Thinking in more positive terms about political issues

From time to time over the past year when I’ve been tempted to write political rage posts, it has seemed to me that even though they’d be cathartic, that wouldn’t be all that constructive. And while I haven’t studied political theory or public policy much, writing helps me work through my thinking on issues. So, my thought goes, maybe I should spend some time thinking through and writing constructive opinions on various political topics.

Then I came across this tweet from Brian Zahnd (this was before my social media fast, honest!) that seems like a good framework to work from:

twitter.com/BrianZahn…

Off the top of my head, some topics I’d like to consider:

  • Taxation
  • Religious Liberty
  • Health Care
  • Gun control
  • Foreign trade policy
  • Foreign military presence
  • Middle East policy / terrorism
  • Racial justice issues
  • Social programs / social safety net
  • Education
  • Internet / technology policy
  • Campaign finance
  • Term limits
  • Science & space
  • Environmental issues

I’m not working through this all to get Brian Zahnd’s vote - I’d need to run for office first! But it might be constructive to think positively about what policy should be instead of just saying “well, that’s a bad idea”.

Really happy for Scott Frost

Really happy for Scott Frost and impressed to see him take UCF to an undefeated season.

Will be even happier to see him on the sideline in Lincoln wearing the Big Red N next year.

Jesus' Appeal to Human Emotion and Reason

Some really fascinating thoughts from Richard Beck this morning on Jesus’ appeal to human emotion and reasoning as a part of His teaching:

Jesus also used human experience as a hermeneutical and theological tool. In Matthew 12 Jesus enters a synagogue on the Sabbath and finds a man with a withered hand. The way the Pharisees interpreted the Sabbath laws prohibited Jesus from healing the man. But Jesus disagrees, and he makes an appeal to human experience to argue for a different hermeneutical approach to Sabbath keeping. Jesus doesn’t appeal to Scripture or tradition, he asks a question about how something would feel. “How many of you,” Jesus asks, “if a sheep of yours fell into a ditch on the Sabbath, wouldn’t pull it out?” Jesus asks the Pharisees to imaginatively place themselves in this situation, asking them to consult their feelings, experiences and reactions. Jesus expects this appeal to experience to lead to an affirmative answer: They would grab the sheep out of the ditch, even on the Sabbath.

This intrigues me. The conservative circles I inhabit are fond of dismissing claims to human emotion and reason as a hermeneutical tool. (Or at least when that emotion and reason doesn’t challenge the conclusions of the existing theological framework.) If we are totally depraved, the reasoning goes, our emotions and reasoning are also totally depraved and therefore untrustworthy.

I tend to think that our intrinsic moral reactions, while fallen, still hold the echoes of what it means to have been created in the image of God, and as such, they shouldn’t be easily dismissed. Beck gives me another angle here to consider that thought.

Some Thoughts on Thoughts and Prayers

The familiarity of yesterday’s breaking news alerts almost muted the shock. Half a church dead, the other half wounded. I’m old enough to remember the Luby’s shooting, which at the time was nearly unimaginable. And we can name the shootings that followed in the next 25 years in a horrific litany: Columbine. Sandy Hook Elementary. Virginia Tech. San Bernardino. Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston. The Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Las Vegas. And now, hardly before the crime tape was down in Vegas: First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs.

The online response comes in three stages and is by this point, sadly, completely predictable:

Stage 1: Thoughts and Prayers House Speaker Paul Ryan called for prayers.

Same from Texas Governor Greg Abbott. And from Senate Majority Leader McConnell. And from the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security committee. And on and on and on.

Stage 2: The Backlash These range from the political from Senator Elizabeth Warren:

to the full on blast furnace from Wil Wheaton,

(who later tempered his remarks just a bit.)

Stage 3: The Persecution Complex

Christians, offended by the anger against the expression of prayers, start feeling put upon. Such as this example from First Things editor Matthew Schmitz:

And so it goes, back and forth, until the shooting passes from the news cycle either by natural decay or by the violence of yet another tragedy.

I have sympathies on both sides of this one.

I’m a Christian. God tells us to pray. I believe that prayer is effective. I’ve seen it work. Sometimes we pray and God works in direct, miraculous ways. But other times (and in my own limited experience, the majority of the time) we pray, and God works through someone else. Sometimes God even uses us to work out the answer to our own prayers. So I want to be sympathetic with the prayers of Christian political leaders. They go up with my own.

But I’m also sympathetic with the ragers. Wil Wheaton is no Christian. I don’t expect him to believe that prayer is effective. I think he’s angry with Christians like Paul Ryan not because they’re praying, but because they don’t seem to be doing anything else.

I don’t think legislation is the 100% solution to gun violence, but Republican leaders could push for real changes that would help things. To proclaim that you’re praying but then not do whatever else is within your power to address the issue is hypocrisy. And that’s reason enough to anger believers and unbelievers alike.

And to those who immediately start feeling hurt that people are criticizing the church? Maybe it’s time to take a hard look in the mirror. Maybe we deserve that criticism. Maybe we should provide them examples of Christians who are praying and also acting.

