Je Suis Charlie? Terrorism, the Left, and Religion

In the following bit of cultural commentary there is much on Islam. I am not directing a critique toward all of Islam. I do not think that all Muslims are Islamists. Far the contrary. There are hundreds of millions of Muslims in the world who actively despise acts of terror. Countless clerics and rulers and Islamic organizations constantly and publicly denounce these acts. Even the Hezbollah chief has recently condemned terrorist violence (whatever his definition of terrorism might be).

I: The Spirit of Marx is Dancing

On Jimmy Kimmel Live a few nights ago, Bill Maher claimed that hundreds of millions of Muslims applaud terrorism, because when you insult the Prophet "all [non-violent] bets are off." I'm unconvinced. I simply don't know what most Muslims harbor in their hearts about the Prophet and terrorism. And I know enough of Maher's anti-religious utopia. But as a Westerner - an American holding a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies from a State University, currently enrolled in a graduate political theology course at Harvard - I am able to think critically about the heart of the cultural seas around me. (edit: I don't say these things to boast, only to emphasize that I'm deep within Western culture, as an outsider.)

In the same 5 minutes with Jimmy, Bill Maher criticized American liberals, of whom he is a part. Liberals in the West, Maher implied, are part of a weak nation (he used a different word) of political correctness and tolerance. Liberals have forgotten what it means to be the critical, liberal Left. They are, according to Maher, supposed to fight for the oppressed with  ideology critique and social justice.

While I applaud true Leftists for their zeal for social justice and ideology critique, I am critical of their strong tendency toward a unique ideology, their own propaganda. Since the French Revolution, and probably before, the Left has used mass-produced vulgar satire to change opinions and incite violence. And when violence is incited, the world watches. This time, it happened in Paris - a figurehead capitol in the West. The world is watching.

What's more, the staff of Charlie Hebdo had been attacked before. They knew that they were flirting with death. They died for a cause. They died for the Party. People love martyrs. We always have. In the second century CE, Tertullian wrote this, of Christian martyrs:

...Those who see us die, wonder why we do, for we die like the men you revere, not like slaves or criminals. And when they find out, they join us.

The world is on the side of the martyrs. This martyrdom is an unprecedented victory for today's Leftists. Even YouTube has cast its vote. Of some 400,000 views, 5,082 people liked the five-minute, anti-religion Leftist satire by Bill Maher; 2,513 disliked it. That's a two-thirds majority for Leftism from viewers of Jimmy Kimmel and Bill Maher (a widely varied audience). The spirit of Marx is dancing.



II: The Ideology of the West

David Brooks published an op-ed in The New York Times on January 8th slamming the West for its failure to be self-critical, focusing his attack against political correctness. The West has failed to be Charlie Hebdo:

The journalists at Charlie Hebdo are now rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom of expression, but let’s face it: If they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds. Student and faculty groups would have accused them of hate speech. The administration would have cut financing and shut them down.

But before we thoughtlessly leap onto the 'freedom of speech' bandwagon, we should remember, as Brooks cautions, that to be intentionally hateful and malicious toward the views of others is not helpful. On the other hand, I don't agree with the slogan that says, "if you mess with the mean dog, you're gonna get bit." The purpose of satire is to show the satirized party their own ridiculousness, so that progress can be made. But satire should not be done simply out of malice and contempt. Such acts are, without a doubt, childish. If we treated each other as fellow humans, even in satire, we'd be much better off. Nevertheless, satire should not be stopped by the rule of law. That would be censorship.

Maher rightly pointed out that gay people are being beheaded in the Middle East by followers of extreme forms of Islam. He also asked the audience to imagine the response in the West if the Vatican were beheading gay people. But his imagined example fails. The Vatican does not represent the same sector of society as extremist religion in an extremist country. In extremist countries, the political power is in the religion. But in the West, the power is in secular, liberal, mass-proliferation of ideas. Television shows are cancelled due to a character's stance on homosexuality. ESPN sports reporters are canned because their views go against the reigning ideology. What if they had been shot? Would the ideology be so very much different? In extremist countries, to be ir-religious is grounds for silencing through death. In the West, on the other hand, to be religious is grounds enough to be ostracized from the world of ideas. Is Charlie Hebdo of a propagandistic tradition? (Someone asked a similar question in an NPR interview I caught this morning). Are the martyrs on the good guys' side? What is the truth?


