Daniel Love Glazer

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/05/05/freedom-for-religion-not-from-it-greece-v-galloway-church-state-separation/

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/01/24/265738369/what-are-the-most-and-least-bible-minded-cities-in-the-u-s?utm_content=socialflow&utm_campaign=nprfacebook&utm_source=npr&utm_medium=facebook

How sweet the name of Jesus sounds
In a believer’s ear!
It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds,
And drives away his fear.

It makes the wounded spirit whole,
And calms the troubled breast;
’Tis manna to the hungry soul,
And to the weary, rest.

Dear name, the rock on which I build,
My shield and hiding place,
My never failing treasury, filled
With boundless stores of grace!

By Thee my prayers acceptance gain,
Although with sin defiled;
Satan accuses me in vain,
And I am owned a child.

Jesus! my shepherd, husband, friend,
O prophet, priest and king,
My Lord, my life, my way, my end,
Accept the praise I bring.

Weak is the effort of my heart,
And cold my warmest thought;
But when I see Thee as Thou art,
I’ll praise Thee as I ought.

Till then I would Thy love proclaim
With every fleeting breath,
And may the music of Thy name
Refresh my soul in death!

Every once in a while, a truly special book comes down the theological pike: a book both scholarly and well-written, a book that stretches the imagination, a book that changes the state of a discussion, if it’s taken with the seriousness it deserves. The late Servais Pinckaers’s Sources of Christian Ethics was such a book. So was N. T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God. Now comes Nigel Biggar’s In Defense of War (Oxford University Press). Biggar’s careful moral reasoning offers a model that, if followed, would deepen and mature the Christian discussion of the ethics of war and peace. And, if I may say, his book ought especially to be read by those who, at first blush, will be shocked or even appalled by its title.

Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford and director, there, of the McDonald Center for Theology, Ethics and Public Life, is not well-known to American readers, save among that shrinking band of Catholic and evangelical thinkers who take the classic just war theory seriously and work to develop it in light of the realities of twenty-first century politics and technology. He is no ivory tower don, however, and in the bracing introduction to his book, he lays his cards squarely on the table:

This is the dilemma: on the one hand going to war causes terrible evils, but on the other hand not going to war permits them. Whichever horn one chooses to sit on, the sitting should not be comfortable. Allowing evils to happen is not necessarily innocent, any more than causing them is necessarily culpable. Omission and commission are equally obliged to give an account of themselves. Both stand in need of moral justification.

Throughout his book, Biggar, a close student of both military history and the just war way of thinking, inveighs “against the virus of wishful thinking.” And while he is appropriately critical of the wishful thinking of those prepared to give political and military leaders a moral blank check in times of war, Biggar understands that that form of moral irresponsibility is not a major problem in the Christian churches today (as it was, say, during World War I). No, the prevalent Christian wishful thinking today is that which imagines there to be just solutions to the evils caused by murderous men like Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, and the Iranian mullahs without the effective threat, or the effective use, of proportionate and discriminate armed force.

That wishful thinking is the result of several bad ideas that Nigel Biggar confronts with Christian intellectual vigor: the bad idea that radical pacifism is implicit in the Gospel and was normative in the early Church; the bad idea that moral authority to wage war today is held by the United Nations alone; the bad idea that contemporary international law adequately reflects the moral reasoning of the just war tradition; the bad idea that the prudential norms within the just war tradition (like “last resort”) trump other considerations.

And while he doesn’t say it in so many words, his able and detailed review of the moral arguments for and against the invasion of Iraq in 2003 makes clear that bad political ideas can combine with bad theological ideas to produce morally incoherent and politically irresponsible judgments and policy prescriptions. Prominent among those bad political ideas is the reflexive anti-western and anti-Israel bias that was palpable among many churchmen in the debate before the second Iraq War—a kind of gag reflex that warps too much church-based commentary on the Middle East today.

Biggar shares my longstanding concern that much of the Christian leadership of the West is functionally pacifist today. Many churchmen affirm what they understand to be the moral criteria of the just war tradition, but as a practical matter they cannot imagine a just use of armed force—which tends to subtract religious thinkers and their insights from the debates where policy is actually devised. If Nigel Biggar’s book gets churchmen thinking seriously about war and peace again, that might change.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Anti-humanists love to point to the seeming genetic closeness of the expressing genomes between us and chimpanzees. It is all a vain attempt to reduce us to their level–or sometimes, try to raise them to ours.

It’s all nonsense, of course. As I have written before http://www.nationalreview.com/human-exceptionalism/323921/humans-are-not-98-genetically-identical-chimpanzees
, the seeming closeness masks the millions of biological differences contained in this seemingly small divergence.

