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Posts Tagged ‘faith’

Of Heads and Hearts

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

photo by Sami Keinanen

I’m not much of a beer drinker — I haven’t been since a still infamous 21st birthday celebration in college that we shall not mention any more. But if I decided to hoist a pint again, I think my mug might be filled with Guinness. Mind you, they’re not paying me to say this. And Guinness might taste like Kentucky Blue Grass, for all I know. But still, I like their style.

I had the pleasure of hearing Os Guinness, a member of the famed brewing family and now a popular Christian author and speaker, and I found him to be quite intelligent and witty — enough so that I walked out of the lecture thinking, “you know, Christianity needs more ambassadors like this guy.”

Turns out, Os is just the latest of a long line of Christian ambassadors from the family Guinness — at least according to this column in USA Today written by Stephen Mansfield. Guinness, an Irish brewery founded 250 years ago by Arthur Guinness, was a brewery built — perhaps paradoxically for some — on Christian values.

“The values Arthur Guinness envisioned for his company were first honed in a life of devotion to God,” Mansfield writes. “He was beloved throughout Ireland for his defense of Roman Catholic rights, for example, an astonishing stand for a Protestant in his day. He criticized the material excesses of the upper class and sat on the board of a hospital for the poor. He was also the founder of the first Sunday schools in Ireland. When he died in 1803, the Dublin Evening Post declared that Arthur Guinness’s life was ‘useful and benevolent and virtuous.’ It was true.” And Mansfield goes on:

There are many tales that could be told: Of the Guinness heir who received millions of dollars as a wedding gift but then moved his new bride into the slums to draw attention to the plight of the poor. Or of how the Guinness company promised all of its employees who fought in World War I that their jobs would be waiting for them when they returned, and then paid their families half wages until they did.

The lesson is clear: Guinness strove to improve the lives of its employees with the same intensity as it strove to sell its beer.

I don’t know if Guinness is still such a great place to work or still serves as such a strong example of corporate charity. But it seems to me that, if more corporations held firm to the same spirit Guinness has, the world would be much improved.

Tags: charity, faith
Posted in Europe | Permalink

Changing the Tone?

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Christopher Hitchens. Photo by ensceptico

Christopher Hitchens, author of “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” has been debating religious leaders for a good long while now, traveling from campus to campus, auditorium to auditorium, arguing the (I think ludicrous) point that faith is an unqualified, unrepentant force for evil.

But perhaps, in spending so much time with real flesh-and-blood people, Hitchens may be ever-so-slightly softening. Look at this line from a column he recently wrote for Slate:

I haven’t yet run into an argument that has made me want to change my mind. After all, a believing religious person, however brilliant or however good in debate, is compelled to stick fairly closely to a “script” that is known in advance, and known to me, too. However, I have discovered that the so-called Christian right is much less monolithic, and very much more polite and hospitable, than I would once have thought, or than most liberals believe. I haven’t been asked to Bob Jones University yet, but I have been invited to Jerry Falwell’s old Liberty University campus in Virginia, even though we haven’t yet agreed on the terms.

I doubt Hitchens will ever decide he’s been wrong all these years and convert to Christianity (or another religion). He now has, in fact, all sorts of public and financial incentives for remaining the staunch atheist he is. But I’m encouraged that, while he may not agree with what we believe, he perhaps sees a glimpse of the people who we are: Christians are no longer people of the “they,” but people who he’s met with, talked with, perhaps even eaten with.

I think it’s much harder to hate a group of people once we meet them. Hitchens, to his credit, has met us where we live. And perhaps, in so doing, there resides a faint flicker of hope that Hitchens and his fellow “angry atheists” may not stay quite so angry.

Tags: apologetics, atheism, conservative, evangelical, faith
Posted in culture war | Permalink

Hope: Our Precious Gift

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

I had a chance to see “Precious” yesterday — a riveting, heartbreaking, inspiring film you’ll probably hear something about come Oscar season.

I won’t say much about it now. But I’ve been chewing on some of the themes for several hours now, and I did want to just touch on one of them.

“Precious” is about a 16-year-old girl (called Precious) saddled with a world most of us would find unimaginable. At an age when most girls’ lives stretch before them in a ribbon of promise, Precious’ life seems stillborn. She’s given birth to one baby — a child fathered by her own father — and is pregnant with another. She’s overweight, illiterate and (she thinks) wholely unlovable. Her mother abuses her in every possible way.

Hers is a life, it appears, without hope.

“Hope” is a deceptively glib word for most of us, I think. Hope is central to us as Americans, to us as Christians. It’s practically part of our DNA to hope — to imagine that, with hard work and faith and love, we can be anything, do anything, achieve anything. We are an optimistic people, at our core, firm in our belief that we’ve been set aside for great things. And, as such, we’ve gone great things.

But for many people around the world — for many people in the United States — the word “hope” represents an outlandish ideal. For people like Precious, poverty and abuse isn’t a horror as much as it’s a way of life. For some, reading a restaurant menu is as unreachable as the moon, and moving out of poverty is as laughable as setting up shop on Neptune.

Hope.

It’s not hard to give someone hope: Food. Education. Opportunity. Yet for a staggering number of people, those small gifts are hard to come by. Yesterday, the United Nations World Food Program announced that another 200 million people joined the ranks of the hungry over the last two years. That means that about 1 billion people are undernourished.

“One out of six people in humanity will wake up not sure that they can even fill a cup of food,” said Josette Sheeran, executive director for the program. “We have to make no mistake that hunger is on the march.”

Imagine, 1 billion people, living on a cup of food or less.

