Chinese Canadian Chris Tse won “Poetry Slam” in Vancouver, BC, in December 2009 with this performance.
Poetry Slam helps keep alive "blood, sweat, and tears poetry delivered live inches from your face," as 2009 National Poetry Slam co-director Henry Sampson put it.
Whether Tse really speaks with blunt eloquence to "what makes young believers tick," as Marty Duren argues, this is a fine work and more than worth the time spent listening to it.
From the Psychology Today essay by Nathan Heflick who [without mentioning Richard Land] wrote:
There are about a zillion verses in the Bible saying we should help the poor, show compassion, be loving (it is the chief virtue right?) etc etc. What I cannot find is a verse where Jesus doesn't help others, or even argues for that. It seems I live in a parellel universe where somehow this equates to "but people who are poor are lazy and shouldn't get our help." Do you really think Jesus would oppose universal healthcare because his taxes would get raised? Really?
Read the rest here.
[H/T: Mainstream Baptist]
Tim Collard, who is retired from the British foreign service and spent most of his diplomatic career in China and Germany, writes about the ongoing U.S. struggle with health reform for the London Telegraph:
You might argue that America is a Christian country too. Oh no it isn’t. You can’t serve both God and Mammon, the Man said, you have to choose one or the other, and the USA has made it admirably clear where it stands. And it flourishes. Yes, a few thousand lives are wrecked by the lack of access to healthcare. But that’s an acceptable price to pay for all the private jets and Manhattan super-apartments, surely? Let’s hope the Man was kidding when he said all that stuff about camels and the eyes of needles.
Read the entire blog here.
Jennifer Harris explains that Christian ethicists view health care as basic right:
Other industrialized nations already provide basic health care, and consider it a human right rather than a commercial commodity, said Terry Rosell, professor of pastoral theology in ethics and ministry praxis at Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Shawnee, Kan., and program associate for disparities in health and health care at the Center for Practical Bioethics in Kansas City, Mo. “They consider us to be barbarians for leaving out millions of our most vulnerable citizens—and non-citizens. They consider us immoral to allow some to grow rich off the sufferings of others.”
Read the entire piece here.
Rifqa Bary is the seventeen-year-old who fled from Ohio to Florida, saying she feared her Muslim father would put her to death for converting to Christianity, and who is at the center of what Time calls the Florida Culture War Circus.
Her status as a minor, whose interests the courts in two states are obligated to treat as paramount, and inevitable limitations in knowledge about her circumstances, should have been enough to move concerned people of good faith to behave with restraint.
Sunday her mother's former court-appointed attorney, Craig McCarthy, came forward in a St. Petersburg Times column to say gently that the culture warriors have gotten their rhetoric ahead of the facts.
A conservative, evangelical Christian, he says:
And I also believe that many Christian conservatives have allowed themselves to adopt a narrative and thus reach conclusions about the Rifqa Bary case prematurely, just as we accuse the mainstream media of sticking to their preferred narratives instead of squaring their passions with reality.
He goes on to bluntly illustrate the case:
By Aug. 12, I already had solid documentation that at least one thing circulating in the media and on blogs was flat wrong: that the parents had not reported the child missing for 10 days. Not long after, I was able to nail down another misreported "fact," that the child's note left to her parents had not been given to police. Neither of those things are true.
Why are those relatively mundane facts important? They are important because the person reporting them couldn't possibly know those things, yet so-called adults surrounding Rifqa eagerly passed those things on to media without analysis, one imagines, because they served to paint the child's parents in a bad light.
. . .
I was annoyed as a Christian, as an officer of the court and as a litigator (in that order) that many with whom I agree on many issues were so willing to disregard the notion that a parent has the right in this country to raise and influence a child without governmental interference, unless there is evidence of abuse or neglect that is credible and not based on stereotypes or based on the beliefs or actions of what people who are not the parents might think, feel or do ... Suffice it to say that a growing list of otherwise uninterested people would have to be lying in order for what you think is true about this case to be true.
McCarthy is, in short, suggesting that right wing activist writers who have poured forth a stream of shrill allegations, have misled all who believed them. Attacks on mainstream media who would not report as fact that which McCarthy now indicates is untrue, were unjustified.
His column deserves a careful reading here.
We feel McCarthy offers good reasons for thoughtful people of good faith to agree that it is time to dial back the heat and volume and proceed with watchful restraint.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement in its official report last week found, according to CNN, "no evidence whatsoever of alleged abuse or threats of death made by the girl's parents."
Her personal writings say she wants to be a prophet.
The matter returns to court this afternoon.
Updated: 7 p.m., Monday, Sept. 21: Rifqa Bary remains in Florida foster care for the time being, reports the Miami Herald.
British Baptist journalist Jonathan Langley writes for the Associated Baptist Press that:
... in a week when Americans opposed to a large role for government in health-care reform have been attacking the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, mistaking American rights for “Christian rights” highlights a tendency in some American Christian circles to mistake the United States for the Kingdom of God.
He goes from that right to the heart of the objection some have to health reform. We Americans tend to believe one and all that God is on our side. Thus anything we feel is somehow un-American must be evil:
This, I think, helps explain why there have been such vehement denunciations of the British health-care system in America in recent days. Socialism, to those still brainwashed by Sen. Joseph McCarthy's legacy, is “un-American.” Why? Because, as an old colleague returning from a time in Chicago explained to me last week, the American dream is to work for yourself and your own betterment. And any attempt to make you pay even a little for someone else's health care is a violation of that dream.
Yet as Christians, he writes, "Our duty is to remember that the God Jesus Christ proclaims requires his children to give freely, love selflessly and sacrifice readily for the well-being of others."
