint and remorse. They are the ballast that stabilizes two better-known Rs from the world of free markets: risk and reward.

Responsibility and restraint are moral sentiments. Remorse is a product of conscience. None of these grow on trees. Each must be learned, taught, passed down. And so we come back to the disappearance of "Merry Christmas."

It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions.

The point for a healthy society of commerce and politics is not that religion saves, but that it keeps most of the players inside the chalk lines. We are erasing the chalk lines.

Hmmm...

No Ogoodey-Boogedy?

Oogedy-Boogedy

I love the sound of it.

Oogedy-Boogedy!

Oogedy-Boogedy!

Oogedy-Boogedy!

Oogedy-Boogedy!

UPDATE: Oogedy-Boogedy!!

MORE UPDATE: I was amused by the controversy over the idea that Christians should vote like we are told and drop the "Oogedy-Boogedy" stuff.

As I pointed out last month:

Many critics stand ready to mock Palin’s Christianity. Fair enough. Will they also mock Obama’s and Biden’s?

Christianity is a miracle religion. Absent belief in the miraculous, there is nothing left of Christianity worth the name.

I don't ask that my political allies believe in the miraculous, I just don't what them to expect me to deny it.

All the way back to Jerusalem

We hear so much these days about the cultural and demographic challenge to the West by Islam. An interesting article in the Asia Times points out that the challenge goes two ways:

For the first time, perhaps, since the time of Mohammed, large parts of the Islamic world are vulnerable to Christian efforts to convert them, for tens of millions of Muslims now dwell as minorities in predominantly Christian countries. The Muslim migration to Europe is a double-edged sword. Eventually this migration may lead to a Muslim Europe, but it also puts large numbers of Muslims within reach of Christian missionaries for the first time in history...

As Father Dall'Oglio warns darkly, Muslims are in dialogue with a pope who evidently does not merely want to exchange pleasantries about coexistence, but to convert them. This no doubt will offend Muslim sensibilities, but Muslim leaders are well-advised to remain on good terms with Benedict XVI. Worse things await them. There are 100 million new Chinese Christians, and some of them speak of marching to Jerusalem - from the East. A website entitled Back to Jerusalem proclaims, "From the Great Wall of China through Central Asia along the silk roads, the Chinese house churches are called to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ all the way back to Jerusalem."

Islam is in danger for the first time since its founding. The evangelical Christianity to which George W Bush adheres and the emerging Asian church are competitors with whom it never had to reckon in the past. The European Church may be weak, but no weaker, perhaps, than in the 8th century after the depopulation of Europe and the fall of Rome. An evangelizing European Church might yet repopulate Europe with new Christians as it did more than a millennium ago.

Bodily Ressurection

An interesting article in Slate about the problem of the resurrection. Not surprisingly, the Gnostics hated the idea of a bodily resurrection:

These differences over what Jesus' resurrection represents and discomfort with the whole idea are nothing new, however: Christians in the first few centuries also had difficulty embracing the idea of a real, bodily resurrection. Then, as now, resurrection was not the favored post-death existence—people much preferred to think that after dying, souls headed to some ethereal realm of light and tranquility. During the Roman period, many regarded the body as a pitiful thing at best and at worst a real drag upon the soul, even a kind of prison from which the soul was liberated at death. So, it's not surprising that there were Christians who simply found bodily resurrection stupid and repugnant. To make the idea palatable, they instead interpreted all references to Jesus' resurrection in strictly spiritual terms. Some thought of Jesus as having shed his earthly body in his death, assuming a purely spiritual state, and returning to his original status in the divine realm. In other cases, Jesus' earthly body and his death were even seen as illusory, the divine Christ merely appearing to have a normal body (rather like Clark Kent!).

