Archive for the 'Books' Category

The Myth of a Christian Nation

Published
by
Mike
on May 31, 2007
in Books, Salt and Light and politics
. 105 Comments

Thanks so much for the spirited “audience participation” yesterday. I was coaching last night and haven’t yet had a chance to get all the way through the comments. But something good has to happen as we listen to each other.

I’d like to recommend as a follow-up to the discussion Greg Boyd’s The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church.

Here are a few words where he explains his position:

“My thesis . . . is this: I believe a significant segment of American evangelicalism is guilty of nationalistic and political idolatry. To a frightful degree, I think, evangelicals fuse the kingdom of God with a preferred version of the kingdom of the world (whether it’s our national interests, a particular form of government, a particular political program, or so on). Rather than focusing our understanding of God’s kingdom on the person of Jesus — who, incidentally, never allowed himself to get pulled into the political disputes of his day — I believe many of us American evangelicals have allowed our understanding of the kingdom of God to be polluted with political ideals, agendas, and issues.

“For some evangelicals, the kingdom of God is largely about, if not centered on, ‘taking America back for God,’ voting for the Christian candidate, outlawing abortion, outlawing gay marriage, winning the culture war, defending political freedom at home and abroad, keeping the phrase ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance, fighting for prayer in the public schools and at public events, and fighting to display the Ten Commandments in government buildings.

“I will argue that this perspective is misguided, that fusing together the kingdom of God with this or any other version of the kingdom of the world is idolatrous and that this fusion is having serious negative consequences for Christ’s church and for the advancement of God’s kingdom.

“I do not argue that those political positions are either wrong or right. Nor do I argue that Christians shouldn’t be involved in politics. While people whose faith has been politicized may well interpret me along such lines, I assure you that this is not what I’m saying. The issue is far more fundamental than how we should vote or participate in government. Rather, I hope to challenge the assumption that finding the right political path has anything to do with advancing the kingdom of God.”

I’d still like to also recommend Balmer’s book.

Grace (Eventually)

Published
by
Mike
on May 17, 2007
in Books and faith
. 12 Comments

A few snippets from Anne Lamott’s new book, Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith.

Often the people with the deepest insight looked as ordinary as any old alcoholic or serial killer. They might look like Siddhartha or Ananda Mai Ma, but odds were they resembled your bipolar cousin Ruth, or Mr. Burns from The Simpsons.

. . . It really is easier to experience spiritual connection when your life is in the process of coming apart. When things break up and fences fall over, desperation and powerlessness slink in, which turns out to be good: humility and sweetness often arrive in your garden not long after.

I will never known how hard it is to be developmentally disabled, but I do know the sorrow of being ordinary, and that much of our life is spent doing the crazy mental arithmetic of how, at any given moment, we might improve, or at least disguise or present our defects and screw-ups in either more charming or more intimidating ways.

That’s me, trying to make any progress at all with family, in work, relationships, self-image: scootch, scootch, stall; scootch, stall, catastrophic reveral; bog, bog, scootch. I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kinds of things; also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace’s arrival. But no, it’s clog and slog and schootch, on the floor, in silence, in the dark.

It’s so hopeless. What are we going to do? I don’t know. But I suppose, while we are on the subject of weight, we might as well address the neck. The neckage. The situation is deeply distressing: the wattle and the wrinkles that gather like Roman shades. The liver spots. The soft pouch like a frog’s vocal sac, or the gular pouches of Komodo gragons that now connect the chin to the neck. But it could be so much worse, as is usually the case, because at least the neck is recessed. God recessed the neck for a loving, caring reason. While the face is right out front, She set the neck back, out of direct light, in the shadows. Sure, you can still see that gravity is having its say, because the neck is where it all shows — it’s like the thighs of the head.

Joy is the best makeup. Joy, and good lighting. If you ask me, a little lipstick is a close runner-up. . . . Pretty lipstick makes you look so much less tense and mean.

Nothing Worth Proving Can be Proven

Published
by
Mike
on January 30, 2007
in Books and faith
. 46 Comments

To the computer experts out there: Is Vista as good as “they” (translation: Bill Gates) say? Will it match OS-X?

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I wasn’t in Fresno long this past weekend. But it was long enough to get a “fix” for my Trader Joe’s addiction. My new stash should last me until Pepperdine lectureship. Why no Trader Joe’s in TX?

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From Alister McGrath:

It is hardly surprising that many are attracted to simple solutions to complex problems. Yet these rightly cause suspicion. We have become cynical of solutions that are too neat and claim to explain everything. We are as weary as we are wary of too-confident answers to difficult questions. The world we experience is just too messy and fuzzy to fit completely into the orderly systems that some crave and others fear. We have to learn to live in an untidy world in which we are not certain of everything — a world in which there are unanswered questions. Some panic at this thought. How can we live when we cannot be confident of anything? The only certainty of our age seems to be that there is no certainty at all. Yet even this confident assertion contradicts itself — like the statement that Bertrand Russell recalled seeing written on a college blackboard: “All statements written on this blackboard are false.” . . .