'Political correctness' requires censorship, from kindergarten to the university. In public schools the propagation of ideology is very effective. It's no wonder that political activists aim for college campuses, and that the President wants to make the first two years of State-funded community colleges free for all. Those who control the schools control the power base. They are the Vatican, and they are silencing the opposition. They are the wannabe Charlie Hebdo, but more pernicious, insidious.

People who hold views opposed to the cultural norm are silenced. They have no real voice; no real martyrdom. Perhaps if, and when, they start dying for their views, then the masses will notice the contradiction of 'tolerance.'

III: Now, to Islamic Extremism.

A common problem, even in the academic field of Religious Studies, is that non-believers have a very difficult time empathetically understanding what being a believer is truly like. A believer has a vision of the end in which he hopes; he believes - if he's of the Islamic extremist camp - that the fury of Allah should be unleashed against those who dishonor his Prophet. 

In 2001, following the attacks on the Twin Towers (2985 people died, mostly American), the United States declared an ‘official’ start to the ‘War on Terror.’ The country was ringing in shellshock. The idea of a 'war,' though elusive in its real object, helped many people respond, however unconsciously, to the horror that had just brutalized the nation. The tremors of the attack rattled the whole world, and continue to frustrate and terrify, daily. Post-9/11 airport security, anyone?

During the Sydney hostage siege, I spent about two hours monitoring Twitter, constantly refreshing the search feed for #sydneysiege—one of the highest trending Twitter feeds of the year, though now totally dwarfed by #jesuischarlie. I observed a significant pattern in the content of these tweets. There were tweets from extremists somewhere, that said things like this: “See what happens when you align your politics against us, Australia! Submit to Allah!”, often accompanied by a video or an ideological image or symbol(s). On one occasion, I clicked on one of these videos. I was transported to the sands of the Middle East. A man stood in the sand, a white Canadian with a blonde pony-tail, with a black and white bandana neatly tied about his forehead (he looked like the blonde male character from Street Fighter, Ken). He spoke, in HD video, in plain, educated English for several minutes about the wrongs of the West and the need for radical Islamic extremism. He said, “If you aren’t coming here to help us, then you had better be fighting where you are.” He was convincing. Sharp. Articulate. Handsome, even. And he ended his sermon with a reminder of Allah's return with swift, severe judgment.

The problem with the ‘War on Terror' is this: we are not fighting terrorists. We are fighting a really convincing idea; especially for the oppressed peoples of the world. We are fighting an idea that promises liberation - "If only we'd fight for true doctrine, then the world would be at peace!" We’re dealing here, even, with apocalyptic eschatology. What that means, basically, is an ‘end times’ vision: a promise of future justice and dominance and the vindicating return of Allah! This is a religious war. Fundamentally. Ideologically. These people are serious, committed believers, with a passionate zeal for a supreme being who they believe demands recompense and dominance for and from them. These are ideologically trained, completely convinced, believers in the extremist idea.

Saint Paul said this of the war:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Again: We’re trying to fight terrorists, but we can’t. Because we’re actually fighting an idea. And ideas, as Dostoevsky reminded us somewhere, cannot be killed. Or hunted down. Ideas must be converted, they must be transformed. From the ground up, from the inside world, these ideas must be confronted. But ideas are too magnificently powerful for us. All we can do is kill and spread propaganda. We need to learn how to transform ideas.

One significant source of an ideology's strength comes with the digital revolution we’re living in. Personal technology is an outrageously effective tool for the communication of ideas, especially in short, easy to read ideological slogans and videos. We are not witnessing the work of a simple, old-fashioned ideology; we’re living in an age when complex ideas and global communication tools are instantly accessible to nearly everyone. 

