Driving to the Funeral

by Anna Quindlen

The four years of high school grind inexorably to a close, the milestones passed. The sports contests, the SATs, the exams, the elections, the dances, the proms. And too often, the funerals. It's become a sad rite of passage in many American communities, the services held for teenagers killed in auto accidents before they've even scored a tassel to hang from the rearview mirror. The hearse moves in procession followed by the late-model compact cars of young people, boys trying to control trembling lower lips and girls sobbing into one another's shoulders. The yearbook has a picture or two with a black border. A mom and dad rise from their seats on the athletic field or in the gym to accept a diploma posthumously.

It's simple and inarguable: car crashes are the No. 1 cause of death among 15- to 20-year-olds in this country. What's so peculiar about that fact is that so few adults focus on it until they are planning an untimely funeral. Put it this way: if someone told you that there was one single behavior that would be most likely to lead to the premature death of your kid, wouldn't you try to do something about that? Yet parents seem to treat the right of a 16-year-old to drive as an inalienable one, something to be neither questioned nor abridged.

This makes no sense unless the argument is convenience, and often it is. In a nation that developed mass-transit amnesia and traded the exurb for the small town, a licensed son or daughter relieves parents of a relentless roundelay of driving. Soccer field, Mickey Ds, mall, movies. Of course, if that's the rationale, why not let 13-year-olds drive? Any reasonable person would respond that a 13-year-old is too young. But statistics suggest that that's true of 16-year-olds as well. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has found that neophyte drivers of 17 have about a third as many accidents as their counterparts only a year younger.

In 1984 a solution was devised for the problem of teenage auto accidents that lulled many parents into a false sense of security. The drinking age was raised from 18 to 21. It's become gospel that this has saved thousands of lives, although no one actually knows if that's the case; fatalities fell, but the use of seat belts and airbags may have as much to do with that as penalties for alcohol use. And there has been a pronounced negative effect on college campuses, where administrators describe a forbidden-fruit climate that encourages binge drinking. The pitchers of sangria and kegs of beer that offered legal refreshment for 18-year-olds at sanctioned campus events 30 years ago have given way to a new tradition called "pre-gaming," in which dry college activities are preceded by manic alcohol consumption at frats, dorms and bars.

Given the incidence of auto-accident deaths among teenagers despite the higher drinking age, you have to ask whether the powerful lobby Mothers Against Drunk Driving simply targeted the wrong D. In a survey of young drivers, only half said they had seen a peer drive after drinking. Nearly all, however, said they had witnessed speeding, which is the leading factor in fatal crashes by teenagers today. In Europe, governments are relaxed about the drinking age but tough on driving regulations and licensing provisions; in most countries, the driving age is 18.

In America some states have taken a tough-love position and bumped up the requirements for young drivers: longer permit periods, restrictions or bans on night driving. Since the greatest danger to a teenage driver is another teenager in the car—the chance of having an accident doubles with two teenage passengers and skyrockets with three or more—some new rules forbid novice drivers from transporting their peers.

In theory this sounds like a good idea; in fact it's toothless. New Jersey has some of the most demanding regulations for new drivers in the nation, including a provision that until they are 18 they cannot have more than one nonfamily member in the car. Yet in early January three students leaving school in Freehold Township died in a horrific accident in which the car's 17-year-old driver was violating that regulation by carrying two friends. No wonder he took the chance: between July 2004 and November 2006, only 12 provisional drivers were ticketed for carrying too many passengers. Good law, bad enforcement.

States might make it easier on themselves, on police officers and on teenagers, too, if instead of chipping away at the right to drive they merely raised the legal driving age wholesale. There are dozens of statistics to back up such a change: in Massachusetts alone, one third of 16-year-old drivers have been involved in serious accidents. Lots and lots of parents will tell you that raising the driving age is untenable, that the kids need their freedom and their mobility. Perhaps the only ones who wouldn't make a fuss are those parents who have accepted diplomas at graduation because their children were no longer alive to do so themselves, whose children traded freedom and mobility for their lives. They might think it was worth the wait.

True Philosopher

Christ is the true philosopher because he embodies in his ministry the welcoming and caring reception of others so that they might more fully be the beings they are meant to be. Indeed, in the Christlike effort to understand, serve, heal, feed, and reconcile the earth and its communities we show forth the highest wisdom.

--Norman Wirzba

Here I Am

What's Acceptable? What's Possible?

by Jim Wallis

(This column is adapted from a commencement address that Jim delivered at Georgetown University on Sunday, May 20.)

Each new generation has a chance to alter two very basic definitions of reality in our world--what is acceptable and what is possible.

First, what is acceptable?

There are always great inhumanities that we inflict upon one another in this world, great injustices that cry out to God for redress, and great gaps in our moral recognition of them. When the really big offenses are finally corrected, finally changed, it is always and only because something has happened to change our perception of the moral issues at stake. The moral contradiction we have long lived with is no longer acceptable to us. What we accepted, or ignored, or denied, finally gets our attention and we decide that we just cannot, and will not, live with it any longer. But until that happens, the injustice and misery continue.

It often takes a new generation to make that decision--that something that people have long tolerated just won't be tolerated any more.

So the question to you as graduates, as ambassadors for a new generation, is this: what are you going to no longer accept in our world, what will you refuse to tolerate now that you will be making the decisions that matter?

Will it be acceptable to you that 3 billion people in our world today--half of God's children--live on less that $2 per day, that more than 1 billion live on less than $1 per day, that the gap between the life expectancy in the rich places and the poor places in the world is now 40 years, and that 30,000 children globally will die today--on the day of your graduation--from needless, senseless, and utterly preventable poverty and disease? It's what Bono calls "stupid poverty."

Many people don't really know that, or sort of do but have never really focused on the reality or given it a second thought. And that's the way it usually is. We don't know, or we have the easy explanations about why poverty or some other calamity exists and why it can't really be changed--all of which makes us feel better about ourselves--or we are just more concerned with lots of other things. We really don't have to care. So we tolerate it and keep looking the other way.

But then something changes. Something gets our attention, something goes deeper than it has before and hooks us in the places we call the heart, the soul, the spirit. And once we've crossed over into really seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting the injustice, we can never really look back again. It is now unacceptable to us.

What we see now offends us, offends our understanding of the sanctity and dignity of life, offends our notions of fairness and justice, offends our most basic values; it violates our idea of the common good, and starts to tug at our deepest places. We cross the line of unacceptability. We become intolerant of the injustice.

But just changing our notion of what is unacceptable isn't enough, however. We must also change our perception of what is possible.

In that regard, I would encourage each of you to think about your vocation more than just your career. And there is a difference. From the outside, those two tracks may look very much alike, but asking the vocational question rather than just considering the career options will take you much deeper. The key is to ask why you might take one path instead of another--the real reasons you would do something, more than just because you can. The key is to ask who you really are and what you want to become. It is to ask what you believe you are supposed to do.

You do have great potential, but that potential will be most fulfilled if you follow the leanings of conscience and the language of the heart more than just the dictates of the market, whether economic or political. They want smart people like you to just manage the systems of the world. But rather than managing or merely fitting into systems, ask how you can change them. You're both smart enough and talented enough to do that. That's your greatest potential.

Ask where your gifts intersect with the groaning needs of the world--there is your vocation.

The antidote to cynicism is not optimism but action. And action is finally born out of hope. Try to remember that. At college, you often believe you can think your way into a new way of living, but that's actually not the way it works. Out in the world, it's more likely that you will live your way into a new way of thinking.

The key is to believe that the world can be changed, because it is only that belief that ever changes the world. And if not us, who will believe? If not you, who?

Illusion

A human being is a part of the whole that we call the universe, a part limited in time and space. And yet we experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical illusion of our consciousness. This illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature.

--Albert Einstein

The End of an Era

by Ron Sider

Jerry Falwell's death marks the end of an era.

Falwell had a major impact on American public life. His Moral Majority, launched in 1979, not only helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980, it also encouraged a whole generation of apolitical fundamentalist Christians to join the political debate. Falwell played a central role in focusing the political agenda of that new group of theologically conservative voters on the issues of abortion, marriage, and sexuality, and in aligning them almost entirely with the Republican Party.

Therein lies the tragedy of Jerry Falwell. He deserves much credit for helping millions of unengaged fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals understand that one aspect of biblical faith is faithful political engagement. Tragically, Falwell failed to develop a biblically balanced agenda for his political work. His tone was sometimes too harsh, but Falwell was largely right in what he promoted on the sanctity of human life and marriage. But he said little about economic justice, overcoming racism, and care for creation. Falwell is one of the significant reasons why evangelical political engagement was so one-sided for more than 20 years.

Speak the Truth

To keep struggling against hate and to practice forgiveness need not mean abdicating one's rights or renouncing justice. This should be emphasized over and over again. It is part of loving one's enemy that Christians must remind the "enemy" of justice and right. It is part of loving to speak the truth.

--Naim Ateek

We Cannot Merely Pray

We cannot merely pray to You, O God, to end war:
For we know You made the world in a way
That we must find our own path of peace
Within ourselves and with our neighbor.

We cannot merely pray to You, O God, to root out prejudice:
For you have already given us eyes
With which to see the good in all people
If we would only use them rightly.

--Rabbi Jack Riemer

Quotes from Albert Einstein

Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind.

No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.

I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.

The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who--in their grudge against traditional religion as the 'opium of the masses'-- cannot hear the music of the spheres.

