Larry James

Larry James is asking people of faith to be involved in his ministry to the people of Dallas. JRB and I read his blog and are convicted by his words. Our contribution to this effort will come after October 1st.

Please read this post and then read on in his blog.

Step up to this challenge.

The South Will Rise Again

The view from our lovely late summer picnic with the Montgomery Symphony at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in the Blount Cultural Park.

The Disciple Whom Jesus Loved

I was internet-researching a church that was mentioned in a book, and happened upon their Junior High ministry. The description included the following:

In ancient culture, Rabbis had followers called talmidins [or disciples]. These life-students were usually 15 to 20 years old [Matthew was probably in his lower 20s]. But one in particular was unusually special. This one disciple would have had a special name. They would have had special proximity to the Rabbi. There would have been a sort of fatherly relationship between the disciple and the Rabbi.

We see this with John. John called himself the disciple Jesus loved. He was one of the “inner three”– the talmidin who Jesus surrounded himself with most frequently. He had proximity. At the last supper, John leans up against Jesus’ chest to ask him questions, like a son might do with his dad.

Which leads us to the last characteristic that made this disciple different than the others.

He would have been around 10 to 12-years-old.

John, “the disciple Jesus loved,” was a 10-year-old kid.

This explains why he lived longer than the others [aside from the fact that the others were killed]. This explains why Jesus left John to Mary’s care while Jesus was dying. He wasn’t telling John to take care of Mary. He was telling Mary to take care of John.

Jesus had the nerve to tell 12-year-olds that they could be influencers of men and women.

Jesus thought emerging teens could change the world.

So must we.

Was John really 10 years old? Does anyone have any resources regarding this?

Preemptive Advice

UPDATE: Wiser and Williams directed us to Senator Kerry's speech on faith and policy at Pepperdine. Suspend your prejudice and read it. He speaks truth.

Also, I buried this link in the body of the article, but please pay special attention to VU's excerpts of Tom Fox's blog from Iraq.


Last week, Iran’s Prime Minister, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, paid a call on Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela. Both men take great umbrage with the U.S. and our current government. Chavez calls Castro his brother, and now Ahmadinejad is in the fraternity, too. Chavez is calling his southern neighbors together into a new version of an old theme, pan-South American social solidarity, and with leftists making good headway in many southwestern nations, he may be onto something. Chavez and Ahmadinejad are revolutionaries with a common enemy, and the Iranian and the Venezuelan are making smart plays in their neighborhoods to invest capital to build influence and to consolidate the collective power of allies. Saddam Hussein had no friends, but the U.S. may be in the midst of a triangulation, a flanking maneuver among ambitious socialists from the developing world, all with luscious oil reserves. Our government has not yet suggested that we might go to war with Venezuela, but “all options are on the table” for Iran.

In Time, a “senior administration official” says that the state department wants “to prevent a situation in which the president finds himself having to decide between a nuclear-armed Iran or going to war.” The administration says that it is determined to seek a diplomatic solution, but we must wonder whether this President’s government can negotiate with Iran or Venezuela or Syria or Israel or North Korea in a post-Iraq world. The prime problem with this administration is its propensity to think in terms of two options. Either you are with us or against us. Either tow the line or appease the enemy. Nations are good or evil. Give up your rights and keep the complaints down, or you will die at the hands of a suicide bomber. Evil dictators are evil. We are good. We do not do deals with evil dictators. Decide between a nuclear-armed Iran or go to war.

These are false choices. Two great flaws plague this administration, a lack of humility and a lack of creativity. For Christians, these qualities are inherent to our faith, our tradition and the teachings of our Lord. With out humility and without creativity, complexity distills to naiveté, at best, and reckless, at worst. Our President claims Christ but has not demonstrated these Christian attributes very well.

As we stare down new crises by the day, many of our own making, let us Christians implore our government to heed some prophecy: I desire mercy, not sacrifice. Do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with your God. Blessed are the peacemakers and the meek. Love your neighbor as yourself.

I am not a pacifist but a just-war pragmatist, yet we must be driven by the Spirit of Christ Who desires peace. We have some choices to make which will affect the live of millions of innocents. War is no abstraction, however far from home. We need not abandon our security, our prosperity or our sovereignty to avoid war. We must be more creative, and we must be humble. Jesus disarmed his religious rivals with truth and goodness that they did not expect. He did not walk brashly into their traps and retaliate when they attacked him. Instead, Jesus surprised their preconceptions. This is good foreign policy strategy for this mighty nation.

Mercy. Let us extend our wealth to relieve the suffering of the poorest masses of humanity. Let us engender good will and influence by our compassion, not our might. Moreover, let us do no more harm than we have done to millions of people in poverty and fear as a result of our preemptive wars. We need not bomb Iran to keep it from getting the Bomb anymore than we needed to level Fallujah to contain Saddam Hussein. Mamas die. Daddies die. Babies die. Little girls run from soldiers and car bombs to learn to read. We have the power to build, not only to destroy, and the use of our power and wealth turns simply on the motives we chose to suffer. We have not shown mercy in Iraq.

Humility. Let us receive insight from others closer to our perceived enemies. Let us at least consider their grievances and shape. Let us admit that we may not be the only righteous people, if any are to be found here at all. Let us take moral counsel from weaker nations. Let us not forget that we once were weak too. Let us not think that we are immune from blood or judgment. Let us remember the Kings of Divine Right who lost their heads to an oppressed underclass. The people still may rise; history continues.

Love. Let us not be the first to strike, even if the threat is imminent. Let us never preempt so that we never surrender the high ground. Let us weigh the value of life and families, even our enemies’, or our enemies’ neighbors, more than we value our own wealth and affluence. Our national interests should be morality, compassion, charity and defense of the defenseless. Torture cannot be loving, and the absence of love is evil.

