Blog Archive
for April, 2007
The Violent Hypocrisy of Some Peace and Justice Evangelicals
— Monday, April 30th, 2007 —
The “peace and justice” Christians are insistent in telling us they don’t wish to move away from issues such as the protection of unborn Christian life. They simply seek to “expand” Christian social witness away from a truncated “Religious Right” focus on abortion and marriage. We’re not pro-abortion, groups such as Sojourners and leaders such as Jim Wallis assure us. It’s just that we believe that life doesn’t begin at conception and end at birth. We believe, they say, that global warming and quality day care and an increased minimum wage are pro-life issues too! Next time you hear this kind of rhetoric, just spend some time looking at the kind of political activists drawn to the big tent of the evangelical Left.
Last summer I mentioned here the sad case of the Rev. Donna Schaper, pastor of Judson Memorial Baptist Church, an American Baptist congregation in New York. Rev. Schaper wrote in Tikkun magazine about aborting her daughter, a daughter she named “Alma.” She wrote in the article that she doesn’t apologize for or even regret her decision. She further argued that abortion has been a positive development, allowing sex to be “recreational” for both men and women.
In a chilling line, Rev. Schaper wrote:
I did what was right for me, for my family, for my work, for my husband, and for my three children. I happen to agree that abortion is a form of murder. I think the quarrel about when life begins is disrespectful to the fetus. I know I murdered the life within me. I could have loved that life but chose not to. I did what men do all the time when they take us to war: they choose violence because, while they believe it is bad, it is still better than the alternatives.
Now, Rev. Schaper writes in recent days for Jim Wallis’s “God’s Politics” blog on the subject of, of all things, responding to violence.
Keep Reading...Athletic Distorter
— Saturday, April 28th, 2007 —
Female sports teams are in the news these days, from Don Imus’s verbal slam of the Rutgers basketball team to the ongoing discussion of whether Title IX requirements have ruined the possibility of male sports programs on many American high schools and colleges. But, a bit less noticed, is a major American newspaper’s male sports columnist who, well, wants to throw like a girl.
Mike Penner, sports columnist for the Los Angeles Times, announced in his column Thursday that he’ll be taking a few weeks of vacation, after which he’ll be returning in a “new incarnation,” as he put it. Scratch that. He said that after the vacation she’ll be returning. You see, Mike Penner will be Christine.
Mike told his readers that he has discovered he is transsexual, that his brain is “wired to be female.” And so he plans to surgically arrange his anatomy to fit his brain wiring. He takes the opportunity to assure his readers that he is not a stereotype, a troubled candidate for the Jerry Springer Show.
Keep Reading...Enough Is Not Enough
— Monday, April 9th, 2007 —
We debate now whether or not we ought to baptize a repentant four year-old. But will your grandchildren be debating whether or not we should baptize a robot with artificial intelligence? That’s one of the questions posed by ecologist Bill McKibben in a book on new horizons in bioethics.
It is hard to imagine someone with whom I would have less in common than Bill McKibben. He is something of a 1960s hippie, a population-control advocating environmentalist who authored a book entitled Maybe One: The Case for Smaller Families. I disagree with him on many things, and expected to disagree with his 2003 book Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, which I read recently. Instead of disagreeing all that much, I found myself saying “Amen” an awful lot.
In this book, McKibben seeks to lay out the case against what he sees as the “frontiers” of genetic engineering, robotics, and nanotechnology, arguing instead for an almost biblical vision of human nature. Along the way, McKibben points out some aspects of contemporary techno-utopian culture Christians would do well to notice.
The book prophetically speaks against the horrors of a technologically “managed” humanity, but it speaks most relevantly to little noticed intrusions of the Brave New World, intrusions that tell us what kind of world we are seeking to engage with the Gospel.
Keep Reading...Spin Like an Egyptian
— Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 —
The parting of the Red Sea was probably a myth, Egypt’s chief archaeologist tells the New York Times today. The archaeologist, Dr. Zahi Hawass, said that he can find no archaeological evidence for the kind of cataclysmic event represented by the Exodus account of God’s deliverance of the Israelite slaves from Egyptian slavery.
Speaking of Jewish and Christian believers in the historicity of the event, Hawass said: “If they get upset, I don’t care. This is my career as an archaeologist. I should tell them the truth. If the people are upset, that is not my problem.”
First of all, it is amazing how the New York Times still finds it newsworthy when a scientist announces a biblical event didn’t happen, right before a major Jewish or Christian holy day. It is also noteworthy that such reports rarely recount all the other biblical claims to historical reality previously “debunked” by the experts: the existence of the Hittites or of King David, for example.
The Times did, however, include an opposing theory, that offered by another archaeologist, Mohamed Abdel-Maqsou, based on his knowledge of contemporary Egypt.
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