We have to learn to live with the fact that we cannot be certain of many of the most important things about life. We can be certaint hat 2 + 2 = 4; but that is hardly going to give us a reason to live and die, or cause our hearts to beat a little faster with excitement. Yet with the greater questions of life, we have to learn to live with a degree of uncertainty. Tennyson captures this dilemma perfectly in his poem “The Ancient Sage” (1885):
For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise,
cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt.

For Tennyson, anything that was worth believing could not be proved with certainty. It involved a leap of faith — a recognition that the clues to the meaning of the universe do not provide an invincible case for a meaningless cosmos or one brought into being by a caring and loving God. Perhaps we can give up and walk away from the big questions that are raised. Yet in the end, this does not really satisfy us. Might not we be missing out on something important — and even exciting?

The Looming Tower

Published
by
Mike
on January 22, 2007
in Books
. 32 Comments

A few weeks ago when I read the list of the NY Times’s Top 10 books of 2006, one in particular stood out. I’d read Lawrence Wright’s excellent In the New World years ago. So I ordered The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 and was not disappointed.

I now feel like I have a much better understanding of Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, of the source of their hatred, and of the fertile ground for their recruitment.

This is an exhaustive book. I kept wondering, How many interviews did this Austin writer actually have?

It’s the carefully woven story of why, in 1996 from a cave in Afghanistan (after being shoved out of Sudan), Bin Laden declared war on the United States. He and many Islamic fundamentalists were furious that five years after the invasion of Kuwait, U.S. troops were still stationed in the land of Mohammed, the prophet of Islam. “Saudis were mortified by the need to turn to Christians and Jews to defend the holy land of Islam. That many of these foreign soldiers were women only added to their embarrassment.”

Mohammed bin Laden fathered 54 children by 22 wives. At least, officially. “The total number of wives he procured is impossible to determine, since he would often ‘marry’ in the afternoon and divorce that night. An assistant followed behind to take care of any children he might have left in his wake.”

Osama bin Laden was the seventeenth son of this wealthy, hard-working construction mogul. His mother had been taken to be one of Mohammed bin Laden’s wives when she was fourteen.

Osama was a fan of westerns, especially Bonanza. “Although he was opposed to the playing of musical instruments [I KID YOU NOT], he organized some of his friends into an a cappella singing group.”

“He was rarely angry except when sexual matters came up. When he thought one of his half brothers was flirting with a maid, Osama slapped him. Another time, when he was in a cafe in Beirut, one of his brother’s friends produced a porno magazine. Osama made it clear that neither he nor any of his brothers would ever have anything to do with the boy again. There seems never to have been a moment in his entire life when he gave way to the sins of the flesh, venal or ribald behavior, the temptations of liquor, smoking, or gambling. Food held little interest for him. He loved adventure and poetry and little else but God.”

Throughout, in addition to the story of bin Laden and other extremists, there are the stories of U.S. involvement in Islamic countries: in Afghanistan (where we supported the resistance against the Russians — the same resistance that wound up hosting al-Qaeda), in Kuwait, in Iran, in Iraq, in Israel, in Sudan, in Somalia. While mistakes by the U.S. government are exposed (including grudges between the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. that resulted in the withholding of incredibly important information leading up to 9/11), this is not a revisionist book that seeks to blame Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, or America for all the evil!

Some insightful words just to whet your appetite:

“Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities. This is especially true where the population is young, idle, and bored; where the art is impoverished; where entertainment — movies, theater, music — is policed or absent altogether; and where young men are set apart from the consoling and socializing presence of women.”

“Few countries in the world were so different from each other, and yet so dependent on one another, as America and Saudi Arabia. . . . In 1970 the United States was the tenth greatest importer of Saudi oil; a decade later, it was number one.”

“In 1990 bin Laden warned of the danger that the murderous tyrant in Iraq, Saddam Hussein, posed to Saudi Arabia. . . . Much of the Arab world was elated by Saddam’s anti-Western rhetoric and his threats to ‘burn half of Israel’ with chemical weapons. He was especially popular in Saudi Arabia, which maintained cordial relations with its northern neighbor. Nonetheless, bin Laden continued his lonely campaign against Saddam and his secular Baath Party.”

“For bin Laden, the cave was the last pure place. Only by retreating from society — and from time, history, modernity, corruption, the smothering West — could he presume to speak for the true religion.”

“The radical Islamist movement has never had a clear idea of governing, or even much interest in it, as the Taliban would conclusively demonstrate. Purification was the goal; and whenever purity is paramount, terror is close at hand.”

The section on al-Qaeda training is particularly frightening. Recruits are engrained with the three main goals: (1) establishing the rule of God on Earth; (2) attaining martyrdom in the cause of God; (3) purification of the ranks of Islam from the elements of depravity. They are taught to hate “the enemies of Islam”: (1) heretics; (2) Shiites; (3) America; and (4) Israel. They often gather in the evenings to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger movies (again, I kid you not), looking for tips about violence. “What the recruits tended to have in common — besides their urbanity, their cosmopolitan backgrounds, their education, their facility with languages, and their computer skills — was displacement.”

I highly recommend this book if you, too, are curious about bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and Islam (including the centuries-old conflicts between the Shiites and the Sunnis).

