Against the wishes of my wife (she wanted me to relax), I cuddled up with Saul Friedlander’s The Extermination Years: 1939-1945 over Christmas. It’s a detailed chronology of the persistent, organized, and relentless Nazi machine— depicted through thousands of original journal entries. Yes, a holly jolly Christmas. I scratched out many notes/questions in the margins, but those will have to wait for other posts. I have real unanswered questions about how the Church should respond to known aggregious acts against other humans. (Darfur, Sudan, Rwanda…and now China)
But history is always safer when it stays in the past.
Not so with this news from China. They have designed a new death-van, that recalls the gas wagons of the Nazi ever-changing approach to the “solution.” What is so chilling, is that they are killing criminals and harvesting their needed organs. Remember, you can be given the death penalty for things like tax-evasion in China. Also more chilling is the fact that executions have risen to 10,000 a year from 1,500. Nothing like efficiency. That’s what eventually drove Zyklon-B and furnaces to get married. The death van: so new, so efficient. But I am sure our Wal-Mart plastic thingamajiggies are worth the trouble.
I must confess that I’ve never heard of the Quiverfull movement. That is, until I read a story from NPR on this faction of modern-day evangelicalism. As indicated by the quotation above, from Nancy Campbell, one of the founders of this movement, the idea is that Christians should reproduce with reckless abandon to repopulate the world with believers. Here’s another great line, also from Campbell, who stopped at a mere six children:
“I think, help! Imagine if we had had more of these children!” Campbell says, adding, “My greatest impact is through my children. The more children I have, the more ability I have to impact the world for God.”
[I pause here for one of my grammar Nazi moments; impact, contrary to every self-help guru and corporate consultant, is NOT A VERB!!! This drives me absolutely nuts. Impact is a noun. The verb is “affect.” GRRR!!!] Now what fascinates me about this notion is that these folks profess reliance on the sovereignty of God to determine their family size, yet seem to believe that it’s going to take their efforts at reproduction to take back the country for Christ. Consider:
Still, Quiverfull is a small group, probably 10,000 fast-growing families, mainly in the Midwest and South. But they have large ambitions, says Kathryn Joyce, who has written about the movement in her book Quiverfull: Inside The Christian Patriarchy Movement.
“They speak about, ‘If everyone starts having eight children or 12 children, imagine in three generations what we’ll be able to do,’ ” Joyce says. ” ‘We’ll be able to take over both halls of Congress, we’ll be able to reclaim sinful cities like San Francisco for the faithful, and we’ll be able to wage very effective massive boycotts against companies that are going against God’s will.’ “
If they believe in the sovereignty of God, then won’t He reclaim SF with or without their efforts, if that be His will? After all, who will thwart the will of God?
I don’t want anyone to hear what I’m not saying. If you really want lots of kids, then go for it. However, procreating in order to take over Congress one day seems to me a completely misguided motivation.
It is merely a matter of time before there is a schism of worldwide proportions in the Anglican Church. That church is in a hole, and Rev. Martin Dudley has decided that the thing to do is to dig as quickly as possible. You see, Rev. Dudley “married” two fellow Anglican priests, complete with a marriage liturgy, hymns, and communion. I suppose it wouldn’t have been provocative enough to just marry two ordinary guys, it had to be two other priests to achieve maximum shock value.
And that it did:
The Most Rev Henry Orombi, the Archbishop of Uganda, said that the ceremony was “blasphemous.” He called on Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to take decisive action if the Anglican Church were not to “disintegrate”. Archbishop Orombi added: “What really shocks me is that this is happening in the Church of England that first brought the Gospel to us.
Yes, but the days of the Church of England taking the Gospel to anybody are long, long gone. Ironically it will be up to the evangelized to do the evangelizing of their former evangelizers.
I guess everyone has heard by now the quote from Barack Obama during his recent fundraiser in San Francisco. But, for the benefit of those who may have been cut off from civilization the past week, here it is:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…;And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
The condescension is utterly mind-boggling. And it hasn’t taken HRC long to respond. Here’s a recent ad of hers from Pennsylvania:
Now, the politics of this are pretty obvious: Obama’s image as the candidate of Hope and Unity is getting a little tarnished. Hillary is trying to take advantage to save her candidacy (though her attempts to portray herself as a bible-toting sportsman ring a bit hollow). I suspect that Obama has just handed HRC a LARGE victory in PA and IN, and maybe NC too. This will also surely make the superdelegates think twice about his ability to carry states like PA, OH, and MI, which the Dem nominee MUST carry to win.
However, all that said, what’s most interesting to me about this is the worldview that BHO has with regard to Christianity. Every reference I have ever heard him make to what drew him to his church are all vaguely political. Almost invariably, they center around the social outreach programs (what we’d call mercy ministries) that the church had. I have yet to hear him mention his own salvation, or, much less, the name of Jesus.
So, it seems that Obama thinks that big city churches that engage in social projects are OK, but people in small towns who “cling” to their religion are just doing so out of bitterness at being out of work. Got that? No, I don’t either. There’s an obvious double standard, and I suspect that the real truth of it lies in how much a church centers on sin, redemption, and Christ. Those that actually mention those things (like in those small PA towns) can’t actually be drawing people to hear that stuff. They MUST have other motives. The must just be all exercised about their bank balance being too low (these small town folks don’t have Ivy League law degrees after all - else why on earth would they be in a small town?). It’s their poverty that makes them need Jesus. Urban churches with educated congregations don’t go in for all that stuff because they’re more sophisticated. They occupy themselves with nobler pursuits - like social outreach.
(For clarity’s sake, I’m NOT slamming social outreach. But, it’s not the reason for church.)
I think that Obama has a typical elitist attitude toward Christianity: it’s OK, so long as it knows its place and stays in it. And that place can’t intrude on anyone’s personal choices for living their life, or, worse, on public policy. But that’s not real Christianity. Christianity is knowing your sin and how Christ redeemed you from it without you even deserving it in the least. How can that knowledge stay contained? As I’ve written before, real Christianity is going to take over the whole person, and not be kept in a nice compartmentalized box where it merely runs a food bank or a clothes closet. A robust Christianity is going to assert itself beyond that, into the political, into the personal, into education and childrearing, into everything. For believing people, that’s a wonderful truth. For the unbeliever, it’s frightening.
That’s how I see it, anyway. But maybe I’m just bitter about being in this small town…….
Deep down, I’ve always suspected that Moses was a stoner. Tell the truth, now - haven’t you? I mean, really, what else could possibly explain how he got the 10 Commandments? Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem is now calling him out:
“As far Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a supernatural cosmic event, which I don’t believe, or a legend, which I don’t believe either, or finally, and this is very probable, an event that joined Moses and the people of Israel under the effect of narcotics,” Shanon told Israeli public radio on Tuesday. “Moses was probably also on drugs when he saw the “burning bush,” suggested Shanon, who said he himself has dabbled with such substances.
Apparently that’s what a group of Catholics in the Netherlands is saying. They figure that the average Dutchman is more familiar with the islamic fasting period, Ramadan, than they are with Lent, so it’s just smarter branding to let folks know what this whole Lent thing is all about by calling it the Christian Ramadan.
Dr. Rowan Williams has recently proposed that British Muslims be allowed to practice Sharia Law to resolve marital and financial disputes. Williams is the Archbishop of Canterbury— the highest position in the Anglican Church. You can read about it here.