Islamic extremist ideas, which gained a revival in the mid-twentieth century, have been incredibly influential among fringe groups of Muslims, especially among the emotionally wounded, radically motivated youth with a pre-existing propensity to political violence. This is a very convincing ideology for them.

I notice, around social media especially, a tendency to minimize the involvement of “true spirituality” in the daily lives of perpetrators of terroristic violence. I would like to graciously point out how flatly wrong this view is. The news reports from a broad range of international outlets and YouTube videos featuring live-action terrorist takeovers of Christian or ‘heretical’ villages (there are many videos there, but truly brutal and to be avoided) - these are enough evidence. Each video is full of prayers and expressions of devotion to Allah from the mouths of masked terrorists as they behead or slaughter innocent people. In the Charlie Hepbo tragedy, the men were shouting “Praise Be to Allah!” as they shot.

Furthermore, the police went into the Jewish market in Paris when they did because they heard the terrorist reciting his prayers, the prayer for salvation, to be recited just before death. This is not purely political violence. It is an idea. A very, very powerful one. A religious idea. It is an idea that tells of the swift and coming return of Allah to pay recompense on oppressors—and that’s us, the Western, Gluttonous, non-believing world.

But this idea can be stopped. And not, sadly, through satire. It must be stopped through worldwide nuclear strikes. Just kidding. I hope that doesn't get me arrested. It is unclear how it can be stopped without more bloodshed and terror. This ideology has the momentum of a rather large snowball, bowling down steep terrain, building ever larger and destroying or pulling into itself all that it touches.

IV: (Part Of) The Solution

While it is certainly the case that terrorism does not represent normative Islam, to say that some interpretations of Islam are not to blame for the headlining stories in Nigeria and Kenya and France and the United States, would be to ruin our chances of being critical toward certain twisted worldviews and ideologies.

Religious discourse must be incorporated into the public square. We live in a religious world. If we do not understand one another, death and destruction will forever ensue. When two people, even in a long term romantic relationship(!), don't understand each other and are each constantly forced to confront the problems of the other, a fight is coming. We are beginning to feel the pains of the other's anger.

But the world does not need another war. God help us. The world needs its leaders - teachers, parents, school principals, tax advisers, and so on - to take a critical and thoughtful approach to their own ideology, and that of others; other worldviews, other religions, are being propagated around us. The goal is not first to stop them, but to understand them. If we cannot understand them, we cannot stop the violence.'They' are the embodiment of an idea.

We're surprised that we can't understand what would make someone want to commit acts of terror in the name of a god. Because we never talk about it. And if we do, we're seen as weird. But here's the thing: ideas and beliefs can easily lead a human being to commit public acts of terror and suicide.

It's called religious zeal, and it's nothing new. Charlie Hebdo, in fact, in their acts of zealous cartooning and subsequent martyrdom, showed a similar type of zeal - yet for Leftist ideology. Suicidal zeal, almost.

We're told to tolerate everyone. One love. But we're not allowed to learn anything about them, from them, in our schools, because we are afraid of those ideas. American teachers get fired for talking about religion. And they're forced to talk about things in their curriculum that many of them do not want to teach. But they do, because the State says so. If the teacher is a believer, wouldn't that teacher be the best person to explain that religion to the students? Shouldn't there be a freedom of ideas? Shouldn't we be allowed to express ourselves? Are you really Charlie Hebdo? Should you be?

edit 01/12/15: We are being confronted by a powerful Idea and its violent fruit. But we are so confused by our own messes, our own spoiled fruit, that we fail to see clearly how to stop this Idea without hateful propaganda and violence. This has been the case in world history with nearly every political entity that has ever existed. Propaganda and violence. That's what we're good at. We must confront our own bad ideas before we can confront those of others. It must start with you and with me.

We are all humans, made in the image of God, and we all therefore deserve love and justice, regardless of our differences. We must understand one another. We must be transformed by the renewing of our minds.