Now, my Discovery Institute colleague Ann Gauger further deconstructs the “humans are chimps, too” meme. From, “The Mismeasure of Man:” http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/03/the_mismeasure083011.html

To be specific, in addition to the 1% distinction already noted, entire genes are either duplicated or deleted between the two species, sometimes in long stretches called segmental duplications. Such duplications represent a 6.4% difference between chimps and humans.

There are also insertions and deletions within genes, which affect the structure and function of the proteins they encode. That contributes another 3%, according to some estimates. And there are entirely new genes, specific to humans. There are also changes that affect the timing and amount of gene expression. These changes include the insertion of new regulatory sequences upstream of genes.

For example, some 6% of our genome is unique Alu insertions, as they are called. And Alu sequences are known to affect gene expression. In addition, there are human-specific increases in DNA methylation that affect gene expression in the brain, and increased RNA modifications in the brain. These changes would not be detected by simply comparing DNA sequences. Yet they affect gene expression and interaction. Indeed, by one measure, 17.4% of gene regulatory networks in the brain are unique to humans.

Then there are DNA rearrangements. How genes are organized along chromosomes, and even the chromosomes structures themselves can be different. Our Y-chromosomes are strikingly different from those of chimps, for example. This was a surprise to researchers, given the relatively short time our species supposedly diverged from one another. Rearrangements are also not included in the 1% number, and are difficult to quantify.

Gauger notes that these distinctions make a huge difference:

You can have two houses built of the same materials — two by fours, pipes, wall board, nails, wires, plumbing, tile, bricks, and shingles — but end up with very different floor plans and appearances, depending on how they are assembled. So it is with us. We may have almost the same genes as chimps, but the timing and distribution of their expression are different, and matter in significant ways.

Of course, these biological difference are not as important as the moral distinctions between us and our closest genetic relatives:

Going beyond the physical, we have language and culture. We are capable of sonnets and symphonies. We engage in scientific study and paint portraits. No chimp or dolphin or elephant does these things. Humans are a quantum leap beyond even the highest of animals. Some evolutionary biologists acknowledge this, though they differ in their explanations for how it happened.

Gauger makes another point I frequently emphasize:

In truth, though, we are a unique, valuable, and surprising species with the power to influence our own futures by the choices we make. If we imagine ourselves to be nothing more than animals, then we will descend to the level of animalism. It is by exercising our intellects, and our capacity for generosity, foresight, and innovation, all faculties that animals lack, that we can face the challenges of modern life.

Yes, we are exceptional. Own it!

Department stores in Thailand put up Christmas trees, snowmen, advertise Christmas specials. In November, 800+ school children formed a record-breaking human Christmas tree at a mall in Bangkok. In India, you can buy Christmas meals at restaurants, carolers sing in the malls, and cities are decorated for the holidays. Indians dress like Saturday Evening Post Santas.

Thailand is 94% Buddhist and 5% Muslim, and only about 2% of Indians are Christian.

Christmas is big stuff all over Asia, with one thing missing: the birth of Jesus. “Christmas in India, and Asia in general, has undergone something of a transformation in recent decades, with countries around the region embracing the gift-buying, food, decorations, and singing—pretty much everything but the religious commemoration of the birth of Christ.”

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2013/12/the-personhood-pincer

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-closing-of-the-scientific-mind/

This year has been a dreadful one for Mideast Christians. In Egypt, Islamists frustrated at the fall of the Morsi government have singled out Copts for vengeance. By some accounts, Copts are suffering the worst persecution they have experienced in 700 years. In Syria, Islamist rebels are targeting Christians, whom they accuse of siding with the Assad regime.  In Iraq, Islamist gangs demand exorbitant protection money from the few Christians who remain–unless the Christians agree to convert to Islam. Across the region, Christians are being kidnapped, driven from their homes, killed. Their churches are being burned, their schools bombed. Christianity faces an existential threat in the place where it was born.

Mostly, the persecution of Mideast Christians has failed to attract attention in the West–although the media seems to be catching on. Mideast Christians lack strong lobbies in Western capitals, and the Western human rights community has a hard time seeing any Christians as victims rather than oppressors. So praise goes to Britain’s Prince Charles, who last week met with representatives of Mideast Christians in London to draw attention to the ongoing persecution:

“It seems to me that we cannot ignore the fact that Christians in the Middle East are, increasingly, being deliberately targeted by fundamentalist Islamist militants,” he said. Noting Christianity’s roots in the region, the Prince observed that today the Middle East and North Africa have the lowest concentration of Christians in the world—just 4 percent—and that this has “dropped dramatically over the last century and is falling still further.” He said that the effect of this was that “we all lose something immensely and irreplaceably precious when such a rich tradition dating back 2,000 years begins to disappear.”

The BBC’s report of the Prince’s meeting is here.