Yesterday was a sweet day for me.  I have two little girls who love making plans and love surprising their Daddy.  To be honest, my kids love me...I don't say this out of pride or anything, they just love me and I know it.  To be quite honest the love of my children is one of the most gracious and lavish gifts of God in my life. Part of the new covenant is that the hearts of fathers will be turned to their children (See Malachi 4 and Luke 1).  Many of us are aware that the involvement of fathers with their children is vastly important in their upbringing and the results of absent fathers upon our society are undeniable. See this site for more information - http://www.fatherhood.org/

Yet oddly enough I have been meditating upon a differnt "trend" in our society...perhaps not as harmful as the absent father, but the stay at home dad (SAHD). Now here we are not talking about Dad being at little league games, dance recitals, schools and spending good chunks of time with his children.  This phenomena is men choosing not to work, to stay at home and be the primary care giver for young children.  Mr. Mom, Daddy Daycare - Daddy with the diaper bag going to the play group. 

I recently watched an ABC News report about stay at home fathers which began some thinking about the issue.  You can read the transcript of that report here.  It was actually entitled "When a man's place is in the kitchen - How Stay-at-Home Dads Redefine Gender Roles." The report was couched in the notion that these men are challenging the status quo, living enlightened lives and pioneering new social trends. Several things stood out in the report.  One of the reasons that was given for Dad to take up the bottles and diaper bags was financial.  She makes more money and we want to care for our kids.  Of course most of it was couched in language of "doing whats best for the children." Additionally, the report made such a choice to have Dad at home sound like a significant social trend.  Oddly enough, the US Census reports the number at only 143,000. The report clearly wants to tell us that Mr. Mom is a new trend, a new way that is being taken on by men in rising numbers.  The truth of the matter is that throughout history, and everywhere in the world today, Mothers and women are the primary care givers for small children. Yet there are men doing this today and you can find several web sites which offer things from articles to "support groups" to men staying at home full time.  See Rebel Dad, At Home Dad, Daddy Stays Home. 

Nevertheless, the tone of ABC report showed that this was a new sort of gender enlightenment happening in our time. I found it to be quite sad and a bit silly. One guy even laments how it is still not "socially acceptable" to invite another woman over "to play."  Good grief, I felt bad for the guy - maybe the world will make it better for him to go to play group with the Moms and other SAHDs some day soon.  Now I am sure this post mayperhaps anger some SAHDs yet I wanted to look a little bit into this phenomena. I mean no harm to anyone walking this route, but I do hope they would change their minds.  In this post I am not referring to temporary situations or single fathers or fathers who work from home.  What I am addressing is men who intentionally do not work to be the primary source of care for babies and small children.

Not just wanting to have an emotional response against stay at home daddydom I thought I would think through my initial objection and think about "why" I do not think this is a good plan for men or for society.  One more disclaimer.  As this is a new "trend" and therefore a social experiment their will be more sociological studies of this phenomena in the decades ahead, I do not claim to offer anything here that claims to know the outcomes or social trends related of this configuration.  What I do want to do is offer some reason why I do not think it is a wise path for men and women to follow.  I reasoned this from first a secular naturalistic worldview AND then from the biblical worldview to which I subscribe.

Evolutionary Explanations against Mr. Mom

In the worldview of naturalism, humans and our societies are the result of material and environmental concerns (also completely material) by which species struggled to adapt and survive on the earth.  Evolution is driven by our genes desire to replicate and pass their information on to the next generation.  Mutations and adaptations to various environments created fit species which thereby passed on their genes to the next generation.  Such thinking has been applied to literally all areas of human life be it ethics or societal structures.  If you ask "WHY" about various phenomena we see and experience, today's evolutionary ethicists and psychologists can cook up a recipe that tells you why evolution favored certain behaviors which then were carried into the community/society.  If you ask why societies favor altruistic behavior, it must have had an evolutionary benefit for our ancient ancestors as they climbed down from the trees. 

Such a way of thinking can be applied to explain WHY mothers have always been the primary care givers for young children.  First, and too obvious, babies come from and feed from their mothers.  OK, we are modern people and can get away from that...we'll create ways for a man to feed the baby so the mother does not have too.  Second, for whatever reason, evolution has created almost a universal situation where women care for young children...in this worldview this configuration MUST have evolutionary advantages.  At this point, it is usually thought that the male needed to be out hunting and gathering...jumping on the back of prehistoric animals with spears and bone made weapons.  So Dad had to go to work as it were...even way back in the day.  Of course male and female bodies were "designed" by evolution to care for children or fight back the saber tooth tiger.  My whole point in all this would be this.  In a naturalistic worldview evolution has created the childcare scenario and helped us survive.

Of course the apologetic given at this point would be - but we humans no longer need submit to evolution, we have become so smart we can now "take control of our own evolution" and do whatever the heck we want.  We can jettison nature for technology so that men can feed infants and Mom and others (men, women, gay people) can use tanks to fight off any wild beasts.  There are so many problems with this system of thinking.  First, it assumes that humans, because we are smart, can actually escape "natural evolution" and be "guides" of evolution. That is like saying nature can overcome nature to make a new path.  Of course, this worldview offers no such resources.  What is will evolve and we cannot kick against the goads of what matter + time + energy do in their mindless contortions.  Perhaps if humans are "special" or "different" we could do such things, but this worldview lacks these resources.  Second, if the system of mothers caring for children and fathers providing for families and protecting their flock evolved in every human society that rears children (and please, no comments about Amazons or the island of Lesbos) should we not see the wisdom of nature and align to her wishes?  Could intentionally rejecting breast feeding, mothers caring for their children and other "ways of nature" be unwise. OK, I fail to see how naturalism would support Daddys becoming the primary care givers for children, so perhaps human beings want to make choices based on other concerns than mere survival...but of course this is precisely what we cannot do if evolutionary naturalism is true.

OK, enough with naturalism, I find the worldview fatally flawed anyway.

Biblical Manhood means providing and protecting

Scripture teaches a different story about sex and child rearing.  From the beginning human beings were designed by our creator as "male and female" of equal value in the image of God (see Gen 1:26,27).  The role of child bearing is a great gift of God to women and also part of God's work in redeeming and sanctifying women.  Men are also charged to love their wives and care for them.  Men are to serve their wives and sacrifice for them.  Fathers are called to teach their children (Ephesians 6) and provide for their household (1 Timothy 5). Additionally, men ought to care for their families and protect them from evil doing as much as possible. I am also not a pacifist and believe that some men ought to learn to fight.  This is a necessary reality in a fallen world filled with sin and violence and a responsiblity of good government (Romans 13). I have written at length on gender roles from a biblical perspective so you can read the rest here. My little apologetic for virtuous fighting is here.

Now, this is not a discussion about whether a mom should stay home or pursue a career.  That would be for another day.  I will only say that families should work for Mom to have that option available and not force her to work for "lifestyle" issues...simply for money.  We counsel young couples to plan for one income and save aggressively when you have two.  This way a couple actually has a real choice to make when the wonderful words "I'm pregnant" come forth. There are many creative ways today for both parents to work and there are many creative ways today for a Mom to choose to stay at home.  Planning ahead makes it a real choice.

What I am saying here is that men ought to work and learn to provide for a family. Men are called to be responsible, to learn to stand on the wall for others. It is good for young men to feel and teak responsibility, in fact this is part of becoming a man.  We have far too many little boys today prancing around the world living maxim magazine manhood and checking out of their families.  The solution is not taking up the pacifier and baby food jar, but rather commitment to work and family.  That work exists to give honor to God and to provide for those in need.  Furthermore, if more men in a culture are moving to man the diaper bag I fear for our future ability to fight off the hoard.  Of course the response is that universal stay at home dadness is not probable, practical or realistic.  I would simply agree as it points out the weaknesses of the practice.