Yet there seems to have been a virtuous consequence to the belief:

In Christianity's first few centuries, when believers often suffered severe persecution and even the threat of death, those who believed in Jesus' bodily resurrection found it particularly meaningful for their own circumstances. Jesus had been put to death in grisly fashion, but God had overturned Jesus' execution and, indeed, had given him a new and glorious body. So, they believed that they could face their own deaths as well as those of their loved ones in the firm hope that God would be faithful to them as well. They thought that they would share the same sort of immortal reaffirmation of their personal and bodily selves that Jesus had experienced. Elaine Pagels, a scholar of early Christianity, has argued that those Christians who regarded the body as unimportant, perhaps including "Gnostics," were less willing to face martyrdom for their faith and more willing to make gestures of acquiescence to the Romans—for example, by offering sacrifices to Roman gods—because they regarded actions done with their bodies as insignificant so long as in their hearts they held to their beliefs.

By contrast, Christians who believed in bodily resurrection seem to have regarded their own mortal coils as the crucial venues in which they were to live out their devotion to Christ. When these Christians were arraigned for their faith, they considered it genuine apostasy to give in to the gestures demanded by the Roman authorities. For them, inner devotion to Jesus had to be expressed in an outward faithfulness in their bodies—and they were ready to face martyrdom for their faith, encouraged by the prospect of bodily resurrection...

Holy Smokes!

Here they are, the Wholey Trinity of Democratic front-runners, Barak, Hillary!, and John.

"Polls conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life show that Americans believe the Democrats to be less friendly to faith than they had been even a few years ago. Yet a donkey with a halo over his head graces the cover of Time magazine this week and the story inside chronicles "How the Democrats Got Religion." From faith working groups to faith breakfasts, Mr. Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards are all participating in what strategist Mike McCurry tells Time is "a Great Awakening in the Democratic Party." --Wall Street Journal

Is this the end of the Republican lock on Evangelicals?

"Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, is probably less than excited by such initiatives. She recently said in a speech, "I don't want a progressive evangelical movement any more than I want the conservative one we have right now."

I guess not. Republicans have been, for the last 20 years, the party beneath an ever-growing tent. This has lead to some of the current fractious (yet healthy) debate over the priority of issues in the public arena. Is the Global War on Terror the top priority, or is it immigration? Or are these two sides of the same coin? What about health care? Medical insurers, threat or menace?

But the Democratic party has one hell of a donnybrook coming when the increasingly-militant secularists start to wrestle with people of faith for control of the party.

Bring popcorn. A circus is not the same without popcorn.

Imagine All the People...

...Living for today.

You don't have to be a dreamer, because these people seem to exist. They are called the Pirahã (pronounced pee-da-HAN). They are described in this New Yorker article:

...They playfully tossed my name back and forth among themselves, altering it slightly with each reiteration, until it became an unrecognizable syllable. They never uttered it again, but instead gave me a lilting Pirahã name: Kaaxáoi, that of a Pirahã man, from a village downriver, whom they thought I resembled. “That’s completely consistent with my main thesis about the tribe,” Everett told me later. “They reject everything from outside their world. They just don’t want it, and it’s been that way since the day the Brazilians first found them in this jungle in the seventeen-hundreds.”

But his [Dan Everett, an American linguistics professor's] work remained relatively obscure until early in 2005, when he posted on his Web site an article titled “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã,” which was published that fall in the journal Cultural Anthropology. The article described the extreme simplicity of the tribe’s living conditions and culture. The Pirahã, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for “all,” “each,” “every,” “most,” or “few”—terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition...

Unlike other hunter-gatherer tribes of the Amazon, the Pirahã have resisted efforts by missionaries and government agencies to teach them farming. They maintain tiny, weed-infested patches of ground a few steps into the forest, where they cultivate scraggly manioc plants. “The stuff that’s growing in this village was either planted by somebody else or it’s what grows when you spit the seed out,” Everett said to me one morning as we walked through the village. Subsisting almost entirely on fish and game, which they catch and hunt daily, the Pirahã have ignored lessons in preserving meats by salting or smoking, and they produce only enough manioc flour to last a few days...