There are so many other parts I haven’t even mentioned. As one blurb on the book cover says, “The portrait of John O-Neill, the driven, demon-ridden F.B.I. agent who worked so frantically to stop Osama bin Laden, only to perish in the attack on the World Trade Center, is worth the price of the book alone.”

The Blind Side

Published
by
Mike
on January 17, 2007
in Books, Salt and Light and sports
. 75 Comments

Which of the following, on average, would you guess is the second highest paid position in football (behind the QB)?

a) Wide receiver
b) Left tackle
c) Running back
d) Middle linebacker

The answer is (b): the second highest paid position in the NFL is the left tackle. Why?

1. Because of Bill Walsh. You could say, more generally, the West Coast Offense. But there were two versions of the West Coast Offense: one went deep and the other (Walsh’s version) went wide. Spread out the field. Send four or five receivers out for shorter passes, raising your completion percentage and extending the run after the catch. Sending more people out, however, left the quarterback more vulnerable.

2. Because of rule changes in 1978. No longer could a cornerback “bump-and-run” with a receiver all the way down the field. Now he’s limited to five yards. And offensive linemen, who formerly were forced to block looking like clothes hangers, were suddenly allowed to use their hands.

3. Because of Lawrence Taylor. If you still wince when you hear the name “Joe Theismann,” then you’re probably a football fan. Taylor was a QB-destroying machine. The new profile for the blind side pass rusher became that athlete who is large, fast, and violent. In other words, someone not easily blocked by a running back.

Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game tells the story of why the left tackle, the person who guards the blind side of the quarterback from the Lawrence Taylors of the world, has become such a valuable position.

The new profile for an NFL left tackle is what Lewis says the scouts call “a freak of nature.” He’s tall (6′4″), big (320+), quick, and has a wide butt, long arms and big hands. Think Orlando Pace or Jonathan Ogden.

Like Michael Oher, now a left tackle for Ole Miss. Much of this excellent book tells his story.

It’s the story of Memphis — a city with an invisible Berlin Wall between white and black. Lewis talks about the Christian academies that sprang up quickly with forced integration so wealthy white children wouldn’t have to go to school with black children. He talks about the pilgrimage east — as far away from the problems of West Memphis as possible.

But this story is specifically told through one young man: Michael Oher. He was a child who seemed to have no hope.

He was one of ten children of a crack cocaine-addicted mother. At times they had no shelter. When asked what he remembers about his first years of life, Michael says: “Going for days having to drink water to get full. Going to other people’s houses and asking for something to eat. Sleeping outside. The mosquitoes.”

For a few years they lived in Hurt Village — a community of about 1000 with no — count them, ZERO — two-parent families. Seventy-five percent of the adults there had some mental illness. Drug lords waited with crack in hand at the first of the month when welfare checks arrived in the mail.

By the time he was 15, Michael Oher hadn’t been to school much. He’d been tested, and his IQ came out to be 80.

But all that changed. I’ll leave the details for you to enjoy the book. But the short story is this: he fell victim to the love and nurture of one wealthy, white family in East Memphis. Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy (a former basketball player and a former cheerleader at Ole Miss) welcomed him into their family. He suddenly had a family, including a sister his age and a younger brother. He had a school to attend — Briarcrest Christian School. He had clothes and food. His IQ rose from 80 to 110.

Whether you’re a football fan or not, you’ll love the chapters on the recruiting of Michael Oher. Every college coach in the country began salivating when he saw tapes of Oher treating large opponents as if they weren’t there. In one game Briarcrest played, every offensive play consisted of giving the ball to the running back and telling him to stay behind Oher’s butt until he heard a whistle. They destroyed their opponent on that one play.

This is a hard book because of the despair. You realize that most people in the Hurt Villages of our inner cities don’t have a Tuohy family to help them.

But it’s also an inspiring read because this one family — this one white, wealthy, Evangelical family — brought a monstrous kid into their lives before anyone knew he had athletic super-talent. He was lost, and Leigh Anne Tuohy was going to care for him.

Michael Oher became what Lewis calls “a freak of nurture.”

Christian Evidences

Published
by
Mike
on January 15, 2007
in Books and faith
. 92 Comments

If I was going to argue the position of atheism, I’d argue about like Sam Harris did. I’d speak about these things:

1. A sense that something is very wrong with this world — something that is hard to mesh with a believe in a loving, all-powerful God. I’d ask why this God doesn’t protect his people better. (How hard would it be to keep an SUV full of teenagers who are returning from a youth rally from turning over on I-20? How difficult would it be to answer the prayer of thousands of believers asking for a 5-year-old with cancer to be healed?)

2. A conviction that the personal testimonies aren’t enough. The same testimonies to healing, answered prayer, and changed lives have come from Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Mormonism, etc. People who believe dramatically different things have offered witness to the amazing things they’ve seen their God do.

3. An observation that people have continued to be willing to kill each other over their holy books. Partly, this is saying that the faith doesn’t seem to “work.” While we might say that’s just talking about the inconsistencies of the people of faith rather than of the faith itself, Jesus said, “By your love they will know you’re my disciples.” Apparently, if they live with grudges, bitterness, and murderous intent, it’s fair enough to assume they’re not Jesus’ disciples.