Final Thoughts

I simply find very few good reasons for a man to choose a permanent and perpetual post as Mr. Mom.   In reading on the subject it seems that social goals are part of the motivation as much as money or looking out for the kids.  What we have seen in segments of western culture is the evacuation of the words "Mom" and "Dad" from any sort of meaning.  They can mean whatever we construct them to be - if that means Dad acts like a traditional Mom then lets cheer the innovator (it seems ABC News will publish on it just about every year around fathers day - at least a search of their site seem to show this). It seems that many like to see themselves as more just, more enlightened, more progressive than other humans - and being a stay at home dad perhaps say "we get it and reject backward patriarchy so much that Dad stays home."  If there is ever a contraption created to have men become pregnant or physically bear the children, I am guessing some "progressives" would cheer the development and some would sign up for this as well.  Huxley foresaw a new world where Mom's loose the ability to bear children and the human race was forever produced in little bottles.  I, for one, am thankful for Moms and Dads.

Thanking God for Fathers and Mothers

So on the day after Fathers day I want to thank God for both Fathers and Mothers.  I want to thank God for the stay at home Dads who are married to one woman and giving their lives to their kids.  I want to say again that I mean no harm to any guys who are SAHDs in writing this. I then want to exhort them to get out of the play group and make their stint as primary child care giver as short as possible.  For their sake and for the sake of the kids...especially their sons.  For the little men will be watching Dad to learn how to focus and develop masculinity. He needs to see a humble king who provides, a tender warrior who fights for what is good right and true, a gracious mentor who will coach life for young men and a friend to guide him through the perils of life outside of the garden. 

British bishop Michael Nazir-Ali has an intersting essay in the June 2008 issue of Standpoint magazine...his premise is that he collapse of British Christianity in the last half century has left the culture beleagured and ripe for Islamic radicals to fill the ideological void.

Interesting read - the source can be found here - Breaking Faith with Britain - When one looks at history the armies of Islam were held at bay in Europe by two powers.  First, the hammer of Charles Martel and the Frankish armies.  Second, the philosophical and scientific efforts of the great philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas.  My fear is that Europe has neither the will to dispute with or resist Islam - I hope I am wrong.

John Mark Reynolds has a refreshing dose of optimism online with his essay Great News Today! Or Despist Us the Church is Winning! OR Ten Reasons to be Happy!  over at the Scriptorium.  If you are typically found hanging out with Chicken little, lamenting how bad everything is or just tend towards a modicum of moribundity this little piece will be good reading for you.  Of course, you will simply want to refute his post and tell us how bad it really is...but hey, it is worth a try to look on the bright side every now and then...no?  Of course John Piper will tell you that our joy is in God and not simply good goings on in the world or culture...but if and when both may be true it is a day for smiling is it not?

Personally, I love Chesterton's exhortation for Christians to be irrational optimists.  At that I will leave you with one of my very favorite sections of Chesterton's book Orthodoxy...I find very few write like this today:

This at least had come to be my position about all that was called optimism, pessimism, and improvement. Before any cosmic act of reform we must have a cosmic oath of allegiance. A man must be interested in life, then he could be disinterested in his views of it. "My son give me thy heart"; the heart must be fixed on the right thing: the moment we have a fixed heart we have a free hand. I must pause to anticipate an obvious criticism. It will be said that a rational person accepts the world as mixed of good and evil with a decent satisfaction and a decent endurance. But this is exactly the attitude which I maintain to be defective. It is, I know, very common in this age; it was perfectly put in those quiet lines of Matthew Arnold which are more piercingly blasphemous than the shrieks of Schopenhauer --

"Enough we live: -- and if a life, With large results so little rife, Though bearable, seem hardly worth This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth."

I know this feeling fills our epoch, and I think it freezes our epoch. For our Titanic purposes of faith and revolution, what we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it. We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return at evening.

No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world: but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get it on. Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing? Can he look up at its colossal good without once feeling acquiescence? Can he look up at its colossal evil without once feeling despair? Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist? Is he enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it? In this combination, I maintain, it is the rational optimist who fails, the irrational optimist who succeeds. He is ready to smash the whole universe for the sake of itself.

I just jumped off the plane from Newark, NJ for a medium sized three hour layover in the Chicago airport.  On the flight into the windy city I read through an article on a persona I have followed a bit over the years.  The article was in WIRED magazine and was simply titled Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity. Well, maybe that title is not so simple nor the ideas being discussed therein.  Let me try to summarize, in a few words, the work of Ray Kurzweil.

In my opinion, Ray Kurzweil is one of the intellectual geniuses of our times. He has been a bit of a legend in the computer science and artificial intelligence worlds.  I know, that is probably something like .00001 percent of the world's population but he has contributed greatly in inventing technology that has changed the world.  His work has been mainly in pattern recognition and machine text/speech recognition.  He has invented software that can read books out loud to the blind and answer you phone calls for large companies.  Well, maybe the latter one has been a bit of a frustrating experience to some.  Kurzweil's more controversial work however has been as one of the leading proponents of what is known as Strong AI. 

Strong AI holds that human intelligence (even consciousness for that matter) can be reduced (read my previous post on reductionism) to processes similar to a very complex computer.  In other words, if you can mimic human thought, decision making...even emotions, you then have consciousness and self awareness. So in his theory, there will be a day when computers are powerful enough for Skynet to "wake up" make its own decisions and take over the world. Many of you have been exposed to the Strong AI view in pop culture through cinematic exploration.  The aforementioned Skynet of the Terminator lore, HAL2000 of 2001 a Space Odyssey, the weird boy robot flick AI, the bizarre world of Minority Report, Will Smith's rambunctious robot romp in iRobot and the new theistic, philosophical cylons of the new Battlestar Gallictica.

Kurzweil believes that as computational power increases the ability to write a brain simulating, consciousness simulating algorithm draws nearer in time.  In other words, given enough processing power, computers will some day be as human as you.  Hence, his earlier works evolved from The Age of Intelligent Machines to the book I read some years ago entitled The Age of Spiritual Machines.  Now, Kurzweill did not suddenly become a dualist in changing his language to "Spiritual Machines."  His point is simply that future computers will appear to be every bit as conscious as ourselves - they might even worship and read books by the compuDalilama (my term, not his).  His latest update of the book and its ideas deals with what he calls the singularity, and according to Kurzweil, it is near.

In the work, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking Penguin), he speaks of a soon coming day where a radical shift in life as we know it will take place. At this singularity, we will all be uploaded as software into the network, with non perishing "bodies" (if you want) and live forever.  Immortality, the fountain of youth and becoming as gods all in one push of a brain upload button.  Now, if you believe this narrative (and many do not - read the sidebar in WIRED, Never Mind the Singularity, Here's the Science, featuring research of those that think the whole scheme of things is flawed) you will want to stay alive long enough to reach this glorious land.  If you die before we arrive, so to speak, you will not get to gather at the other side with the other comphumans. Interestingly enough a Physicist Frank Tipler in The Physics of Christianity is writing about similar ideas though from a theistic perspective; though I found it very bizarre. If all this sounds a bit nuts, you are not alone. 

One of the philosophical problems with computing=consciousness is that of self-knowledge.  Computers, by nature of their design, perform by processing tasks according to algorithms.  Even the learning and evolving systems, do so according to predetermined rules of logic placed upon them from minds - in this case programming.  In other words, computers process data and symbols , they do not "know" anything.  I actually thought of this over the weekend observing the functioning of a GPS navigation system in a car.

