A Smith College newspaper editors says “Obama is my Jesus…” and describes her conversion.

I’ve officially been saved, and soon, whether they like it or not, the rest of the country will be too. I will follow him, all the way to the White House, and I’ll be standing there in our nation’s capital in January 2009, when Barack Obama is inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States of America. In the name of Obama, Amen.

And Jesus saw the multitudes and had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shpherd…

But worth reading…

It is long past time to get back to basics — to faith, to church, to principles, to relationships, to integrity. We are, I believe, about to be tested in a most difficult and frightening way — a darkness the likes of which we have not seen before, and may never see again. The provocation may be known, or unknown, be it nuclear terrorism, or some yet-unseen financial collapse; a cataclysmic natural disaster; or a butterfly in some unknown location flapping its wings and setting off a chain reaction which ignites the world in conflagration.

I have shared, with more or less intensity some of the sentiments of the author of this post, the sense we’re on the edge of a very dark and hard era. And as a child of my culture I sometimes fear the things I may have to face, the loss of my comforts, the pain of losing my soul’s flabbiness, the uncertainty of whether I will have what it takes to endure.

Yet at the same time I feel very free and this is one thing I wish the author would have addressed. These hard times are distilling the extraneous from me. I’m far from where I need to be but at the same time I sense a clarity about who I am and should be and more important “whose” I am. Despair leads to questions which lead to searching and then to discovery and rest. I hate the thought of what these times may be like but I feel closer to all the things that matter in ways that I never have in fatter times.

I watched the debates tonight, at least chunks of the whole thing, and my first impression is that Sen. Obama looked like a man who senses victory and Sen. McCain is beginning to look spent. That’s the drawback of these things, impression is everything, content is secondary.

Going beyond the art of looking good on television (anybody but me seem to notice that Sen. Obama seems to be going “grayer” in the hair over the past months?) were the words themselves and for those of us who value, as the Roman Church has called it, the “culture of life” those words are foreboding. Sen. Obama is basically and profoundly “pro-choice” and it was clear in the debate that position would the policy of his presidency. Certainly it will influence the laws he signs and the judges he appoints. Combined with the possibility of a Democrat “super-majority” in Congress the pro-life cause will take a beating in the next four to eight years if Sen. Obama is elected. No amount of calm TV presence can obscure this central truth. Despite the Senator’s non partisan rhetoric pro-lifers will have no place at the table or even in the room of an Obama administration.

And in one sense this will be an enormous setback. The small and reasonable restrictions on abortion, the product of years of hard political work, will be swept away, the freedom of protest will be curtailed, and more millions will pour into agencies and groups that support abortion. This is what we face. Yet at the same time we who believe in the sanctity of life will need to do what we should have been doing all along, focusing not just on the larger picture of laws and public policy but on each individual person who has a crisis pregnancy, each person who struggles with their sexuality, and each family that needs help. We need no laws to do this and there are no laws that can effectively forbid it.

This also underscores a central challenge for our call to be salt and light in this culture. For too long we have focused on the larger world of politics and structures to support our vision of what society should be and in doing so we have ignored a central truth of our Faith, that the world is changed as each individual is changed by the reality of Jesus Christ. For too long we have asked the government, the structures of our culture, to do what we should have been doing all along. Now faced with the possibility of a government hostile to much of what traditional Christian faith would espouse in the area of life, the failure of that policy has also been exposed. Yet even that exposure, that vulnerability, has the potential to turn, again, our hearts, our efforts, and our lives to both the message and the method of the Gospel. How ironic would it be if we, stripped of our temporal power, discover again the fullness of the Gospel and the Senator’s claims of hope and change find themselves realized not in the government, but in the Church.

When that happens the real revolution will begin.

Some new research that may provide hope for victims of spinal cord injuries.

As a former chaplain in health care I’ve had the chance to see the enormous devastation caused by spinal cord injuries. In my particular circumstances, working in a number of inner city nursing homes, the injuries were often related to gun shot wounds. When you see young men in wheelchairs in the inner city the chances of their being there due to diving accidents is generally pretty slim.

And the devastation these injuries cause is profound and expensive, regardless of the cause. People with spinal cord injuries can require permanent attendants, expensive mobility and medical devices, and constant medical care. With spinal cord injuries there is only a matter of degrees, even those who have the smallest amount of injury will still have their life permanently changed. Being a 20 year old man facing a lifetime in a wheelchair is a prison all by itself.

Through the years living with and serving the ill and struggling I’ve had a dream for this country, a dream that somehow we could use our tremendous wealth for the alleviation of disease and human suffering. As I’ve watched over the years I’ve seen my country spend billions in aid for countries that repress their citizens and never support our ideals. I’ve seen even more billions spent on ever more expensive tools of war. I’ve paid attention as money has been thrown in piles at utopian social engineering schemes, ineffective wars on poverty, and thousands of useless pet projects. And I imagine what could be different, what could be better, if that money, or even a portion of it, would have been used for the elimination of illness and disease. Why is it that a country that can put human beings on the moon with computers less powerful than my laptop seems unable to find a cure for cancer, eliminate malaria, or do the research needed to treat spinal cord injuries.

I’m still asking those questions, probably always will. Hey, a guy can dream can’t he?

Remember

150 AD Didache
“The second commandment of the teaching: You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not seduce boys. You shall not commit fornication. You shall not steal. You shall not practice magic. You shall not use potions. You shall not procure [an] abortion, nor destroy a newborn child” (Didache 2:1)

250 AD Diognetus
(a likely reference to both exposure of infants to die and abortion): “(Christians) marry, like everyone else, and they beget children, but they do not cast out their offspring.” (Letter of Diognetus (late 2nd or 3rd century; ch.5, vs.6)

314 AD Council of Ancyra
“Concerning women who commit fornication, and destroy that which they have conceived, or who are employed in making drugs for abortion, a former decree excluded them until the hour of death, and to this some have assented. Nevertheless, being desirous to use somewhat greater lenity, we have ordained that they fulfill ten years [of penance], according to the prescribed degrees” (canon 21).

