Faith

The other night I watched most of PBS' Frontline episode from 2002 titled "Faith and Doubt At Ground Zero." A common theme was people either barely clinging to or losing their faith because, to paraphrase, "how could God let something like that happen." Not that it's a surprising reaction, but I couldn't help thinking, "Do these people think this is the first time ever that something terrible happened to a believer?" The other really weird thing was hearing the Jewish rabbi (Irwin Kula) chanting (singing) the last words (as heard from cell phone calls or voice mail recordings) of people who died on 9/11. Speaking of last words, an admonition from a recent blog post from Mike Cope:

For the past few days, as we've remember the tragedy of 9/11 five years later, I've been moved again by all the calls made to loved ones - some from jets and some from the twin towers. They were good-bye calls to make sure that people knew they were loved. And again it makes me ask myself: Am I holding anything back? Is there something I'd say if I had just a couple minutes to live that I'm not saying now? Why would we hold back? There are no guarantees in life. I might live another three decades; I might not live through 9-14-06. How about you? Are there words you need to speak to your parents? kids? spouse? friends? enemies? Maybe this is the time to say them.

Church of Christ minister Joe Beam is getting national media attention for his frank discussion of sexuality. See the article by Brian Alexander on MSNBC.com titled "One preacher's message: Have hotter sex".

From an article of the same title by Neela Banerjee in the NY Times:

On a Web site called mysecret.tv, there is the writer who was molested years ago by her baby sitter and who still cannot forgive herself for failing to protect her younger siblings from the same abuse. There is the happy father, businessman and churchgoer who is having a sexual relationship with another man in his church. There is the young woman who shot an abusive boyfriend when she was high on methamphetamine. Then there is this entry: "Years ago I asked my father, ‘How does a daddy justify selling his little girl?' He replied, ‘I needed to pay the rent, put food on the table and I liked having a few coins to jangle in my pocket.' " About a month ago, LifeChurch, an evangelical network with nine locations and based in Edmond, Okla., set up mysecret.tv as a forum for people to confess anonymously on the Internet. The LifeChurch founder, the Rev. Craig Groeschel, said that after 16 years in the ministry he knew that the smiles and eager handshakes that greeted him each week often masked a lot of pain. But the accounts of anguish and guilt that have poured into mysecret.tv have stunned him, Mr. Groeschel said, and affirmed his belief in the need for confession. "We confess to God for forgiveness but to each other for healing," Mr. Groeschel said. "Secrets isolate you, and keep you away from God, from those people closest to you."... Since its inception, mysecret.tv has received more than 150,000 hits and more than 1,500 confessions...

I just went to the site and read a few of the confessions. Interesting stuff. Is some of the power of confession lost when it is anonymous? Probably, since you lose the compassion, understanding, accountability that comes from the one to whom you confess. When you confess to the net, are you confessing to God? Probably.

From an article of the same title by Michael Alison Chandler in The Washington Post:

On June 6, Cheryl Smith took her last $600 and drove her teenage daughter from Baltimore to Severna Park to get an abortion. When they got there, a receptionist told them the clinic had changed hands. The abortion provider had moved a few miles away, she said, but the new clinic would offer a pregnancy test and sonogram for free. The Smiths stayed. After they saw a picture of the fetus at 21 weeks with arms and legs and a face, their thoughts of termination were gone. "As soon as I seen that, I was ready. It wasn't no joke. It was real," Makiba Smith, 16, said. "It was like, he's not born to the world yet, but he is inside of me growing." With its ultrasound machine and its location, the Severna Park Pregnancy Clinic demonstrates two of the most important tactics in an intensifying campaign to woo women away from abortion clinics. Antiabortion organizations in recent years have added medical services to hundreds of Christian-oriented pregnancy counseling centers nationwide. Many of these antiabortion clinics have opened in or near places where women go to end pregnancies... By many accounts, the ultrasound exams have proven effective in convincing women to stay pregnant. A 2005 survey by Care Net, a Sterling-based network of about 1,000 antiabortion pregnancy centers in the United States and Canada, found that 72 percent of women who were initially "strongly leaning" toward abortion decided to carry their pregnancies to term after seeing a sonogram. Fifty percent made the same choice after counseling alone. Such results have led antiabortion forces to buy more ultrasound machines, which can cost as much as $50,000 each. In the past 2 1/2 years, the evangelical organization Focus on the Family, based in Colorado Springs, estimates it has helped 200 pregnancy centers buy the machines... Defending the decision to locate antiabortion pregnancy centers near abortion clinics, Hartshorn said abortion foes are not seeking "to be deceptive or to trick people, but to be right where they are when they are making decisions." Some Feel Deceived But many women say they have felt duped. The National Abortion Federation has received hundreds of calls and e-mails from women who say they went into pregnancy centers with vague or confusing names, many of them found under "abortion services" headings in the phone book. Rather than receiving unbiased counseling on all of their legal options, these women said, they found themselves listening to frightening, sometimes false, information... For Cheryl and Makiba Smith, ending up at the wrong clinic was a mistake they say they are deeply glad to have made. "God sent me to that clinic," Cheryl Smith said.

From an article of the same title by Steven Waldman on beliefnet:

When U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris said separation of church and state is "a lie," many critics figured this was a characteristic Harris gaffe--another sign she was out of the mainstream. Actually, she was reflecting what has become a common view in religious conservative circles--that the idea of separation of church and state was concocted by 20th-century courts, not the Founding Fathers... Conservative activists point out that the words "separation of church and state" appear nowhere in the Constitution--and they're right about that. The phrase came from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to a group of Connecticut Baptists in which he praised the First Amendment's "wall between church and state." When the Supreme Court quoted that letter in a key church-state ruling in 1947, the "wall" became the dominant metaphor. While political activists have lately pushed the more combative rhetoric, serious conservative scholars have long argued that the Founders were mostly attempting to block the creation of official state religions when, in the First Amendment, they wrote that Congress could not make laws "respecting an establishment of religion." Therefore, wrote former Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, "there is simply no historical foundation for the proposition that the Framers intended to build the 'wall of separation.'" It's also true that when the First Amendment was approved, lawmakers assumed it would only apply to the federal government, allowing the states wide latitude in mixing church and state. (It was the 14th Amendment, passed after the civil war, that applied freedom of religion to the states)... But there's one important difference between mainstream conservative legal scholars and the Christian political activists. Most conservative scholars argue that the Constitution can accommodate a great deal of state support for religion, as long as the government avoids favoring one faith over another. Many modern Christian activists have argued that the U.S. is "a Christian nation" and that the Founders intended not only religion in general, but Christianity specifically... Christian activists usually make the argument by casting the Founders as orthodox Christians, except when it comes to Jefferson, who was downright hostile to organized Christianity.