Driven by that faith-based logic he concludes:
Let's pray that our American brothers and sisters can free themselves of any heresies that would see them deny the less fortunate among them health care for the sake of any false dream.
From Compass Direct News:
Five months after the daughter of a member of Saudi Arabia’s religious police [Fatima Al-Mutairi] was killed for writing online about her faith in Christ, Saudi authorities have reportedly arrested a 28-year-old Christian man for describing his conversion and criticizing the kingdom’s judiciary on his Web site.
. . .
On his web site, which Saudi authorities have blocked, [Hamoud] Bin Saleh wrote that his journey to Christ began after witnessing the public beheading of three Pakistanis convicted of drug charges. Shaken, he began an extensive study of Islamic history and law, as well as Saudi justice. He became disillusioned with sharia (Islamic law) and dismayed that kingdom authorities only prosecuted poor Saudis and foreigners.
Read the rest here.
Egyptian judge, according to WordNet Daily, said:
A woman arrested at the Cairo airport because her identity card described her as a Christian has been threatened for her faith by the judge in her case, according to a new report.
. . .
The decision to grant her bail came Saturday in the hearing before Hashem after Makkar told the judge about her new Christian faith and her abandonment of Islam.
Tawfiq told Compass Direct "the judge then said, 'I want to talk with Martha alone,' so we all left the room, and he said to her, 'Nobody changes from Muslim to Christian – you are a Muslim.'
Read it all here.
The American Life League MySQL server choked on their "abortion donuts" news release. You cannot can now read it here, where they busted a rhetorical gusset over Krispy Kreme's offer of a "free donut of choice" to celebrate "American's sense of pride and freedom of choice on Inauguration Day."
They and others twisted that donut marketeering into an allusion to "freedom of choice," which refers to a legal right to an abortion, and by twisting created reason to take grave offense.
Thus ALL president Judy Brown could write:
The next time you stare down a conveyor belt of slow-moving, hot, sugary glazed donuts at your local Krispy Kreme you just might be supporting President-elect Barack Obama's radical support for abortion on demand – including his sweeping promise to sign the Freedom of Choice Act as soon as he steps in the Oval Office, Jan. 20.
Understandable. It's a big anti-abortion/pro-life week. Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry warned recently on National Public Radio that "the pro-life movement is imploding" and should begin "ratcheting up our rhetoric." ALL et al doing their part.
President Bush did his part by proclaiming Jan. 18 Sanctity of Human Life Day. Lest anyone miss the point, his proclamation concludes, "We ... encourage more of our fellow Americans to join our just and noble cause."
The Christian Defense Coalition (CDC) is completing it's Jan. 1-19 campaign of fasting and prayer for President-elect Obama, conducted in part because it is "deeply saddened by his policy choices concerning abortion."
The CDC will be holding an Inauguration pro-life vigil with a series of protest signs along the parade route during the Presidential Inauguration.
The Christian Defense Coalition in New Jersey and others also have plans to demonstrate their views.
Operation Rescue has already decried as unbiblical Rick Warren's role in the inauguration and is holding a variety of events associated with the January 22 anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
Dubbing the inauguration "P for Perverse," Gary Cass of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission has recommended that we "pray that God will not rain fire and brimstone down on Washington DC," and if our prayers are heard, it seems some pro-life forces will rise there with donutless effect to Terry's call.
Otherwise, remember to ask your wife not to look back as you leave D.C.
On April 17, 2005, at the southern California Anaheim Angels sports stadium thirty thousand Saddleback Church members, more than ever gathered in one spot, assembled to celebrate Saddleback's 25th anniversary and listened as Rick Warren announced his vision for the next 25 years of the church: the P.E.A.C.E. Plan.
Towards the close of his nearly one hour speech, Pastor Warren asked his followers to be as committed to Jesus as the young Nazi men and women who spelled out in mass formation with their bodies the words "Hitler, we are yours," in 1939 at the Munich Stadium, were committed to the Führer of the Third Reich, a major instigator of a World War that claimed 55 million lives. ...
You may purchase the entire audio recording of this Rick Warren presentation from Saddleback Church.
The entire blog entry by Bruce Wilson at Talk To Action.
From slaughtering Buddhist monks in 2007 the Burmese junta has moved on to steadily increasing oppression of the Christian and Muslim minorities. In the 1990s, authorities stop issuing permits for churches and mosques to buy land and construct buildings, forcing worship in homes and apartments. And, Religion Clause writes:
... both Christians and Muslims were ordered last week to stop holding religious services in residential apartments. Mizzima reported on Wednesday that in Rangoon, the Kyauktada Township Peace and Development Council held a meeting with nearly 50 church leaders last Monday to deliver their demand. ... According to a subsequent report by Mizzima, Muslim leaders were separately summoned by authorities on Monday and similarly ordered to stop holding worship services in private apartments.
Maybe you wore cowboy boots to your morning cowboy church service, says boston.com. After all, the Cowboy Church Network of North America, based in Midland, N.C., reports having "started dozens of churches in 12 states and Canada since 2003."
Neither Boston nor Midland has a native cowboy culture, but cowboy churches are about getting people casually and nostalgically into church. Baptism in a horse trough is about showmanship intended to attract an audience, not authenticity.
This evangelical beguilement is primarily a Southern Baptist church planting strategy, one which nonetheless has some rough Methodist, Presbyterian, independent and other analogs.
Church-planting may be the stated mainspring, but in this era of low church attendance and declining church membership, it's more often about bringing nonattending Christians back to church.
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