Žižek: A Very Brief Introduction, and His Critique of Western Buddhism

Some have called him dangerous. Some have called him a bête noire ("black beast" - something that is particularly distasteful or difficult and to be avoided). Some - perhaps most - have never heard of him. The Slovenian political philosopher (and I give him that title because I'm not sure how else to classify him, if not bête noire), Slavoj Žižek, is the patron saint of the young European intellectual elite (if in fact we've entered an era in which sainthood can be conferred upon the living), and he'll be shaking things up with the hipsters on this side of the pond soon enough. Although, if history offers a key to understanding the process of culture shaping, Žižek's influence will probably linger just below the surface, waiting for a posthumous eruption.

I've been reading a couple of his books in my current research, The Sublime Object of Ideology and The Monstrosity of Christ. Before you get tripped up on "monstrosity," know that it does not mean what you probably imagined at first glance. With "monstrosity," Žižek refers to Hegel's notion (which Žižek shares) of the subversively powerful claim that God, the divine Logos, the Word of God, "became flesh and lived among us" (John 1:14). Here's Žižek on the matter:

Hegel uses this unexpectedly strong word,"monstrosity,” to designate the first figure of Reconciliation, the appearance of God in the finite flesh of a human individual: “This is the monstrous [das Ungeheure] whose necessity we have seen.”¹ The finite fragile human individual is “inappropriate” to stand for God, it is “die Unangemessenheit ueberhaupt² [the inappropriateness in general, as such].”³

So much for introductions. I'll let you wrestle with the Incarnation. I began this post with the intention of presenting a few of his insights on Western Buddhism. To those we now turn. Oh, and it's important to know that he's a Marxist:

Spiritual meditation [and here Žižek means the so-called "pure" forms of meditation - mindfulness, Zen, "sitting," Transcendental Meditation (TM), etc.], in its abstraction from institutionalized religion, appears today as the zero-level undistorted core of religion: the complex institutional and dogmatic edifice which sustains every particular religion is dismissed as a contingent secondary coating of this core. The reason for this shift of accent from religious institution to the intimacy of spiritual experience is that such a meditation is the ideological form that best fits today’s global capitalism.⁴

Elsewhere, in an interview with Believer, a San Francisco based magazine that concerns itself with issues of hipster culture, Žižek elaborates on Buddhism and Capitalism:

...This basic Buddhist insight that there is no permanent self, permanent subject, just events and so on, in an ironic way perfectly mirrors this idea that products are not essential. [What is] essential is this freedom of how you consume products and the idea that the market should no longer focus on the product. It is no longer: this car has this quality, blah blah blah. No, it’s what you will do with the car. They are trying as directly as possible to sell you experiences, i.e. what you are able to do with the car, not the car as a product itself. An extreme example of this is this existing economic marketing concept, which basically evaluates the value of you as a potential consumer of your own life. Like, how much are you worth, in the sense of all you will spend to buy back your own life as a certain quality life. You will spend so much in doctors, so much in beauty, so much in transcendental meditation, so much for music, and so on. What you are buying is a certain image and practice of your life. So what is your market potential, as a buyer of your own life in this sense?

 To which the Believer interviewer responds,

OK, so ironically, when Westerners buy into a Buddhist mentality, then they set themselves up to be perfect consumers in contemporary capitalism. It is kind of sad and funny at the same time. While looking for spirituality or God, they become ideal consumers to marketing executives. Sounds like science fiction.

Science fiction, or the high point of Western Civilization as it is today. Have you ever noticed that a great deal of the highest quality clothing and gear at REI is branded with Buddhist names? "The Zen," "Prana" ("breath" in Sanskrit), and so forth. They don't even attempt to conceal it.



_________________________________________


I owe a great deal for my understanding of Žižek to my friend, Vincent. You know who you are.

¹G. W. F. Hegel, Theologian of the Spirit, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
1997), p. 238-9.

²G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, vol. 17 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), p. 272.

³Slavoj Žižek, John Milbank, and Creston Davis. The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), p. 74.

⁴ibid, p. 28. Italics added for emphasis.