...Everett hypothesized that the tribe embodies a living-in-the-present ethos so powerful that it has affected every aspect of the people’s lives. Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Pirahã do not think, or speak, in abstractions—and thus do not use color terms, quantifiers, numbers, or myths. Everett pointed to the word xibipío as a clue to how the Pirahã perceive reality solely according to what exists within the boundaries of their direct experience—which Everett defined as anything that they can see and hear, or that someone living has seen and heard. “When someone walks around a bend in the river, the Pirahã say that the person has not simply gone away but xibipío—‘gone out of experience,’ ” Everett said. “They use the same phrase when a candle flame flickers. The light ‘goes in and out of experience.’ ”

To Everett, the Pirahã’s unswerving dedication to empirical reality—he called it the “immediacy-of-experience principle”—explained their resistance to Christianity, since the Pirahã had always reacted to stories about Christ by asking, “Have you met this man?” Told that Christ died two thousand years ago, the Pirahã would react much as they did to my using bug repellent. It explained their failure to build up food stocks, since this required planning for a future that did not yet exist; it explained the failure of the boys’ model airplanes to foster a tradition of sculpture-making, since the models expressed only the momentary burst of excitement that accompanied the sight of an actual plane. It explained the Pirahã’s lack of original stories about how they came into being, since this was a conundrum buried in a past outside the experience of parents and grandparents.

No cultural memory...no art...I don't want to come off as a kind of cultural imperialist here, but this really tests the boundaries of my understanding.

He's Got Global Warming in His Hands...

The Constant Reader knows of my dismay when Churches leave the realm of bearing witness to the Good News and enter the realm of trying to get on the Nightly News. This dismay is illustrated in the following snark from National Review Online's Planet Gore blog.

Stephen Hawking Opposes Designated Hitter Rule [Jim Manzi]

Apparently the Southern Baptist Convention has just approved a statement that questions the role of humans in creating global warming, and has come out against government-mandated limits on carbon emissions. I assume this is at least in part a response to the National Council of Churches June 7^th statement that the unequivocal role of human activity in creating global warming demands, among other things, legislation to reduce US carbon emissions by 15 – 20 percent by 2020.

In related news, NASA has released a statement affirming the Trinitarian nature of God, and the Modern Language Association has published a new Global Climate Modeling textbook — presumably as a direct response to Paris Hilton’s recent research papers questioning the lack of robust Bayesian analysis of parameter uncertainty in long-term temperature forecasts.

Big Early Endorsements

It's only February 2007 and this race has already pulled outta Oddburg and taken the interstate for Bizzaro Springs, CA.

Chuck Norris has come out for Newt Gingrich.

First of all, I make no secret of my fondness for Newt, and I have every respect for Chuck Norris and his roundhouse kick.

But Holy Tamale, Chuck is quoting a 1790 sermon by Rev. Daniel Fosters! Chuck, I didn't know that you were familiar with the 18th century Great Awakening.

I feel as I did when I was a small boy and wandered into a hall of mirrors.

What We've Been Missing, Why We're Proud

In the Wall Street Journal's opinion page, Peggy Noonan comments on the funeral of former President Gerald Ford:

The Marines snap their salutes and bear the flag-draped coffin up the marble steps and we hear the old hymns--"Going Home," "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," "The Navy Hymn": "Oh hear us when we cry to thee / For those in peril on the sea." We don't hear these songs much in modern life, only at formal occasions like this. We lock them in a closet until a state funeral, and then they come out and we realize how much they meant, and how much we miss them.

Man, do I miss those hymns. The best of them contain a great theology lesson in verse form.

Ms Noonan ends her essay with a scene from the House of Representatives:

Time moves, life moves, we grow older together. And now a new era begins, and with another great ceremony. As I write, a new Democratic speaker of the House is about to be sworn in. The great hall of the House is full and teeming--members have brought their children in brightly colored dresses and little jackets and ties. Nancy Pelosi in a russet suit and pearls is standing, laughing and holding a grandchild.

Now a clerk with a high voice is reading, "Therefore the Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi is duly elected . . ." and the House has erupted in cheers. She is escorted to the back of the chamber. And now the first woman to lead the House of Representatives is being handed the gavel by John Boehner, the leader of the opposition. He kisses her. She holds it high. And now she speaks. "I accept this gavel in a spirit of partnership . . . for the good of the American people." "In this House", she says, "we may be different parties but we serve one country."

And so again we remind ourselves who we are. We "show an affirming flame." We are a great republic and a great democracy. We are a great nation and a great people. We peacefully--gracefully--pass power from one group to another. And we start this new time on the right foot, with a cheer.

