The rest of us
When you think of Britain, you think tea drinkers, right? When you imagine China, you imagine communists, right? In both cases, you’d be partly right but mostly wrong. So when you hear that 94% of Americans believe in God, what do you imagine – an enthusiastically religious country? In this case, you’d be partly right but mostly wrong. In fact, you’d be very wrong about 83% of the US population. But let’s start with Britain.
Cascading books
Two bookends that bind American culture are the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Without them, our freedoms collapse like cascading books. Two bookends that bind American capitalism are Adam Smith’s 1776 classic An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations and… what else? Smith also wrote the other bookend, tying Wealth to an ageless wisdom that keeps our free markets from cascading off a shelf.
Not in the numbers
What’s the right number of kids for a family? How often should you kiss your spouse? Some questions require a mystical answer, not a mathematical one. This is why the proposal by college presidents to lower the drinking age is misguided. In fact, if finding the best drinking age is a matter of numbers and not the numinous, they ought to raise it to 25. Why 25? And what the heck is the numinous?
Thinking horizontally
You’re smart to take Labor Day lying down. Being horizontal is holy, since God tells us to periodically kick up our feet and take a break (Leviticus 23:3). But there’s another reason to ‘go horizontal.’ Today’s teens, twenty- and thirty-somethings think horizontally. Those who communicate a horizontal faith will connect better with younger Americans who appear to be increasingly resistant to Christianity, but not to spirituality.
A false virtue
Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew within a month that he had made a mistake. Arriving in New York in 1939 to accept a position at Union Seminary, he wrote to a friend: “I shall have no right to take part in the restoration of Christian life in Germany after the war unless I share the trials of this time with my people.” Bonhoeffer returned to Germany to help the Jews flee Nazi persecution, crediting his resolve to an ancient virtue. With rear view mirrors, we can see it… and appreciate why optimism is a false virtue.
A false virtue…
Christians are to “be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (I Peter 3:15). Has anyone recently asked you to give the reason for your hope? If the research is right, few Christians are asked and few can answer.1 But the problem might not be the person in the pew. It might be that modern day Christianity has made a virtue out of a vice. To fix this problem, you’d have to pull your car over and peer into the rear view mirror. What – your faith has no rear view mirrors?
Arf???
Henri Poincaré’s flash of insight arrived as he boarded a city bus. Albert Einstein’s epiphany came as he imagined a boy riding alongside a light beam. When C. S. Lewis arrived at Whipsnade Zoo, he got a surprise – he believed in Christ as the Son of God.1 In each case, insight started with a surprise, not a search. Surprised? Welcome to the “doggie head tilt” – the first step for reframing religion in today’s world.
Praying for China
They say if you throw a frog in a kettle of boiling water, it will immediately jump out. But if you throw it in a pot of cool water and slowly turn up the heat, it’ll boil to death. If Japan’s economy is a frog, it’s already boiled, says Shumpei Takemori, a professor of economics at Tokyo’s Keio University.1 China’s economy is following the same flight path as Japan’s – just a few years behind. There’s only one problem with the pictures of frogs and flight paths. Only one is true. As the Summer Olympics open this Friday in Beijing, it will help those who pray for China to know which one is right.
Family and home.
“I don’t care what they do in their private life… as long as they can get the job done.” A lot of people today see no problem in disconnecting their private life from their public one. But it disturbs many Christians. Rightly so. Yet believers might be contributing to this dilemma. Beginning in the nineteenth century, some Christians began to consider the family and home “the most sacred place.” What’s wrong with that?
The most immediate adversary
On the twenty-fourth of May 1844, Professor Samuel F. B. Morse tapped out a four-word message before a hushed gathering in the chambers of the United States Supreme Court in Washington: “WHAT GOD HATH WROUGHT.” It was the first telegram sent over Morse’s invention, the telegraph. Yet for all the fanfare, people like Henry David Thoreau predicted a cost in conquering “the first enemy.” What enemy? What cost?
