Past Articles from 2004 until last year. Many important lessons can be found in each of these articles.
Encore
216 years ago this Sunday, Thomas Jefferson wrote a long letter to George Washington from Paris. The letter covers everything from foreign affairs (from Turkey to Sweden), to possible markets for American rice. It is filled with the facts, figures, gossip, and intrigue one would hope a cultivated insider like Jefferson would provide to our new nation. And yet, there is a real sense that he is the one away from the action. The Constitution is in the process of being ratified. Washington is still a few months away from becoming our first president. The course of the nation is being set, but he is in Paris, away from these activities, dependant on dispatches from Madison and Monroe. There is a line at the end which, although understated and restrained, communicates the loss he feels at being away.
"I hope therefore the pleasure of personal conferences with you….of getting my own ideas set to rights by a communication of your, and of taking again the sentiment of my own country which we loose in some degree after a certain absence."
Absence may make the heart grow fonder, but it also makes you feel more distant, more challenged to communicate, to be able to speak the language of home as well as you used to. Paul certainly felt a measure of this pinch when he wrote to the Corinthians after an extended absence (II Corinthians 1.12-2.4, 10) and Thessalonica (I Thessalonians 3.1-10).
So also do we.
A few of you have encouraged me to begin writing about my cancer, and the lessons I have learned from the experience. I feel completely inadequate for this task. I have only dealt with having cancer for a few weeks, while so many of you have battled cancer for years. In addition to this, the experience is still fresh, and I am at the beginning of the journey. My cancer is hereditary, and I will be trying to stay ahead of it the rest of my life. I don’t know that I have learned anything yet. Time will demonstrate that in improved character, greater patience, and a keener appreciation of God’s blessings. I will offer a few preliminary observations, though, in the hope that you veteran survivors will help me assess their truth.
I firmly believe that nothing is more important than kindness. Being fully dependant on others for one’s most basic needs teaches a person that the meeting of those needs includes being cared for with kindness. I have for years prayed over sick beds that the sick “receive the best care possible, and receive it with kindness.” I know that these are not just words.
I am not a fan of reality television. I prefer a stiff shot of epicac to five minutes of anything even remotely associated with Jeff Probst. I do, however, really like those historical “house” shows where people agree to recreate the past, to experience what it was like to live before television, air conditioning, and Little Debbie Snack Cakes. I liked 1900 House, enjoyed Frontier House, and then got addicted to Colonial House, and Empire House. These experiments are strictly overseen by “experts”, to ensure authenticity, and yet participants don’t exactly fly without a net.
In the class I teach for Pepperdine University, the first thing I want my students to understand is that religion is always a dimension that bears upon politics and statecraft. Contrary to secular theorists, who believed that humanity would evolve, and religion would wane. We see religion playing an increasingly prominent role in international and domestic politics. The attacks of September 11, 2001 were acts of religious aggression. The energized evangelical base of support for George W. Bush turned the tide of the election.
Niall Ferguson in the recent Atlantic (January/February 2005, pp.40-41), argues that America’s widening split with Europe is more about the religion vs. secularization, than about Bush’s Texas drawl. Niall points our that 95% of Americans believe in God, and that only about 50% of Europeans do (a number which is significantly less if Italy and Ireland are taken out of the mix). This leads Americans, and American foreign policy, he argues, to see moral absolutes where Europeans see none.
Sounds sensible to me.
There was another article on religion in the same Atlantic, entitled “Beyond Belief” (pp117-120) by Hanna Rosin. In it she detailed that the religious divide in America is no longer between denominations, but between fundamentalists and modernists. She showed how it was no longer catholic against protestant, or high church against low church, but Baptists, Episcopalians, and Catholics who are conservative on moral issues versus members of those same groups who were not. These fault lines have been well documented in the media. Rosin tries to get to the heart of this realignment by interviewing some of the key players. The remarks of Richard Land, President of the Southern Baptist Commission on Ethics and Religious Liberty, were particularly notable.
Karol Wojtyla and Terri Chiavo are both dead now. Through our screens, we all waited at their bedsides until they were no more. Both were devout Roman Catholics, both their deaths involved feeding tubes, both seemed to be symbols of something - as every talking head on anyone’s payroll kept telling us. So much separated Pope John Paul II and Theresa Marie Schindler Chiavo, but in our minds it was like they were in the same hospital room – the one with all the TV cameras outside the window. Many have asked me what I thought about them, and the issues surrounding their deaths. I can honestly say that I don’t know. I don’t know that we have enough information, or distance to make much sense of anything yet. I would, however, like to share a few preliminary observations which might, perhaps, stimulate further thought.
