Honoring the valiant

means remembering both the price they paid, and the reason why that price was necessary.

What President Obama should have done about the BP spill

It's probably too late now, but this administration that's so fond of appointing "czars" for various jobs should have appointed an oil-spill czar, told them (and everyone else) that they had the full authority of the executive branch behind them, sent them down to Louisiana and told them not to come back until the hole had been plugged. They would have wanted someone who met several criteria:

Maybe we should call him President BP Obama?

The incomparable Michael Barone writes,

In uncertain times, worship

Yesterday, William Jacobson wrote,

Decades from now, we will look back on this time period as the bad old days. I hope.

Because if these are the good old days, we are in deep trouble.

I don’t disagree with him; as is probably clear from recent posts, I have a deep feeling of foreboding about the current state of our nation and the world. At the same time, though, I am being reminded day by day that that’s only half the picture. When it seems like the world is coming apart, it’s important to remember that’s nothing new—and that as Christians, our hope is not in this world. As Ray Ortlund brilliantly says,

This life we live is not life. This life is a living death. This whole world is ruins brilliantly disguised as elegance. Christ alone is life. Christ has come, bringing his life into the wreckage called us. He has opened up, even in these ruins, the frontier of a new world where grace reigns. He is not on a mission to help us improve our lives here. He is on a mission to create a new universe, where grace reigns in life. He is that massive, that majestic, that decisive, that critical and towering and triumphant.

We don’t “apply this to our lives.” It’s too big for that. But we worship him. And we boast in the hope of living forever with him in his new death-free world of grace.

Yes, we need to care about the troubles of this world, because God is at work in and through them—including in and through us. But as Christians, we don’t begin there. We begin by remembering that we are not first and foremost people of this world, but people of the risen King; and so, properly, we begin with worship. The rest will follow, as God leads and empowers, if we keep our eyes firmly fixed on him, and our focus firmly set on following Christ.

Umm . . . about those “death panels” . . .

The media may have assured us that Gov. Palin didn’t know what she was talking about when she coined that phrase, and the Democrats may have insisted there was no such thing lurking in ObamaPelosiCare's shadows—but try telling that to the man President Obama nominated to take over government health care, Dr. Donald Berwick,

an outspoken admirer of the British National Health Service and its rationing arm, the National Institute for Clinical Effectiveness (NICE).

“I am romantic about the National Health Service. I love it,” Berwick said during a 2008 speech to British physicians, going on to call it “generous, hopeful, confident, joyous, and just.” He compared the wonders of British health care to a U.S. system that he described as trapped in “the darkness of private enterprise.”

Berwick was referring to a British health care system where 750,000 patients are awaiting admission to NHS hospitals. The government’s official target for diagnostic testing was a wait of no more than 18 weeks by 2008. The reality doesn’t come close. The latest estimates suggest that for most specialties, only 30 to 50 percent of patients are treated within 18 weeks. For trauma and orthopedics patients, the figure is only 20 percent.

Overall, more than half of British patients wait more than 18 weeks for care. Every year, 50,000 surgeries are canceled because patients become too sick on the waiting list to proceed. . . .

With the creation of NICE, the U.K. government has effectively put a dollar amount to how much a citizen’s life is worth. To be exact, each year of added life is worth approximately $44,305 (£30,000). Of course, this is a general rule and, as NICE chairman Michael Rawlins points out, the agency has sometimes approved treatments costing as much as $70,887 (£48,000) per year of extended life.

To Dr. Berwick , this is exactly how it should be. “NICE is not just a national treasure,” he says, “it is a global treasure.”

And, Dr. Berwick wants to bring NICE-style rationing to this country. “It’s not a question of whether we will ration care,” he said in a magazine interview for Biotechnology Healthcare, “It is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”

My one complaint with Michael Tanner’s article is its title, “‘Death panels’ were an overblown claim—until now” . . . are you really so sure about that? If the claim isn’t overblown now, maybe it never was. Isn’t it just possible, Mr. Tanner, that Gov. Palin understood from the beginning what it took you a while to figure out? So the Democrats said there were no death panels in the bill. So they also said, “If you like your present health insurance, you can keep it”—but they didn’t write the bill that way. (Rather to the contrary, actually.) Who’s really worth believing here?