Science can be created only by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

The Age of U-Turns

by Bruce Grierson

It's easy to get the sense these days that you've stumbled into a party where the punch is spiked with some powerful drug that dramatically alters identity. The faces are familiar, but the words coming out of them aren't. Something has happened to a lot of people you used to think you knew. They've changed into something like their own opposite.

There's Bill Gates, who these days is spending less time earning money than giving it away--and pulling other billionaires into the deep end of global philanthropy with him. There's historian Francis Fukuyama, leading a whole gang of disaffected fellow travelers away from neoconservatism. And in the back, humming Give Peace a Chance, the new Nicaraguan President, Daniel Ortega, former head of the Marxist Sandinistas. The comandante has come around on open economies and free trade and is courting foreign investment as the way out for his nation's poor.

From modest recants--Oprah Winfrey on James Frey, NBA commissioner David Stern on leather balls, Rupert Murdoch on global warming--to full-on ideological 180s, reappraisal is in the air. The view long held by social psychologists that people very rarely change their beliefs seems itself in need of revision.

To flip-flop is human. Oh, sure, it can still sometimes be a political liability, evidence of a flaky disposition or rank opportunism. But there are circumstances in which not to reverse course seems almost pathological. He's a model of consistency, Stephen Colbert said last year of George W. Bush: "He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday--no matter what happened on Tuesday."

It's still too early, post 9/11, to get an accurate bead on how much that day actually affected people's lives in a concrete way. But what you can say with confidence is that those slicing jets pierced the bubble of privileged optimism that many Americans had been enjoying. It changed the perception that there was an inside detached from an outside you could voluntarily avoid.

Over the past three years, while researching a book on what I call secular epiphanies, I found people who had pulled a big U-turn in their lives. There was a slaughterhouse worker who became an animal-rights activist, a venture capitalist who quit to found a high-minded nonprofit, a death-penalty advocate who became a leading death-penalty opponent. Often the insight came in a forehead-smiting moment in the middle of the night: I've got it all wrong.

It looked at first like a random bunch of data points, a sprinkling of outliers beyond the curve of normal human experience. But when you stepped back, a pattern emerged. What these personal turns had in common was the apprehension that, well, we're all connected. Everything leans on something, is propped up by something--is both dependent and depended on.

Sure, there were folks who didn't don the love beads but buried them: ex-Greenpeacers who morphed into industry apparatchiks, utopians who left their kooky social experiments for banker's hours. But these aren't typically the kinds of journeys one makes suddenly--and in that sense they didn't count as epiphanies. There are lives that one slowly acquires, like a carapace. And sometimes these are the same lives that, in one deeply private moment of dead reckoning, get shed.

"The difference between you and me," a visiting Chinese student told University of Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett not long ago, "is that I think the world is a circle, and you think it's a line." The remark caught the professor off guard with its size. It prompted him to write a book, The Geography of Thought, about the differences--culturally encoded over a few hundred generations--between the Western and the Asian mind.

To Western thinking, the world is linear; you can chop it up and analyze it, and we can all work on our little part of the project independently until it's solved. The classically Eastern mind, according to Nisbett, sees things differently: the world isn't a length of rope but a vast, closed chain, incomprehensibly complex and ever changing. When you look at life from this second perspective, some unlikely connections reveal themselves. You're forced to retreat from the den of libertarianism and sniff the wind, to wake up when someone in Khartoum or Mogadishu twitches in his sleep.

I realized this was what almost all the U-turns had in common: people had swung around to face East. They had stopped thinking in a line and started thinking in a circle. Morality was looking less like a set of rules and more like a story, one in which they were part of an ensemble cast, no longer the star.

The Hope of the World

by Shane Claiborne

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Don’t let anyone make you think that God has chosen America as [God's] divine messianic force to be reckoned with.” There are compelling voices who claim that God has chosen America (not the church) as a special embodiment of hope for the world, and then there are times (perhaps in more recent history) where it seems America embodies an antithesis of what God hopes for. U.S. flags colonize the altars and the money is branded “In God We Trust,” but the economy is an eerie reflection of the seven deadly sins listed in scripture, with a culture dangerously close to the sins of Sodom, a culture the prophet Ezekiel describes as “arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned.” Given the fact that America and God’s kingdom are not the same--and are often at odds--how do we resist the temptation of thinking that America, rather than God or God’s church, is the hope of the world?

Perhaps reflect on the following words from George W. Bush: “The ideal of America is the hope of all mankind. That hope still lights our way. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” And the recent words of Barack Obama on the Late Show with David Letterman, “This country is still the last best hope on earth.” As Christians, how do we reconcile where our ultimate faith lies, especially within an empire as mesmerizing as Rome or America?

Questions for the Democratic Candidates

by Brian McLaren

I'm writing from the Republic of South Africa, where I've been speaking in conferences and other gatherings with church leaders from across many denominations. With the memories of apartheid still alive here, with a poverty rate of about 40 percent, with crime rates moving higher and higher--in part due to desperate immigrants from Zimbabwe--and with
the continuing work of creating a successful multicultural democracy ongoing, several questions come to my mind for the three candidates. Here is how I would formulate them sitting in a home in downtown Johannesburg:

1. For Senator Clinton: If you are elected and serve two terms, it would mean that two families would share the presidency of the United States for 28 years. It's hard not to conclude that we are living in something more like an oligarchy or plutocracy than a democracy. Would you reflect on this problem so we can see how deeply you have thought about it, and would you propose what can be done about it?

2. For Senator Obama: I've heard critics express fear that you aren't tough enough or militaristic enough to be president in a world of terrorism and nuclear weapons. I would imagine that would prompt you to want to prove you are indeed capable of being tough and militaristic. But many of us are hoping for someone who will present another vision for the role of America in the world--something beyond the world's dominant military force, the world's police, or the world's imperial center. Not that America would be weak, but that we would be strong in new and different ways. Can you comment on your vision for the role of America in the world, and what you would do to pursue that role?

3. For John Edwards: When the subject of terrorism comes up, many Americans seem to think that terrorism can be stopped by guns and bombs. But others believe that wherever there is a large gap between rich and poor countries, terrorism (like high crime rates) will be likely, perhaps inevitable. If that is the case, creating a more equitable global economy becomes one of the most essential dimensions of reducing terrorism. Do you agree, and if so, what can America do to increase its security by helping poor nations improve their economic systems?

There are two additional questions I would want to ask all the candidates:

1. America seems to be caught in a cycle of fear. Politicians use fear to garner support and inhibit criticism. News media profit when people are afraid and watch TV news more often, raising ratings and advertising income. The arms industry profits when fears run high. Political parties compete for fear dominance over other parties. Cycles of fear are hard to break. How will your campaign and your presidency address this rise in the fear quotient?

2. The United States is not leading the world in addressing our unsustainable economy. We are the world's prime example of an unsustainable consumer society, and if our lifestyles were generalized to the whole human population, we would need many planet earths to sustain us. Should we be a leader in environmental stewardship and sustainability? How would you lead in this regard? What would your priorities be in environmental renewal and sustainable living?

Baptism

I have glimpsed intimations of baptism being fulfilled in a multitude of unexpected reminders: laughing with the inner-city children I taught as we spashed in the gushing water of a fire hydrant on a sweltering afternoon. Washing dishes at the kitchen sink with my grandmother. Sharing a canteen of icy water with thirsty hikers at a trail junction in a mountain wilderness. Hand watering my dad's newly planted vegetable garden.

--Pat Peterson

Advertising

by Adam Wells

I find it painfully interesting to muse on how advertising make us less free. Consider the following argument: The purpose of advertising is to peak our desires of products: sneakers, foods, cars, drugs and so on. According to a host of wise people, religious, spiritual, and otherwise, it is desires that take us away from a more ideal life, God, or enlightenment, for example. In sum, desires create suffering. This applies both to individuals and humanity.

When we desire, we are not satisfied. When we desire we feel we are lacking something. This could be anything from more genuine human interaction to more shoes or more beer. Ads channel this human desire to consumptive goods, goods that we buy from people making money. From a broader perspective, desires create vast amounts of suffering for people and the ecosystems that they inhabit.

As a nation, Americans consume enormous amounts of products that are not produced within sight. Indeed many of these products are produced in less than desirable conditions across oceans. Consider how often something that is consumed in this nation was produced at the cost of the happiness, health, or wellness of a human being.

It is reasonable to say that much of this consumption is driven by advertising. When we look at our consumption in this way, it becomes obvious that advertising is truly an evil force in modern times in that it is horrifically unhealthy, both physically and spiritually for both consumers and producers.

I would not hesitate to claim that advertising is one of the most awful and horrific inventions that humans have ever conceived. It makes profits for a few while fueling systems of oppression and suffering for billions of human beings. I am reminded why I avoid television at all costs.

Chatty World

In our chatty world, in which the word has lost its power to communicate, silence helps us to keep our mind and heart anchored in the future world and allows us to speak from there a creative and recreative word to the present world.

--Henri J.M. Nouwen

Put Peace Back in Mother's Day

by Marcia Angle and Naila Bolus

For moms, nothing is more important than making the world safe for their children. Mother's Day was originally founded in America as a holiday to unite women against war. Yet today we are bombarded with news and images of warfare and violence.

In proposing a "Mother's Day for Peace" more than a century ago, the American abolitionist and women's rights advocate Julia Ward Howe called on women to use their powerful maternal instincts to turn the world around.

