Echoes in Eternity

Interesting interview...

This study of college students shows just how destructive the self-esteem cult has become in this country. These students were raised by teachers and parents who believed that the most important thing is to make kids feel good about themselves, to the point of lavishly praising them for doing nothing, giving participation awards and grades instead of alphabetical ones, and generally making them feel like they are the center of their own universes. As a result, they've grown up to believe their own hype and are addicted to the sound of their own praise. Another case where Christians haven't done a very good job of being counter-cultural.

Doug Wilson has an excellent post on the natural and Biblical progression from the freedom brought by the Spirit of God to economic freedom for all mankind.

Everything about God’s purposes and plans converge upon liberty. This is the Spirit of jubilee. Proclaim liberty throughout the land, which cannot be done apart from the gospel. And when the gospel is preached in power, men are set free.
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And when these men are set free from their sins, these freed men in turn set their markets free. Slaves have never built a free economic system, and they never will. They always build tyrannies, with the people enslaved to their lusts and their masters at the bottom, and their masters enslaved to their lusts at the top.

One of the fundamental confusions that drives much of our discussion of American free markets is the confusion between businesses and markets. Being pro-free-market is not at all the same thing as being pro-General-Electric (say). Over the course of our history, American markets have only been comparatively free, but the Spirit of God is nowhere near done with us. We have been free compared to Cuba and Sweden, but we are not yet free compared to the standards of a postmill biblical republic.

The free market consists of the rules of the game. Someone who is pro-free-market thinks that clipping should be clipping for all teams, holding should be holding, and so forth. Someone who is pro-business only sees the rules of the game as one instrument among many that can be used to advance the self-interest of their favored team. Their only rule is winning. Now in the American game of free market football, our refs still make plenty of bad calls, with more than a few of them on the take. But the rules of the game are (still) somewhat recognizable.

Enter the Jim Wallis types, who point out all the cheating, and want to solve the problem by making it legal to bribe the refs and, for good measure, to make it legal for the refs to threaten the wife and children of any of the players. If pressed, he might even cite the Jubilee laws of the Old Testament, apropos of nothing.

So it is hard to determine which is sillier—professed Christians manufacturing chains with Lev. 25:10 stamped on every link, or atheistic Austrian economists pulling theories of true liberty out of the unregenerate heart of man. The former tries, using confused appeals to Augustine, to make the Spirit a slave trader, and the latter tries, using confused appeals to the Scottish Enlightenment, to make the devil the Lord of Manumission.

John Piper, that is. One could learn a lot about humble and transparent leadership from his post on his return.

Organizations like this one and this one give me hope that Christians will finally get a clue and (hopefully) lead the West in properly attacking the problem of poverty and hunger.

And my 100 year old great grandpa Chester...


To dust they all returned...

"Christian" musician Derek Webb had an interview recently with the Huffington Post where he continued his campaign of complaint against the evangelical Church in America. In response, Frank Turk over at Pyromaniacs called him out in an open letter this week. It's charitable where it can be, yet hard-hitting and Gospel-illuminating.

Webb is quickly coming to a point where he will have to decide if he is a Christian or a poser... the next Amy Grant, if you will. Probably the most pathetic part of Webb's interview was where he said that because he's an "artist," he is better equipped at making moral pronouncements than the average person because he thinks through issues. Pretentious much?

“The idea that God, if there is a force of Logic and Love in the universe, that it would seek to explain itself is amazing enough. That it would seek to explain itself and describe itself by becoming a child born in straw poverty, in [manure] and straw a child I just thought: Wow! Just the poetry. Unknowable love, unknowable power, describes itself as the most vulnerable. There it was. I was sitting there, and it’s not that it hadn’t struck me before, but tears came streaming down my face, and I saw the genius of this, utter genius of picking a particular point in time and deciding to turn on this." - Bono

(HT: VZ)

Well, now it seems that the governmental health food kick is getting to the point of absurdity and self-parody. Here in Minnesota, the St. Paul school district has decided to ban all sweets. And not just ban it as the recent Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act did by removing candy vending machines from the schools. Kids who brings snacks to school will not be allowed to eat them. It's one thing to help kids make healthy choices by giving them better options, but to specifically contradict what the parents are choosing for their kids' lunches... this tyranny has no end it seems. One more example of why public schools are ultimately corrosive to society: they undermine the role and authority of the parents and teach that the State is the ultimate authority. I pray for the demise of the public school system, its end cannot come soon enough.

On a side note, anyone want to guess how many years we have left before Halloween candy is banned? I'd probably guess in the 5-10 year range... after all, it takes these people a little while to figure out the logical end to their thinking.

"[Our present sufferings in these bodies] will not be worth comparing to the glory that is to be revealed in us."

Here are a couple ("O Come, O Come Emmanuel" pt 1 & 2) excellent sermons from my church this Christmas season. Even if you've heard them already, they worth a second listen. The above quote comes from the second sermon discussing the glory to come in eternity. It reminded me somewhat of what Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov:

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage... that in the world’s finale... something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, of the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; and it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify what has happened.

This is a really interesting discussion between Robert George and Cornell West.

Here is Roger Ebert's list of the best movies of 2010.

Just when it seems like the federal government's ever-expanding power and reach has finally hit terminal velocity, up pops even more absurd new laws and legislation. First this week was the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act and its ridiculous ban of snack food in public schools. And now today, the utterly corrupt Consumer Product Safety Commission banned the fabrication of any cribs with sides that drop... all because 30 babies have died in crib-related accidents in the last decade. In that same time period, 15 MILLION babies were killed by a little procedure called abortion... but no one is banning that. Also in the last ten years, approximately 30 children have died because they swallowed balloons. So I'd imagine that we very well may see balloons made illegal next week (I wish I were joking). The CPSC is the same organization that brought us the horrendous Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act in 2008 and the "Year of the Recall" in 2007. If we're going to try to reduce the federal deficit, I'd recommend starting by defunding the CPSC, since it has single-handedly put thousands of people out of work and destroyed hundreds of companies.