A deeply troubling development on the world scene

is the accelerating pivot of Turkey from an ally of the West into the Islamist camp. It shouldn't have been surprising, I suppose, given that its secularist parties were so corrupt; the effort to secularize a Moslem country was probably doomed to failure anyway, but when their corruption and incompetence left them with no moral legitimacy or political capital, there was no one to stand up to or counterbalance the radicals. The consequences are becoming increasingly dire:

To follow Turkish discourse in recent years has been to follow a national decline into madness. Imagine 80 million or so people sitting at the crossroads between Europe and Asia. They don't speak an Indo-European language and perhaps hundreds of thousands of them have meaningful access to any outside media. What information most of them get is filtered through a secular press that makes Italian communists look right wing by comparison and an increasing number of state (i.e., Islamist) influenced outfits. Topics A and B (or B and A, it doesn't really matter) have been the malign influence on the world of Israel and the United States.

For example, while there was much hand-wringing in our own media about "Who lost Turkey?" when U.S. forces were denied entry to Iraq from the north in 2003, no such introspection was evident in Ankara and Istanbul. Instead, Turks were fed a steady diet of imagined atrocities perpetrated by U.S. forces in Iraq, often with the implication that they were acting as muscle for the Jews. The newspaper Yeni Safak, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's daily read, claimed that Americans were tossing so many Iraqi bodies into the Euphrates that local mullahs had issued a fatwa ordering residents not to eat the fish. The same paper repeatedly claimed that the U.S. used chemical weapons in Fallujah. And it reported that Israeli soldiers had been deployed alongside U.S. forces in Iraq and that U.S. forces were harvesting the innards of dead Iraqis for sale on the U.S. "organ market."

The secular Hurriyet newspaper, meanwhile, accused Israeli soldiers of assassinating Turkish security personnel in Mosul and said the U.S. was starting an occupation of (Muslim) Indonesia under the guise of humanitarian assistance. Then U.S. ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman actually felt the need to organize a conference call to explain to the Turkish media that secret U.S. nuclear testing did not cause the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. One of the craziest theories circulating in Ankara was that the U.S. was colonizing the Middle East because its scientists were aware of an impending asteroid strike on North America.

Given this, the fact that Turkey was behind the deliberate provocation that was the Gaza flotilla is an ominous sign (though the fact that the administration, in the person of Joe Biden, was willing to stand up to them on Israel's behalf is an encouraging one); a country that was for many years a key ally of the US in the region is now well on its way to becoming another Iran—and while the Turks lack the mullahs' oil money, they are in all other ways in a far better position to damage us and our allies. If their current moves toward Iran turn into a long-term alliance, that would be an extremely difficult radical Islamic power bloc to counter; if they end up as rivals with Iran, the resulting conflict could be even worse. It's hard to see a way this turns out well.

For lack of better options, if Turkey continues to swing in an Islamist direction, maybe the US and Iraqi governments need to get together and figure out a way to strike a deal with the Kurds—see if they would be willing to make concessions to the Iraqis in exchange for all-out assistance against the governments of Iran, Turkey and Syria. After all, as nervous as the government in Baghdad is about the Kurds, at this point one would think Iraq and the Kurds could find real common cause here.

It's a great product, with one tiny flaw . . .

This is the Laptop Steering Wheel Desk, available on Amazon.com for $24.95. No, this is not a joke—click on the link, it's an actual product. In the product description, it says, "For safety reasons, never use this product while driving"—which is less reassuring than it ought to be; it also makes one wonder how many people really would rather do their work in a parked car rather than sitting at a desk. Judging by the user-submitted photos, the customer-submitted tags (including "accident waiting to happen" and "alcohol accessories") and the customer reviews (some of which are quite funny), it would appear I'm not the only one dubious about the whole idea, or about how people who buy the thing are actually likely to use it. At least it was the inspiration for a great many wits (and would-be wits).