4. A feeling that the holy books of the various religions have serious problems. Each religion finds serious flaws in the holy books of the other religions. Few are able to back off and say that they all are problematic. (E.g., just pointing out that the OT has a higher moral than, say, the Babylonians, doesn’t really answer all the questions about killing teens who talk back and about taking women as personal spoils of war.)

All right, you may be wondering. Has Mike converted?

Nope. But I’ve always had a deep appreciation for serious struggles of faith. Several people introduced me to an approach to Christian evidences of the EVIDENCE THAT DEMANDS A VERDICT variety when I was in college. Shortly after I graduated, I started a Bible study with university students at UNC-Wilmington who were searching for faith. It quickly became clear that the EVIDENCE THAT DEMANDS A VERDICT perspective only demands a verdict if you already believe. (There is, of course, some value to that.)

First, let me mention a couple books I read over the holidays that I think help us think through Christian apologetics in our current world context. One is Greg Boyd’s Letters From a Skeptic. The book contains a series of letters that Boyd exchanged with his father, Edward Boyd, who was an unbeliever.

In the preface Greg Boyd writes: “Exceptionally intelligent, intensely skeptical, very strong-willed, and 70 years old — could a more unlikely candidate for conversion be found than my father? He had given me little grounds for hope.”

The letters from the dad ask the good, tough questions; the letters from the son are honest and hopeful.

The last letter in the book says:

Dear Greg:

Well, as I told you over the phone, I finally “took the leap.” Hallelujah! As I sit here and read over all of our correspondence, I still can’t believe how I’ve changed from a smart-ass-know-it-all to an actual believer! Jeanne can’t believe it either! It’s probably even confused the hell out of our dog! The angels whom you say rejoice over this sort of thing are probably giving each other high-fives! . . .

As you know, I’ve still got a number of questions, and I’m sure we’ll continue to hash these out. But my disposition has completely changed. I’m asking them no longer as a skeptic, but as a believer. You don’t need to end your letters “with hope” any longer. . . .

Lots of love, with faith (!)

Dad

The other book is Alister McGrath’s brief (123 pages) Glimpsing the Face of God: The Search for Meaning in the Universe. It’s the kind of book that I’d be glad to put in the hands of those university students whose rental house I met in weekly so many years ago.

Here are a couple of my conclusions about Christian evidences:

1. My central arguments for faith aren’t cosmological (”nothing comes from nothing”), teleiological (”there’s an intricately designed watch, so there must be a watch-maker”), moral (”why does everyone agree that Hitler was evil?”), or ontological (”I can imagine that there is a God . . . so there must be a God”). I begin as a Christ-follower. I am a believer in the story of Jesus Christ. That’s where I begin. I believe because I have committed myself to this one who came from God “to put the world to rights” (as N. T. Wright would say it). So I’m inviting others to consider that possibility with me. My opening move is one of story. Within the consideration of that story, the other traditional Christian evidences find their value.

2. The whole EVIDENCE THAT DEMANDS A VERDICT doesn’t ring true for many seekers. If there were evidence that DEMANDS a decision, they’d already believe. Some are dishonest, of course, but many are not. Many are genuine truth-seekers. I prefer to speak about clues. There are footprints in the sand. We’re trying to figure out the story behind those footprints.

“What if nature is studded with clues to our true meaning and destiny, and fingerprinted with the presence of God? This book is an exploration of this fascinating possibility.” (McGrath)

Someone asked in my last post how I could question Harris’s statement that atheism is “simply an admission of the obvious.” And the reason is because you can’t prove faith in atheism. There is no scientific discovery that can conclude definitively that there is no God. The man who was a primary driver in the Genome Project is himself a devoted believer!

Again, from McGrath: “There has never been any shortage of people who will tell us that the evidence is totally persuasive, and that — unless we are complete fools — we will accept that there is no meaning in life, and no God behind this world. Some argue that atheism is the only logically and scientifically respectable worldview. Yet this overlooks the inconvenient fact that the truth claims of atheism simply cannot be proved. How do we know that there is no God? The simple fact of the matter is that atheism is a faith, which draws conclusions that go beyond the available evidence.”

Finally, today, these words from Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

Letter to a Christian Nation

Published
by
Mike
on January 11, 2007
in Books and faith
. 100 Comments

I know this seems strange, but over the break I’ve been doing some reading of works by atheists. I’m not in the market for conversion. But I also want to hear what’s being said.

There are some resources online, such as “Why Does God Hate Amputees?” There are even videos on YouTube such as this one or this one.

Again, I think it’s obvious that I’m not in agreement with what’s said. But in order to “give a reason for the hope that’s in us,” we need to know what unbelievers are saying. Scripture recognized long ago that the big battle isn’t against atheism but against idolatry (reducing God by trying to find life in someone or something other than God). But still, I’ve wanted to know what voices are out there, rather than just assuming some stereotype.

Last year I read Sam Harris’s The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, and over the break I added the much shorter Letter to a Christian Nation.

Harris begins by talking about the irony of the Christian assumption that their faith is primarily about love and forgiveness.

