One other hymn
This is a communion hymn I wrote a couple years ago.Thank God for God (a Thanksgiving meditation)
On being grateful to God even in the hard times.Christian escapism
Why I don’t believe in the Rapture.The Christian discipline of forgiveness
With thanks to Dr. Stackhouse for his wisdom on repentance, forgiveness, and letting the past be the past and not the present.
Monthly Archives: January 2009
The global-warming hoax and the better environmental path
courtesy of Harold Ambler in HuffPo (which is nowhere I would have expected to see global warming called “the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind,” but there you go). He does a nice job of exposing the baloney “science” underlying global-warming claims (including a point about the limited ability CO2 has to absorb heat); perhaps more importantly, he also points out that bowing to global-warming hysteria would misdirect our environmental efforts and do considerable damage to the world economy—which would not only increase human suffering, it would also further damage the global environment by moving the world collectively back toward more primitive, and dirtier, technologies for energy generation.One of my fellow debaters in high school used to say, “I’m pro-environment, but anti-environmentalist.” Issues like this make me think he was right.HT: Bill Roberts
God does the improbable, too
We had a good and surprising thing happen today—I won’t go into what, because it’s my wife’s story to tell or not to tell, as she chooses—and it got me thinking. It wasn’t the sort of thing that’s completely impossible unless God does a miracle, and so you pray for a miracle, and sometimes God says yes; rather, it was the sort of thing that’s completely improbable, and so you never pray for it because it never crosses your mind that it could happen. It was the sort of possibility that’s so far off the normal course of how things happen that my wife had never even thought to hope for it, or to ask for it . . . and yet, in God’s good time, it did, completely out of left field. She never saw it coming (nor did I).God does this sometimes; he doesn’t just do the impossible, he also does the wildly improbable—the sort of thing which is objectively easier than healing the sick and raising the dead, but just as unheard-of in our experience. I think in some ways that impresses us even more, despite the fact that it’s objectively easier; granted, it might not show off as much of the power of God, but instead it reveals a great deal about the imagination of God, that he can think of and bring about good things which would never cross our minds. God isn’t simply a being who has a lot more power than us, nor even just a being who has a lot more power and knows a lot more; he’s also infinitely wiser, more creative, better at thinking sideways and around corners. He conceives of possibilities that we would never conceive of even if we had the power to make them happen; and then he brings them about, out of the blue, just to remind us that he’s God and we’re not. (Well, not just to remind us, since he uses them to accomplish all sorts of other things, too. But still.)
How not to grow a big church
I was bouncing around Kathy Escobar’s blog—now that she’s finished her series on what the church could and should be, I need to put up a post on that—and caught a link to a post on her congregation’s blog on “8 sure ways to shrink a church.” I commend it to your reading. No doubt, the principles they lay out are no way to create a big organization; but they are, I think, quite helpful in growing the people of God.
In defense of conservative government
Contra the triumphalism of many liberals—for whatever reason, the Democratic Party in the US has much of the same “Natural Governing Party” view of itself as Canada’s Liberal Party, though it’s spent far less of the past century in power than the Grits—and somewhat despite the ways in which the years in the driver’s seat have pulled the GOP away from its conservative principles, the three decades (give or take) since the Reagan Revolution have seen some major substantive conservative successes and achievements which have brought significant benefits to this country. Matthew Continetti has a useful brief rundown of some accomplishments of which conservatives can be proud, including welfare reform and decreases in drug use and violent crime.There is one accomplishment he lists, though, which strikes me as possibly double-edged:
In 2002, President Bush named Philip Mangano executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. Mangano has spent the last six years pointing out that the way to reduce homelessness is to give people homes. Experts call this the “housing first” strategy. It works. The most recent data show that the number of chronically homeless declined by 30 percent between 2005 and 2007.
One has to wonder, how much of that was only possible because of subprime mortgates?
Another model for fighting terrorists
Afghanistan, and the Indian subcontinent. Iraq. Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. The Philippines.The Philippines? Yes, the Philippines are also a significant theater in the GWOT, and the other place besides Iraq where we and our allies have had noteworthy success against the jihadist movement led by al’Qaeda and its allies. The conflict there is a very different sort, with a different set of restrictions (many of them political, since we’re operating within the territory of a sovereign ally against its own domestic enemies); but as Max Boot and Richard Bennet point out, it offers us a model for how a “soft and light” approach—”a ‘soft’ counterinsurgency strategy, a light American footprint”—can work against terrorist groups.Perhaps the chief benefit of such an approach, where possible, is illustrated by the fact that you probably didn’t even know we’re fighting in the Philippines. As Boot and Bennet note,
One of the beauties of this low-intensity approach is that it can be continued indefinitely without much public opposition or even notice. The reason why Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines gets so much less attention than the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan is not hard to see. In Iraq there are 140,000 troops. In Afghanistan 35,000. In the Philippines 600. The Iraq war costs over $100 billion a year, Afghanistan over $30 billion. The Philippines costs $52 million a year.Even more important is the human cost. While thousands of Americans have been killed or maimed in Afghanistan and Iraq, in the Philippines only one American soldier has died as a result of enemy action—Special Forces Sergeant First Class Mark Jackson, who was killed in 2002 by a bomb in Zamboanga City. Three soldiers have been wounded in action, the most serious injuries being sustained by Captain Mike Hummel in the same bombing. Ten more soldiers died in 2002 in an accident when their MH-47 helicopter crashed. Every death is a tragedy, but with the number of tragedies in the Philippines minuscule, there is scant opposition to the mission either in the Philippines or in the United States. That’s important, because when battling an insurgency the degree of success is often closely correlated to the duration of operations.