Is a Clinton-Obama war brewing?

This from Politico makes me wonder:

Former President Bill Clinton returned to his home state Friday to help a beleaguered ally and delivered a broadside against some of the most powerful interests in the Democratic Party.

Using unusually vivid language to describe the threat against Sen. Blanche Lincoln, Clinton urged the voters who nurtured his career to resist outside forces bent on making an example out of the two-term Democratic incumbent.

He pounded the podium with Lincoln at his side, warning that national liberal and labor groups wanted to make her a “poster child” in the June 8 Senate run-off to send a message about what happens to Democrats who don’t toe the party line.

“This is about using you and manipulating your votes to terrify members of Congress and members of the Senate,” Clinton said in the gym of a small historically black college here.

Clinton didn’t mention Lt. Gov. Bill Halter’s name—the lieutenant governor worked in the former president’s administration—or single out any specific liberal groups. But he didn’t need to.

Halter, who held the incumbent to under 50 percent in the May 18 primary election, has been the beneficiary of millions of dollars in advertising from liberal groups and unions angry with Lincoln over her hesitance to support labor organizing legislation and ties to the business community.

It’s a clash that pits the ascendant forces of the progressive left against a centrist Southern Democrat cut from Clinton’s own Democratic Leadership Council mold, a proxy fight that the former president and longtime Arkansas governor sought to underscore by noting that Lincoln’s “opponent is not her opponent.”

This is especially true given the way the whole Sestak story has played out, with the White House trying to focus everyone’s attention on President Clinton (as opposed to, say, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, whom they admit asked President Clinton to talk to Rep. Sestak on the administration’s behalf). I can’t imagine he appreciates the “when in doubt, blame a Clinton” approach (as Tabitha Hale put it) that the Obama administration is using here.

There’s more to the story than that, though, as Susannah of The Minority Report points out in a piece at RedState; specifically, there’s the relationship between President Clinton and Rep. Sestak. Susannah makes the case—circumstantial but compelling—that President Clinton submarined President Obama here, and that he did so deliberately. If so, this is something neither man wants to come out officially, for differing reasons, but if there’s a better explanation of President Clinton’s conduct during the PA Senate primary, I can’t think of it. And certainly, President Clinton has plenty of reason to want to bring President Obama down—not just for the way the Obama campaign treated the Clintons during the presidential primaries, but for the way the President has treated Secretary Clinton since taking office.

I do have a couple disagreements with Susannah; for one thing, I don’t think she goes far enough—if matters indeed played out as she speculates, I’m sure that President Clinton not only encouraged Rep. Sestak to stay in the primary, but that he actively encouraged Rep. Sestak to campaign on the fact that the White House had tried to buy him off. For the other, yes, James Carville has always worked for the Clintons, but I don’t think we can see their encouragement in Carville’s recent verbal defenestration of the White House, because I don’t think we need to. Carville’s a Democrat, yes, he’s a Clintonite, yes, but before either of those things, he’s a Cajun. He wasn’t speaking as a political operative there, he was speaking as a man of Louisiana, and good for him.

Now, she could be wrong, and I could be wrong, and everything could be just fine between Barack Obama and the Clintons; but given that there’s never been any evidence of that, but plenty of evidence to the contrary, given that it makes the best sense of l’affaire Sestak, and given that President Clinton seems to have come out and declared war on Barack Obama’s base—well, given all those things, at the end of the day, I don’t think we are. I will be shocked if Peter Ferrara’s recent prediction that President Obama will resign before November 2012 comes true, but as for his earlier prediction that the President won’t stand for re-election—that, I suspect, is the Clintons’ goal. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and who ends up being the last one standing. For my part, I wouldn’t bet on Barack Obama.