“The truth is that many who claim to be transformed by Christ’s love are deeply, even murderously, intolerant of criticism. While we may want to ascribe this to human nature, it is clear that such hatred draws considerable support from the Bible. How do I know this? The most disturbed of my correspondents [since the release of The End of Faith] always cite chapter and verse.”

He opens with this honest declaration: “Either the Bible is just an ordinary book, written by mortals, or it isn’t. Either Christ was divine, or he was not. . . . So let us be honest with ourselves: in the fullness of time, one side is really going to win this argument, and the other side is really going to lose.” (I’m reminded here of Pascal’s famous “wager argument”!)

Here is a frontal blow from Harris as he considers how nations of the world are willing to kill each other over their holy books and their confident interpretations:

“The idea that the Bible is a perfect guide to morality is simply astounding, given the contents of the book. Admittedly, God’s counsel to parents is straightforward; whenever children get out of line, we should beat them with a rod (Proverbs 13:24, 20:30, and 23:13-14). If they are shameless enough to talk back to us, we should kill them (Exodus 21:15, Leviticus 20:9, Deuteronomy 21:18-21, Mark 7:9-13, and Matthew 15:4-7). We must also stone people to death for heresy, adultery, homosexuality, working on the Sabbath, worshipping graven images, practicing sorcery, and a wide variety of other imaginary crimes.”

What about Christianity — as set out in the New Testament?

“If you think that Christianity is the most direct and undefiled expression of love and compassion the world has ever seen, you do not know much about the world’s other religions. Take the religion of Jainism as one example. The Jains preach a doctrine of utter nonviolence. While the Jains believe many improbable things about the universe, they do not believe the sorts of things that lit the fires of the Inquisition. You probably think the Inquisition was a perversion of the ‘true’ spirit of Christianity. Perhaps it was. The problem, however, is that the teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. You are, of course, free to interpret the Bible differently — though isn’t it amazing that you have succeeded in discerning the true teachings of Christianity, while the most influential thinkers in the history of your faith failed?”

Harris is aghast at the way Christians talk about morality — usually about sex — while ignoring the relationship to suffering.

“Relieving suffering seems to rank rather low on your list of priorities. Your principal concern appears to be that the creator of the universe will take offense at something people do while naked. This prudery of yours contributes daily to the surplus of human misery. . . We now have a vaccine for HPV that appears to be safe and effective [in battling cervical cancer]. The vaccine produced 100 percent immunity in the six thousand women who received it as part of a clinical trial. And yet, Christian conservatives in our government have resisted a vaccination program on the grounds that HPV is a valuable impediment to premarital sex. These pious men and women want to preserve cervical cancer as an incentive toward abstinence, even if it sacrifices the lives of thousands of women each year.”

“Kids who are taught abstinence alone are less likely to use contraceptives when they do have sex, as many of them inevitably will. One study found taht teen ‘virginity pledges’ postpone intercourse for eighteen months on average — while, in the meantime, these virgin teens were more likely than their peers to engage in oral and anal sex. American teenagers engage in about as much sex as teenagers in the rest of the developed world, but American girls are four to five times more likely to become pregnant, to have a baby, or to get an abortion. Young Americans are also far more likely to be infected by HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. The rate of gonorrhea among American teens is seventy times higher than it is among their peers in the Netherlands and France. The fact that 30 percent of our sex-education programs teach abstinence only (at a cost of more than $200 million a year) surely has something to do with this. The problem is that Christians like yourself are not principally concerned about teen pregnancy and the spread of disease. That is, you are not worried about the suffering caused by sex; you are worried about sex.”

He scoffs at the idea that God answers our prayers:

“While many people of faith seem convinced that prayer can heal a wide variety of illnesses (despite what the best scientific research indicates), it is curious that prayer is only ever believed to work for illnesses and injuries that can be self-limiting. No one, for instance, ever seriously expects that prayer will cause an amputee to regrow a missing limb. Why not? Salamanders manage this routinely, presumably without prayer. If God answers prayer — ever — why wouldn’t he occasionally heal a deserving amputee? And why wouldn’t people of faith expect prayer to work in such cases?”

And he’s unmoved by personal testimonies about changes that have come into people’s lives:

“I have no doubt that your acceptance of Christ coincided with some very positive changes in your life. Perhaps you now love other people in a way that you never imagined possible. You may even experience feelings of bliss while praying. I do not wish to denigrate any of these experiences. I would point out, however, that billions of other human beings, in every time and place, have had similar experiences — but they had them while thinking about Krishna, or Allah, or the Buddha, while making art or music, or while contemplating the beauty of Nature.”

Well, there’s so much I’d like to say in response. When he says that “atheism is not a philosophy . . . it is simply an admission of the obvious,” I think he’s self-deceived. Isn’t that like an overly-confident declaration of being opposed to over-confidence? And when he’s utterly amazed that “80 percent of Katrina’s survivors claim that the event has only strengthened their faith in God,” perhaps he should ask if there is more going on in this world than a scientist can test and a rationalist can figure out.

Why does faith flourish in pediatric oncology wings of hospitals? (It’s the question that led Dr. Diane Komp, a pediatric oncologist, back to faith.)