Creativity. Let us act to forge a better world built in progress, education, investment and wisdom, not in war. We can craft solutions that protect our own ends while contemplating our opponents’ interests. Only rarely must we go to war. Negotiation is not weakness. Negotiation is reconciliation. Negotiation takes maturity. Negotiation is peacemaking. Negotiation preempts death. Talk to Iran. Talk to Syria. Talk to Castro. Talk to Venezuela. Talk to North Korea. Engagement yields insight and information, and knowledge informs negotiation. Negotiation is not weak. Negotiation is smart.

Be certain; in international politics, never are two options the only way. Never. The President doesn’t have two options, good or evil; he has a thousand and one options, along the spectra, from evil to good, from unworkable to effective, from smart to stupid, from unilateral to consensus, from military to economic to political, to personal to spiritual. Nuance does not imply weakness. Nuance and subtlety demonstrate a realistic grasp of grown up problems.

May I now go on the record as new opponents gather on our shores and plot our demise, while dangers multiply and enemies call their guerillas to arms. Now is the season for wisdom, creativity, love, humility and courage. We should not wage war on any of these enemies, because victory does not require war. War imposes too great a cost on our own souls and the lives of those we would shatter. If we go to war against Iran, North Korea, Venezuela or Syria, we will have failed.

Too little, too late

I guess imploring some critical explication of the Pope's actual words would be lost on the enraged and offended. Probably, that's the point.

In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.

Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. 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. At the same time, as I have attempted to show, modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology.

Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought - to philosophy and theology.

For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding.

***

The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur - this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. "Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God", said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor.

It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.

Tingly Sensation

"[Nancy] Grace's conviction that there is a single, simple 'truth' to every case, and that lawyers and legal processes work to confound rather than clarify it, is chilling in a lawyer. More troubling still, is her tingly spider-sense that she alone can discern that truth in the earliest days of the investigation. But worst of all is her belief that she has some singular role to play in bringing the criminal to justice."

See more here.

School Pride

With gratitude and apologies to Dutro, I'm not so sure that Scout is feeling this shirt:



She's skeptical of the origins of that big globe in the Heritage Lobby. Go figure.

Fewmets!

Mike the Eyeguy, of the Huntsville Eyeguys, tagged me for some literary reflection.

Here are they:

1. One book that changed your life: A Wind in the Door, Madeleine L’Engle. She got to me early in life with a beautiful story and kept me reading when I may have quit. This book demonstrated to me early that Christian stories can be full of imagination, that imagination heightens faith instead of threatening it. Honorable Mention: Ecclesiastes.

2. One book that you’ve read more than once: The Alchemist, Paulo Coehlo, a mysterious, joyful book, the sort I'd like to write. Honorable Mention: A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens.

3. One book that you’d want on a desert island: John.

4. One book that made you laugh: The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain. ("Our friends, the Bermudians." Brilliant.)

5. One book that made you cry: To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee. This book could satisfy six of these criteria, but I’m trying to be a little interesting.

6. One book you wish you had written: The Magician’s Nephew, C.S. Lewis. The scene in which Aslan creates Narnia with song is one of my most precious and astounding literary memories. I try to write well and with convincing imagination, but that scene humbles me forever. Honorable Mention: Gilead, Marilynne Robinson, a sutble, heavy, lovely, Christian book with a rich voice.

7. One book that you wish had never been written: I can think of none, although I can think of many I don't like.

8. Books you’re currently reading: Understanding Elder Law, L. Hunt Rush. God’s Politics, Jim Wallis. Goodnight Gorilla.

9. One book you’ve been meaning to read: Moby Dick, Herman Melville. I’ve started it three or four times, but it turns to work faster that I can fight distractions. I'm not a complete man without it, so I may have to strap down now that I get summers off.

Now, I tag only my co-contributors, if they will. Then stop the madness.

Damascus Road

Syria: Our partner in peace against the Islamofascists. How will we honor the Syrian soldiers for shedding their blood to protect American lives?

Cuba: When two bad policies collide, will oil profits beat communist containment?

Or, Witness a Superpower Bending Over a Barrel.

It sounded like a freight train coming through my window.

Today is the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. August 29 was the first anniversary since Hurricane Katrina. This weekend, we spent time with dear friends and their young children. Anniversaries, common trauma and deep relationships always emphasize a great truth to our collective experiences. On blogs and newspapers, in hallways and classrooms and around lunch tables today, people will gather and tell their stories of the September 11, 2001.

Most of us do not have first hand stories from New York or D.C. Most people did not witness the attacks. Few of us actually knew people killed or trapped. All of us have stories to tell.

Storytelling is the fundamental human trait. Every person has a story to tell, and every person wants an audience. Stories compel us all to speak our own. Not everyone has the capacity to articulate their stories. Some people fall victim to an absent audience. Even so, to articulate a story into the world validates a human being and the human’s experience. Even more, to launch a narrative into the cosmos, or even to reincarnate a tired tale to a new listener is to cooperate with the Creator.

The Lord spoke the World into existence. John introduces his story of Christ by declaring that Christ is The Story, the logos, the word, the tool of storytelling. The New Testament is not the constitution of a new religion but the Story of Christ. The Story, not the procedure, is the good news.

Telling a story contributes to the spirits in the universe. Storytelling animates matter and is the quick fiber binding human souls to the Divine Soul. Stories are functions of creation, and receiving stories is a grace of worship. The one who hears and who reads ministers to the narrator. Listening effects the creation.