My daughter — about the same age as Precious — is working on a paper dealing with John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address. In her paper, she quoted Kennedy:

To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required — not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

But Precious didn’t convict me as an American — that we should be sending more aid to nations untold. Rather, it convicted me as a Christian. The Christian Church, as fragmented as it is, could still be the most powerful force on earth, if it wished to be. To paraphrase Kennedy again, it is in our power to abolish human poverty. It is in our power to bestow hope.

Thousands of Christians give hope to people every day, every minute. But we could be doing still more. We’re called to live our lives in radical love. We’re called to give hope to people around the world and across the street. And yet so often, we — I — ignore the need and go about our lives.

Living our lives as Jesus would have us live them is hard. Yet that is what we’re called to do. Our lives are not our own, we’ve been told. We’ve been bought with a ransom, and that ransom gave us hope. It’s fair and fitting we should do our upmost to give hope to others, giving freely of our time, our talents, our money, our passion. It’s time to show the world what it truly means to be Christian. It’s time to show the world what hope’s all about.

Tags: charity, faith, global, hunger, movie, Poverty, Precious
Posted in Body Parts | Permalink

Silence Isn’t Always Golden, Pastor Says

Monday, October 26th, 2009

Interesting release from the Baptist Press. Johnny Hunt, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, visited four Middle-East countries this October, and he listened to Islamic imams call followers to worship. This is what he said in response.

We’re hearing the voice of the leaders of Islam giving their Friday messages. It’s the message of Muhammad, the message of the Qur’an that is dominant in an area that once was very Christian. The Apostle Paul would have made his way through these hills within probably 20 miles of this very city. We would have heard the message of Jesus Christ. But that voice has been silenced. We have been drowned out because we’ve allowed ourselves to be silenced. The voice of Islam has been raised because they are willing to pay the cost to make their message known, while we in our affluent culture have done less and less to make Jesus known. As never before in our lifetime, we must raise our voices even louder than the voice of Islam to make the Gospel known.

Tags: Baptist, church, evangelism, faith, Islam, Muslim
Posted in Middle East | Permalink

The Truth of Faith

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

I’ve never quite understood these so-called “new atheists,” folks like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the like. I mean, it’s one thing to say you don’t believe in God, or a god. I don’t agree with that point of view, naturally, but I can grasp how people get there.

But new atheists, or “angry atheists,” as they’re sometimes called, seem to not disbelieve as much as the hate the very concept. They consider faith not just a fallacy, but a dangerous delusion: It, not the love of money, such atheists argue, is the root of all evil. The title of Hitchens’ bestselling book denouncing religion says it all: “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.”

But anyone who looks at history with just a smidgen of fairness can see that religion doesn’t poison everything: It flavors it. Even those who deny God as the source of all creation can’t, in good reason, deny that the belief in God has influenced and, arguably, improved, everything that it’s touched: Art, architecture, literature, law, music … we all owe a tremendous debt to people who celebrated their Creator through their own creativity.

And while some atheists shout their denial at such evidence, others seem willing to acknowledge their debt to faith.

“More than any other institution, religion deserves our appreciation and respect because it has persistently encouraged people to care deeply — for the self, for neighbors, for humanity, and for the natural world — and to strive for the highest ideals humans are able to envision,” writes Bruce Sheiman in his new book, “An Atheist Defends Religion: Why Humanity is Better Off With Religion than Without It.”

The Religion News Service (via USA Today) offered a fascinating take of a movement it calls “Atheism 3.0″ — a pretty sudden movement, considering Hitchens’ and Dawkins’ 2.0-version of atheism really just got off the ground less than a decade ago. These new, new atheists, as RNS author Daniel Burke calls them, want to make peace with their religious brethren, not war. They want to, if not embrace religion themselves, at least acknowledge that it holds a place in the public square and that it can be a catalyst for good behavior.

That’s great, of course, on a couple of different levels.

For one, it’s so much easier to talk with those who disagree with you when they’re not shouting all the time. And we’ve got a lot to talk about. As Greg Epstein, Harvard University’s humanist chaplain, tells the RNS, it really behooves believers and non-believers alike to not fight with each other, what with the world facing so many problems. “When our goal is erasing religion, rather than embracing human beings, we all lose,” Epstein says.

But that dialogue may open up new, more spiritual avenues, as well. Because when one looks at the benefits of faith rationally, one can’t help but wonder whether there’s something to it, after all — more than just a benign fairy tale. Statistically, people of faith live longer, happier lives than those without faith — and the more religious you are, generally the happier you think yourself. Religion has been a tremendous source of beauty, of justice, and societal advancement. It’s survived and thrived in times of war and peace, famine and plenty, superstition and skepticism. And, with science and nature so ruthlessly efficient, is there really a better explanation for the enduring power of faith other than … it reflects the truth?

” … you have to have a purpose in life bigger than yourself, and that not everything is all about you,” Epstein says. But that purpose, if atheists give the matter enough thought, almost assuredly points to the possibility of Divine purpose. It almost has to. Faith is, in many ways, both gloriously implausible and relentlessly logical. We must never forget that what we believe is not just beautiful — it is true. We can’t definitively prove it to be true, of course — I think God likes the mystery — but every indicator points us in the right direction, if we give it enough thought.

And I think it’s possible that, when folks are given a glimpse of that truth, it might lead them back home.

Tags: atheism, beauty, faith, religion, truth
Posted in Body Parts | Permalink

Armed for Jesus?

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

The 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?

Tags: church, conservative, faith, Tiller, tragedy
Posted in North America, politics | Permalink