But having said that, I think Harris has done us a favor by writing honestly and clearly about what faith looks like from his perspective. He has pointed out some things that we must face if we’re going to have a voice in this world. I’d love to be in a study group with a bunch of university students working through this. I trust that our faith is not too fragile to face such arguments with compassion and truth.

Peanut Brittle Day . . . and An Evangelical’s Lament

Published
by
Mike
on December 20, 2006
in Books, Church, family, food and politics
. 33 Comments

From my mom’s newspaper column:

Today was peanut brittle-making day at this household. It’s a tradition.

Every year the Runner says, “Well, I guess I’ll make peanut brittle today.” I make a flying trip to the store for all that stuff that is not normally in our cabinets – raw peanuts, corn syrup, coconut (for the one batch with coconut added), margarine (well, I usually have that but not always). Years ago his mother showed him how to make this Christmas treat and I don’t believe in all the years he’s been doing it he has ever had a failure at it.

First, we get out every pan in the kitchen, including all the mixing bowls, measuring cups and measuring spoons.

I used to stay around to offer advice. This is not, you may realize by now, my project. I’d say, “You better get that off of there. It’s going to burn.” “It’s not going to burn,” he’d reply. And it never did.

Or – “The peanuts aren’t done yet.” He’d reply, “They’re done.” And they were.

Who am I to know? I have never made a batch in my life. But I am an aficionado and his greatest fan. He has realized through the years that not only do I not make peanut brittle – I do not clean up the kitchen. That would include – every pan, bowl, measuring spoon and cup in the kitchen, the stove, the sink and the floor. It is a very messy job.

Now, after only 51 years, he has become self-sufficient and cleans it himself. So, this morning, getting back from my second run to the grocery store. (I only got enough corn syrup for four batches and he decided to make five) I asked, “Did you remember this is the ‘off’ year? No one is coming for Christmas. We cannot eat 10 pounds of peanut brittle.”

“If I make it, they will come,” he replied.

And so, he began, cooking the first part of water, syrup and sugar until the hard ball stage, measuring out all the ingredients while it cooked. Then he would add the peanuts and cook them – each batch – to perfection. Quickly he would pour in the margarine, the vanilla and the baking soda, stirring carefully so it wouldn’t spill over – a very big potential mess, as
you might guess. Then into the greased cookie pans.

Each batch was wonderful. I did manage to arrive just in time to give my opinion each time by sampling the brittle. Soon we had pans of the hardened candy all over the kitchen.

Then it was time to get out all the Tupperware bowls we own and begin to fill them, cleaning up each little crumb along the way – by eating it, of course.

Then the first ones came. Two granddaughters arrived. One gave her approval. The other declined to try. She only likes pecan brittle, which is usually the last batch made. He omitted that, bowing to our small crowd this year. (He certainly had plenty of corn syrup, as I made sure on the second run to the grocery store that we didn’t run out. I’ll be making pecan pies all year. I don’t know what else to do with it.)

By the time we put it away, we only had two (very large) covered bowls full. We had certainly done our part to make sure it wasn’t wasted. Even the dog enjoyed it.

In the next few days I’ll package some up to send to the ones who didn’t come. I certainly hope he made enough!

Cheers – for the Runner and his ability to make this wonderful Christmas candy.

Jeers – for my inability to add any wonderful sweet thing to the snack table. I do make a mean crab dip. Nice start for a Christmas Eve repast! (He is sending us two – we’re going to be great-grandparents in 2007!)

- - - -

Someone needed to say it.

And Randall Balmer, a feature writer for Christianity Today, did — in Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical’s Lament.

You won’t agree with everything. (Nor did I. It seems to me that there is much more diversity within Evangelicalism than it sometimes sounds in this book. Think, e.g., about the work of many young Evangelicals for Darfur!) But it is a compelling argument about something that has gone very wrong with much of the Evangelical movement in America.

Here’s a taste from the chapter: “Where Have All the Baptists Gone? Roy’s Rock, Roger Williams, and the First Amendment.”

Some of the things I learned from the radio while traveling the two hundred miles from George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston to Longview, Texas:

- The intellectual and scientific case for evolution is crumbling.
- Global warming is a myth.
- The flat income tax is a superb idea.
- “Satan wants the United States to be kind to pluralism.”
- The reason we swear an oath on the Bible is because the Bible was the sole foundation of American law.
- The world has an unlimited supply of oil.
- The Constitution provides no guarantee of personal privacy.
- Government fuel-efficiency standards kill people.
- Satan dominates the secular media.

My visit to East Texas came at a strange time. A day earlier, Pat Robertson had issued his fatwa against the president of Venezuela, and I was certain, given their hysteria over terrorism, that my friends on the Religious Right would join me in calling for Robertson’s detention and interrogation on suspicion of making a terrorist threat. (The televangelist is no stranger to making death threats, of course, though in the past he has generally targeted Supreme Court justices, not foreign heads of state.) . . .

But Robertson’s statement elicited nary a comment from what passes for Christian radio in East Texas, although one pundit allowed that the televangelist might try to convert the Venezuelan president before calling for his assassination.