Howe witnessed firsthand the horrors of the Civil War and the scourge of violence, death and disease that claimed the lives of soldiers both on and off the battlefield. She worked with widows and orphans of both Union and Confederate soldiers and later traveled to Europe, where she encountered the devastation of the Franco-Prussian War. In response to all this, she called on mothers of the world to gather to work for peace, as she proclaimed the first special day in their honor in 1870:

"Arise, then, women of this day!" she wrote, "`Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience."

What can we do?

More than a century later, our nation is again at war. Today, more than ever, it's time for us to put peace back into Mother's Day.But how can we do this? Most of us can't just pack up our bags for Iraq or Sudan or other conflict-torn regions badly in need of peace building. Nor can we step in and broker peace negotiations among warring nations.

Still, there are many things we can do on Mother's Day, or any other day, to promote the ethics of peace that Howe envisioned.

• Make room for peacemakers. Even though the daily news focuses overwhelmingly on conflict, this is only part of the story. To kindle a sense of hope in our children and grandchildren, we can tell them about people who are working to make the world safer and more secure for us all.

Why not use Mother's Day to talk about what inspiring and courageous moms are doing around the globe? Moms like Wangari Matthai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner whose Green Belt Movement motivated thousands of ordinary citizens in Kenya to overcome fear and a sense of helplessness and to defend democratic rights. Or Susan Granada of the Nonviolent Peaceforce, who works on the ground in Sri Lanka to facilitate dialogue between opposing sides in that country's civil war. Or Susan Shaer of Women's Action for New Directions, who works to ensure that women have a seat at the table on Capitol Hill. You can find more stories about moms working for peace at www.rediscovermothersday.org.

• Break down barriers. Most wars and violent conflict can be traced to clashing ideologies that have drowned out our common humanity.

Introduce your children to different cultures by inviting people of different races, nationalities, religions and cultures into your home. Visiting their houses of worship can break down barriers that could contribute to hate and misunderstanding. Encourage your children to stand up for any child who is being bullied, even when it is unpopular to do so.

• Be a role model. There are many ways to model your values. Practice resolving everyday conflicts by asking questions rather than rushing to judgment. Mend fences whenever possible. Speak out against injustice in your community and in the world. Volunteer for and make family donations to groups that work for peace. Explain to your child on Election Day why you're voting and what you're voting for.

• Consume ethically. Talk to your children about shopping decisions you make to support products from companies that protect our environment and countries with good human and workers' rights records. And work with your family to use energy wisely, because reducing our dependence on fossil fuels makes us all more secure.

War enters our homes on a daily basis through the TV, over the Internet and in conversation at the dinner table. As parents and grandparents, we owe it to our kids to make sure peace gets an equal hearing. Mother's Day is the perfect chance to begin that conversation, to hold a space in our homes for something better.

How do we talk to our children about war? The answer is simple: Talk to them about peace.

Deadened to Depravity

by Rod Dreher

The Washington Post recently carried out an unusual experiment. It hired Joshua Bell, one of the world's most famous classical musicians, to dress like a common street busker and play his Stradivarius in a D.C. metro station during rush hour. The anonymous violinist played Bach, he played Schubert, he played some of the most beautiful music ever to emerge from the minds of mortals. And virtually nobody stopped to notice.

The point was not that most people are uncultured clods. The point, rather, is that we are so caught up in the routine of our lives that we fail to see extraordinary beauty right in front of us. Something's wrong with us.

As Post reporter Gene Weingarten wrote, "If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that--then what else are we missing?"

If we don't see the beauty that we should, we don't see the ugliness either. For much of my career I was a film critic and saw just about every movie that came out. Every now and then, I'd take my wife to screenings with me, and I'd observe her flinching at intensely violent or explicitly erotic images onscreen. Though I shared her conservative moral sense, or so I thought, I pitied her oversensitivity.And then I changed jobs. I went from seeing 30 or so movies a month to seeing maybe three. It was as if I'd been a heavy smoker who'd gone cold turkey and was shocked to experience my sense of taste returning. Without meaning to, I began to watch movies differently.

The graphic sex and extreme violence that I'd manage to aestheticize away earlier, I no longer could deal with. I told my wife I must be turning into a prude. "No," she said, "you're becoming normal again."

Around that time, I became a father for the first time. One evening not long after my son was born, the mob picture "Goodfellas" came on cable. Three years earlier, I'd written that it was the best movie of the year. Forty minutes into the film, I turned it off. Couldn't stomach the onscreen savagery. Having a newborn gave me eyes to see things I couldn't before. Those eyes that had looked with wonder at this soft pink miracle could no longer take any pleasure in looking upon vivid images of human beings being shot, stabbed, beaten, tortured and abused.

Once we were a culture that looked to our art to educate our moral imagination, to show us what it meant to be fully human. Human in all our brokenness and passion and glory. Even artists who confronted evil did so with an eye toward illuminating the good (which is not a synonym for "nice").

Now, we are afraid to call anything good or evil and no longer have the confidence to assert that standards exist. When people ask if a movie, book, album or play was good or bad, what they're really asking is, "Was it entertaining?" In a culture with an insatiable craving for sensation, boredom becomes the root of all evil.

Thus our moral imagination declines into decadence. A decadent society is one that has lost its hold on standards and denies that they exist. A society in the early stages of decadence loses its sensitivity to beauty and to the good. As it slips further into decadence, it loses its ability to recognize how far it has fallen.

Which brings us to the case of Seung Hui Cho. We may never know to what degree he was psychopathic and what fed his insanity. But Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter identified striking parallels between the mass-murder ritual Cho conceived as performance art, and the hyper-violent films of director John Woo. While it's impossible to say these films "made" Cho go berserk, Hunter is right to assert that all creative artists have to face the real-life consequences of their work.

What does it say about our culture that there is a hot genre of mainstream films called "torture porn," the point of which is to show human beings being eviscerated? The latest entry, "Vacancy," opened days after the Virginia Tech savagery. It's about a couple who are unwittingly set up to star in a snuff film--a movie in which people are tortured to death for the viewer's sexual pleasure. The Los Angeles Times called "Vacancy" a "ruthlessly efficient stalk-and-slash machine"--this, in a favorable review.

Something is wrong with us, all right.

We have learned to expand our understanding of the normative to include art that exalts things that ought to be repugnant to those who love life. In so doing, we teach ourselves to embrace death, or at least to remain indifferent to its putrid presence. "A human body that cannot react is a corpse," wrote literary critic Russell Kirk. And a human imagination that cannot react against that which would destroy it is nothing more than fever dreams of a zombie.

Do you want to live? Then look at the culture of death, say not this, not anymore--and turn to the good, the beautiful and the true. It's still here, hiding in plain sight.

When Violence Kills Itself

by Shane Claiborne

I’ve always heard the old adage, “violence is a weapon of the weak.” But after events like the Virginia Tech massacre, it’s easy to think that violence has ultimate power. After all, we’ve learned history through the lens of war. And we read the news through acts of violence rather than the hidden acts of love that keep hope alive.

But there is a common thread in many of the most horrific perpetrators of violence that begs our attention – they kill themselves. Violence kills the image of God in us. It is a cry of desperation, a weak and cowardly cry of a person suffocated of hope. Violence goes against everything that we are created for--to love and to be loved--so it inevitably ends in misery and suicide. When people succumb to violence it ultimately infects them like a disease or a poison that leads to their own death. Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus with a violent kiss, ends his life by hanging himself with a noose. After his notorious persecutions, the Emperor Nero’s story ends as he stabs himself. Hitler passed out suicide pills to all his heads of staff, and ended his life as one of the most pitifully lonely people to walk the earth. We see the same in the case of Columbine, the 2007 Amish school shootings, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and this recent Virginia Tech massacre--each ends in suicide.

Violence is suicidal. Suicide rates of folks in the military and working the chambers of death row execution are astronomical; they kill themselves as they feel the image of God dying in them.

It is in moments like these violent times that grace looks so magnificent. It is in the shadow of such violence, as was the case after the Amish school shooting, that the victims' grace to the murderer’s family shines so brightly. Sometimes all the peacemakers need to do is practice revolutionary patience, and steadfast hope--for the universe bends toward justice, and the entire Christian story demonstrates the triumph of love. And it makes it even more scandalous to think of killing someone who kills--for they, more than anyone in the world, need to hear that they are created for something better than that.

I am reminded of a letter I got from someone currently on death row. After reading some of my writing, he wrote to me to share that he was a living testimony against the myth of redemptive violence (the idea that violence can bring redemption or peace). This fellow on death row told me that the family of his victim argued that he should not be killed for what he did, that he was not beyond redemption, and so he did not receive the death penalty for his crime. “That gave me a lot of time to think about grace,” he said. And he became a Christian in prison. Another story of scandalous love and grace.

So in these days after Easter, even as we see the horror of death, may we be reminded that in the end love wins. Mercy triumphs. Life is more powerful than death. And even those who have committed great violence can have the image of God come to life again within them as they hear the whisper of love. May the whisper of love grow louder than the thunder of violence. May we love loudly.