John Calvin on Valentines Day

Deep humor, lighthearted wisdom:

"Always keep in mind what I seek to find in [a wife], for I am none of those insane lovers who embrace also the vices of those with whom they are in love, where they are smitten at first with a fine figure. This is the only beauty that allures me: if she is chaste, if not too fussy or fastidious, if economical, if patient, if there is hope that she will be interested in my health."

And how can you not love that flowing beard? I'm sure he was fighting women away with those waves of glory. And that hat. It looks so supple.

A Brief Theology of the Academic Vocation

Over at Intervarsity's Emerging Scholars Network I've written an article about the purpose of academic work, and about how that work is informed and influenced by the Christian understanding of the glory of God. Check it out! http://blog.emergingscholars.org/2014/01/a-brief-theology-of-the-academic-vocation/

The Joy of The Gospel: Pope Francis' Missionary Exhortation

I've been reading through the Pope's recent exhortation to the Church, The Joy of the Gospel (Evangelii Gaudium in Latin), and have been refreshed at every turn.  It's a long document (something like 250 pages), but Francis has written an exhortation that can be taken into consideration not only by Catholics, but by all who call themselves followers of Jesus.  How dangerous would it be if we refused to hear wisdom simply because of it's speaker's denomination (1 Corinthians 1:10-18)?  The exhortation is full of scripture and, as far as I've read, contains nothing that a Protestant might find unorthodox.  To be quite honest, this is, at its core, an evangelical document.  It is an exhortation to the Church to preach the Gospel to all, to do everything in love and mercy and truth for the sake of making Jesus known to all people, especially the poor. This is my favorite quote so far:

48. … We have to state, without mincing words, that there is an inseparable bond between our faith and the poor. May we never abandon them.
49. Let us go forth, then, let us go forth to offer everyone the life of Jesus Christ. Here I repeat for the entire Church what I have often said to the priests and laity of Buenos Aires: I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security. I do not want a Church concerned with being at the centre and which then ends by being caught up in a web of obsessions and procedures. If something should rightly disturb us and trouble our consciences, it is the fact that so many of our brothers and sisters are living without the strength, light and consolation born of friendship with Jesus Christ, without a community of faith to support them, without meaning and a goal in life. More than by fear of going astray, my hope is that we will be moved by the fear of remaining shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security, within rules which make us harsh judges, within habits which make us feel safe, while at our door people are starving and Jesus does not tire of saying to us: “Give them something to eat” (Mk 6:37).

Edit: At the end of the exhortation Francis includes his prayer to Mary.  I do understand that we all have our differences, but the prayer that Francis includes goes above and beyond devotion, and elevates Mary to a recipient of the praise only due the triune God.  Especially when the New Testament is read as a Jewish document, which it certainly is (Jesus was, in fact a Jew), to praise Mary to the degree that Francis does is certainly not biblical.

A Letter To Phil Robertson: On Gentleness and Wisdom

Mr. Robertson,

One part of me wants to encourage you for your boldness in the face of a cultural war, speaking out on an issue that's important to you.  Going against the grain, if you will.  One part of me wants to say, "Yeah!  You should be able to say whatever you want to say about whoever, whenever!  This is the United States of America and you've got the right to free speech!"  And I think, in one sense, this is true.

Consider this, if you will:  "Existing power structures would have loved to silence Nelson Mandela (and Martin Luther King while we're at it) because of his views. I don't think anyone can propose media restriction while discussing huge ideas... What if someone deemed this conversation "lacking in character" or "dangerous" and deleted it?" That's a quote from a Facebook conversation with a friend of mine earlier this month--he makes a great point, doesn't he? The Germans and Russians who opposed their power structures were deemed dangerous and silenced. And things escalated quickly from there.

Another point to consider, however, is this:  A&E, the television business that suspended you, is just that--a business. And just like you have the freedom to say what you want, they have the freedom to present their own views with their own business.  (But then I wonder, can someone legally be suspended from their job for talking about their religious convictions?)

