I was standing in Wal-Mart today, not buying anything, just watching the HDTV’s as I do from time to time.  Today was a knockoff of March of the Penguins. If you’ve seen it, or Happy Feet, you know that after the eggs are laid, the fathers shelter them while the mothers go off to fish.  By the time they get back the eggs have hatched and the babies are all fluffy and cute.

Well, some babies don’t make it, so when the mamas come home they have all these motherly instincts and no one to use them on.  Some mamas don’t make it either, so the babies (and the fathers) wait with anticipation that won’t be satisfied.  So they seek a new mama, like babies will do.  We know that from human experience.

What we don’t know from human experience, is the mad rush the female penguins who lost their chicks made for the orphans.  If only human women would make such a rush to care for our orphans.  My wife and I plan to adopt at least one child, and we marvel at the lengths women will go to in order to have biological children - hormones, drugs, ivf, surrogacy - when there are children everywhere who need loving as much as they need someone to love.

Shall we leave our own motherless and fatherless out in the cold, while these animals race and fight for the chance to care for theirs?

I’m not buying that Barack Obama has suddenly shed an uncommon and unprecedented light on the discussion of race in America. And I’m not buying that the racial views of Jeremiah Wright and others are at all justifiable.

On Thursday an article came out at AmericanThinker.com called “Obama’s Anger“. The whole article is worth reading. The author, Ed Kaitz spent quite a bit of time with the Vietnamese immigrants in New Orleans. He talks about how they came over after the war with no money, no friends, and no knowledge of English. They faced “a mostly unfriendly and suspicious local population:

They did however have strong families, a strong work ethic, and the “Audacity of Hope.” Within a generation, with little or no knowledge of English, the Vietnamese had achieved dominance in the fishing industry there and their children were already achieving the top SAT scores in the state.

He then recounts his conversation with a black prison psychologist he met on a plane:

asked him point blank why these Vietnamese refugees, with no money, friends, or knowledge of the language could be, within a generation, so successful. I also asked him why it was so difficult to convince young black men to abandon the streets and take advantage of the same kinds of opportunities that the Vietnamese had recently embraced.

(continue reading…)

I’ve come up with a genius plan to Get high-def movies on the cheap. I went to Circuit City today and picked up an HD DVD player for my 360. You may think it foolish, HD DVD being abandoned by every major retailer and deprecated by Toshiba, but you’d be wrong. See, the player was $50, and Best Buy is selling all their HD DVD’s for 30% off. Amazon has Planet Earth for $45, The Ocean’s Trilogy for $37, and I Am Legend for $19. I think it’s friggin’ steal.

My favorite part of the plan is how the XBOX and HD DVD and Wii are sitting on top of my VCR and 11-year-old DVD player.

So I was on 9marks the other day, catching up, and ran into this back and forth about “social restoration” (there’s more that I didn’t link to…keep reading). It got me thinking once again about why we do what we do. This question, the reason behind our social ministries, has become more important to me over the last few days because I’ve come to realize how much it says about our faith in Christ.

J.D. Greear set out four categories in his post that started the whole thing: (continue reading…)

I knew it from the moment I got the email, but I walked into it anyway. For our interaction this week Mike posed the question: “Heaven and Hell. What are they, where are they and who’s going?” It was blunt, and potentially dangerous…right up my alley.

But it was con. In his post on the subject, he says this:

In fact, as I’ve already indicated, I do not believe that two destinations such as those exist, so the discussion of who is going and how they get there is moot!

I could have played the same game with my question, but chose not to. This is not an invitation to a shared intellectual exercise. It’s more like Carrie being voted prom queen so they could dump a bucket a pig’s blood on her. Don’t worry, I’m not telekinetic…

So I sent him this email, which I am only making public to try to avoid a future ambush. If you think it’s in bad taste, I apologize:

Mike,

I enjoy difficult and uncomfortable questions. I even enjoy being backed into a corner occasionally. But I don’t appreciate the bait-and-switch game. I could have asked the same type of loaded question the first time around, but I had hoped we’d both want to work harder than that. If this is the way things are going to be – you asking loaded rhetorical questions as straw-men so that you can respond “in true postmodern fashion” and denigrate “those who are looking for linear answers” – our interaction will not last very long, which would be unfortunate.

Charles

So Mike, I offer you a challenge. Let’s make an effort to come up with questions that are a challenge for both of us, instead of creating easy opportunities to make our pet arguments. That way something real is happening, instead of some kind of sound-byte theology.

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Update:

Here’s Mike’s response to my email, posted out of fairness:

Dude - you’re reading me all wrong. I’m sorry if I caught you off-guard, I answered the questions honestly, and the linear comment wasn’t directed at you in the least. I chose that question because it’s basic to the faith, and I figured we would have differing answers to it. The comments you’ve quoted were honest acknowledgments that the way I would have answered the same question 10 years ago in no way resembles the way I would now. (I was the guy looking for the linear answers back then and would have been quite satisfied with one.)

Again, I apologize for putting you off but please know I wouldn’t do what you’ve suggested I did.

Peace,
Mike

 I guess we’ll see what happens next week…

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