35 Million Ways to Be Black

Look at these black college students today. They’re worried about somebody black jumping in their face and saying, “You’re not black enough. You’re a Harvard kid, a turncoat, a traitor, you speak standard English, you get straight A’s—those are all white things.” And they had to put up with that all their lives, probably. I give a speech to the black freshmen at Harvard each year, and I say, “You can like Mozart and ice hockey . . .”—and then I used to say “golf,” but Tiger took over golf!—“and Picasso and still be as black as the ace of spades. You know, there are 35 million black people in this country and there are 35 million ways to be black.” When I say that, I get a standing ovation.

--Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

What Patriotism Requires

Government is set up--and here's what a Declaration of Independence is about--government is set up by the people in order to fulfill certain responsibilities: equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. And according to the Declaration of Independence, when the government violates those responsibilities, then, and these are the words of the Declaration of Independence, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish the government.

In other words, the government is not holy; the government is not to be obeyed when the government is wrong. So to me patriotism in its best sense means thinking about the people in the country, the principles for which the country stands for, and it requires opposing the government when the government violates those principles.

So today, for instance, the highest act of patriotism, I suggest, would be opposing the war in Iraq and calling for a withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Simply because everything about the war violates the fundamental principles of equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, not just for Americans, but for people in another part of the world. So, yes, patriotism today requires citizens to be active on many, many different fronts to oppose government policies on the war, government policies that have taken trillions of dollars from this country's treasury and used it for war and militarism. That's what patriotism would require today.

--Howard Zinn

Dilemma

by Max Lucado

John has a dilemma. He and the other disciples ran into someone who was doing great work. This man was casting out demons (the very act the disciples had trouble doing in Mark 9:20). He was changing lives. And, what’s more, the man was giving the credit to God. He was doing it in the name of Christ.

Everything about him was so right. Right results. Right heart. But there was one problem. He was from the wrong group.

So the disciples did what any able-bodied religious person would do with someone from the wrong group. “We told him to stop, because he does not belong to our group” (v. 38).

John wants to know if they did the right thing. John’s not cocky; he’s confused. So are many people today. What do you do about good things done in another group? What do you do when you like the fruit but not the orchard?

I’ve asked that question. I am deeply appreciative of my heritage. It was through a small, West Texas Church of Christ that I came to know the Nazarene, the cross, and the Word. The congregation wasn’t large, maybe two hundred on a good Sunday. Most of the families were like mine, blue-collar oil-field workers. But it was a loving church. When our family was sick, the members visited us. When we were absent, they called. And when this prodigal returned, they embraced me.

I deeply appreciate my heritage. But through the years, my faith has been supplemented by people of other groups.

A Brazilian Pentecostal taught me about prayer. A British Anglican by the name of C.S. Lewis put muscle in my faith. A Southern Baptist helped me understand grace.

One Presbyterian, Steve Brown, taught me about God’s sovereignty while another, Frederick Buechner, taught me about God’s passion. A Catholic, Brennan Manning, convinced me that Jesus is relentlessly tender. I’m a better husband because I read James Dobson and a better preacher because I listened to Chuck Swindoll and Bill Hybels.

And only when I get home will I learn the name of a radio preacher whose message steered me back to Christ. I was a graduate student who’d lost his bearings. Needing some money over Christmas break, I took a job driving an oil-field delivery truck. The radio only picked up one station. A preacher was preaching. On a cold December day in 1978 I heard him describe the cross. I don’t know his name. I don’t know his heritage. He could have been a Quaker or an angel or both for all I know. But something about what he said caused me to pull the pickup onto the side of the road and rededicate my life to Christ.

Imus Isn't the Real Bad Guy

by Jason Whitlock

Thank you, Don Imus. You’ve given us (black people) an excuse to avoid our real problem.

You’ve given Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson another opportunity to pretend that the old fight, which is now the safe and lucrative fight, is still the most important fight in our push for true economic and social equality.

You’ve given Vivian Stringer and Rutgers the chance to hold a nationally televised recruiting celebration expertly disguised as a news conference to respond to your poor attempt at humor.

Thank you, Don Imus. You extended Black History Month to April, and we can once again wallow in victimhood, protest like it’s 1965 and delude ourselves into believing that fixing your hatred is more necessary than eradicating our self-hatred.

The bigots win again.

While we’re fixated on a bad joke cracked by an irrelevant, bad shock jock, I’m sure at least one of the marvelous young women on the Rutgers basketball team is somewhere snapping her fingers to the beat of 50 Cent’s or Snoop Dogg’s or Young Jeezy’s latest ode glorifying nappy-headed pimps and hos.

I ain’t saying Jesse, Al and Vivian are gold-diggas, but they don’t have the heart to mount a legitimate campaign against the real black-folk killas.

It is us. At this time, we are our own worst enemies. We have allowed our youths to buy into a culture (hip hop) that has been perverted, corrupted and overtaken by prison culture. The music, attitude and behavior expressed in this culture is anti-black, anti-education, demeaning, self-destructive, pro-drug dealing and violent.

Rather than confront this heinous enemy from within, we sit back and wait for someone like Imus to have a slip of the tongue and make the mistake of repeating the things we say about ourselves.

It’s embarrassing. Dave Chappelle was offered $50 million to make racially insensitive jokes about black and white people on TV. He was hailed as a genius. Black comedians routinely crack jokes about white and black people, and we all laugh out loud.

I’m no Don Imus apologist. He and his tiny companion Mike Lupica blasted me after I fell out with ESPN. Imus is a hack.

But, in my view, he didn’t do anything outside the norm for shock jocks and comedians. He also offered an apology. That should’ve been the end of this whole affair. Instead, it’s only the beginning. It’s an opportunity for Stringer, Jackson and Sharpton to step on victim platforms and elevate themselves and their agenda$.

I watched the Rutgers news conference and was ashamed.

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke for eight minutes in 1963 at the March on Washington. At the time, black people could be lynched and denied fundamental rights with little thought. With the comments of a talk-show host most of her players had never heard of before last week serving as her excuse, Vivian Stringer rambled on for 30 minutes about the amazing season her team had.

Somehow, we’re supposed to believe that the comments of a man with virtually no connection to the sports world ruined Rutgers’ wonderful season. Had a broadcaster with credibility and a platform in the sports world uttered the words Imus did, I could understand a level of outrage.

But an hourlong press conference over a man who has already apologized, already been suspended and is already insignificant is just plain intellectually dishonest. This is opportunism. This is a distraction.

In the grand scheme, Don Imus is no threat to us in general and no threat to black women in particular. If his words are so powerful and so destructive and must be rebuked so forcefully, then what should we do about the idiot rappers on BET, MTV and every black-owned radio station in the country who use words much more powerful and much more destructive?

I don’t listen or watch Imus’ show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it’s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they’re suckers for pursuing education and that they’re selling out their race if they do?

When Imus does any of that, call me and I’ll get upset. Until then, he is what he is--a washed-up shock jock who is very easy to ignore when you’re not looking to be made a victim.

No. We all know where the real battleground is. We know that the gangsta rappers and their followers in the athletic world have far bigger platforms to negatively define us than some old white man with a bad radio show. There’s no money and lots of danger in that battle, so Jesse and Al are going to sit it out.

Theologian Sees Jesus the Beloved, Not a List of Beliefs

by Nancy Haught

Oregon's leading theologian walks his dog up and down the trendy streets of the Pearl District. His neighbors know Henry, the shaggy gray Glen of Imaal terrier, whose short legs set the pace. But few recognize Marcus Borg, the graying guy in the wool cap, as the spokesman for a different approach to Jesus Christ.

At 64, Borg is a public theologian and a private mystic.

He writes best-selling books on theology and reads murder mysteries. He was trained at Oxford University and teaches at Oregon State. He lives in a neighborhood overflowing with espresso but drinks Taster's Choice instant decaf.

But mostly, his is a polite and progressive voice in an often intense conversation about who Jesus was and what his life may mean to his modern followers.

Borg talks, primarily, to three decidedly different groups: his students, who are mostly undergraduates; his readers, who are mostly Christians who question long-held beliefs about Jesus; and his critics, who are mostly evangelical or orthodox Christians. They confess their beliefs in familiar terms. Jesus was, the last say, conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of a virgin, suffered for human sins, died, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven and will come again.

As a historian and a biblical scholar, Borg was a member of the Jesus Seminar, a scholarly group that spent years evaluating the historical evidence of Jesus' life and sayings. Borg emerged from the process with deeper faith in Jesus and a different understanding of Scripture.Borg interprets the Bible and its descriptions of Jesus as a mixture of memory and metaphor, better suited to preserving meaning than as a list of beliefs fashioned by Jesus' followers into a list that Christians must believe.

"For me, to believe a set of statements is impossible," Borg says. What is possible, he argues, is to "belove" Jesus and walk in his path.

"For the past 300 years," Borg says, "faith was a matter of believing a list of beliefs about Jesus. The list varied among Christians--that Jesus was the son of God, that he was born of a virgin, that the tomb was empty on Easter morning.

"But in the pre-modern world, before about 1600, the object of belief was never a statement," he says. "It was always a person. To believe meant to belove a person.

"To belove Jesus means more than simply loving Jesus. It means to love what Jesus loved. That is at the heart of Christianity."

Faith, Borg says, is a matter of living in relationship with Jesus and working politically, first for justice and then for peace.

Borg has taught religion at OSU for 28 years. He'll retire this spring and continue his writing and speaking, but says he'll miss his encounters with undergraduates.

"There is something wonderful about their openness," he says in his office, brimming with books and papers, on the Corvallis campus.