Our realtor during our house hunting in NJ would punch in an address and then a kind woman's voice (perhaps using Kurzweil inspired technology patents) would tell us precisely where to turn to arrive at our destination.  In our case it was usually a small, dumpy, overpriced house...but I digress.  Let me do a bit of a thought experiment with you at this point.  Imagine for a moment that you were in a vehicle where you could not see where you were going yet you could cause a car to turn right or left based upon the cues from a GPS system processing your location.  You would receive data, act upon it, then arrive perfectly at your desired destination.  I felt like I actually did this many, many times sitting in the back seat of a car zipping around New Jersey this weekend.  Now, in our experiment, you would seem to have a great knowledge of the area and a great sense of directions.  Yet there is one glaring problem - you actually have no idea where you are.  You have zero knowledge of New Jersey or any conscious sense of direction.  You simply processed input and data.  Computers process symbols and data, they do not know anything.  They can do many things, appear intelligent, etc but they do not know.  For a more sophisticated argument John Searle's now famous Chinese Room Problem is similar and much more cogent.

I also find massive ethical problems with this view because it will mean the rich and technological persons will keep themselves alive while others will languish in the pre-singularity world of death and decay.  A new elitism will be even more severe in the imagined world of Kurzweil's future.  It seems like a world that will have more selfish people, concerned only about the perpetuation of their own lives.  God forbid the poor masses ever decide to pull the plug (literally) on the machines - we all know that will mean war.  I've seen the Matrix you know.  Or perhaps we will be self-deluded once again that we will make the world perfect this time around.  Perhaps we have forgotten what happens in reality, as well as literature and film, when human beings think they can make the perfect world in their own image.

So what is Kurzweil doing besides promoting his vision of the coming singularity? He is taking hundreds of supplements a day and trying to experiment with any life lengthening idea just to keep his biological existence intact so he can make it.  He is quite wealthy and is spending massive amounts of resources on keeping his ticker going as the clock ticks forward.  Unfortunately none of this can keep one from getting hit by a bus, shot by a crazy person, or succumbing to disease. Yet it does seems that hope for immortality, even eternal life, lives even among materialists.  Many today hope in aliens, hope in getting off this mound called earth by a coming Starship Enterprise and many hope to create our descendants and be transferred into machines by fiber optic transfer (or whatever high bandwidth technology is available at the singularity).  Sadly, some may choose suicide. 

What does all of this reveal about the human soul? I think we see that we long to live, not die.  We long for a better future where the harsh realities of life outside of Eden are brought to an end.  Some choose to trust in the promises of God and resurection for the hope of eternal life.  Others seek to become godlike themselves.  Where does this leave a human being?  In Kurzweil's own description - it has left him lonely.

Note

For all one of you interested in wrestling with these ideas further I recommend the work
Are We Spiritual Machines?: Ray Kurzweil vs. the Critics of Strong A.I. edited by Jay Wesley Richards.

A few interesting articles in this easter season.  First, my friend Tim Dees sent me an article on Slate.com which talks about the Episcopal Relief and Development agency's "new" stations of the cross exercise. For those of you who don't know the stations of the cross is a long traditional exercise found in catholic and some high Protestant traditions. It is used to remember the passion of Jesus Christ, particularly during holy week.  Now here's a new twist from the ever creative Episcopalians...just a short excerpt from the Slate piece.

This year in time for Lent, Episcopal Relief and Development, the relief agency of the Episcopal Church, began offering a variation on the Stations of the Cross called the Stations of the Millennium Development Goals. It features eight stations, one for each of the global priorities identified by the United Nations in 2000, from eradicating poverty to promoting gender equality. Where each of the 14 stations of the traditional Stations of the Cross represents an event leading up to Jesus' death—"Jesus is condemned to death" and "Jesus falls the first time," for example—the alternative version, promoted by Episcopal Relief and Development, shifts the focus to righting global problems. At Station 8, "Create a Global Partnership for Development," participants are reminded that a "fair trading system, increased international aid, and debt relief for developing countries will help us realize" the U.N. goals. An optional activity at Station 7, "Ensure Environmental Sustainability," asks that "pilgrims calculate their carbon footprint and come up with three strategies to reduce it."

Interestingly enough even Slate understands why this is just goofy and trivializes the sacred:

The value of liturgy lies in its ability to unite people around powerful ritual moments. But the Stations of the Millennium Development Goals appropriate the form of the old-school Stations of the Cross service without retaining the sense of sacred mystery that makes it so powerful. That's no sin—but it is a bit of a shame.

I just think it is possible to worship the God-man Jesus Christ and care about global development too.  Maybe its just me. It seems some denominations cleverly invent new paths to loosing one's way.  You can read the whole thing here.

This time of year the easter eggs, bunnies, chocolate and fake green grass fly around in a consumeristic frenzy making all the little kids happy.  I remember how much I loved getting an Easter basket this time of year.  This year I have wrestled quite a bit on the season and how easy it can be lost to each of us.  Let's make it clear - there is no commandment in Scripture to have a celebration/feast called Easter. The observance does however have a long history and such celebrations hinge upon what it is we are celebrating.  At Easter the church celebrates something extremely important, in fact the central kernel of the gospel.  Easter is the celebration of the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ to bring sinful human beings back into relationship with God.

Every year people come out with opinions, articles and documentaries about the life and death of Jesus.  The usual experts are paraded around on both sides to say that Jesus was or was not this or that.  Yet the central tenet and claim of Christian faith is remembered annually at this time - God became a human being and died himself for rebellious human beings.  The question for me - is this lost to the church at Easter in our day?  

This year I have struggled a bit in soul with a sort of goofy reality.  This year Easter came early in the church calendar which also meant it coincides with another religious activity found on the American cultural landscape - March Madness.  Now you may think - Reid, basketball does not compare to Jesus.  Not so fast friend.  My guess is that Good Friday and Easter will not cause a blink away from the massage celebration of the round ball in America.  In fact I have struggled with what to do with the NCAA Tournament because I am a huge fan.  I am a sports guy, love the tourney, but feel awkward about Easter and talk of Sweet 16s in the same breath.  Maybe because I sense that I am actually a worshipper of both God and basketball games.  Thank God for Easter – as it demonstrates God’s grace to me as an idolater.   

My fear is that in our culture of show without substance we might miss, and our neighbors will certainly miss the incredible, radical implications and claims of the gospel.  Many will do their hat tip duty of church attendance for family this year at Easter - yet what will they hear in the churches?  My hope is that sin, death, the cross and the resurrection might be on full display.  My hope is that people will be corned by good news and choose to turn to God for his forgiveness...or they will have to wrestle with the gospel in its biblical form - not the "here are three things to make you happy this Easter" drool that some churches will peddle. 

May Christ dwell in each of your hearts richly through faith this Good Friday.  May his love and wrath, mercy and justice, grace and severity be real to each of you in these days.  And please don't shame yourself for watching basketball games with friends.  I will be cheering for the UNC Tarheels in the tourney and have a few brackets I will check.  Yet do examine your hearts if you are feeling that Good Friday and Easter celebrations are "in the way of your getting back to the games" - such would be a huge adventure in missing the point.  My hope and prayer for this weekend is that my life, love and worship will be found in Christ alone...even amongst Easter eggs and Easter hoops.

Al Mohler has a good post up on the confusion faced by young men in our times as to their roles in life.  One quote that stuck out was from Mark Peters recent article in the Boston Globe:

How to act like a man is a humdinger of an issue if you are one. The late Steven L. Nock, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, said in an e-mail to me last year that it doesn't take much for women to prove that they're "real women" in the widely accepted senses, but men are in a more slippery situation, especially with the role of father/protector/provider not considered as necessary or desirable as it once was. "[M]asculinity must be continuously earned and displayed. It is never won," Nock wrote. Without a traditional role to embrace, being a man requires constantly defining yourself in opposition to all things female: "No wonder things like man-purses attract attention."

For those who have not seen this, Harvey Mansfield (yes, the name is ironic) put out a book in 2006 which chronicles the decline of Manliness.  An interesting read as well.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece on early Christian Art by Willard Spiegelman. It is interesting how the humble beginnings of the crucified good shepherd turns toward the pomp and jewels reflecting imperial majesty.  Jesus - he is a shepherd and a lofty King...but how much loot should be spent reflecting these truths?

Here is the link

Shortly after I was really into the REM song "Loosing my Religion" Jesus saved me and changed my whole game life game plan. Yet many travel the opposite path down the river away from churches and the infamous, eeeevil things which get labeled with the term "organized religion." 

There is an interesting article about perceptions about “religion” in the coming generation. The article is by Stephen Prothero Chair of the Department of Religion at Boston University. This being so, it is a fair assessment that his classes do not represent “a whole generation of young people” across America but I do think his editorial is indicative of the mood of the younger folk today. 

The big mistake people make today is adjusting doctrines to the “tastes” of young folk as if we change the product to “sell to the young consumer.”  Yet I do think understanding how people think helps us to communicate truth in a manner which connects with the next generation.  Anyway, I thought this might interest others as well…

Here is the link – Is religion losing the millennial generation?

Daniel Henninger has an interesting article over at the Wall Street Journal regarding what he calls one of the most popular presidential accessory for a candidate in this election.  What is it? Authenticity. I found the opinion piece fascinating in that it is all about how to be an "authentic" politician.  The ironic thing touched upon is that authenticity, being real, being yourself is very hard for political folks trying to win elections and please many different interest groups.  It is so easy to pander to left, right, etc. 

The funny thing about Henniger's piece is that it chronicles the struggle of candidates trying to be or appear to be authentic.  A few quotes:

One almost feels sorry for the 13 or 14 pols who've been running for the presidency this year. Keeping the authenticity balloon afloat is hard work. For starters, the press is obsessed with the phenomenon. The modern reporter is a human tuning fork, alert to the merest false note of inconsistency. It isn't widely known, but no journalist is allowed to moderate a presidential debate unless he vows to turn every question into an accusation of hypocrisy.

...

If we want a better understanding of the style of authenticity that people who vote are looking for, consider the real meaning of Barack Obama's controversial praise for Ronald Reagan. Sen. Obama was correct that Reagan caught the nation's need for a new direction, which is now the senator's claim. But Reagan's published letters and papers make clear that he believed in his political ideas for a long time. By 1980, they were deep and clear. They were authentic.

If that is the standard of true political authenticity, and I think it is, then the relationship in this campaign between the people and the pols will remain as it has been -- difficult.

That is fancy speak for - America does not seem not find it easy to trust the convictions of the folk running for office.  One wonders if someone can actually be themselves and win broad elections - maybe politics is for people who like the game and the dance even as they complain about it and talk about "bringing change to Washington."  In Reading Obama's book, it seems to attempt to show him as a centrist, an authentic person who is different than the others who are part of the political machine.  But in his book I still hear pandering to different groups - perhaps politics can be done no other way?  At least winning politics.  But to be honest, I think we all should vote and participate in self-government.  But I do understand why some in the younger generations get cynical about the whole song and dance - it seems, well, inauthentic.  Thats as political as I want to get around here.

There is a great article in this month's Book's and Culture magazine summarizing a book by Arthur Brooks entitled Who Really Cares?  The work studied the difference between religious conservatives and secular liberals in the area of charitability.  Here is a summary from the article:

Religious Americans are not only much more likely to give money and volunteer their time to religious and secular institutions, they are also more likely to provide aid to family members, return incorrect change, help a homeless person, and donate blood. In fact, despite expecting to find just the opposite, Brooks concluded: "I have never found a measurable way in which secularists are more charitable than religious people."

There is a very interesting article by Nick Paumgarten in the New Yorker regarding commuting culture in America.  As we are soon moving the the New York City metro area, I found the article to be of great interest.  We will soon be ministering to people in New Jersey, some of whom will be on trains during the week.  It is one of the challenges of church planting in the area we are going as people are strapped for time and financially stretched thin.  Weekends are also sacred as the pace slows from the hours in cars and on trains.  Here is an excerpt:

“People with long journeys to and from work are systematically worse off and report significantly lower subjective well-being,” Stutzer told me. According to the economic concept of equilibrium, people will move or change jobs to make up for imbalances in compensation. Commute time should be offset by higher pay or lower living costs, or a better standard of living. It is this last category that people apparently have trouble measuring. They tend to overvalue the material fruits of their commute—money, house, prestige—and to undervalue what they’re giving up: sleep, exercise, fun.

Robert Putnam sociologist and author of the book Bowling Alone made some insightful statements about the reality of modern life:

Putnam likes to imagine that there is a triangle, its points comprising where you sleep, where you work, and where you shop. In a canonical English village, or in a university town, the sides of that triangle are very short: a five-minute walk from one point to the next. In many American cities, you can spend an hour or two travelling each side. “You live in Pasadena, work in North Hollywood, shop in the Valley,” Putnam said. “Where is your community?” The smaller the triangle, the happier the human, as long as there is social interaction to be had. In that kind of life, you have a small refrigerator, because you can get to the store quickly and often. By this logic, the bigger the refrigerator, the lonelier the soul.

Please pray for us as we move to a place that has fragmented community and very large refrigerators.  I pray that God might use the church to allow people a respite and joy for the soul as we live for the glory of God, the good of the City extending hope through the gospel of Jesus Christ. Growing in community will be difficult in commuterland - but it is also a deep felt human need. 

For those of you from the Atlanta area, this sprawling southern city receives some treatment as well.  It is not a land of time spent on trains, but rather a car bound people guzzling down gasoline.   Just think, for some in Atlanta -" travelling ten miles can take forty-five minutes." One final segment was of interest to me as it actually mentions the great garden state of New Jersey. In this, Putnam is comparing Bologne, Italy and its quaint, smaller feel to the land of Tony Soprano.

Putnam’s favorite city is Bologna, in Italy, which has a population of three hundred and fifty thousand; it’s just small enough to retain village-like characteristics. “It would be interesting to swap the citizens of Bologna with the population of New Jersey,” Putnam said. “Do the Bolognese become disconnected and grouchy? Is there a sudden explosion of malls in Bologna? How much of the way we live is forced on us? How much is our choice?”

It is a lenghtly article but well written and worth your time.  May God use Jacob's Well in the lives of disconnected and grouchy people.

Great quote today from Kairos Journal on the moribund nature of materialistic understandings of the world.  The quote is from David Hart, an Eastern Orthodox Theologian...great stuff:

Now that the initial, delirious raptures of eighteenth and nineteenth-century atheism have long since subsided, and a sober survey of the landscape left behind by God’s departure has become possible, only the most ardently self-deluding secularist could possibly fail to see how much of the moral, imaginative, creative, and speculative glory of humanity seems to have vanished from the earth. Far from draining the world of any intrinsic meaning, as many of the critics of religion are wont to claim, faith in the divine source and end of all reality had charged every moment of time with an eternal significance, with possibilities of transcendence, with a reason for moral striving and artistry and dreams of future generations. Materialism, by contrast, when its boring mechanistic reductionism takes hold of a culture, can make even the immeasurable wonders of matter seem tedious, and life seem largely pointless.

David B. Hart , “Beyond Disbelief,” review of The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World, by Alister McGrath, The New Criterion (June 2005), 80.