I learned something else in the course of my travels through the triple-digit heat of a Texas summer: There seems to be at least some truth in the oft-quoted statement of Bill Moyers (the pride of Marshall, Texas) that in East Texas there are more Baptists than there are people. I passed First Baptist Church and Second Baptist Church, Long Range Baptist Church, Faith Family Baptist Church, Charity Baptist Church, Timpson Missionary Baptist Church, Appleby Baptist Church, Holly Springs Baptist Church, First Freewill Baptist Church, Zion Hill Baptist Church, Friendship Baptist Church, Friendship Bobo Baptist Church, Heritage Baptist Church, Pleasant Hill Baptist Church, Pleasant Valley Baptist Church, and Grace Baptist Church, which, according to a large sign, featured “Old Fashion Preaching” — to name only a few.

Given all of these churches, given all of these angry voices defending the faith on my car radio, imagine my surprise that evening when I attended a huge Religious Right rally at the Maude Cobb Convention and Activity Center in Longview and learned that, despite all appearances to the contrary, East Texas is actually in the grip of Satan.

The endorsements are as diverse as Rick Warren and Tony Campolo (though actually, I don’t think this is diverse as I would have five years ago). Campolo says: “Randall Balmer knows Evangelicalism inside and out. He writes with the ambivalence of a jilted lover who still cares very much about the movement but who is broken-hearted . . . .”

The Classics on Youtube . . . My next book

Published
by
Mike
on November 30, 2006
in Books, Church of Christ and music
. 63 Comments

There’s a book I’ve been wanting to write for a decade. But I haven’t been ready.

Now I’m ready. I’m going to try to start working on it during “spare time” (ha!), and then the elders have given me some time this June to finish it.

It’s very important to me, and I’d appreciate your prayers. I’ll tell you more about it later.

- - - -

You asked for it. You got it. (The antecedent of “you” is a few readers with a warped sense of humor.) “Mike Cope Sings the Classics” from the ‘05 Zoe Conference.

Thanks to Matt Maxwell, my tech guru, for getting this on youtube. He and I filmed the whole thing in about an hour, and then Grant Boone added the impromptu voice-over later.

The Color of Law

Published
by
Mike
on November 28, 2006
in Books, Salt and Light and justice
. 26 Comments

After ten years in a large Dallas law firm and after making partner, Mark Gimenez has moved with his family outside Ft. Worth to write.

But after eleven years in a large Dallas law firm and after making partner, A. Scott Fenney had no such plans. His future was money. Green, it turns out, is The Color of Law.

Fenney, a former star running back at SMU who married Miss SMU, has been on the fast track with a Dallas firm. But after he gives a rousing speech to colleagues about the nobility of law, invoking the memories of his mother reading to him about Atticus Finch (a speech which he later admits he didn’t believe), a federal judge appoints him to represent a black prostitute from East Dallas who is being charged with murder.

And, we learn, the man she supposedly murdered after he picked her up on Harry Hines Boulevard is the son of a powerful, wealthy Texas senator with aspirations for the White House.

Representing her holds the potential for career suicide since the powerful senator will do anything to keep the name of his son from being raked through the mud — which would be required since the son had a history of slapping around prostitutes and dates.

He comes to a critical fork in the road: will he continue with the dream life in “the Bubble” of Highland Park, or will he provide the counsel for this young mother?

As the Texas Monthly said, The Color of Law is “an unbeatable legal thriller with a lot of heart.”

It would be a great novel for a group of university students to work through along with To Kill a Mockingbird, which it continually refers back to. (Fair, warning, however: If Grisham is PG and Turow is R, Gimenez’s first novel is maybe a PG-13. Or, say, PG-16.)

I won’t be surprised if sometime I find out that “Mark Gimenez” is a pen name for Larry James. For through the events of the story, Gimenez forces us to think about the gap between a place like Highland Park and a place like East Dallas. How could two places be so close and so far?

I liked knowing the city where the action is set. I’ve driven down those roads (Lover’s Lane, Mockingbird, Preston Road, etc.) and seen those shopping centers.

But at the same time, there is discomfort. Here are some passages:

“A concrete-and-steel landscape as far as the eye can see, all the way to the brown haze of pollution that perpetually rings the city above the loop, treeless and barren, the city’s master plan obvious — to pave over every square inch of green . . . . Which might explain Dallas’s ranking as the ugliest major city in America. Other than women, Dallas has no natural beauty whatsoever. No ocean or lake or water of any kind except the Trinity River running west of downtown, used for decades as a natural sewage system and today as a big drainage ditch. No Central Park, no Rocky Mountains, and no Miami Beach. No wonderful weather. Nothing other great cities have. All Dallas has is a white X on Elm Street marking the exact spot where an American president was killed. But then, you don’t live in Dallas for any of that; you live in Dallas to make a lot of money fast.”

“Grammar skills notwithstanding, she was a fine example of what Texas men most want — a gorgeous Texas girl. Texas myths were many, but one was no myth: the most gorgeous girls in the world were found in Texas. Dallas, Texas. Girls like her, they graduate from high school or maybe junior college, and from small towns all across Texas they had straight to Dallas like moths to light. They come for the jobs, they come for the nightlife, they come for the single men making lots of money, the kind of money that buys big homes and fancy cars and fashionable clothes and glittery jewelry guaranteed to bring a smile to any Texas girl’s face. Girl wants to marry a refinery worker and live in a double-wide, she moves to Houston; girl wants to marry money and live in a mansion, she moves to Dallas.”