His fans, the ones who read his books and fill church halls as he travels the country talking about Jesus, express their admiration with a sense of humor. They wear T-shirts proclaiming themselves "Borg Again Christians" and, borrowing from "Star Wars," "May the 'phors (as in "metaphors") be with you."

"There is a hunger for something other than a fundamentalist, literal understanding of the Bible," says the Rev. Tom Tate of Portland's Rose City Park United Methodist Church. Tate says he doesn't always "buy" the traditional viewpoint. "Borg has given me the courage to come out and say certain things."

Borg's critics are his toughest audience, but one he is determined to engage. He says he accepts every chance he has to talk to them in public settings, preferably with an opportunity for questions and answers from an audience.

In February, Borg debated OSU history professor Gary Ferngren in front of 750 people. Their back-and-forth exchanges on the heart of Christianity sparked a few good-natured jibes and an unexpected measure of laughter.

In a characteristic quick show of hands, Borg observed that fewer than a third of the audience members were sympathetic to his position, a third were already in Ferngren's camp, and the others had come to listen.

"I'm not so interested in changing people's minds," he says, "as to let them hear and see a Christian like me instead of reading people who are critical of us."

Paul Metzger, a theology professor at Multnomah Biblical Seminary, is very clear about where he disagrees with Borg.

"I appreciate Professor Borg's emphasis on Jesus having been crucified for his identification with the poor and oppressed, a point often lost on many conservatives," Metzger says. "But there is more: Jesus' suffering was part and parcel of his dying for the sins of the world. Jesus was also raised bodily from the dead to bring new life."

That said, Metzger appreciates the serious and civil debate that Borg encourages. The alternatives are dangerous, he says.

"If people don't dialogue because they think that only their ideas matter, or if we put all the ideas to the side and just go for some neutral frame of reference, neither is meaningful."

And meaning, Borg would say, is the point of the Bible, of Jesus and of Christianity.

Jesus "is for us the decisive revelation of God--of what can be seen of God's character and passion in human life," Borg says. "But for followers of Jesus, the unending conversation about Jesus is the conversation that matters most."

What Would Jesus Really Do?

by Roland Martin

When did it come to the point that being a Christian meant caring about only two issues, abortion and homosexuality?

Ask the nonreligious what being a Christian today means, and based on what we see and read, it's a good bet they will say that followers of Jesus Christ are preoccupied with those two points.

Poverty? Whatever. Homelessness? An afterthought. A widening gap between the have and have-nots? Immaterial. Divorce? The divorce rate of Christians mirrors the national average, so that's no big deal.

The point is that being a Christian should be about more than abortion and homosexuality, and it's high time that those not considered a part of the religious right expose the hypocrisy of our brothers and sisters in Christianity and take back the faith. And those on the left who believe they have a "get out of sin free" card must not be allowed to justify their actions.

Many people believe we are engaged in a holy war. And we are. But it's not with Muslims. The real war--the silent war--is being engaged among Christians, and that's what we must set our sights on.

As we celebrate Holy Week, our focus is on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But aren't we also to recommit ourselves to live more like Jesus? Did Jesus spend his time focusing on all that he didn't like, or did Jesus raise the consciousness of the people to understand love, compassion and teach them about following the will of God?

As a layman studying to receive a master's in Christian communications, and the husband of an ordained minister, it's troubling to listen to "Christian radio" and hear the kind of hate spewing out of the mouths of my brothers and sisters in the faith.

In fact, I've grown tired of people who pimp God. That's right; we have a litany of individuals today who are holy, holy, holy, sing hallelujah, talk about how they love the Lord, but when it's time to walk the walk, somehow the spirit evaporates.

A couple of years ago I took exception to an e-mail blast from the Concerned Women for America. The group was angry that Democrats were blocking certain judges put up for the federal bench by President Bush. It called on Americans to fight Democrats who wanted to keep Christians off the bench.

So I called and sent an e-mail asking, "So, where were you when President Clinton appointed Christian judges to the bench? Were they truly behind Christian judges, or Republican Christian judges?

Surprise, surprise. There was never a response.

An African-American pastor I know in the Midwest was asked by a group of mostly white clergy to march in an anti-abortion rally. He was fine with that, but then asked the clergy if they would work with him to fight crack houses in predominantly black neighborhoods.

"That's really your problem," he was told.

They saw abortion as a moral imperative, but not a community ravaged by crack.

If abortion and gay marriage are part of the Christian agenda, I have no issue with that. Those are moral issues that should be of importance to people of the faith, but the agenda should be much, much broader.

I'm looking for the day when Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Joyce Meyer, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, James Kennedy, Rod Parsley, " Patriot Pastors" and Rick Warren will sit at the same table as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Cynthia Hale, Eddie L. Long, James Meek, Fred Price, Emmanuel Cleaver and Floyd Flake to establish a call to arms on racism, AIDS, police brutality, a national health care policy, our sorry education system.

If they all say they love and worship one God, one Jesus, let's see them rally their members behind one agenda.

I stand here today not as a Republican or a liberal. And don't bother calling me a Democrat or a conservative. I am a man, an African-American man who has professed that Jesus Christ is Lord, and that's to whom I bow down.

If you concur, it's time to stop allowing a chosen few to speak for the masses. Quit letting them define the agenda.

So put on the full armor of God because we have work to do.

Fall in Love

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone--we find it with another. We do not discover the secret of our lives merely by study and calculation in our own isolated meditations. The meaning of our life is a secret that has to be revealed to us in love, by the one we love. And if this love is unreal, the secret will not be found, the meaning will never reveal itself, the message will never be decoded. At best, we will receive a scrambled and partial message, one that will deceive and confuse us. We will never be fully real until we let ourselves fall in love--either with another human person or with God.

--Thomas Merton

What Are We Spreading?

I find this so unsavory; they‘re going out and killing people around the world to spread democracy, and what are we spreading? A form of government based on how much money you can raise from rich people.

--Chris Matthews

Revolution of Values

When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism, are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.


--Martin Luther King, Jr

Disciples

If you have any knowledge at all of human nature, you know that those who only admire the truth will, when danger appears, become traitors. The admirer is infatuated with the false security of greatness; but if there is any inconvenience or trouble, he pulls back. Admiring the truth, instead of following it, is just as dubious a fire as the fire of erotic love, which at the turn of the hand can be changed into exactly the opposite, to hate, jealousy, and revenge. Christ, however, never asked for admirers, worshippers, or adherents. He consistently spoke of "followers" and "disciples."

--Soren Kierkegaard

To Be a Follower of Jesus

To be a follower of Jesus means in the first place to enter by compassion into his experience, with all that it expresses of the divine and of the human. And it means in the second place to enter with him into the suffering and the hope of all human persons, making common cause with them as he does, and seeking out as he does the places of his predilection among the poor and despised and oppressed.

--Monika K. Hellwig

We Must Repent of This War

by Jim Wallis

The war in Iraq is personal for me.

It’s personal for the families and loved ones of the more than 3,200 American soldiers who have lost the precious gift of life. The stories I hear every day on the radio and TV break my heart. They are so young to die, and it is so unnecessary. When I look at my son and celebrate his birthday, I think of all the children whose fathers or mothers won’t be coming back from the war to celebrate theirs.

It’s personal for the tens of thousands of service men and women who have lost their limbs or their mental and emotional health, and who now feel abandoned and mistreated.

It’s personal for all the Iraqis who have lost their loved ones, as many as hundreds of thousands. What would it be like to wait in line at morgues to check dead bodies, desperately hoping that you don’t recognize someone you love? I can only imagine. And when I look at my son, I think of all the Iraqi children who will never celebrate another birthday.

This isn’t just political; it’s personal for millions of us now. And for all of us here tonight, the war in Iraq is actually more than personal--it has become a matter of faith.

By our deepest convictions about Christian standards and teaching, the war in Iraq was not just a well-intended mistake or only mismanaged. This war, from a Christian point of view, is morally wrong--and was from the very start. It cannot be justified with either the teaching of Jesus Christ or the criteria of St. Augustine’s just war. It simply doesn’t pass either test, and did not from its beginning. This war is not just an offense against the young Americans who have made the ultimate sacrifice or the Iraqis who have paid such a horrible price. This war is not only an offense to the poor at home and around the world who have paid the price of misdirected resources and priorities--this war is also an offense against God.

And so we are here tonight, very simply and resolutely, to begin to end the war in Iraq--not by anger, though we are angry; not just by politics, though it will take political courage; but by faith, because we are people of faith.

This service and procession are not just another political protest, but an act of faith, an act of prayer, an act of non-violent witness. Politics led us into this war, and politics is unlikely to save us by itself. The American people have voted against the war in Iraq, but political proposals keep failing one after the other.

I believe it will take faith to end this war. It will take prayer to end it. It will take a mobilization of the faith community to end it--to change the political climate, to change the wind. It will take a revolution of love to end it, because this endless war in Iraq is based ultimately on fear, and Jesus says that only perfect love will cast out fear.

So tonight we say, as people of faith, as followers of Jesus, that the deep fear that has paralyzed the conscience of this nation, which has caused us to become the kind of people that we are not called to be, that has allowed us to tolerate violations of our most basic values, and that has perpetuated an endless cycle of violence and counter-violence must be exorcised as the demon it is--this fear must be cast out!

And to cast out that fear, we must act in faith, in prayer, in love, and in hope--so we might help to heal the fears that keep this war going. Tonight we march not in belligerence, or to attack individuals (even those leaders directly responsible for the war), or to use human suffering for partisan political purposes. Rather, we process to the White House tonight as an act of faith, believing that only faith can save us now.