The (possible) coming global freeze

This is no certainty, but depending how things play out, we might see a short-term but serious dip in world temperatures:

In a cosmically ironic twist of fate and timing, nature may be set to empirically freeze any and all anthropogenic global warming talk: a blast of Arctic cold may encase the earth in an icy grip not seen for 200 years.

This is not alarmist fantasy or 2012 babble—several natural forces that are known to cause cooling are awakening simultaneously, raising speculation of a “perfect storm” of downward pressures on global temperature. These forces let loose one at a time can cause the Earth to cool and can bring about harsh winter conditions. If they all break free at once, the effects could be felt not just in the coming winter, but year-round, and for several years to come.

Read the whole thing for the details. As you can probably guess, we should all be watching Iceland’s volcanoes very closely.

Fly, eagle, fly

Trying, frying, fragmented day. This is good:

Note: before the song proper starts, there's a (sort-of-related) spoken clip and a neat instrumental bit by Mark Gersmehl.

Worry?

These are fretful days—an unprecedented ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the situation in Afghanistan is coming apart, Turkey appears to be turning from ally to enemy right before our eyes, the economy's in the tank and shows no real signs of climbing out, Iran continues to loom, and the Seattle Mariners are 19-31. (OK, so that last is nowhere near as serious as the others, but it still depresses me.) And of course, the list goes on and on, including such things as our government voting to abandon the Democratic Republic of the Congo (the former Zaire) to government by rape. These are not the salad days for most folks.

Which is why it was apropos, when I gathered the younger ones up to tuck them in (our eldest having uncharacteristically fallen asleep on her floor before 8pm) and pulled out the Jesus Storybook Bible to read to them before bed, to find ourselves here, at the Sermon on the Mount:

Wherever Jesus went, lots of people went, too. They loved being near him. Old people. Young people. All kinds of people came to see Jesus. Sick people. Well people. Happy people. Sad people. And worried people. Lots of them. Worrying about lots of things.

What if we don't have enough food? Or clothes? Or suppose we run out of money? What if there isn't enough? And everything goes wrong? And we won't be all right? What then?

When Jesus saw all the people, his heart was filled with love for them. They were like a little flock of sheep that didn't have a shepherd to take care of them. So Jesus sat them all down and he talked to them. . . .

"See those birds over there?" Jesus said.

Everyone looked. Little sparrows were pecking at seeds along the stony path.

"Where do they get their food? Perhaps they have pantries all stocked up? Cabinets full of food?

Everyone laughed—who's ever seen a bird with a bag of groceries?

"No," Jesus said. "They don't need to worry about that. Because God knows what they need and he feeds them."

"And what about those wild flowers?"

Everyone looked. All around them flowers were growing. Anemones, daisies, pure white lilies.

"Where do they get their lovely clothes? Do they make them? Or do they go to work every day so they can buy them? Do they have closets full of clothes?"

Everyone laughed again—who's ever seen a flower putting on a dress?

"No," Jesus said. "They don't need to worry about that because God clothes them in royal robes of splendor! Not even a king is that well dressed!" . . .

"Little flock," Jesus said, "you are more important than birds! More important than flowers! The birds and the flowers don't sit and worry about things. And God doesn't want his children to worry either. God loves to look after the birds and the flowers. And he loves to look after you, too."

Thank you, Father. That's just what I needed to hear.

Case study in educational reform

This comes from the NYT article I posted immediately below; it’s of particular interest because if you wanted to design a scientific experiment in educational reform, you’d have a hard time beating this real-world example.

A building on 118th Street [in Harlem] is one reason that the parents who are Perkins’s constituents know that charters can work. On one side there’s the Harlem Success Academy, a kindergarten-through-fourth-grade charter with 508 students. On the other side, there’s a regular public school, P.S. 149, with 438 pre-K to 8th-grade students. They are separated only by a fire door in the middle; they share a gym and cafeteria. School reformers would argue that the difference between the two demonstrates what happens when you remove three ingredients from public education—the union, big-system bureaucracy and low expectations for disadvantaged children.

