Monthly Archives: November 2003

Another false solution

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I’ve had a couple of people recommend Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code, but I haven’t gotten around to reading it (with a three-year-old, a six-week-old, and sermons to write every week, I’m a little behind on time for new fiction—new adult fiction, at least). After running across Sandra Miesel’s evisceration of the book in the September issue of Crisis, however, I think that’s just as well; I still intend to read it, but now I’m aware it won’t be for pleasure. The abuse of history to serve contemporary causes infuriates me, and from Miesel’s analysis, this book is a particularly egregious example of that offense. Clearly, though, that hasn’t stopped a lot of people from buying into its portrayal of history and Christianity.

Another piece worth reading on this book is one Miesel co-wrote with the Catholic theologian Carl E. Olson; this is the first part of what will be a two-part article.

“Evangelism”? What’s that?

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Now, this is just sad; but maybe it contains the seeds of hope, too. Apparently, the controversy over Avodat Yisrael, the Messianic Jewish congregation planted recently by Philadelphia Presbytery of the PCUSA, has started Presbyterians thinking about evangelism—many for the first time. According to Leslie Scanlon, the reporter who wrote the piece, “For some Presbyterians, the idea of evangelizing people in the United States—as opposed to China or Africa or Latin America—is sort of a new thought.” As a firm believer in the importance of sharing the gospel, I find that cause for depression. Still, if this is what it takes to start the PCUSA doing evangelism again, if this is what it takes to renew the denomination’s commitment to planting churches (which is the best large-scale evangelistic strategy there is), then so be it.

And as someone with good friends who are Messianic Jews (some of whom are part of the Messianic Jewish community in Jerusalem, which is not an easy place to be), here’s hoping more of them are like Avodat Yisrael—however much flak we take for it.

Backlash

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An article by Uwe Siemon-Netto, UPI’s religious-affairs editor, posted on The Layman‘s website (and nowhere else, oddly enough), reports that the latest Pew survey has shown a public backlash in America against homosexuals, perhaps driven in part by the recent court decision in Massachusetts. It isn’t that Americans want to deny equal rights for homosexuals or mind being around them, that much is clear from the survey; but almost all groups (including Democrats, by a small margin, though Siemon-Netto doesn’t mention that datum) oppose gay marriage. The only exception, understandably, is those with no religious affiliation.

I’m not sure of the exact significance of this, but it does make one think.

“The Occupation of Iraq Means Liberty”

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The problem with most of the news the US gets from Iraq is that it gets it from Westerners; even the statements we get from Iraqis are filtered through Western media. There is a cure for that problem, though: MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute). I was particularly struck a few weeks ago by a piece they posted excerpting (at length) three columns by an expatriate Iraqi, who flatly declared, “the occupation is a blessed and promising liberation for Iraq, even if the U.N., Europe, Russia, India, and all the Arabs say otherwise.”

Kamel al-Sa’doun, writing from Norway in a London-based Arabic daily, makes this argument for two reasons: the evil of the Saddam regime (which, he notes, it was easy for his supporters in other Arab nations to ignore—they didn’t have to live through it), and the past history of American occupations. His hope for Iraq is “a safeguard that will create an open vista in which we can thoroughly reexamine our assumptions, just like Germany, South Korea and other nations . . . which the Americans liberated.” Here’s hoping he gets his wish. We certainly owe Iraq no less.