Ironically, this war has often been cloaked in the name and symbols of our faith, confused American imperial designs with God’s purposes, and tragically discredited Christian faith around the world, having so tied it to flawed American behavior and agendas. Millions of people around the world sadly believe this is a Christian war. So as people of faith, let us say tonight to our brothers and sisters around the world, and as clearly as we can--America is not the hope of the earth and the light of the world, Jesus Christ is! And it is his way that we follow, and not the flawed path of our nation’s leaders who prosecute this war. As an evangelical Christian, I must say that the war in Iraq has hindered the cause of Christ and, in this season of Lent, we must repent of this war!

More Powerful?

To suggest that the sin of man so corrupted his creation that God cannot fix it but can only junk it in favor of some other world is to say that ultimately the kingdom of evil is more powerful than the kingdom of God. It makes sin more powerful than redemption, and Satan the victor over God. Reducing the gospel to a strictly spiritual dimension of human existence concedes everything outside of that dimension to the enemy.

--Michael D. Williams

What Will Quench the Light?

It is not scientific doubt, not atheism, not pantheism, not agnosticism, that in our day and in this land is likely to quench the light of the gospel. It is a proud, sensuous, selfish, luxurious, church-going, hollow-hearted prosperity.

--Frederic D. Huntington

Transforming Effect

What God requires of those who call on God's name is responsive servanthood. God wishes to act in and through us, so Christian hope does not relieve men and women of responsibility. We are not primarily responsible for shrewd analysis of problems, for strategic selection of means, for maximizing the chances of success. We are primarily responsible for turning to God, for attempting to know and do God's will. That well may lead us into actions which are not shrewd, strategic, or successful, as the life of Jesus suggests. But as Jesus' life demonstrates, human action which is faithful to God's will can have transforming effect.

--Parker Palmer

The Sin of Self-Sovereignty

An interview with Eugene Peterson:

RADIX: [In EAT THIS BOOK (Eerdmans, 2006), you write that] "the text that seems to be most in favor on the American landscape today is the Sovereign Self." Do you think there are reasons why that's a special problem in this particular culture in a way that it wasn't in the past?

PETERSON: Well, the basic ingredients go back to Eden. But I think American culture with our combination of individualism and consumerism has taken it pretty far. We've got the money, most of us do, to do whatever we want to. With our post-Enlightenment individualism and consumerism, combined with the total erosion of community, which we're all experiencing, I think America has almost perfected the self-sovereignty sin.

RADIX: Do you notice a difference when you travel in other countries?

PETERSON: I don't do that much traveling, but when I talk to friends who are in Third World countries, it's very different. The little bit of travel I do is usually in Scotland and Ireland, and Christians are such a minority people there, they don't have that same sense of self-sovereignty--they're more marginal to the culture. So I think it's an American problem, although some of the Asians might be catching up with us--the Hong Kong, Korean, Japanese Asians.

RADIX: Toward the end of the book, you say that when the Hebrews were at home in the Canaanite culture, they knew how to say "no" to the culture when they needed to. So I'm wondering, at what points do you think we American Christians need to be saying "no" to our culture? Are there any points that are especially important?

PETERSON: Well, yes. I think the identification of the culture with the church, with the evangelical church, makes us prone to an idolatry of nation. That's so pervasive it's almost impossible to carry on a conversation about it. America's founders left Europe because of nationalized churches. Now we've got one of our own, and we aren't even aware of it. So the nationalism combined with the pervasive consumerism are big problems for the American church.

We go church-shopping; we demand services of the church. The scary thing about this for me is that the vocabulary stays the same. We use all the right words, and we still keep all our doctrines in the evangelical church, but the context has changed so radically that they no longer mean anything. I don't know how the Devil works, but if I were the Devil, I don't think I could have devised a better way of destroying the congregation than talking about "big"--you know, the bigger, the bigger, the bigger, the more glamorous. And that destroys congregations. Congregations aren't glamorous; they're comprised of sinners.

But we've got these poster pictures, glamour shots of what churches ought to be. It can destroy pastors of small churches--they feel always inadequate, always inferior. And it destroys the people in the big churches, because they're no longer dealing with community; they're just part of a crowd. In the vaunted small-group movement--which certainly has some good things going for it (probably earlier on, more than now)--people say, "Well, we take care of community by having small groups." Well, those aren't communities--those are people you like. And, you know, a community has to have people you don't like in it.

RADIX: Yes, actually, my small group is made up of people I like.

PETERSON: They all are. If you don't like them, you just drop out. Good things happen in these groups, but it's not community. Congregation is God's way to give us community.

Great Moral Issues

Is the fact that 30,000 children will die globally today, and everyday, from needless hunger and disease a great moral issue for evangelical Christians? How about the reality of 3 billion of God’s children living on less than $2 per day? And isn’t the still-widespread and needless poverty in our own country, the richest nation in the world, a moral scandal? What about pandemics like HIV/AIDS that wipe out whole generations and countries, or the sex trafficking of massive numbers of women and children? Should genocide in Darfur be a moral issue for Christians? And what about disastrous wars like Iraq? And then there is, of course, the issue that got Dobson and his allies so agitated. If the scientific consensus is right--climate change is real, is caused substantially by human activity, and could result in hundreds of thousands of deaths--then isn’t that also a great moral issue? Could global warming actually be alarming evidence of human tinkering with God’s creation?

Or, are the only really "great moral issues" those concerning abortion, gay marriage, and the teaching of sexual abstinence? I happen to believe that the sanctity of life, the health of marriages, and teaching sexual morality to our children are, indeed, among the great moral issues of our time. But I believe they are not the only great moral issues.

--Jim Wallis

The True Hermeneutic

For in Christ and through Christ and because of Christ Christians have been given a revealed insight into God's nature and character. This understanding of God was vindicated for us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, whom we acclaim as the Christ, God incarnate. Jesus the Christ thus becomes--in himself and in his teaching--the true hermeneutic, the key to the understanding of the Bible, and beyond the Bible to the understanding of the action of God throughout history. In other words, the Word of God incarnate in Jesus the Christ interprets for us the word of God in the Bible.

--Naim Ateek

Resources

The earth provides enough resources for everyone's need, but not for some people's greed.

--Mahatma Gandhi

Big Ideas That Can Change the World

By David Batstone

Pedagogy--a word rarely used. And in our age of achievement testing, a bit of a lost art. For nearly 15 years I have been a professor in the university system. I guess by now I cease to be annoyed by the students who approach school like an obstacle course: hurdles they need to crawl under or jump over in order to achieve the grade they want.

I make it my personal challenge each semester to inspire these students to love the process of learning. I tell them that they soon will enter a world of work that will value individuals who can apply intelligence and emotional tools to evolving environments. Memorizing a set of data or mastering a skill has a value, to be sure. In the 21st century, however, a law of diminishing returns immediately kicks in to depreciate the value of those personal assets.

It jars my students--who obsess over the major of study they should choose--when I proclaim, "It really doesn't matter what you study, but it does matter immensely that you study with curiosity and passion." At this point, I imagine more than a few parents with teenagers roll their eyes and mutter, "If only." They would be content to get their kids to complete their homework, and do so in a way that does not feel like pulling their teeth. If this battleground scene sounds all too familiar, your teen sounds like a good candidate this summer for a SuperCamp.

Meet Bobbi DePorter, who started the SuperCamps over 25 years ago and continues to run them as part of her Quantum Learning Network. More than 43,000 youth are now graduates of her camps that focus on learning and life skills. The camps operate in 10 countries and take place on top-grade university campuses--Stanford University and the Claremont Colleges host the camps in California--across the United States.

"Most young people are not taught to learn effectively," Ms. DePorter told me. "They do not understand how to discover their strengths, pursue goals, make decisions, solve problems and resolve conflicts," she added. Ms. DePorter launched the SuperCamps to give kids confidence to develop and follow their own interests and curiosities. Over a 10-day SuperCamp experience, youth learn better strategies for reading, writing, public speaking, memorizing, note-taking and test-taking.

Sounds like an intensive summer school, doesn't it? Yet kids want to keep coming back. The SuperCamp experience shows that to pique a kid's curiosity translates into a fun experience. I imagine they are inspired once they look inside themselves and find new ways to reach out to everything around them.

The SuperCamps engage in some bold myth-busting: Myth: Teens waste their minds on video games. Reality: Teens decode and create games as well as play them. SuperCamp Insight: Getting inside video games can help teens reconsider their cognitive boundaries.

Myth: Teens believe they are entitled to whatever they want. Reality: Teens yearn to know how to take responsibility to earn their success. SuperCamp Insight: Teen's struggle for independence is also a search for ownership of their personal achievements.

I latched onto Quantum's program because it became obvious to me that, with notable exceptions, our school system is not preparing young people for a society of hyper-connected networks. Many parents--and teachers--wish that young people would not be so mega-sensory oriented and drawn to producing their own knowledge more than they are absorbing the classics. Instead of berating youth for being wired differently, wouldn't it be better to help them feel confident about themselves and help them to build bridges from classical knowledge to emerging ideas?

Ms. DePorter has a big vision for her SuperCamp. Yes, she is boosting student performance; The Wall Street Journal reports that SuperCamp "turns so-so students into academic achievers." Yet her more expansive dream is to set a new standard for learning and life skills that fills the social and leadership gaps of our institutions. Helping kids gain tools for the little things leads them to big ideas that can change the world.