And this is what America can brag of. Not of her armies, which are the finest and most powerful in history; nor of her navies which sail where they will and defend freedom of the seas for even our sharpest economic rivals; but for the political culture that nurtures and celebrates the peaceful transition of power between parties.

Scrubs on Abortion

I don't watch Scrubs, but all the cool kids tell me that it's a very funny and important (popular) show. So I was surprised to see this clip on YouTube.

The point I'd like to make is that I don't find this depiction of Jesus troublesome.

Congratulations to the producers and writers of this episode for taking on what could have been a flaming train wreck and making a well placed point. (Jesus doesn't negotiate.)

Obama Fever! Catch it at Church!

I, for one, welcome our Democratic Overlords:

WASHINGTON — Famed pastor and best-selling author Rick Warren on Wednesday defended his invitation to Sen. Barack Obama to speak at his church despite objections from some evangelicals who oppose the Democrat's support for abortion rights.

Obama is one of nearly 60 speakers scheduled to address the second annual Global Summit on AIDS and the Church beginning Thursday at Warren's Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif.

But seriously, folks, the idea of inviting Barack Obama to speak to Conservative Evangelicals is a great one. It allows those Evangelicals to see the man and verify that he doesn't have horns or a bifurcate tail. It allows Obama to receive feedback from a conservative crowd, which is much better for us all than for him to be stuck in the Liberal echo chamber.

The end result may be a contribution to the moderating effect in national politics.

Speaking of Obama, a great observation on This Week with George was the two possible effects of Barack Obama on the Hillary! primary campaign:

• It's terrible! He preempts Hillary's tack to the social center!
• It's wonderful! he's sucking all the oxygen from the room, snuffing out lesser lights!

I tend to go with the second of these perceptions, hence my prediction of a Hillary/Obama ticket.

One Cosmos

As if I didn't have enough on my plate, new books, articles, and blogs keep appearing.

A new read (for me) is One Cosmos, a very funny and almost surrealistic walk through the mind of a thoughful supernatualist.

So many words, so little coffee.

The "Come to Jesus" Story

Back in the late 1980s, there was a fascinating political indicator. It became very easy to tell which Republicans had presidential ambitions by listening to their "Come to Jesus" stories.

What I mean is, everybody on the Republican bench was going around Lions and Kiwanis meetings giving much the same old rubber-chicken speeches of yesteryear, but adding a section where they described the moment they had become "born again." It was startling to read transcripts of Bob Dole, Alexander Haig, and many more telling how they had (figuratively) walked down that sawdust trail.

Well, what is old in new again. John Kerry has trotted out his redemption story, and he's not alone:

Kerry is the third high-profile Democrat to give a reflective, deeply personal speech on religion and politics in recent weeks, following Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) and Robert P. Casey Jr., the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania.

The addresses fit into a broader effort by liberal religious groups and Democratic candidates to appeal to religiously motivated voters in November's midterm elections.

I welcome this new thread of discussion to American politics. I only hope that none of these men develop a facial tic from frantically winking to their secularist supporters.

Oh, Jeeze...

Via Day at a Glance:

Anglican dean compares terrorist bombers to the 'violent passion' of Jesus

The Anglican Communion - seen by many Christians as being a sort of Huffington Post of Christendom - apparently has added another clerical eccentric to its ranks. After a series of well-publicized rifts, including some led by bishops who deny the Resurrection and at least one who is a practicing homosexual, the latest controversial pronouncement comes from the Rev. Canon Philip Gray, chaplain to the Bishop of Blackburn, who compared the actions of the London tube bombers to Jesus:

We cannot simply ignore the violent passion of Jesus cleansing the temple with whips. We are never told of the collateral damage possibly resulting from his actions. In the Christian tradition we rejoice over the passionate commitment and bloody deaths of numerous martyrs.

We need to consider deeply the fact that the same religious passion and spiritual single-mindedness lies at the heart of a London bomber and a Christian crusader.

According to the Yorkshire Post, Gray's remarks appeared in the Blackburn diocesan newsletter.

It seems that there is no end of professing "Christians" who are eager to trivialize their own beliefs and the suffering of people.

I mean really. "Collateral damage?"