On the charter side, the children are quiet, dressed in uniforms, hard at work—and typically performing at or above grade level. Their progress in a variety of areas is tracked every six weeks, and teachers are held accountable for it. They are paid about 5 to 10 percent more than union teachers with their levels of experience. The teachers work longer than those represented by the union: school starts at 7:45 a.m., ends at 4:30 to 5:30 and begins in August. The teachers have three periods for lesson preparation, and they must be available by cellphone (supplied by the school) for parent consultations, as must the principal. They are reimbursed for taking a car service home if they stay late into the evening to work with students. There are special instruction sessions on Saturday mornings. The assumption that every child will succeed is so ingrained that (in a flourish borrowed from the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, a national charter network) each classroom is labeled with the college name of its teacher and the year these children are expected to graduate (as in “Yale 2026” for one kindergarten class I recently visited). The charter side of the building spends $18,378 per student per year. This includes actual cash outlays for everything from salaries to the car service, plus what the city says (and the charter disputes) are the value of services that the city contributes to the charter for utilities, building maintenance and even “debt service” for its share of the building.

On the other side of the fire door, I encounter about a hundred children at 9:00 a.m. watching a video in an auditorium, having begun their school day at about 8:30. Others wander the halls. Instead of the matching pension contributions paid to the charter teachers that cost the school $193 per student on the public-school side, the union contract provides a pension plan that is now costing the city $2,605 per year per pupil. All fringe benefits, including pensions and health insurance, cost $1,341 per student on the charter side, but $5,316 on this side. For the public-school teachers to attend a group meeting after hours with the principal (as happens at least once a week on the charter side) would cost $41.98 extra per hour for each attendee, and attendance would still be voluntary. Teachers are not obligated to receive phone calls from students or parents at home. Although the city’s records on spending per student generally and in any particular school are difficult to pin down because of all of the accounting intricacies, the best estimate is that it costs at least $19,358 per year to educate each student on the public side of the building, or $980 more than on the charter side.

But while the public side spends more, it produces less. P.S. 149 is rated by the city as doing comparatively well in terms of student achievement and has improved since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took over the city’s schools in 2002 and appointed Joel Klein as chancellor. Nonetheless, its students are performing significantly behind the charter kids on the other side of the wall. To take one representative example, 51 percent of the third-grade students in the public school last year were reading at grade level, 49 percent were reading below grade level and none were reading above. In the charter, 72 percent were at grade level, 5 percent were reading below level and 23 percent were reading above level. In math, the charter third graders tied for top performing school in the state, surpassing such high-end public school districts as Scarsdale.

Same building. Same community. Sometimes even the same parents. And the classrooms have almost exactly the same number of students. In fact, the charter school averages a student or two more per class. This calculus challenges the teachers unions’ and Perkins’s “resources” argument—that hiring more teachers so that classrooms will be smaller makes the most difference. (That’s also the bedrock of the union refrain that what’s good for teachers—hiring more of them—is always what’s good for the children.) Indeed, the core of the reformers’ argument, and the essence of the Obama approach to the Race to the Top, is that a slew of research over the last decade has discovered that what makes the most difference is the quality of the teachers and the principals who supervise them. Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the University of Washington, reported, “The effect of increases in teacher quality swamps the impact of any other educational investment, such as reductions in class size.”