Many of you have asked me about the books in the His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman.  As some of you know the first book, The Golden Compass has been made into a full length feature film set to debut nation wide on December 7th.  Many Christians have called for boycott's etc. Many people are asking what the stories are about. 

I think Al Mohler wrote a decent piece today that avoids boycott reactionism yet is pretty clear about the message and agenda of Pullman and his works. You can read it here. It was good to hear a baptist telling folks NOT to boycott something in culture...even a story which has no hidden agenda...this trilogy is about killing God.

I would encourage Mr. Pullman to write his next fantasy story about Islam...wait, he probably wouldn't do that.     

Ravi Zacharias has a good reflection on the state of meaning and coherence in contemporary culture.  Here is the first paragraph of his brief commentary which is entitled The Story that Centers: 

There is a vacuum at the heart of our culture. Saul Bellow argued in his 1976 Noble Laureate lecture: "The intelligent public is waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, and social theory and what it cannot hear from pure science: a broader, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for. If writers do not come into the center, it will not be because the center is pre-empted; it is not." Very simply stated, there is no center to hold things together. Or to put it differently, there is no over-arching story to life by which all the particulars can be interpreted. The pursuit of knowledge without knowing who we are or why we exist, combined with a war on our imaginations by our entertainment industry, leaves us at the mercy of power with no morality. May I illustrate this?

If you would like him to illustrate this...continue reading here. 

I know the word prophet may bug a few of you, but I do think some men just see things clearly before their time. I find such a person in the writings of AW Tozer. I read this quote from him this morning and found it very revealing:

Modern civilization is so complex as to make the devotional life all but impossible. It wears us out by multiplying distractions and beats us down by destroying our solitude, where otherwise we might drink and renew our strength before going out to face the world again.

A.W. Tozer, Of God and Men

And now we have e-mail, IM, blogs (smile), RSS feeds and smart-phones which watch them all 24/7.  It is no wonder we are so thirsty in the parched contemporary desserts of western culture. Reminded again of the importance of solitude, reflection (thinking deeply), reading and prayer.

(HT - Sandy Young) 

It is an amazing thing which happened in the region of Caesarea Philippi when Peter confessed Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God almost two millennia ago (See Mark 8:27-30 and Matthew 16:13-20).  Caesarea Philippi was a city dedicated to the worship of the emperor at the time of Jesus and in previous generations was a place dedicated to the pagan god Pan and to the idolatrous worship of Baal.¹  It was in this place where Jesus' identity is openly confessed.  In our world today we often speak of pluralism, the idea that there are many gods and many ways to worship.  We think this is a new situation in the world brought on somehow by the diversification of viewpoints in contemporary America.  Yet this reality is nothing new at all for people have been building alters from the dawn of humanity.  People have always created and worshipped gods, yet the radical confession of Peter is that there was one God and that they were walking with him on the earth.

The claim of Monotheism was the teaching of the ancient Jewish people² among nations who believed in many, many deities.  The ancient philosophers were coming to monotheistic conclusions³ as they wrestled with metaphysical questions of ultimate reality and truth.  Yet monotheism has an undeniable edge to it.  If there is one and only one creator God, then all other pretenders to the throne are no gods at all.⁴  Those who stand for religious pluralism today and throughout history see this very clearly as a problem.  Mary Lefkowitz, professor emerita at Wellesley College recently wrote the following in an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times. 

Prominent secular and atheist commentators have argued lately that religion "poisons" human life and causes endless violence and suffering. But the poison isn't religion; it's monotheism.⁵

Of course she is following the drivel of the so called "new atheists" who place all the problems of the world on religion. The thesis is that monotheism, belief in one God, necessitates killing those who disagree.  This of course is hardly what you find in the life of Jesus.  Yes, some Christians in history have murdered and conquered others in the name of Jesus, but in doing so they acted in contradiction to his very life and teaching.  Yet we must not dodge the reality found in the incarnation, in the biblical teaching that the one creator God, became flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  The implications are that this person is the most important figure on the horizons of history and the coming contours of the future.  He is not one teacher among many, nor one way to many gods.  

The teaching of God incarnate in Jesus the Messiah is radical, humbling and life changing for in the gospel we do not see God coming to oppress humanity.  In stark contrast to the totalitarian visions of human utopias, offered by king, caliph, or communist, God came to earth to die for and redeem a people for himself from every nation on the earth.  There will be a kingdom on the earth some day which will be one of righteousness, love and peace.  It will not come by force of man or technological heroism.  It will come with the same Jesus at his return to the earth. 

All people from every ideology, religion, ethnicity and background are welcome at the foot of the cross of Christ.  It is a great heresy to teach that all from every nation are saved, but a beautiful biblical truth that some from every nation will be saved by grace.  In every age, from the time of Jesus until the end of the world, Christians will proclaim the wonderful news of God incarnate in Jesus Christ dying for sinners.  It was and will be an unpopular message to declare Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father.  Yet this will be the song of all people at the close of history.  We now have the great joy and privilege of knowing him and sharing him with all.  In following Jesus in this world, living his mission and declaring his message, there will always be those who shout "crucify him!" and we must take up this cross.  Yet there will be those, to whom the Father reveals Jesus, who will look at him as did doubting Thomas and exclaim-my Lord and my God...

Notes 

1. Ben Witherington III, Mark: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001) 240.
2. See Deuteronomy 6:4,5.
3. The looming historical figures of Plato and Aristotle, though in very different ways, were coming to this conclusion.
4.For a good look at Jesus among world religions see Ravi Zacharias, Jesus Among Other Gods (Nashville, Word, 2000)
5. Mary Lefkowitz, Bring back the Greek gods—Mere mortals had a better life when more than one ruler presided from on high, LA Times, October 23, 2007. 

Today is a guest essay from Timothy Dees.  The following is the October 25th installment of his excellent Fact of the Day.  Enjoy - insightful cultural analysis to follow.  Tim, your last lines are some of what makes the biblical values of Jacob's Well so important to me...see you in Jersey soon.

Yours for truth, family, passion, hope and dependence on the one who instituted work, sets the solitude in families, gives us hope each day...even today - when I need it. 

KARL MARX, THE OFFICE, ET AL

‘My work is an alienation of life, for I work in order to live, in order to obtain for myself the means of life. My work is not my life.’

This statement is a common sentiment today, but when a young Karl Marx wrote it down in 1844, it was novel expression of an idea that had been percolating since the Industrial Revolution.  Marx’s idea became known as the theory of alienation.  A fundamental gap had appeared between life and work.  In a pre-industrial world, one grew food.  If one did not rise daily to milk the cows and till the soil, that farmer would have nothing to eat.  The farmer wanted to live, and he needed food for nourishment, so he grew potatoes, carrots, and beets.  If the farmer wanted shoes, he made shoes, or perhaps he traded some beets to the cobbler for shoes.  There was no division between the products of his work and the necessities of his life.

After the Industrial Revolution, however, mankind started spending twelve-hour days making shoes, or pressing buttons, or turning screws, and suddenly production was cut off from one’s needs.  The worker had little personal interest in making hundreds of shoes, or pressing hundreds of buttons, or turning hundreds of screws, but the worker did it anyway, because that was the lot given to him by his society.  The daily act of work became separated from survival.

Lately, the situation has become complicated further by the breakdown of traditional families.  People are staying single well into their 30s, and the divorce rate teeters around 50%.  Without a family to support, aimless individuals are further alienated from their work. People work in jobs they don’t care about, to make things that don’t matter, so they can buy things that they’re only half-convinced they need.  Worst of all, they’re doing it alone.