As the article goes on to concede, this kind of approach won’t work everywhere, because it “requires having capable partners in the local security forces”; we couldn’t have started off on this footing in Iraq or Afghanistan, and there would be real problems in trying to handle Afghanistan this way (or, just as much to the point, Pakistan) even now, though it seems to me that there would be real benefit to implementing as much of it as we can as part of our operations there. In Iraq, however, our success in the Philippines offers a worthy roadmap for the way forward. This is ironic, since our conflict in the Philippines at the turn of the last century offered the best model for the initial situation in Iraq; but as the new government in Baghdad and its security forces continue to grow stronger with our assistance, there’s a real opportunity to transition to a model for American involvement along the lines of our work in the Philippines; the surge has won us that opportunity. Perhaps in another few years our work in Iraq will get as little attention, and be as successful, as our work in Mindanao. That, it seems to me, is the goal, so that when the House of Sa’ud finally falls, Iraq will be a strong and stable ally in the region as we try to deal with whatever comes next on the Arabian Peninsula.
When you have to laugh to keep from crying
be grateful Dave Barry still has his column. His “Year in Review” column from this past Sunday is a classic; of course, with so much material to work with, it ought to be. For a taste, here’s the first part of his entry for January,
which begins, as it does every four years, with presidential contenders swarming into Iowa and expressing sincerely feigned interest in corn. The Iowa caucuses produce two surprises:
- On the Republican side, the winner is Mike Huckabee, folksy former governor of Arkansas, or possibly Oklahoma, who vows to remain in the race until he gets a commentator gig with Fox. His win deals a severe blow to Mitt Romney and his bid to become the first president of the android persuasion. Not competing in Iowa are Rudy Giuliani, whose strategy is to stay out of the race until he is mathematically eliminated, and John McCain, who entered the caucus date incorrectly into his 1996 Palm Pilot.
- On the Democratic side, the surprise winner is Barack Obama, who is running for president on a long and impressive record of running for president. A mesmerizing speaker, Obama electrifies voters with his exciting new ideas for change, although people have trouble remembering exactly what these ideas are because they are so darned mesmerized. Some people become so excited that they actually pass out. These are members of the press corps.
Obama’s victory comes at the expense of former front-runner Hillary Clinton, who fails to ignite voter passion despite a rip-snorter of a stump speech in which she recites, without notes, all 17 points of her plan to streamline tuition-loan applications.
An unintended consequence of socializing medicine
In the latest issue of Forbes, Peter Huber points out the hidden cost of efforts to cut prescription-drug costs: the US is currently the only major market supporting research into new drugs. Government efforts to bring down drug costs will no doubt make existing drugs cheaper; but they will also choke off the flow of new drugs, because the money needed to finance the research and development behind them will no longer be there.This points to the flaw in the reasoning of those who point to Canada and say, “Why can’t we do that? It works for them.” The fact is, their system only works as well as it does because of the US, which helps keep their costs down and their waiting lists more tolerable by treating many of their patients, and because the US’ open market effectively subsidizes their drug costs. It will be interesting to see, if the Democrats get their way and move the American health-care system hard left, what the other unintended consequences are for health care in Canada, and Mexico, and elsewhere in the world. I have a hunch they won’t be pretty.
This is the day that the Lord has made
let us rejoice and be glad in it. This has been a productive study leave so far; the most pressing item on the agenda was sermon planning, and I actually got farther than I had intended—I have all of 2009, not merely blocked out even, but laid out in detail. This is of course only prospective, since God reserves the right to upskittle all my plans; but still, if I have to deviate, I now have a base course to deviate from, which is quite satisfying (and more than a little reassuring, honestly).As noted, of course, that wasn’t the only objective I set myself for this week (just the one that needed to be accomplished first), so with that done, it’s on to other projects. At the moment, though, I could really use a brain break, so I’ll leave that for this evening; for now, it’s time to join the kids on the sledding hill.
Wishing you a joyful New Year
I’m not sanguine about 2009; I don’t think it’s going to be, objectively and materially, a good year for America or the world. That said, I hope and pray that even if it’s a hard year for all of us, that God uses those difficulties and those challenges to make us a better, wiser, more mature, and more godly people, and thus that it will be a year that bears good fruit in this nation in the future; and I pray for everyone who reads this that God will richly bless you this coming year in ways you do not expect and cannot see coming now, such that whatever happens, you will look back on 2009 as a good year, and one filled with joy.Happy New Year.