American Polytheism

by James W. Skillen

Much of today's media coverage of religion identifies its subject matter by referring to the number of Americans who attend church, or to the Jewish observance of holy days, or to the Muslim practice of praying five times a day. Church, synagogue, or mosque--that's the religion tag. Then, since many Christians who attend church regularly also happen to be politically conservative, the media identifies them with the "Christian right." Positions that "right-wing" Christians take on political issues such as abortion, or interpreting the Constitution, or marriage, are then viewed as expressions of Bible-believing fundamentalists. This, in part, is what Jeff Sharlet does in a recent and provocative essay in Harper's Magazine (December 2006) on "how the Christian right is reimagining U.S. history."

There are at least two major problems with this approach, however. First, many Bible-believing Christians, like Jimmy Carter, are not part of the Christian right. And second, what the political right does with religion and politics does not necessarily qualify as Christian.

Consider a recent piece by George F. Will in which he expresses sympathy with a new book on Ronald Reagan by John Patrick Diggins. Diggins, who is enthusiastic about Reagan, argues that Reagan's god was the god bequeathed to America by Ralph Waldo Emerson, not by the Bible. Diggins contends that in effect "Reagan's religion 'enables us to forget religion' because it banishes the idea of 'a God of judgment and punishment.'"

Emerson's and Reagan's god is good and therefore humans are good. A good god couldn't have created evil; consequently, we and our desires must be good. Therefore, no American leader needs to "suggest that the public has shortcomings and should engage in critical self-examination."

Americans should be optimistic about the future. For example, "Reagan said that the people never start wars, only governments do." Under Reagan, according to Diggins, "Americans could live off government and hate it at the same time." They could (and still do), as I would put it, love America while holding government suspect. With this religious spirit of goodness and freedom, Reagan, says Will, "frequently quoted [Thomas] Paine's preposterous cry that 'we have it in our power to begin the world over again.'"

Now, we know that many conservative Christians turned enthusiastically to Reagan and away from the born-again Carter. Yet this cannot be explained in terms of the degree of Christian orthodoxy of the two presidents. To make sense of American public religiosity, in other words, we need to look at what Americans - including many American Christians--believe about the god (or gods) of America and not first at what they believe about Jesus Christ.

Yet how can any Christian accept such a dualism of religions--serving an American god in public who may be at odds with Jesus Christ? Can it even be done? My friend, Joe Loconte, with whom I radically disagree at this point, offers one familiar way to do it. "The Church," he explains, "aims to create a spiritual community grounded in the law of love. The State seeks to maintain justice in a secular society that rejects the divine law."

Never mind that Jesus told his followers that they cannot serve two masters and that the totality of their lives should be oriented by the love of God and the love of their neighbors as themselves. Never mind that Jesus claimed that all authority in heaven and on earth (not just spiritual authority) had been given to him. Is it perhaps the case that Christians have found room for American gods in the vacuum they have created by trying to confine Christ's authority and love to a spiritual community?

I must be quick to say that I do not belong to the pro-appeasement, be-nice-to-fascists camp that Loconte sets up in his lecture as the foil for his support of the stay-tough-America war against terrorism. My disagreement with him does not arise from within the polarized alternatives he presents in his speech. His polarity works only so long as one accepts the privatization of Christian love so that the American military is free to do un-spiritual and nasty things to defend the world from evil. As Loconte puts it, "Biblical realism does not seek to make the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount a road map for U.S. foreign policy" But it is precisely this kind of dualism--all too prevalent among Christians of both liberal and conservative stripes--that cuts off any possible consideration of a deeply biblical, seriously Christian approach to politics and government.

How will we ever be able to assess from a Christian point of view what is on track or off track in the work of government if we insist at the outset on making one or both of two errors? The first is to assume that America's god is the God of the Bible. The second is to assume that Jesus Christ puts the work of politics and government in the hands of America's god.

Revolution of Love

In essence, what Jesus imparted to his disciples was that they must strive for true justice on earth as in heaven, as their righteous service to God; that they must honor God by doing indiscriminate justice, by lifting up "the least of these" on the altar of God's justice and mercy; that they must set into motion a revolution of love and holistic spirituality that demonstrates love for God by treating the needs of even the least of God's children as holy.

--Obery M. Hendericks, Jr.

The Wilderness

by Joy Carroll Wallis

What can be very difficult in Lent is the wilderness. The wilderness within, or the wilderness we find ourselves in. We may be led quite involuntarily into the wilderness – and not just in Lent. What we call in spiritual speak "the time of testing" can actually feel like desperation, a loss of hope. We may cry out, "where is God?" in the face of random or meaningless suffering, immense stress, depression, illness, debilitating grief, war, and tragic death.

Reading about the temptations of Jesus, his "time of testing" in the wilderness, might offer some guidance. All of Jesus' replies to the devil come from Deuteronomy 6-8 and each temptation is a temptation to sin against the great commandment in Deuteronomy 6:5, to love God "with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might."

Firstly, we read that Jesus was tempted to turn stones into bread. There's a great humanity about this temptation. You have to remember now that he was hungry, he was exhausted; he hadn't eaten for 40 days! This was a temptation to security. Immediate gratification, the quick fix, the easy answer. My kids know all about that temptation! So do I. In my constant efforts to be efficient, I am always looking for the easy, instant solution. On a purely domestic level, it's so tempting to buy the ready-to-serve juice pouches, the individual applesauce pots--but all that excess packaging!

Much of life is like that. We go to great lengths to have an easy life. It can be a daily temptation for us not to discipline ourselves in areas of greed, materialism, or even sensuality. Health and wealth--we want it now. We want God to speak to us now, to guide us now, to heal us now. And Jesus is saying: No, have patience. Be in the wilderness and discover how to rely on God. Simplify your lifestyle, reject the easy answers, and the wilderness journey will start to teach you something about trust in God and how to serve God with your heart, your soul, and your mind.

The second temptation was to power and wealth over and against loving God. Satan showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and said, "I will give you their glory and all this authority." He's promised "all the kingdoms of the world"--if he will only bow down to the voice behind the principalities and powers. This is a particularly American temptation, the notion that America is indispensable, the one remaining superpower that is needed by the world. George Bush has given us plenty of reason to believe that he puts his hope in America rather than God and indeed can confuse the two. In his address delivered on the anniversary of September 11, he quoted from John's gospel, "And the light shines in the darkness. And the darkness has not overcome it." The trouble is that he was not referring to the light of the world, Jesus Christ. Rather, he was referring to America and its ideals of freedom and democracy as the light and hope of the world. It's easy to apply this to the administration and to George Bush, but we should also consider how it challenges us--this is especially true for the third temptation.

The third temptation was to the spectacular. Satan took Jesus to Jerusalem, placed him on the pinnacle of the temple and said, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down--the angels will bear you up." This is the temptation to fame, or to the spectacular. Almost four years ago to the day, as many of you were working very hard to stop the war in Iraq from happening, the official Pentagon language was that an attack would leave Iraq and the world in a state of "shock and awe." Three thousand bombs will be dropped in the first week. It doesn't matter about the weather, we'll amaze them with our technology. And America did the spectacular. But it was the devil's temptation, and so much more evil abounds right now because the administration succumbed to that particular temptation.

God's way of transformation is not spectacle, but the patient enduring of the wilderness and the cross. As I said, this temptation can hit home personally too. We can all be tempted to seek God in the spectacular and not in the struggle and the suffering. It's also a challenge for Sojourners, particularly in the face of success, to remain humble.

In his Lenten reflection last year, Jim said, "Humility is difficult for people who think they are, or want to be, 'radical Christians.' Humility is difficult when you're always calling other people--the church, the nation, and the world--to stop doing the things you think are wrong and start doing the things you think are right. Humility is difficult for the bearers of radical messages. When we're always calling other people to repent and change, it's not always easy to hear that message for ourselves. I want to suggest that there is a real and very deep tension between humility and the prophetic vocation."

We can be tempted by the idols of materialism, power and spectacle, in the forms of war, wealth, prestige, and celebrity, just to name a few. But Jesus said, "Away with you Satan! For it is written, 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only God.'" Then the tempter left him, and will leave us, too, if we stand our ground passing with Jesus through the wilderness.

Are Evangelicals Fixated on Homosexuality?

by Tony Campolo

Sigmund Freud would have something to say about the ways in which we evangelicals seem to be fixated on homosexuality. That fixation became abundantly clear to me recently when I was doing radio interviews upon the publication of my most recent book, Letters to a Young Evangelical. The book has 21 chapters, yet on every one of the two dozen interviews that I had on Christian radio stations, I had to spend at least 80 percent of my air time concentrating on the few pages that dealt with homosexuality.

The primary focus of the questioning during these interviews focused on my assertions, based on my own research and a survey of literature on the subject, that nobody has come up with a conclusive explanation of what causes a homosexual orientation, and that it develops so early in the bio-physical and social development of children that it's practically impossible that it could be something that is deliberately chosen. It seemed to me that the interviewers were not willing to accept what I had to say, and wanted me to commit to one of two other options that I believe to be erroneous. The first was the suggestion that the homosexual orientation is the result of poor socialization. This is the commonly held belief among those evangelicals who head up ministries that propose to “deliver” homosexuals and make them into heterosexuals. The most cited version is that a boy overly identifies with a dominant mother, while his father is either absent from the household or is a somewhat weak personality. This theory puts already upset and confused parents of gays on unnecessary guilt trips.