Which brings us to the Scranton office of Dunder-Mifflin, a paper company, and its cast of employees.  I mention this place because it’s the setting of the American incarnation of the television show The Office.  While there is no appropriate term for it in English, Swedish has a term, kulturbaerer, which is used when something encapsulates the culture of its time.  The Office is a kulturbaerer, and it is important in a way that television has only been a few times.

The American Office has a British predecessor, but the shows diverged quickly.  The British Office centered around Ricky Gervais as David Brent, a numb-skull boss who always wanted to be funny.  He wasn’t funny, however; he was grossly inappropriate, and much of the enjoyment of the show centered around watching the grimaces of the employees as they suffered their boss’s intolerable stupidity.  The boss, however, is the protagonist.  As such, it is a traditional dark comedy, finding humor in schadenfreude.

The show was innovative, using a documentary style, and it seemed a refreshing change from the cleaned-up simulacra of Friends or Seinfeld.  Watching those shows, one couldn’t help but notice that they were divorced from reality (How do these people afford cavernous apartments in Manhattan?  What do they do?  Why are they so attractive?).  In contrast, the British Office was filled with mildly unattractive people, going about their day-to-day work.

The American Office began by going in the same direction.  Steve Carrell replaced Gervais as the boss (his name changed to Michael Scott), but the archetypes were the same.  The first season had many grimace-inducing moments reminiscent of the British Office (including one particularly off-putting racist rant by Michael), and the rest of the ensemble existed mainly as set-up for Michael Scott’s unthinking viciousness.

But in the first episode of the second season, something fundamental changed, and the show went from being a second-rate retread of the British series to something culturally significant.  It was in that episode that the protagonist ceased to be the boss and became Pam and Jim (played brilliantly by John Krasinski and Jenna Fischer).  The episode centered around the annual Dundies awards, an awards show that Michael Scott puts on for his employees.  Corporate refuses to allow open bar at the local Chili’s, so the mood is glum, and Michael’s inept comedy routine and third-rate karaoke leave the employees bored.  At one point, Michael’s rendition of “Tiny Dancer” wharbles, and people begin to pelt him with food.  He hangs his head and cancels the rest of the show.

But then Pam, in a drunken haze, begins cheering for him to come back.  She claps and the office joins her, and Michael is eventually brought back.  The party comes alive, the Dundees are awarded, and for a night at least, everything is wonderful.

At this point, the show is no longer about a stupid, inconsiderate boss and the decent people who put up with him.  It’s about a group of decent people, who are forced into an insane, and at times unbearable situation, and the way they get through their day.  Pam and Jim get through their days with pranks and stolen glances, Michael just wants friends, Stanley wants to send his kids to college, Meredith drinks too much, Ryan dreams of something better, and Dwight lives in delusions.  Somehow, they all cope and find meaning and purpose in a job that is the essence of meaninglessness.

But this show is about more than just getting by in an alienated, meaningless workplace.  It is also a romance.  The Pam-and-Jim power-couple is the most credible post-feminist love story on television, and it represents a new iteration in male-female relations.  From the Jane Austen days to the 1960s, love stories were about a dashing man pursuing a coy woman who was eventually won over by his irresistable perfection (it didn’t hurt that he tended to be rich and excessively handsome).  With the sexual revolution, women took the driver’s seat, dictating the pace of the relationship and dominating the stammering, infantile man (Woody Allen and Adam Sandler are the patron saints of these sorts of stories).

With Pam and Jim, however, we have something new.  It’s not a fiery love affair, it’s a de-sexed partnership.  There is almost no talk of physical attraction between them, and the sort of erotic love that is never left to the imagination in mainstream movies would be unthinkable in this case.  The sexual revolution came and went, and we’re left with these two: a receptionist and an affable salesman.

But the show isn’t just post-feminist, it’s post-everything.  As Fitzgerald once said, “We were a generation who woke to find all wars fought, all gods dead,” and the generation of Pam and Jim has much in common with Fitzgerald’s Lost Generation.  Pam and Jim, like myself, missed the turbulence of feminism, the Vietnam War, civil rights, and the sexual revolution, and now we’re left without anything but the vestigial structures of jobs, friends, and decreasingly) family.  Cultural institutions have been deconstructed, and we have little left but a few sidelong glances between friends, and a meandering hope for something better.

A good friend just sent me a delightful list of books from the Christian intellectual tradition.  This particular list is from Dr. David Lyle Jeffrey and it entitled A Beginners Christian Bookshelf and is served up by the Yale Graduate Christian Fellowship.

Personally, I would have liked to see a work by Jonathan Edwards, but nonetheless a great list:

A BEGINNER'S CHRISTIAN BOOKSHELF compiled by Professor David Lyle Jeffrey

The following list is divided into three categories: (1) classic works of Christian spirituality and devotional theology; (2) post-enlightenment and modern works of Christian intellectual and cultural criticism; (3) great novels, poems and plays whose Christian content and/or asking of questions central in their importance to accountable Christian reflection make them a desirable part of the well-tempered, well-furbished apostolic mind.

I. CLASSIC FOUNDATIONS

Athanasius On the Incarnation of the Word
Augustine Confessions
The City of God
Enchiridion of Faith, Hope, and Love
Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount
The Teacher (De Magistro)
Boethius Consolation of Philosophy
Gregory the Great Pastoral Care
John Chrysostom Homilies on 1 and 2 Corinthians
Anselm of Canterbury Truth, Freedom and Evil
Cur Deus Homo?
Proslogion
Basil On the Holy Spirit
Bernard of Clairvaux On Loving God
Sermons on Charity
Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica, 5 vols. (Christian Classics)
Theological Texts, ed. Thomas Gilby (Oxford)
Commentary on John's Gospel
Bonaventure The Mind's Road to God
Walter Hilton Ladder of Perfection
Thomas à Kempis Imitation of Christ
Martin Luther On the Bondage of the Will
Commentaries on Galatians, Romans
John Calvin Institutes
Commentary on Deuteronomy
Thomas More The English Prayers of Sir Thomas More
Blaise Pascal Pensées
Thomas Browne Religio Medici
Richard Baxter Saints' Everlasting Rest
Ignaius of Loyola Spiritual Exercises
John of the Cross Dark Night of the Soul
Theresa of Avila The Way of Perfection
Lancelot Andrewes Private Prayers
Isaac Watts Guide to Prayer
William Law Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life
Phillip Doddridge The Rise and Progress of the Soul
John and Charles Wesley Spiritual Writings (Paulist Press)
Charles Simeon Memoirs
John Henry Newman Apologia Pro Vita Sua
Søren Kierkegaard Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing (Princeton)
Fear and Trembling
The Present Age: The Difference Between
A Genius and an Apostle (Harper and Row)
C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity
Screwtape Letters
God in the Dock and Other Essays
Dietrich Bonhoeffer The Cost of Discipleship
Watchman Nee The Normal Christian Life
Sit, Walk, Stand
The Release of the Spirit
J.I. Packer Knowing God
A.W. Tozer The Knowledge of the Holy
Josemaria Escriva The Way
Christ is Passing By
Simone Weil Waiting for God
Hans Urs Von Balthassar On Prayer
John Paul II Letter to Families
The Splendor of Truth
The Gospel of Life
Crossing the Threshold of Hope
Ut Unum Sint

II. CHRISTIAN INTELLECTUAL AND CULTURAL CRITICISM

A. Focusing on the Patristic Era

Jaroslav Pelikan The Christian Tradition: A History of the
Development of Doctrine (Chicago)
Bernard Lonergan The Road to Nicea
F.F. Bruce The Canon Of Scripture
Tradition Old and New
The Spreading Flame: The Rise and Progress
of Christianity from First Beginnings to the
Conversion of the English (Eerdmans)