As I am finishing up this post, Tyler Huckabee has a twitter thread that captures this a lot more pithily than I have. Here’s how he brings it home:

That’ll preach.

Finished reading: fiction!

Two weeks, two business trips, it was time for light reading. Trolling the fiction shelves found me these:

Price of Duty by Dale Brown

Dale Brown has managed to crank out 21 books in the Patrick McLanahan series over the past 30 years. I’ve read far too many of them. They crossed the line into ridiculousness several books back… and this one is no different. This one reads more like the script for a direct-to-video action movie (a genre, I fear, that has been killed off by Netflix!) than a proper novel.

Tom Clancy - Point of Contact by Mike Maden

Tom Clancy is long dead and buried but his name and book series lives on. According to Amazon, this book is “Jack Ryan Universe book #23”, which is roughly the same output as Dale Brown’s series in roughly the same timeframe. This one was thin enough that, writing this post a couple weeks after finishing the book, I have exactly zero recollection of what this one was about.

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland

Now this one was worth my time. While it starts out seeming to be about ’the return of magic’, it’s much more an adventure in time travel combined with some humorous observations about how bureaucracy can take over and ruin even the best ideas. I had a lot of fun here.

Land of My Sojourn

A Rich Mullins song as timely today as it was when it came out back in 1993.

And the coal trucks come a-runnin’
With their bellies full of coal
And their big wheels a-hummin’
Down this road that lies open like the soul of a woman
Who hid the spies who were lookin’
For the land of the milk and the honey

And this road she is a woman
She was made from a rib
Cut from the sides of these mountains
Oh these great sleeping Adams
Who are lonely even here in paradise
Lonely for somebody to kiss them


And I’ll sing my song and I’ll sing my song
In the land of my sojourn

And the lady in the harbor
She still holds her torch out
To those huddled masses who are
Yearning for a freedom but still it eludes them
The immigrant’s children see their brightest dreams shattered


Here on the New Jersey shoreline in the
Greed and the glitter of those high-tech casinos
Some mendicants wander off into a cathedral
And they stoop in the silence
And there their prayers are still whispered

And I’ll sing their song, and I’ll sing their song
In the land of my sojourn

Nobody tells you when you get born here
How much you’ll come to love it
And how you’ll never belong here
So I call you my country
And I’ll be lonely for my home
And I wish that I could take you there with me

And down the brown brick spine
Of some dirty blind alley
All those drain pipes are drippin’ out
The last Sons Of Thunder
While off in the distance the smoke stacks were belching back
This city’s best answer
And the countryside was pocked
With all of those mail pouch posters
Thrown up on the rotting sideboards of these
Rundown stables like the one that Christ was born in
When the old world started dying
And the new world started coming on

And I’ll sing His song, and I’ll sing His song
In the land of my sojourn

A healthier approach to a mid-life crisis...

Andrew Osenga started a new podcast earlier this year called The Pivot. Episode 3 is his discussion with musician, producer, and composer Don Chaffer. Toward the end of the interview, Don talks about how he’s started writing for musical theater, and how it provides an outlet that he needs as a 40-ish father and husband.

…when you have kids in particular you just give and give and give and give. And one day you wake up and you’re like ‘what do I get, what’s my part in this thing? Because I used to do a lot of stuff I liked… sometimes I would go out to eat or watch a movie! That was crazy!’. I told a monk friend of mine one time, he said ’tell me everything’. And I said ‘well I feel like between family and work I’ve got nothing left.’ And he said “yeah! and a hundred years ago you’d be dead by now, too.” So, there’s just something about this phase of life, it’s just - he’s like, ‘people died at that point just because they were too pooped to keep living’. And I feel like - so that’s what a mid-life crisis is. You hit these limitations and you think ‘I’d rather have, you know, a Corvette and a hot blonde with a boob job. And so you do these crazy stupid things, blow up your whole life. And it’s like – one of the jokes I’ve made is that my mid-life crisis was music theater instead of hookers and blow. But it’s true. I think that it became - one of the things I realized is that you find a healthy outlet to give yourself some space, to do some things you enjoy. Because that’s important. You can’t live on only sacrifice. It ends up being a negation. While love and sacrificial love are endless, hypothetically, they aren’t for a human, right? They’re only endless because they come from somewhere else. There’s some point you kinda run yourself out and you realize ‘I don’t have infinite capacity here to be a loving husband and father. I’ve gotta do something for myself.’ The other piece of it for a marriage is to try to invite each other into it together. Not necessarily doing the same things, because usually that isn’t going to help - you need space from each other - but invite each other into that headspace of like, ‘do some things for yourself. I’ll do some things for myself. We’ll get a babysitter if we can afford it. Or swap. I’ll take the kids tonight, you take them on Wednesday.’

I resonate with that more than I’d like to admit many days. (I bet my wife does, too.)

Over-reaction?

This is a good word…

When we call the lamentations of others Over-reaction without first pursuing knowledge as to what ails them; we expose loveless privilege.

— Kyle J. Howard (@KyleJamesHoward)