374 AD Basil the Great
“He that kills another with a sword, or hurls an axe at his own wife and kills her, is guilty of willful murder; not he who throws a stone at a dog, and unintentionally kills a man, or who corrects one with a rod, or scourge, in order to reform him, or who kills a man in his own defense, when he only designed to hurt him. But the man, or woman, is a murderer that gives a philtrum, if the man that takes it die upon it; so are they who take medicines to procure abortion; and so are they who kill on the highway, and rapparees” ((First Canonical Letter, canon 8).

374 AD Basil the Great
“Let her that procures abortion undergo ten years’ penance, whether the embryo were perfectly formed, or not” (First Canonical Letter, canon 2).

391 AD John Chrysostom
“Wherefore I beseech you, flee fornication . . . Why sow where the ground makes it its care to destroy the fruit?–where there are many efforts at abortion?--where there is murder before the birth? For even the harlot you do not let continue a mere harlot, but make her a murderess also. You see how drunkenness leads to prostitution, prostitution to adultery, adultery to murder; or rather to a something even worse than murder. For I have no name to give it, since it does not take off the thing born, but prevents its being born. Why then do thou abuse the gift of God, and fight with His laws, and follow after what is a curse as if a blessing, and make the chamber of procreation a chamber for murder, and arm the woman that was given for childbearing unto slaughter? For with a view to drawing more money by being agreeable and an object of longing to her lovers, even this she is not backward to do, so heaping upon thy head a great pile of fire. For even if the daring deed be hers, yet the causing of it is thine” (Homilies on Romans 24).

400 AD The Apostolic Constitutions
“Thou shalt not use magic. Thou shalt not use witchcraft; for He says, ‘You shall not suffer a witch to live’ [Ex. 22:18]. Thou shall not slay thy child by causing abortion, nor kill that which is begotten; for “everything that is shaped, and has received a soul from God, if it be slain, shall be avenged, as being unjustly destroyed.” (Apostolic Constitutions 7:3).

Let me tell you something. It’s hard to help an old church renew itself, harder then you can imagine.

Most of the older small churches in Orthodoxy are that way for a reason. Perhaps they had a small immigrant base upon which to build and demographics took their toll. Sometimes these churches were planted in places without the population to truly grow a sustainable church. There may also have been a good chance of pathology in their past, hurts, pains, struggles, and conflict that drove people away and diverted vital energy. Often, too, there was a simple lack of planning and proactive management in the development of churches, skills lost in the state church / persecuted church heritage of the Orthodox who came to this land.

Regardless there are any number of parishes out there, too small to be sustainable, too large or too stubborn to die, and a handful of folks trying to make a go of it. St. Elias is one of those churches and we’re fighting to save it. We have to deal with the reality of where we are, the work we must do, and the fact that there will be no help for us coming from anywhere. The money for missions is, sadly, pitiful, and big churches largely have no interest in helping the stragglers. The diocese sends a Priest and hopes something might happen. The bottom line is that we’re all alone.

Yet we’re slowly crawling out from under. Visitors are coming, a trickle now, but still some. The core is largely holding steady. We’re building and repairing, taking care of those things that couldn’t be done when there was a full time Priest with a salary. The kitchen is next to be fixed and my hope is that a winning attitude will come with the renewal of the building. Yes, we’ve got a ways to go. We need to relearn our faith, and learn how to evangelize. We still need to see ourselves as a people with a call from God on our lives and a vital mission in LaCrosse. The task list is long.

But the garage will be done by the end of the month and the kitchen hopefully by the end of the year and its a proud moment as we claw our way out into the sun. Pray for us.

We’ve been doing some construction around St. Elias building a garage for storage and work space and reconditioning the front steps with a special grit enhanced paint to prevent slips. Winter is coming and the clock is ticking!

The man who used to be my most outspoken atheist colleague (he is now retired) provides a good example of what I’m talking about. His decision to adopt atheism had nothing to do with honest intellectual reflection. He simply had a horrible relationship with his father and he took it out on God. The consequence of this was a level of emotional insecurity that made him simply impossibly to deal with. He was constantly plagued by indecisiveness and anxiety.

Read more here…

This article reflects what I’ve experienced in over two decades of ministry. At the heart of, much (but not all), atheism are painful experiences or painful emotions. One of the men I remember most was a gentleman who billed himself as the “resident atheist” at a nursing facility where I served as Chaplain. What most distinguished him was not the depth of his arguments or his winsome demeanor but the deep anger and pain that radiated from him. He disbelieved in God not on the facts but on a hurt that I could not reach even though we had a cordial relationship.

This speaks to us as Christians as well because this culture has many people who’ve been mistreated, even devastated, by people and structures in their church. I’m not talking about the faux outrage of the kind where people are angry the church won’t affirm their personal sexual proclivities. I’m talking about people who really have been hurt by others who are rude, arrogant, and just plain mean all within the walls of the church. There’s a lot of those folks around and their actions plant the seeds of future “atheists”.

By way of analogy, I don’t believe in unicorns, because there is no evidence for them, but I haven’t written any books called “The Unicorn Delusion” or “Unicorns are Not Great” or made any documentaries denouncing unicorns. Maher’s agnosticism is clearly a pose. Like Christopher Hitchens, he is an “anti-theist” who hates the Christian God. And the main reason seems to be, as Maher himself says at one point, that this God has rules that interfere with Maher’s sex life.

Read the rest of the article here.