But Phil, if you don't care about anything I've said thus far, please do consider this final point:

Click to read more »

Pope Francis I: Time Magazine's "Person of the Year"

This morning, Time named the Pope the "Person of the Year." While Time admittedly is just a magazine and publisher, this decision is remarkable. Since when does the leader of the Catholic Church win the top spot on a pop-culture list of the best people ever? Since this morning, I guess.

What's most amazing to me is not that a Pope won this contest, but that this Pope did.  Apparently the attributes of Jesus Christ are, even after 2,000 years of human failure in his name, still desirable to our culture. A few weeks ago Francis I wrote an eighty-something page document called "The Joy of the Gospel." In it he emphasizes and reemphasizes his desire for "...a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security."  Yes.

If this man does what he says he'll do, if he continues to change the face of the Church into one of kindness, humility, and self-sacrificial love, while holding fast to the principles of God's created order, he's my man of the year, too.

On the controversial issues, the Time article had this to say of the new Pope:

And so Francis signals great change while giving the same answers to the uncomfortable questions. On the question of female priests: “We need to work harder to develop a profound theology of the woman.” Which means: no. No to abortion, because an individual life begins at conception. No to gay marriage, because the male-female bond is established by God. “The teaching of the church … is clear,” he has said, “and I am a son of the church, but”—and here he adds his prayer for himself—“it is not necessary to talk about those issues all the time.”

And to the divorced and remarried who have been disallowed the sacrament of Communion in the Catholic Church, Francis says this: Communion "is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak."  Wonderful.

As Anthony LeDonne said in his post on this same article, "...I care that the Pope is attentive to the longstanding portrait of a humbled and humbling Jesus."

Here's to the Pope.

Eyewitness Accounts in the New Testament?

I came across a gem of a post on the blog of historian Larry Hurtado. He quotes Richard Bauckham commenting on a new book he's working on.  Bauckham has written some incredibly influential books (here and here) on the history of the first century Greco-Roman and Jewish world, and his comment on Hurtado's blog makes me wonder in anticipation what this new project might add to Bauckham's influence on the understanding of the New Testament.  Here's the comment:

“I guess I ought to clarify my position on eyewitness testimony in the Gospels, since it has been raised and you, Larry, say: ‘As I understand him, he doesn’t mean that the Gospels are “eyewitness testimony” such as a court transcript would provide, but that the Gospels draw on “eyewitness testimony” as it circulated in early Christian circles.’ Well, no, certainly nothing like a court transcript, more like “oral history.” But my point was that the Gospels are CLOSE to the eyewitnesses’ own testimony, not removed from them by decades of oral tradition. I think there is a very good case for Papias’s claim that Mark got his much of his material directly from Peter (and I will substantiate this further with quite new evidence in the sequel to [my book] Jesus and the Eyewitnesses that I’m now writing). I think that the ‘Beloved Disciple’ himself wrote the Gospel of John as we have it, and that he was a disciple of Jesus and thus an eyewitness himself, as he claims, though not John the son of Zebedee. Of course, his Gospel is the product of his life-long reflection on what he had witnessed, the most interpretative of the Gospels, but still the only one actually written by an eyewitness, who, precisely because he was close to Jesus, felt entitled to interpret quite extensively. Luke, as well as incorporating written material (Mark’s Gospel, which he knew as substantially Peter’s version of the Gospel story, and probably some of the “Q” material was in written form), also, I think, did what ancient historians did: he took every opportunity to meet eyewitnesses and interviewed them. He has probably collected material from a number of minor eyewitnesses from whom he got individual stories or sayings. Matthew is the Gospel I understand least! But whatever accounts for Matthew it is not the form-critical picture of anonymous community traditions, which we really must now abandon!”

Here's the link to Hurtado's post: 

http://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/bauckham-on-eyewitnesses-and-the-gospels/

And here's another little treat.  Bauckham explaining Jesus and the Eyewitnesses:

Dallas Willard: One Who Knows His God.

Dallas Willard 

Dallas Willard died this morning after announcing Stage 4 Cancer on Monday.