The other theory often proposed in these interviews was that being homosexual is somehow the result of trauma resulting from the gay person being sexually molested as a child.

The reasons for these beliefs were all too obvious to me. If either of these theories had validity, then it could be said that homosexuals who wanted to change could do so by making the decision to be open to the work of God in their lives and getting some good Christian counseling. When I questioned such conclusions, the interviewers usually came back at me by claiming that if I did not accept what they were saying, then I must be implying that the homosexual orientation was inborn. That, to them, was unthinkable because accordingly, this would lead to the assumption that God created homosexuals the way they are, and that we should accept them as such. Over and over, I would have to repeat that nobody knows definitively what establishes same-sex attraction in persons--and again I would have to assert that what we do know is that it is practically never the result of any conscious decision.

The interviewers immediately sensed that I was suggesting that there are no easy answers that we evangelicals can offer to gays and lesbians who ask us about changing their sexual orientation. I added to their anxieties when I went on to say that it is very rare that sexual orientations ever do change. I never say “never” because with God miracles are always possible. I make it clear, however, that barring miracles, we evangelicals have little to offer in the way of positive suggestions for those who are struggling with being homosexual in a homophobic world. In reality, we only have two proposals--celibacy, which is my answer; and monogamous partnerships, which is an answer posed by my wife.

In my book, Letters to a Young Evangelical, I point out that there is an emerging new generation of young evangelicals who are still conservative on their views on homosexual behavior, but refuse to make gay marriage the defining issue that it has become for older Christians. Instead, these young people are more concerned with such issues as poverty, the AIDS crisis, the environment, and war. It is no surprise, therefore, that they take Bono as their model for Christian activism. This rock singer who has raised their consciousness about the crisis in Africa is working hard to eliminate Third World debts. Bono is committed to the causes that young evangelicals deem significant and they are joining with enthusiasm in his crusade to “Make Poverty History.”

In many instances, those in this new generation are even reluctant to accept being called evangelicals. They sense that the label “evangelical” is commonly thought to be synonymous with right-wing politics and suggests a gay-bashing, anti-environmentalist, anti-feminist, and pro-war mindset. Instead, they are increasingly calling themselves Red Letter Christians. This name, of course, associates them with those verses in scripture that record the words that Jesus spoke, which in many Bibles are printed in red. That I affirm this designation and promote this new label in my book often greatly disturbs my interviewers. They quickly remind me that Jesus never mentioned homosexuality. “That’s right!” I respond. “He most likely maintained ancient Jewish laws on the matter, but condemning gays was not on His big-ten hit list, while attacking judgmental religious people was.”

In Letters to a Young Evangelical, I call young people to move beyond the preoccupation with sexual issues that have so absorbed the discussion of the over-50s crowd and coalesce into a new movement that is committed to also include a whole range of other crucial social justice issues. I let them know that while they ought not to neglect sexual issues, they really must move beyond them and overcome the fixation on homosexuality that I found so evident in my recent radio interviews. Embracing a Christianity that deals with the broad spectrum of social concerns that are relevant to living out love and justice in the 21st century is required for an emerging church of young evangelicals. Any other kind of Christianity will prove irrelevant to them.

Nature

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

--Henry David Thoreau

Public Witness

Because Jesus' teachings are so challenging and radical, it is much more comfortable to focus on a quiet, private, personal relationship with him than it is to follow his teachings that call for a public prophetic witness.

--Alvin Alexi Currier

Advice for Barack Obama

by Brian McLaren

Thanks for entering the 2008 presidential race. I know a lot of people feel as I do: After several elections where we felt we were left to choose between tired and uninspiring candidates with little fresh to offer except new twists on old electioneering techniques, it seems that in the upcoming primary elections, at least, we will have several exciting options. In both parties, in fact, we may get to choose between a number of fresh, creative, and substantial candidates instead of settling for the lesser of famliar disappointments. I hope that we will feel the same way when it comes down to two candidates in the 2008 presidential elections as well.

No doubt you'll be getting a lot of advice and requests from a lot of people in the coming weeks, and the only reason I think mine deserves to be heard is that I know I'm expressing what a lot of people feel. So I would like to make this request at the beginning of your campaign.

Please don't lie to us. Please forego both the repulsive, deceptive, and twisted lies and also the flattering lies we like to hear. For example, I heard a fellow candidate recently trot out the tired old line, "America is the greatest country in the history of the world." This makes Americans feel good and gets applause. Maybe it wins votes. But it is a lie.

Yes, we are the richest country. Yes, we have the most weapons. Yes, we dominate in many fields, from sports to pop music to movies to pornographic websites to resource consumption and waste production. But the seductive lie of superiority is bad for any nation, including ours. Any nation that keeps telling itself that it is the greatest will become a proud nation (if it isn't already), and pride, I have it on good authority, comes before a fall. Pride makes nations, as
individuals, unpleasant and ugly neighbors, and so candidates make a bad long-term decision when they seek to coddle pride in exchange for votes. If they win, they will preside over a country that their rhetoric has made more ugly and more likely to fall.

Instead of telling us this lie of American superiority, please tell us the truths that we need to hear. Tell us, as you just did in your campaign-launch speech, inconvenient truths * that we and our leaders have a habit of making mistakes and blaming others * whether it's in New Orleans or Baghdad. Tell us the truth about our past * from our own original genocide and ongoing apartheid regarding the Native peoples of this land, to our profoundly unacknowledged and unhealed legacy of slavery and racism, to our failure to care properly for this beautiful part of God's green earth, to our desperate and shameful violations of our own principles and ideals around the world, from Congo to Chile, and from Central America to the Middle East.

Those who say, "Those things are in the past, we should just move on," would never say that about, say, September 11, 2001. Tell us the truth that we have unfinished business, recalling the old proverb that says the one who hides his transgressions will not prosper, but the one who confesses and forsakes them will find mercy. South Africa discovered how a different future is possible when a nation tells the truth about its past, and you could help us have our own time of truth and reconciliation.

And of course, please tell us the truth about the hope that comes through truth-telling. You and John Edwards and several other candidates have already begun inspiring many of us with your hope * audacious hope regarding poverty, environmental healing, and peace. Because, as you say, another world is possible. Many of us dare to hope that, and if you don't tell us the old political lies and instead tell us the inconvenient truth, then our shared emerging hopes
can become a dynamic new reality.

All of us are cynical at times, but in the launch of your campaign, I feel more hopeful and inspired than I have in a long time. Thank you.

Slaves

Twenty-seven million slaves exist in our world today. Girls and boys, women and men of all ages are forced to toil in the rug looms of Nepal, sell their bodies in the brothels of Rome, break rocks in the quarries of Pakistan, and fight wars in the jungles of Africa. Go behind the façade in any major town or city in the world today and you are likely to find a thriving commerce in human beings.

--David Batstone

From Plato's Republic

Socrates: "Now, all this study of reckoning and geometry and all the preliminary studies that are indispensable preparation for dialectic must be presented to them while still young, not in the form of compulsory instruction."

Glaucon: "Why so?"

Socrates: "Because, said I, a free soul ought not to pursue any study slavishly, for while bodily labors performed under constraint do not harm the body, nothing that is learned under compulsion stays with the mind."

Glaucon: "True," he said.

Socrates: "Do not, then, my friend, keep children to their studies by compulsion but by play. That will also better enable you to discern the natural capacities of each."

Glaucon: "There is reason in that," he said.

Free to Begin to Become

Often I am tempted to mold or guide my children while forgetting that there is an essence, a budding life, that I must first nurture and acquaint myself with, before attempting to lead. Socrates words caught my attention for that ingenious combination of simplicity and profundity. How can you guide what you do not know?

As educators we must first create an environment of life where the child feels free to begin to become. Then we must attune our senses to the recognition of the many and varied ways a child can become in order to rightly nurture and care for the way they begin to grow. Once we have "discerned the natural capacities" we can begin to provide a curriculum or environment further suited to those capacities.

This is obviously a very idealistic picture which would be almost impossible to implement on a "mass" scale in our current educational system. But I think Socrates' words speak well of the type of "education" our children need. At this stage it is the educator who is being educated about the child in order to later provide the education the child will need.

--Daniel Kruidenier

Work Has to Work

Americans think that if you work hard and full time, you shouldn't be poor. But 9.2 million American families are. Somebody in all those households works hard, full time, and yet they're all raising their kids in poverty. That's wrong. It's against our theology and it's un-American.

What is at risk here is a genuine opportunity society. It's a "fraud," I would say, when the average CEO of a Standard & Poor's 500 company made $13.5 million in total compensation in 2005, while a minimum wage worker made $10,700. Thirty years ago CEOs made 30 times what their average workers made. Japan and Germany are still at about that ratio. Now in America its 400 to 1--which means the average worker has to work a whole year to make what their boss makes in one day. This is wrong; it's an injustice; it's a theological issue.

The House has acted, now the Senate has decided to act. And when the minimum wage passes, we must then take the next step needed to guarantee that work works in America and provides a family success and security. Those who work responsibly should have a living family income with a combination of a family's earnings, and supports for transportation, health care, nutrition, child care, education, and housing. Tax policies should reward work and family stability. Ownership and job creation is critical. Work has to work in America. It doesn't right now.

--Jim Wallis