B. Medieval through Reformation

Fredrick Coppleston A History of Philosophy (Penguin)
C.S. Lewis The Discarded Image (Oxford)
Gillian Evans The Language and Logic of the Bible, 2 vols. (Cambridge)
Beryl Smalley The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame)
Etienne Gilson Thomas Aquinas
The Christian Philosophy of St. Bonaventure
A Christian Philosophy (PIMS)
Alistair McGrath The Intellectual Origins of the European
Reformation (Blackwells)
Heiko Oberman Luther (Image)
William J. Bowsma John Calvin (Oxford)
Dom David Knowles Saints and Scholars
E. Harris Harbison The Christian Scholar in the Age of Reformation

C. Enlightenment and Early Modern

Donald Davie A Gathered Church
William Paley Evidences of Christianity
D.L. Jeffrey, ed. English Spirituality in the Age of Wesley (Eerdmans)

D. Modern

1. Arts and Humanities

Hannah Arendt Between Past and Future
Men in Dark Times
Herbert Butterfield Christianity and History (Bell)
Dorothy Sayers The Mind of the Maker (Methune)
G.K. Chesterton The Everlasting Man (Doubleday Image)
Orthodoxy (Doubleday Image)
Jacque Ellul The Technological Society (Seabury)
Propaganda
The Humiliation of the Word (Eerdmans)
Hope in a Time of Abandonment (Seabury)
T.S. Eliot The Idea of a Christian Society
W.H.V. Reade The Christian Challenge to Philosophy
John A. MacMurray The Self as Agent (Faber)
Persons in Relation (Faber)
George Grant Technology and Justice
David L. Jeffrey People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary
Culture (Eerdmans)
Harry Blamires The Christian Mind (Seabury)
Mark Noll The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans)
Paul Ricoeur History and Truth (Northwestern)
George Marsden The Soul of the American University (Oxford)
J.I. Packer and Thomas Howard Christianity: The True Humanism (Word)
Nicholas Wolterstorff Reason Within the Bounds of Religion
Keith Yandell Christianity and Philosophy (Eerdmans)

2. Science

Herbert Butterfield Christianity and Science
Paul Davies God and the New Physics
The Mind of God
Jean Daujat Physique moderne et philosophie traditionelle (Desclée)
Le système du monde. Histoire des doctrines
cosmologique de Platon a Copernic (Hermann)
Le théorie physique (Minerva)
Phillip Johnson Reason in the Balance: the Case against
Naturalism (IVP)
John Eccles and Daniel Robinson The Wonder of being Human, Our Brain and our
Mind (Free Press)
R. Harre The Philosophies of Science (Oxford)
Theories and Things (Sheed & Ward)
Casual Powers (Rowman & Littlefield)
W. Heisenberg Physics and Philosophy, The Revolution in
Modern Science (Harper)
Mary Midgley Science and Salvation (RKP)
Stanley Jaki Cosmos and Creator (Scottish Academic Press)
The Relevance of Physics (Chicago)
The Origin of Science and the Science of
Origin (Scottish Academic Press)
Angels, Apes, and Man (Sherwood)
Jacques Maritain Science et Sagesse (Desclée)
Roger Penrose The Emperor's New Mind
Emile Simard La Nature et la portée de la methode
scientifique (Laval)
William Wallace Causality and Scientific Explanation (U. Mich.)
From a Realist Point of View: Essays on the
Philosophy of Science (U. Press of America)

3. Law

Huntington Cairns Legal Philosophy from Plato to Hegel (Johns Hopkins)
Benjamin Cardozo The Nature of the Judicial Process (Yale)
Oliver W. Holmes The Common Law (Yale)
Roscoe Pound Justice According to Law (Yale)
Samuel Rutherford Lex Rex

4. Social Sciences

Peter Berger A Rumor of Angels (Doubleday)
C.S. Lewis The Abolition of Man (MacMillan)
Jacques Ellul The Meaning of the City (Eerdmans)
The Politics of God and the Politics of Man (Eerdmans)
William K. Kilpatrick Psychological Seduction (Nelson)
Neil Postman Amusing Ourselves to Death
Paul Tournier The Meaning of Persons (SCM)
Mary Stewart van Leeuwen The Person in Psychology (Eerdmans)
Paul Vitz Psychology as Religion: the Cult of
Self-Worship (Eerdmans)

5. Philosophical Theology

Donald Bloesch Theology of Word and Spirit (IVP)
Holy Scripture (IVP)
The Battle for the Trinity (Vine)
O. O'Donovan Resurrection and Moral Order (Eerdmans)
T.F. Torrance God and Rationality (Oxford)
The Trinitarian Faith (T & T Clark)
Diogenes Allen Christian Belief in a Postmodern World(Westminster)
Carl Henry God, Revelation and Authority 6 vols. (Word)
A. Plantinga God, Freedom, and Evil (Eerdmans)
A. Plantinga and N. Wolterstorff Faith and Rationality (Notre Dame)
R. Swinburne The Coherence of Theism (Oxford)
The Existence of God (Oxford)
Faith and Reason (Oxford)
Revelation (Oxford)
Responsibility and Atonement (Oxford)
Alasdair MacIntyre Three Rival Genealogies of Moral Inquiry (Notre Dame)
Cardinal J. Ratzinger In the Beginning (Eerdmans)
Bernard Lonergan Insight (Darton, Longman and Todd)
Hans Urs Von Balthassar The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics,
3 vols.; trans. E. Leiva-Merikakis (Ignatius)

III. INDISPENSABLE WORKS OF LITERATURE

Donald Davie Christian Poetry: An Anthology
Dante Divine Comedy
Christopher Marlowe The Tragicall Historie of Doctor Faustus
William Roper The Life of Thomas More
George Herbert The Temple
John Donne Holy Sonnets, etc.
Devotions
John Bunyan Pilgrim's Progress
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners
John Milton Paradise Lost
Paradise Regained
William Shakespeare A Winter's Tale
Measure for Measure
King Lear
Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre
Fyodor Dostoevski Crime and Punishment
Brothers Karamazov
Albert Camus La Peste
Leo Tolstoy War and Peace
Anna Karenina
Resurrection
G.M. Hopkins Poems
François Mauriac Viper's Tangle
Woman of the Pharisees
The Leper's Kiss
John Betjeman Summoned by Bells
C.S. Lewis That Hideous Strength
Till We Have Faces
T.S. Eliot Poems
Murder in the Cathedral
Cocktail Party
Charles Williams Descent into Hell
All Hallows Eve
J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings
Graham Green The Power and the Glory
The Heart of the Matter
The End of the Affair
Alexander Solzhenitsyn One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Walker Percy Lost in the Cosmos
Second Coming
Thanatos Syndrome
Flannery O'Connor Collected Stories
The Habit of Being
Mystery and Manners
Wendell Berry Fidelity (stories)
Remembering (novel)
Sabbaths (poems)
The Country of Marriage (poems)
Margaret Avison Collected Poems
No Time
George Bernanos Diary of a Country Priest
P.D. James Children of Men

(HT - Sandy Young) 

Several weeks ago I read an interesting essay in the Atlantic Monthly entitled Crises of Faith by Ross Douthat.  The article peaked my interested for several reasons, namely it discussed two very interesting trends associated with American and European religious perspectives.  Most people know that Europe has trended highly secular over the last century with large cathedrals echoing times long past.  Most people also know that America is a highly religious country with belief in God regularly polling in the 80-90th percentiles.  What was interesting about this article that it was commenting on very recent trends that America is becoming more secular and Europe is seeing a religious resurgence.  Now both trends are very small, some may say insignificant, but the sociological movements are real and observable.

Unbelief in America

The trend in America which is highlighted follows the work of two Berkeley sociologists and their paper in the American Sociological Review.  In this work Michael Hout and Claude Fischer noted that the percentage of Americans who state no religious preference had doubled in less than 10 years.1  The percentage had gone from 7% to 14% in the 1990s.  The reason given is interesting and I will revisit it shortly.  I will quote the article at length:

This unexpected spike wasn't the result of growing atheism, Hout and Fischer argued; rathern, more Americans were distancing themselves from organized religion as "a symbolic statement" against the religious right.  If the association of religiosity with political conservatism continued to gain strength, the sociologists suggested, "then liberals alienation from organized religion [might] become, as it has in many other nations, institutionalized"2

In other words, people's current and deeply held political convictions actually sway people from religious involvement as they see it a front for the other side of the aisle.  Christian leaders, give ear to this.  Among the younger generation this seems to be more acute with the percentage of irreligious found to be 20% by a recent pew research center survey.3

A Religious? European Vacation

The article goes on to say that things are moving in Europe as well, yet perhaps a slight drift towards religion.  Douthat mentions the rise of Islamic immigrants who are not assimilating into secular European values and culture.  Additionally, Christian faith is reasserting with Pope Benedict focusing on the re-Christianization of Europe and immigrants from Latin America and Africa giving life to pentecostal and evangelical churches.4  The higher birth rates of Muslims and Christians are sure to influence the future of the continent in some way. Finally, Philip Jenkins has written recently on the resurgence of Christian faith in Europe in Foreign Policy magazine focusing on both the Catholic and Protestant flavors of the faith.

Overly Politicized Christianity Shrouds the Gospel of Jesus Christ

The Christian faith has long been entangled in political struggles and maneuvering.  From the time of Jesus himself to our very day, leaders in movements of Christian faith have affected political views or have been viewed as a threat from political leaders.  Rome was threatened by messianic uprisings in Jerusalem, this perhaps even part of the human equation in the crucifixion of Jesus. Certainly the church/state union which was birthed under the emperor Constantine in the 4th century had repercussions, both good and bad, throughout the last sixteen hundred years.  I for one am of the opinion that the Christian worldview should inform issues in the public sphere.  Our faith and philosophy should weigh into decisions related to the common good of society.  Personally, I subscribe to a view of law much akin to that of the medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas some of which I describe a bit here. 

Yet there is a difference between Christian vision shaping our view of the public square and Christian leaders aligning with a certain political party as the Christian way.  One thing that stood out in this article is the nature of reaction to what is perceived as political visions shrouded in religious clothing.  If the research is accurate, people have reacted against religious faith because of particular political impressions given by certain groups, in this case the perceived religious right.  I am deeply troubled that perhaps our political stances would keep people away from even a hearing of the gospel. 

It is well known that a good percentage of evangelicals have been recently on the Republican side of the aisle.  Whether or not you swing that way personally, I want all of us to see that such one party alignment is not good for the church.  The gospel transcends political parties and is very much for leftists, right wingers and libertarians alike.  There is much to say about the conservative right and some of its stances related to Christian ethics.  Certain views on the sanctity of human life (abortion, bioethical issues, etc.) are typically found in the Republican camp today, though not the domain of one party.  Yet are there not concerns of the gospel (the poor, the environment, justice) which are as deeply biblical as the sanctity of life and found more on the left?  My issue today is not whether or not a Christian can or should vote for party or candidate x, y or z.  My issue is with the cultural implications of perceived captivity of Christians to a certain political view.  When Christian leaders and pastors hold forth a political view rather than the gospel, the results can be that people feel excluded rather than invited to Jesus.  Before they hear from us, they already think we are their cultural adversary in a war of ideas.

I think the church must see space for all manner of political viewpoints and must not politicize her message in the world.  I am not saying we should endorse sin, vote for candidates against conscience, etc.  Of course the Christian worldview should affect the way someone sees issues and votes. But what I am saying is that we should not declare political war against half of the population to which we hope to present the hope of the gospel.

We ought to put no stumbling block before others and preach Christ and him crucified.  Our salvation comes neither through the supreme court nor through the election of the right president.  It is a gift of grace purchased by Jesus Christ on a cross of execution.  If we forget this our mission may suffer - not out of persecution for righteousness sake, but the result of misguided worldly strategies.  Such would be what the Scripture would call folly, the trusting in the princes of men.

Notes

1. Ross Douthat, "Crises of Faith", The Atlantic Monthly (July/August 2007) 38.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid, 42.

Naomi Wolf has written a rather graphic and heartfelt piece on the effects of pornography on the lives of Western people over at the New York Magazine.  Her discussion centers around how pornography has affected the intimate relationships between men and women.  A few quotes: 

The young women who talk to me on campuses about the effect of pornography on their intimate lives speak of feeling that they can never measure up, that they can never ask for what they want; and that if they do not offer what porn offers, they cannot expect to hold a guy. The young men talk about what it is like to grow up learning about sex from porn, and how it is not helpful to them in trying to figure out how to be with a real woman. Mostly, when I ask about loneliness, a deep, sad silence descends on audiences of young men and young women alike. They know they are lonely together, even when conjoined, and that this imagery is a big part of that loneliness. What they don’t know is how to get out, how to find each other again erotically, face-to-face.

The article discusses how women feel they cannot measure up to the image of porn and how men are clueless about real relationships.  The end of the article takes a surprising turn, even quoting from the Old Testament and discussing traditional views of sexuality.  The final quote is hard breaking - indeed for so many, the honeymoon does not exist any longer.  

“Mystery?” He looked at me blankly. And then, without hesitating, he replied: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Sex has no mystery.”

God's design for our sexuality is mystery, glory and intimacy.  He intends it to bring us together, produce children, give us pleasure in committed relationship and penultimately, to display the glory of God to husband and wife in marriage.  Porn is everywhere - it is a bigger industry that pro football, baseball and basketball combined.  I hardly meet a young man today who does not struggle with pornography.  My counsel is this - for the sake of joy, for the sake of your relationships, for God's sake...we need a new dream for sex in our lives.  

A year and a half ago we produced some short studies on sexuality and God.  If they are of use to you, please feel free to reproduce them as you see fit.

• Dream a new Dream about Sex - MP3 audio
  
• Dream a new dream about Sex - study guide
  
• Additional file - A Biblical Vocabulary for Sex

(HT - Ben Schellack) 

 

I was recently alerted to the story that Walmart will soon be selling "religious toys" in some 425 of its mega stores across these lands. The person who forwarded an e-mail to me about this seemed to think it a good thing for the kids.  These are not any religious toys you see, they are best of breed Bible Action figures.  Sort of like GI Joe's but with Bible characters.  See the Nightline story television story here.  Here is a brief excerpt from the story which ran in the USA Today:

For David Socha, CEO of One2believe, it's a dream come true. "Our goal is to give the faith-based community an alternative to Bratz dolls and Spider-Man," he says.

The toys are based on biblical stories. For example, there's a set of 3-inch figures based on Daniel in the lion's den for about $7. A 12-inch talking Jesus doll is about $15. And 14-inch Samson or Goliath action figures are about $20.

To be fair, Socha offers his reasons for what he calls "the Battle for the Toy Box" in his rallying cry for support of Bible action figures.  Please don't think this is a joke either as Focus on the Family and Family Life seem to be standing with the project.  Now, I believe this company to be sincere, concerned about kids and is generally trying to do something good for Christian parents whose kids and toy boxes swim in secular seas.  Here are just a few reasons not to play with Jesus dolls and have Daniel replace the little people.

First, that whi