It appears that the Associated Press has learned that there are Christians like Saddleback pastor Rick Warren who invoke the name of Jesus (!) when they pray and that it may offend some — notably people like journalists who hold to a faith that relies on human understanding alone. Warren, for his part, played it coy:
Warren did not answer directly when asked whether he would dedicate his prayer to Jesus. In a statement Tuesday to The Associated Press, Warren would say only that, “I’m a Christian pastor so I will pray the only kind of prayer I know how to pray.”
“Dedicate” his prayer to Jesus? What kind of people are these Christians? The Associated Press investigates further and finds this, courtesy of the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, who invoked the name of Jesus at George W. Bush’s 2001 inauguration:
Evangelicals generally expect their clergymen to use Jesus’ name whenever and wherever they lead prayer. Many conservative Christians say cultural sensitivity goes way too far if it requires religious leaders to hide their beliefs.
“If Rick Warren does not pray in Jesus’ name, some folks are going to be very disappointed,” Caldwell said in a recent phone interview. “Since he’s evangelical, his own tribe, if you will, will have some angst if he does not do that.”
This Jesus thing is tricky. Everybody knows that the only people allowed to invoke his name are liberal politicians bent on shaming conservatives into paying way more taxes. When it comes from an acknowledged evangelical minister it can only mean proselytizing. Fortunately, the Associated Press is on the case. Stay tuned.
My younger brother, serving our country in Iraq, writes about what the mission looks like these days. Surprisingly, it looks less like a war and more like everyday life:
In 2006 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Muhammad Yunus for his work in giving micro-grants to people needing a little help to improve their small businesses. He showed the world how grants as little as $1,000 could change the lives of those (high-potential, low income) people. This week, I began handing out micro-grant applications to local sheiks (who will help me find and nominate the best candidates from the area).
I wish I could say that I thought of the idea. I am merely helping to facilitate the program in our area. The idea is simple yet powerful: meaningful growth and improvement can come from humble beginnings. This isn’t just an Iraqi phenomenon either; this micro-grant program is growing in the United States as well (see http://www.microgrants.net).
The types of applications I’ll be looking for will buy tools for that small engine repair shop; it will buy refrigeration for the local butcher to keep his products safe and hygienic. It will add a sewing machine to the local clothing shop, it will add workers to these shops, it will expand the economic base and capacity of this area.
As my brother writes, none of this kind of work would be possible without first securing the area. So, in other words, there has been significant progress made in Iraq. When you hear about reporters throwing their shoes at the president of the United States, remember that there’s more news out there than what gets on the network.
Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Lisa Miller, religion editor at Newsweek, were recently guests on NPR’s Talk of the Nation Program. The program’s topic, “What’s The Word? The Bible on Gay Marriage” was discussed in the context of Miller’s recent cover story for Newsweek, “The Biblical Case for Gay Marriage.” You can listen to the program here.
Greg Koukl, who does the Stand to Reason radio broadcast — also available as a podcast — gives three questions we should ask when reading Newsweek’s “The Religious Case for Gay Marriage”:
1. What do they want you to believe?
2. What are the reasons they offer in support of this idea they want you to believe?
3. Are the reasons good ones?
Koukl reviews the article and goes through these questions on the podcast.
When the economy is struggling, and your industry is on a steady decline, what is your next move? Well, in the case of Newsweek, you decide to become something totally different and, in the process, spit at a good deal of your subscriber base. Is it working? If is if you want to shed circulation and jobs, as reported by the Wall Street Journal:
Newsweek could subtract anywhere from 500,000 to one million copies from its current guarantee of 2.6 million, according to people familiar with the magazine’s thinking. That Newsweek is exploring a rate-base cut was first reported by the trade publication Folio.
Newsweek's highly controversial cover story comes as it is dropping subscribers and guarantees to advertisers.
The WSJ reported Newsweek “has emphasized commentary on hot-button issues, such as gay marriage, by big-name journalists like editor Jon Meacham and international editor Fareed Zakaria, as well as contributions from political operatives and academics like Michael Beschloss and Sean Wilentz.” And while looking at these issues is not in itself something to be up in arms about, it’s the way Newsweek has been going about it that has driven — or about to — subscribers and advertisers away:
Mr. Meacham said recently that Newsweek has never been an objective summarizer of the week’s events, or “AP on nicer paper,” though he acknowledged a greater emphasis lately on editorializing. “We are trying to be more provocative,” he said.
This week’s cover story, “The Religious Case for Gay Marriage,” is a case in point. The story spawned an organized campaign to get readers to cancel their subscriptions and elicited so many angry emails that Newsweek Chief Executive Tom Ascheim had to open a new email account to handle the added volume, a company spokesman said.
For those who subscribed thinking they were getting “AP on nicer paper,” the shift to provocation was jarring and, mostly, unwelcome. Without any rebuttal or guidance from a theologian, lines like this are tossed out by religion editor Lisa Miller in her piece “The Religious Case for Gay Marriage” (emphasis mine):
The Bible does condemn gay male sex in a handful of passages. Twice Leviticus refers to sex between men as “an abomination” (King James version), but these are throwaway lines in a peculiar text given over to codes for living in the ancient Jewish world, a text that devotes verse after verse to treatments for leprosy, cleanliness rituals for menstruating women and the correct way to sacrifice a goat—or a lamb or a turtle dove. Most of us no longer heed Leviticus on haircuts or blood sacrifices; our modern understanding of the world has surpassed its prescriptions. Why would we regard its condemnation of homosexuality with more seriousness than we regard its advice, which is far lengthier, on the best price to pay for a slave?
Of course, this kind of writing did not go unnoticed. MZ Hemingway at GetReligion.org gives a lengthy excoriation of Miller and her work:
When I started looking at the media coverage of this hot topic, I had to do just that. As a libertarian, I was unfamiliar with why people thought the state should define marriage, much less why it should be defined in such a way as to limit it to a certain number or sex of people. And what I found is that there is an unbelievable wealth of argument in favor of traditional marriage. And most of it is based (no, not in the fevered imaginations of what Hollywood and the media elite think religious conservatives believe) but in NaturalLaw. In this way of thinking, society defines marriage as a sexual union between a husband and wife, based around the ideas that babies are created via intercourse, that procreation is necessary for the survival of society and that babies need fathers as well as mothers. So the entire premise of this article is wrong, if you look at it that way.
But if you are going to pretend that opposition to same-sex marriage is based Sola Scriptura, could we at least get our Scripture right?
This is such hackery that it’s offensive. Abraham and Sarah, while certainly noted for their eventual trust in God were basically poster children for marital disobedience when they didn’t trust God to provide them with children. Even though he promised them they would have offspring. Sarah was a jealous and cruel slavemaster and Abraham was pliant and cowardly during their Hagar offensive. In fact, if you are reading the Old Testament as a self-improvement book based on anything other than the commandments from God, you are an idiot. God’s chosen people, some of them with great and abiding faith, are sinful disasters — the lot of them.
I hold sacred the New Testament model of marriage and find Miller’s comments to be beneath contempt. I also wonder what, if anything, she has read from the New Testament.
When my husband read the opening graph of this train wreck of a hit piece, he wondered if these words of Jesus, found in the Gospel of Matthew, indicated indifference to family:
And He answered and said to them, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.”
My younger brother, who posts at Jedi Blog when he’s not doing his job as a major in the U.S. Army, has written a moving piece about something we can all relate to in some sense. Imagine being in a place that is far from the ones you love, where a good many people hate your guts, where the conditions are hard and you work long hours. Now imagine that the conditions you’ve been adapting to just got worse. Would you complain? Would you feel sorry for yourself? It would be so easy, and my brother makes it clear in his writing that the was definitely the mood. That is, until something changed.
Read here to find out what and then ask yourself if you’ve maybe been feeling sorry for yourself lately.
My younger brother, who posts at 
Rockstanding 