Is the pendulum swinging against teachers’ unions? (Updated)

Steven Brill had a remarkable piece in the New York Times a couple weeks ago on the rise of the education reformers, folks like Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America; I’ve kept meaning to post on it in detail, and I just haven’t had the time to dig into it that deeply. It seems like a remarkably honest piece about the state of our educational system and the reasons for its problems, including the fact that

If unions are the Democratic Party’s base, then teachers’ unions are the base of the base. The two national teachers’ unions—the American Federation of Teachers and the larger National Education Association—together have more than 4.6 million members. That is roughly a quarter of all the union members in the country. Teachers are the best field troops in local elections. Ten percent of the delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention were teachers’ union members. In the last 30 years, the teachers’ unions have contributed nearly $57.4 million to federal campaigns, an amount that is about 30 percent higher than any single corporation or other union. And they have typically contributed many times more to state and local candidates. About 95 percent of it has gone to Democrats.

This, of course, creates powerful political inertia—and political inertia makes a virtue of incumbency and stifles change. There’s no question that the teachers’ unions did great things in the past, but in too many places, the pendulum has swung far too far in the other direction (as pendula will usually do).

Part of that, on my observation, is that the unions are at least as much about the good of the union leadership as they are about the good of their membership. Certainly, they stand up to governments and school districts to defend their members’ incomes and benefits; but do they stand up to parents and trial lawyers to defend their members’ freedom to teach? The greatest threat to our teachers, it seems to me, is the erosion of their authority driven by our individualistic and litigious culture, and by the spineless failure of principals and other bureaucrats to back teachers who seek to assert that authority by enforcing real discipline; where are the unions in that struggle?

Brill paints a hopeful picture, but this rests on his belief that “there is a new crop of Democratic politicians across the country . . . who seem willing to challenge the teachers’ unions.” I’m not so sure about that; we’ll see when push comes to shove, I suppose. There are certainly those who are willing to push the unions a bit and go beyond the “all we need is more money” paradigm, including President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan; but to really challenge them? Well, we’ll see if Mickey Kaus can win the California Senate primary next Tuesday.

Update: I don’t know about Democratic politicians, but there’s certainly one politician in this country who’s unequivocally willing to challenge the teachers’ unions: NJ Gov. Chris Christie.

The power of grace

This goes well with Friday's post on grace-driven effort; this is E. Stanley Jones, courtesy of Of First Importance:

Grace binds you with far stronger cords than the cords of duty or obligation can bind you. Grace is free, but when once you take it, you are bound forever to the Giver and bound to catch the spirit of the Giver. Like produces like. Grace makes you gracious, the Giver makes you give.

Jesus Manifesto: for those who have ears to hear

Due to a combination of circumstances, I found myself this week filling in for my wife, who’s one of the book-review bloggers for Thomas Nelson (which now calls their review-blogging program, absurdly, BookSneeze), to write a review of the book Jesus Manifesto by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola. It’s a 179-page (plus footnotes) expansion of a ~2400 word essay they posted last summer, which I noted at the time when Jared Wilson flagged it. The essay was a powerful challenge to the increasingly Jesusless American church, but there was plenty of room to expand on each of their ten points; now, each one gets a chapter. The resulting book is not perfect, by any means—there’s room for criticism, as there is with any human work—but I’m grateful to Sweet and Viola for writing it, and to Thomas Nelson for publishing it and pushing it, because the church in this country badly needs to hear what they have to say.

I will probably come back to this book and interact with it more than once, because there’s a lot here; but for now, let me just post here what I put up on my wife’s blog. The best summary of this book comes from the authors themselves, in the last chapter, in words taken straight from the original essay:

Christians don’t follow Christianity; they follow Christ.

Christians don’t preach themselves; they preach Christ.

Christians don’t preach about Christ: they simply preach Christ.

The purpose of the book is to lay out why that’s so and what that looks like, in order to address “the major disease of today’s church . . . JDD: Jesus Deficit Disorder.”

Sweet and Viola do an excellent job of this; they have written a book which is truly centered on—indeed, saturated with—Jesus. Rather than resting on human wisdom, it rests solidly on Scripture, the word that contains the Word, “the cradle that contains the Christ,” in Luther’s phrase; this is not to say that they ignore the wisdom of Christians through the ages, but they only use it to expound and amplify the voice of the Scriptures as they speak of Christ. This book will make anyone who reads it with an open mind and heart aware of their hunger and thirst for Jesus; one hopes it will do the same for the American church.