“Developed in 1906 on thirteen hundred acres of high land above downtown Dallas, Highland Park today is a sanctuary of elegant homes, landscaped lawns, and broad avenues canopied by towering oak trees. On its wide sidewalks European nannies and Mexican maids can be seen pushing the heirs of the great Texas fortunes in strollers while their fathers — billionaires and millionaires and the lawyers who tend to them — work in the downtown skyscrapers and their mothers play tennis at the country club and shop at Anne Fontaine, Luca Luca, and Botega Veneta in the Highland Park Village shopping center, its Spanish Mediterranean architecture and quaint stucco buildings with terra-cotta roofs and decorative wrought iron harking back to a distant time and place when great wealth was reserved for people of a certain class, not just anyone who could dunk a basketball. Visitors from California say the town reminds them of Beverly Hills, and with good reason: the same architect who designed Beverly Hills designed Highland Park. Only difference is, the founders of Beverly Hills did not file deed restrictions that legally limited home ownership in their new town to white people only; the founders of Highland Park did. Almost a hundred years later, the Town of Highland Park is a two-square-mile island entirely surrounded by the 384-square-mile City of Dallas. It’s an island of white in an ocean of color: Dallas, a city of 1.2 million residents, is now only 39 percent white; while Highland Park, a town of 8,850 residents, remains 98 percent white, with not a single home owned by a black person. It’s an island of wealth — on any given day over a hundred homes in Highland Park will be listed for sale at prices exceeding $1 million. It’s an island immune from the crime and social ills that affect Dallas — Highland Park kids call their hometown “the Bubble,” happy to be insulated from the outside world that beckons at the town boundary — albeit an island without a river or stream or even a moat to keep the outside world out, only the highest home prices in Texas, a well-armed police force, and a long-standing reputation that if you’re black or brown and don’t live there, you’d damn well better be passing through.”

“Thirty-six years Scott Fenney had lived in Dallas and not once had he driven into South Dallas. White people drove south of downtown three times each year and only for events held within the gated Fair Park grounds — the State Fair, the Oklahoma-Texas football game, and the Cotton Bowl game — being careful to stay on the interstate, to take the Fair Park exit, and to drive directly through the park gates without detour or delay. White people never drove into South Dallas, into the neighborhoods and mean streets of South Dallas, into the other Dallas of crime and crack cocaine, prostitution and poverty, drive-by shootings and gangbangers, into black Dallas . . . .”

When he continues to represent the woman on trial, his senior partner says to him:

“When I graduated from law school, Scotty, a wise older lawyer gave me some good advice. He said, ‘Dan, every new lawyer must make a fundamental choice from which every other decision in his professional life will flow. And that choice is simple: Do you want to do good or do well? Do you want to make money or make the world a better place? Do you want to drive a Cadillac or a Chevrolet? Do you want to send your kids to private schools or public schools? Do you want to be a rich lawyer or a poor lawyer?’ He said, ‘Dan, if you want to do good, go work for legal aid and help the little people fighting their landlords and the utility companies and the police and feel good about it. But don’t have regrets twenty years later when your classmates are living in nice homes and driving new cars and taking vacations in Europe. And you have to tell your kids they can’t go to an Ivy League school because you did good.’”

Well, I have so many other passages marked. It is about Dallas, but it far transcends one city. It’s about lawyers, but it moves far beyond that.

It’s about justice, isolation, racism, materialism, law, service, courage, character, and beauty. (”Rebecca Fenney was still remarkably beautiful, still the most beautiful woman in Highland Park, still able to compete with a twenty-two-year old for her lawyer. But the day would come for her, she knew; and with each passing day, Rebecca Fenney was a day older and a day less beautiful.”)

It’s about Atticus Finch. Even before he was Gregory Peck.

At a critical moment when Fenney is explaining to his senior partner that without good representation his client would unfairly be put to death in Texas, the older man got a puzzled look and replied, “And how does that affect your life?” For anyone who’s read the gospels, they know how important that question is.

It’s a question that hits him hard in the nose when his former secretary doesn’t seem too torn up by his leaving. She says:

“For eleven years I’ve fetched your dry cleaning and coffee, run your personal errands, paid your personal bills, shopped for gifts for your wife and child and clients, lied to clients for you . . . Did you care about me? About my life? You never once asked about my life. Do you know I have a handicapped child and that’s the only reason I’ve put up with you for all these years? Because I needed the money? You didn’t know and you didn’t care. Did you care when Mr. Walker got fired? No. Like every other lawyer here, you care only about yourself.”

The ending is not as strong as the rest, I thought, but, heh–it’s a first novel. And quite a good one at that. I look forward to more novels from Gimenez.

Reading it makes me very thankful for those who are working to bridge the gap between haves and have nots, and it makes me grateful for those lawyers I know who still understand that the color of law is not green. They are, indeed, salt and light in the world.