Dallas--a USC Professor of Philosophy, a man whose writing has greatly magnified my view of beauty and goodness and hope in this life, and a lover and beloved of God--awakened early this morning into the full experience of the brilliantly abundant life with God.  His last two words were,

“Thank you.”

This morning, as his life-light dawned into full day, I think Dallas was welcomed into rest and love and praise by the voice of God; a voice which he once described as recognizable through its "spirit of exalted peacefulness and confidence, of joy, of sweet reasonableness and of goodwill."

And I think the voice sounded something like this: "Well done, good and faithful servant."


Here's something he wrote about the intersection of God and love and death, from Hearing God, 1984:

"Thomas à Kempis speaks for all the ages when he represents Jesus as saying to him, 'A wise lover regards not so much the gift of him who loves, as the love of him who gives. He esteems affection rather than valuables, and sets all gifts below the Beloved. A noble-minded lover rests not in the gift, but in Me above every gift.' The sustaining power of the Beloved Presence has through the ages made the sickbed sweet and the graveside triumphant; transformed broken hearts and relations; brought glory to drudgery, poverty and old age; and turned the martyr's stake or noose into a place of coronation.

As Saint Augustine has written, when we come to our final home, 'there we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise.  This is what shall be in the end without end.'  It is this for which the human soul was made."

Thank you, Dallas.

A Universal Letter to Fathers And Sons: Parenting Christian Children.

"Spiritual Warfare" by Ron DiCianni

Fathers, 

if you don’t like the way your son walks, do not say to him, “Walk like a man.” 

Instead, learn to hear his heart.  Learn who he is.  What makes him tick?  What saddens him, and why?  What is it for him to be who he was created to be?

The Father in heaven and our King, Jesus, have shown us the way of raising successful men—men who die having really lived.  Men who die having loved honorably, spoken truthfully; men who die having cared for the wounded and the needy and the heartbroken and the sick and the dying and the orphaned; men who die having lived as Jesus lived.  Men who don’t stop living even when they die.  

We’re raising up immortals.  Heroes. 

Sons of God.

Do not say to him, “Walk like a man.”  Tell him that he is a man.  Tell him what the goodness of God looks like and find it in him.  Pray for him. 

Let him catch you with your hands raised on the crest of a mountain, enjoying the presence of the Living God. 

Teach him like Jesus teaches his own—graciously, wisely, thoughtfully and spiritually.  

Love him like God loves his own, in order that one day God might love the world through him. 

When you fail him, ask him for his forgiveness and tell him that you’re learning too.

Tell him what makes you tick.  Tell him about your dad.  What was it like for you to be a son?  What is it like now, being a son of The Father?

Tell him that you love him and that you trust him.  Let him know you. 

And when discipline comes, he’ll trust you through it.

While doing these things, you’ll notice his gate improving.  Confidence will fall into his steps.  You’ll begin to enjoy the way that he walks.  He’ll start walking like his King.  He’ll walk like a man.

This is how my Father in Heaven loves me.

"For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, 'Pappa! Father!'"  Romans 8:15

Civil Rights, Gandhi and the Religion of Tolerance

It is a rare household that's ignorant of the name “Gandhi.”  Equally rare, however, are those with knowledge of his life beyond trendy cliché. His life tells a complex story; it is, after all, a human story, riddled with virtue and vice.  One of the virtues Gandhi developed over his life—one which he prized and others still esteem him for—was tolerance.  He was tolerant of ignorance, political differences, and even violence committed against himself.  But the tolerance of M. K. Gandhi was limited, especially regarding many forms of religion and ethics.

Many scholars of South and Southeast Asian Studies have regarded Gandhi’s religion as the source of his tolerance. He encountered many religious traditions early in his traveling life and public career, and the Hindu culture that raised him increased his understanding of religious diversity. Although he was brought up in a Hindu household with a devout mother, Gandhi kept himself unattached to any particular sect, and he claimed that his “inner voice,” something like Socrates' daimon, guided the beliefs to which he did adhere (Gandhi, 2008). This inner voice was his chosen spiritual guru for his lifelong quest toward a religion of tolerance, non-violence and reason.

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