Theology and discipleship

Time was, I used to read a lot of systematic theology; I don't do that much anymore. Rather, I'm much more likely to read commentaries. This is not to disparage the work of systematic theology—I still have a lot of it on my shelves, and I make use of it; but I think the church, at least since Aquinas, has tended to make much too much of theological systems, to the point where we identify with and believe in them rather than in what—or rather, Who—they're supposed to point us to. Just consider the labels Protestants use: Lutheran, Calvinist, Wesleyan, Baptist, Reformed, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian. (Those churches which call themselves Catholic and Orthodox are different because they defined themselves against each other—the purpose of their names is to identify them as the true church and the other as not.) I think systematic theology has a useful and important purpose in helping us to interpret Scripture holistically, in the big-picture view, with integrity; but we must always remember that it is merely a guide to understanding, not the substance of our beliefs.

It's easy to lose sight of that, but it's true, because true Christianity isn't about believing in beliefs, it's about believing in a person: Jesus Christ, the Son of God, in whom the fulness of the Triune God is revealed. Doctrines, even true doctrines, don't save us—only Jesus saves us; it matters that we believe true things, yes, but we seek to believe true things in order that we may more clearly see and know and believe in the one who is Truth.

Christ cannot be summarized in propositional statements and assertions of fact; indeed, all the true statements we can make about him and his teaching are of necessity partial. We cannot follow him by making up a list of things to do and not to do, or by identifying the things he did and trying to do them; we cannot help others know him merely by telling them things about him, even if every last one of them are true things. Christian faith cannot ultimately be explained, nor can it fully be taught, even though teaching is an important element of the work of the church. In the end, it can only be lived, Christ in us by his indwelling Holy Spirit; and the only way we can fully carry out his command to make disciples is by living in him and allowing others to live closely with us as we do so, so that we can say to them, "Follow me as I follow Christ."

That it may not be in vain

I'm not sure why it had never occurred to me before to post Lincoln's Gettysburg Address for Memorial Day, but I think it's well worth doing—not least because of its insistence that the most important thing we can do to honor those who died fighting for that which is good and true and right is to take up the work and carry it on.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Memorial Day

Pete Hegseth, the head of Vets for Freedom, posted this on NRO’s The Corner last year; I posted it at the time, and decided it was worth re-posting this year.

Memorial Day is about one thing: remembering the fallen on the battlefield and passing their collective story to the next generation. These stories, and the men who bear them, are the backbone of this American experiment and must never be forgotten. As John Stuart Mill once said, “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse.” The minute—excuse me, the second—we believe our freedoms inevitable and/or immutable, we cease to live in history, and have soured the soldier’s sacrifice. He died in the field, so we can enjoy this beautiful day (and weekend). Our freedoms—purchased on the battlefield—are indeed “worthy of war.”

And this day, with America still at war, it is also fitting that we remember the soldiers currently serving in harm’s way. Because, as any veteran can attest, just one moment, one explosion, or one bullet separates Veterans Day from Memorial Day. Soldiers currently in Iraq and Afghanistan are fighting for our freedoms today, knowing it’s possible they may never see tomorrow. These troops—and their mission—deserve our support each day, and our prayers every night. May God watch over them—and their families; May He give them courage in the face of fear, and righteous might in the face of evil.

On a different note

For those who might be interested, I just finished a sermon series working along the lines of the Nicene Creed (though I didn't hit everything the creed affirms) and ending up today with a sermon on the Trinity. I think that's the first time I've ever preached a full sermon on the subject. The texts are all up on the sermon blog; the audio of the sermons can be found on the church website, though at the moment only the first six are up—this morning's message will be posted tomorrow (Lord willing).

Update: OK, the audio of yesterday's message is up.

One more song

just because I've been thinking about this one lately: