A lot of us all over the western world watch England with fascinated horror, to see what our own futures may bring.
Our friend Hal G. P. Colebatch has an article today over at the American Spectator about local government actions to restrict the freedoms of Christians in England that occurred in one single week.
I frankly don’t approve of all the challenged actions, but the pattern of repression, along with the reasons given for repression, are troubling.
Professor James A. Herrick (I’m sorry. The academic title is the Guy Vander Jagt Professor of Communication at Hope College), author of Scientific Mythologies: How science and Science Fiction Forge New Religious Beliefs has written for Christianity Today on certain sci-fi authors’ tendency to spiritualize their materialist or secularist stories:
Science fiction is important to scientists interested in transcendent themes such as the design and purpose of the cosmos and the future of humanity. Dyson, a devoted reader of Stapledon, writes, “Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.” Ironically, the universe that science stripped of the supernatural is being resupplied with deities and redemptive purposes by science fiction writers and moviemakers. Apparently, we cannot do without myths.
… The church must attend more diligently to the presentation of her true myth in public settings. The biblical account of human origins and purpose, of our predicament as well as our redemption, and of the nature and purpose of the cosmos we inhabit, is emotionally, spiritually, and rationally more satisfying than modern myths featuring aliens, starships, divine evolution, hidden knowledge, and biomechanical post-humanity.
The UK’s Channel 4 is running a series on Christian history, and Scottish Pastor Iain Campbell is blogging about it. The first episode argued Christianity was an anti-Semitic invention of the Apostle Paul. Iain writes, “History might demonstrate that some Christians have been against Jews; but the New Testament is decidedly for them. ‘God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew’, says Paul of Israel, and he anticipates a day when they – to quote one of the Hebrew prophets – will look on the one they pierced and mourn for him.”
Another episode tells us how bad the Reformation was and Protestants today [are] a sorry bunch (some Protestants have especially sorry grammar and spelling habits).
From the London Daily Mail: More news from what was once the land of the Venerable Bede, Duns Scotus, Thomas More, John Wesley, William Wilberforce, and C. S. Lewis:
A foster mother has been struck off the register for allowing a Muslim girl in her care to convert to Christianity.
The woman, who has looked after more than 80 children in the past ten years, is considering suing the council over the decision.
Do you think there would have been any problem if she had allowed a Christian child to convert to Islam?
Last April, they ruled that the girl, now 17, should stay away from church for six months.
No coercion was involved:
Of the Christian convert, she said: ‘I did initially try to discourage her. I offered her alternatives.
‘I offered to find places for her to practise her own religion. I offered to take her to friends and family.
‘But she said to me from the word go, ‘I am interested and I want to come.’ She sort of burst in.’
Somewhere an English World War II veteran is lying in a bed in a rest home, asking, “What did I fight to protect?”
Tip: Threedonia.
The Freedom from Religion Foundation organization has put up a few church-styled billboards with the message, “Praise Darwin, Evolve Beyond Belief.” They tried to place one of the billboards in downtown Dayton, Tennessee, site of The Scopes Trial with William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow. My local paper quotes a pastor making a good point:
The Rev. J. Milton Knox, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dayton, said many residents would get “bent out of shape” over the sign but look past more subtle anti-Christian messages every day.
“This mindset continues to be propagated whether it’s on a billboard or not,” he said citing advertising messages like “What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas.”
World has some good articles on Darwin and the current phase of the evolutionary debate.
I note that the bloated plutocrats who run television have chosen to put “House” opposite “Chuck” on the schedule tonight. Thus am I torn between two monosyllabically titled series that I especially enjoy.
I’ll have to go with “House.” “Chuck” is great, and even has a hot girl character named Walker, but Gregory House is the one character on television with whom I most identify. The pain of losing “House” will be greater than that of losing “Chuck.”
Someday (probably when I’m old, blind and deaf) I’ll get Tivo.
I went to a different church this past Sunday. Actually I’ve gone to this different church for the past two weeks. I was contemplating changing my membership (same national church body, different congregations).
As you may have noted from occasional blog posts of mine, my mild enthusiasm for what is called “praise music” in church has cooled over the years to indifference, and has now settled into plain loathing. Some people hate the music, but I can live with the music. It’s the lyrics that scratch my chalkboard. There are exceptions (I can think of exactly one, which we never use in our church anymore), but praise song lyrics are pretty generally amateurish, banal in sentiment, incoherent in theology, and repetitious. Some of them are like a slap in the face to anybody who’s ever attempted to write a decent song lyric. Continue reading Not in praise of praise music
This afternoon, my good wife asked me a simple question. “Where does it say God is a father to the fatherless and a husband to the widow?” As I was sitting at the computer, tethered to that fount of all knowledge, the InterWeb, I looked it up. “A father to the fatherless” comes from Psalm 68:5, but the phrase that follows is either a judge or defender of the widow depending on your translation. Looking up the Hebrew word in question, I see that judge, advocate, and defender are the ideas at hand, close to but not actually a husband. A couple verses in Deuteronomy speak of God the Father’s intent to protect widows and bring justice to those who would harm them. Where is the phrase “husband to the widow?” It doesn’t appear to be in the Bible, unless it came from an old translation which is no longer in use.
More irritating than not finding a quotation you felt strongly about is finding a couple articles which claim to have read the verse. A couple writers said, “I came across a verse that said that God is a husband to the widow and a father to the fatherless.” No reference, of course, but how can people write so carelessly that they don’t double check or reference their biblical quotations?
Or did I just not find the right verse? Any idea where this phrase “husband to the window” came from?
Some days a blog topic leaps out at me and takes me by the proverbial throat. Other days I’m like a wallflower at a dance, watching all the topics foxtrot past; everyone else in a couple and me the odd man out.
Not that I ever went to a dance.
So I shall free-associate. The thing I heard today that impressed me most was something a pastor said at the meeting of the board of the Georg Sverdrup Society, which I attended in my capacity as Journal Editor.
He was talking about the history of Scandinavian Lutherans in America.
In general, he said, there were two kinds of Swedes in America—those who belonged to the One Lutheran Church (called the Augustana Synod), and those who left Lutheranism altogether and became Baptists or Evangelical Free Church or nothing at all.
And among the Danes there were also two sorts—those who belonged to the One Lutheran Church (called, I think, the Danish Synod), and those who left Lutheranism altogether and became Baptists or Pentecostals or Salvation Army (for instance) or nothing at all. (My mother, who was half Norwegian, half Danish, was raised a Methodist, and some of her family were Baptists). Continue reading Herding Norwegians
Here’s a note from a missionary I know. It’s a few days old, but for those of us who know nothing about life in parts of Africa, it’s revealing.
On Saturday, a contact told my friend “that the Lord’s Resistance Army (a rebel group from Uganda that has been terrorizing northern Congo and the Central African Republic (CAR) throughout the past year) are advancing on Assa, a mission station near the CAR border, and moving toward Zemio. There is a large church, a Bible School, a small hospital, and a town that used to have around 8,000 people. People are beginning to flee in panic.
“A general field conference was to begin Monday at Zemio. People usually come in the thousands to attend these conferences. They are trying to get word out to the distant outlying areas to warn them not to come. Please pray for God’s protection for a virtually defenseless people. The LRA are heavily armed and known for their atrocities and brutality. They burn houses, steal the few possessions and food owned by a poverty-stricken people, rape, kill, and capture children and young people for their army.”
If you’ve been watching 24, I believe this year’s storyline uses an African warlord who kidnaps young boys for his army, like this one from Uganda. May the Lord pour out his rage against the LAR and save many of those abused kids and the innocent people they are attacking.