Apparently You Can Go Home Again

October 14th, 2009

A girl who fled her Muslim family in Ohio after she converted to Christianity will have to return, according to a judge who heard the case yesterday.

 

The girl, 17-year-old Rifqa Bary, claimed she couldn’

t go back because her father would literally kill her because she switched faiths — an accusation her father denies. She found shelter with an evangelical Christian couple in Orlando, Fla., and had most recently been living in foster care while authories investigated her accusations.

But an investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement uncovered no real threat to the girl, and a judge ruled she’d need to go back to Ohio (albeit apparently still in foster care), pending another look into her immigration status. Her parents originally came from Sri Lanka.

Armed for Jesus?

October 13th, 2009

gunThe Rev. Ken Pagano, the pastor of New Bethel Church in Louisville, Ky., who created quite a stir several months ago when he invited congregants to bring their guns to church, is leaving the pulpit to spend more time talking about firearms. 

“Thirty years was a good, long run, but it’s time for a change,” Pagano told The Washington Times. “If I can write my own ticket, I want to get involved more in Second Amendment issues as they affect the church, and I can do more from outside the pulpit than from behind it.”

Pagano’s move comes at a time when churches seem, more than ever, to be in the line of unfriendly fire. We’ve covered here the case of George Tiller, who was shot at church in Wichita, Kan., earlier this year — the same year in which an Illinois pastor was gunned down while giving a sermon. About two years ago in Colorado Springs, where I live, a gunman burst into a church and shot several church-goers, killing two of them, before a security guard took him down. And, given churches are: a) inherently controversial, b) eager to help those suffering all manner of problems, and c) are reluctant to install metal detectors, there’s sadly a chance we’ll see more would-be shooters try to disturb the sanctity of church. 

Pagano is now teaming up with New York Rabbi Gary Moskowitz in an effort to educate clergy on how to better protect places of worship. And, while most pastors are understandably reluctant to install armed guards in their churches, Pagano says they may have no other choice.

“Churches are very soft targets and very vulnerable to attack from terrorists and other homegrown, disgruntled individuals,” Pagano said. “Unfortunately, most religious leaders are living in denial.” 

Pretty interesting. I wonder, though, what you think about introducing armed guards — be they in uniform or in plain clothes — into worship services. What does your church do? What do you wish they’d do?

Imprisoned for Faith

October 12th, 2009

Ran across a story from the Baptist Press of two Iranian women imprisoned for their faith:

Maryam Rostampour, 27, and Marzieh Amirizadeh, 30, were detained by Iranian security officers in March after being arrested on grounds of being “anti-government” and “a threat to national security,” according to freethemm.com, a website dedicated to winning their release. At an Aug. 9 hearing in Tehran’s Revolutionary Court, the two learned the sole charge against them is apostasy — leaving Islam. When the judge told them they would be executed if they did not recant their faith, the two reportedly told him to expedite the sentence.

The Iranian government did not “expedite” the sentence, thankfully. But the women are in prison now, and their health is reportedly deteriorating. The women are, according to Mervyn Thomas of Christian Solidarity Worldwide, just two of “scores” of Christians arrested in Iran this year because they were of the wrong sort of faith. “Neither woman has committed a crime under Iranian or international law,” Thomas told the Baptist Press. “We wholeheartedly stand in solidarity with Maryam and Marzieh, who are being held solely on the basis of exercising their most basic right: freedom of thought, conscience and belief.”

There’s a Web site up where you can learn more about Maryam and Marzieh’s story. Check it out here.

O.J. Award: Fisher DeBerry

October 9th, 2009

 

Fisher DeBerry. Photo courtesy the United States Air Force Academy

Fisher DeBerry. Photo courtesy the United States Air Force Academy

For 23 years, from 1984 to 2006, Fisher DeBerry coached the Fighting Falcons at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. For 23 years, he took a cadre of high-character cadets — technically a little too slow, a little too small to play Division I football — and built them into a team that was consistently competitive, consistently dangerous and upset some of the best college programs in the country: Notre Dame. Texas. Tennessee. They and many others fell to this ever-rotating band of over-achievers as the Falcons flew to 169 wins in 23 years — and DeBerry rolled to three Western Athletic Conference Coach of the Year honors. 

 

But, for all those wins, I’d imagine that DeBerry, a longtime Christian, would say his real legacy at the Air Force Academy wasn’t the wins, or the titles, or the honors. It was the impact he had on the lives around him.

“We all become who we are privileged to know,” he writes in the opening of the book, “The Power of Influence.” “Many of our leadership techniques and character traits are learned from others. As a coach, I constantly reminded our staff of the awesome responsibility we had as coaches to be a positive influence on the lives of our players. Sometimes a coach is the only father figure in a young man’s life, and a team is the only family identification a young man can claim.”

 ”The Power of Influence” is a biography of sorts — but it’s one told through the short, two- or three-page reflections of the people the coach coached, mentored and worked with. They constantly reference the coach’s energy, his commitment, his friendship, his drive. And they sometimes mention a few of DeBerry’s more colorful catchphrases, such as “Most of the itme when you’re ahead at teh end of the fourth quarter, you’re gonna win the dadgum ball game,” or “You’re gonna eat until it ouches you.”

My favorite DeBerryism, though, may be, “If you see a turtle on the fence post, you know he didn’t get there by himself.” 

Truth is, no-one got where he or she is by themselves, and DeBerry understood that. For him, mentorship seems to be a critical part of his Christian walk.

“If I had to choose the one principle Coach DeBerry unequivocally stands for, it would be commitment,” writes Troy Calhoun, AFA quarterback between 1985-88 and the man who took DeBerry’s place at the Air Force Academy. “Commitment to his family, friends, community, church, players, coaches and country; the man gives every bit of his heart to all.”

DeBerry received a measure of fame as a prominent Division I football coach. But he made perhaps his greatest impact away from the field of play. It’s a good thing for all of us to remember — and the lesson is worth, I think, an O.J. Award.

The Mojave Cross: Supreme Court Listens

October 8th, 2009

A few days ago, I talked a bit about a controversy storming around a 6-foot cross in the Mojave Desert commemorating soldiers who died in World War I. The Supreme Court heard opening arguments yesterday.

From what I gather, the court seemed relatively uninterested on the big, underlying question at hand — whether a war memorial in the shape of a cross constitutes the government supporting a particular religion over all others. Rather, they restricted their questioning as to whether the government (specifically, the U.S. Congress) had the right to deed the parcel of land on which the cross stands to the Veterans of Foreign Wars (as they did) to, essentially, wash their hands of the prickly problem. 

According to The Washington Post, ” … only Justice Antonin Scalia seemed to want to decide the more basic question of whether the cross was unconstitutional in the first place. He had a testy exchange with [American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Peter J.]  Eliasberg about whether the symbol — which the lawyer said “signifies that Jesus is the son of God and died to redeem mankind for our sins” — could also double as a secular marker for the war dead of all faiths.

Scalia said the cross was the “common symbol of the resting place of the dead,” and asked, “What would you have them erect . . . some conglomerate of a cross, a Star of David, and you know, a Muslim half-moon and star?”

Eliasberg drew laughter from the crowded courtroom when he responded, “I have been in Jewish cemeteries. There is never a cross on a tombstone of a Jew.”

Scalia did not laugh. “I don’t think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead that that cross honors are the Christian war dead. I think that’s an outrageous conclusion,” he said.

But Scalia, if he’s trying to protect this cross — and others across the country — from being pulled down in lawsuit after lawsuit, he’s missing support from a pretty important voice in Christianity: Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and one of American Christianity’s most thoughtful conservative voices. 

While the government’s lawyers try to press their case, Christians should reject any argument that presents the cross as a secular symbol. There is nothing remotely secular about the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Arguments for the constitutionality of religious language and symbolism based in the supposedly secular character of the speech or imagery may win in the courtroom, but the arguments are devastating to authentic belief.

Of all people, followers of the Lord Jesus Christ must be the first to insist that the cross is a symbol of Christian faith, pointing directly to the cross on which Christ died as our substitute. The cross must not be reduced to a generic symbol of death and the memory of loved ones.

To that I offer a hearty “amen.” 

It’ll be interesting to see how this case moves forward, though I doubt this, like most of the other cases involving religious symbolism on government property, will yield a definitive conclusion. The justices seem inclined to take each case on its own merits, electing to allow one courtroom to keep its Ten Commandments display in one state while ordering a courtroom in another state to take a similar (but younger, less entrenched) display down. 

 

 

Fractured Theology

October 7th, 2009

The New Oxford Review ran a piece from Tom Beaudoin, an associate professor of theology at Fordham University in New York City. Beaudoin (who, I think, deserves special kudos for having a last name that includes all five vowels) has compiled a short “Theology According to Student Bloopers.” It’s not so much an example of bad theology as it is of bad English—and it helps explain why I try to stick to words of two syllables or less.

My favorite:

“Theocratically, God is so far more advanced than mankind. And while there is nothing you can do to impress God enough to give you internal life, universal salvation is a huge turn on.”

(Thanks, Thunderstruck)