WORLD Magazine, April 4, 2015 Vol. 30 No. 7

Brushing back Christian ballplayers and churches

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HUNGRY RUSSIA ARE THE BALTICS NEXT?

Serious about the gospel From the heart of Louisville’s Southern Seminary campus to the north woods of Dunbar, Wisconsin, Boyce College’s committed faculty trains students who will serve the church and engage the culture from a convictional and biblical worldview amidst a rapidly changing world.

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HOW TO LIVE A GODLY

LIFE IN AN INCREASINGLY GODLESS NATION Meet a man forced to live in a fast changing and godless society. He faced fears about the future, concern for his safety, and the discouragement about a world that seemed to be falling apart at warp speed. Yet he also lived with great faith and hope—and he changed an entire empire while he was at it. In Thriving in Babylon, Larry Osborne explores the story of the biblical character of Daniel to help us live godly lives in an increasingly godless culture.

Available in print and digital editions everywhere books are sold

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APR0415 / VOLUME 30 / NUMBER 7

COVER STORY

Drawing a red line

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Will NATO defend the Baltics if Russia attacks? As signs of imminent warfare grow, the Ukraine example breeds fear and frustration

F E AT UR E S

DEPARTMENTS

44 Terri + 10

6 Joel Belz 9 DISPATCHES

A decade after the starvation of patient Terri Schiavo, medical advancements are helping other patients with disorders of consciousness

48 Parents vs. doctors

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In the treatment of children with severe genetic disabilities, the interests and opinions of parents and doctors aren’t always the same—and hospital futility policies may become the flash point of the fight

52 Cultural hardball

52 g Visit our website—wng.org—for breaking news and more

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In an increasingly hostile culture, pastors and Christian ballplayers both face brushback pitches.

Will they stand up to the pressure?

ON THE COVER Illustration by Krieg Barrie

News Human Race Quotables Quick Takes

24 Janie B. Cheaney 27 CULTURE Movies & TV Books Q&A Music

36 Mindy Belz 59 NOTEBOOK Lifestyle Technology Science Houses of God Sports Religion

67 Mailbag 71 Andrée Seu Peterson 72 Marvin Olasky

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WORLD

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“The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world and those who dwell therein.”

—Psalm 24:1 editorial Editor in Chief Marvin Olasky Editor Mindy Belz Managing Editor Timothy Lamer News Editor Jamie Dean Senior Writers Janie B. Cheaney • Susan Olasky Andrée Seu Peterson • John Piper Edward E. Plowman • Cal Thomas • Lynn Vincent Reporters Emily Belz • J.C. Derrick Daniel James Devine • Sophia Lee • Angela Lu Correspondents Megan Basham Julie Borg • Anthony Bradley • Andrew Branch Tim Challies • Michael Cochrane • Kiley Crossland John Dawson • Amy Henry • Mary Jackson Michael Leaser • Jill Nelson • Arsenio Orteza Stephanie Perrault • Joy Pullmann • Emily Whitten Mailbag Editor Les Sillars Executive Assistant June McGraw Editorial Assistants Kristin Chapman • Mary Ruth Murdoch

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Website worldandeverything.com Executive Producer Nickolas S. Eicher Senior Producer Joseph Slife

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mission statement To report, interpret, and illustrate the news in a timely, accurate, enjoyable, and arresting fashion from a perspective committed to the Bible as the inerrant Word of God.

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Joel Belz

The blink of an eye The culture has changed quickly, and Christians will face more and more tests

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Having been emboldened by their victories, those with the mindsets that have brought us gay rights in employment and same-sex marriage will not be satisfied by any means.

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A WORLD reader told me last week, with frustration interrupting every sentence, how her teenage granddaughter, playing on the volleyball team of her public high school, had been paired on one of the team’s road trips to room with a teammate known as a lesbian. “It was like it was a test,” the grandmother told me.

“The coach is also a lesbian, and she knew [our granddaughter] was a professing Christian. Yes, she knew exactly what she was doing. She wanted to see how she would react.”

I’m not sure whether social conservatives really meant it a generation or so ago—or if we knew what we were saying—when we warned that the legal affirmation of homosexual behavior in its various expressions might change our society forever in ways we could not imagine.

We used to wonder whether someone like the woman coach would be exonerated in her claim to serve in a place of special influence over adolescents. Now the question has moved with exponential speed to whether a student like our reader’s granddaughter has any rights to claim in a scenario like this one. But don’t be silly. Of course the granddaughter has no rights.

Even to suggest the possibility is to display not just her insensitivity but her actual hatred of her homosexual teammate.

All that took place not in a liberal urban or metropolitan setting, but in a rural agricultural community.

So did it happen fast? Was it only yesterday that many of us were claiming that same-sex marriage would never gain approval if we only allowed the general public to vote on the issue?

We were wrong. We may not have been wrong then—but we didn’t allow for the profound influence of the mainstream entertainment and news media, the secular educational establishment, the courts and political elite, and mainstream religious spokesmen. In the blink of an eye, policies we were so sure could never win

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general approval were clobbering us by growing majorities.

All of which prompts us to look warily ahead—and not to kid ourselves this time about how far off the new round of issues is likely to be. For having been emboldened by their victories, those with the mindsets that have brought us gay rights in employment and same-sex marriage will not be satisfied by any means.

Here are three examples of other tests we should prepare for.

First is the threat to evangelical institutions, including those involved in education, media, and social welfare. Their very existence will be challenged on the basis of their refusal to hire or to accept as clients/customers practicing homosexuals. The clout of the state, or of professional bodies (think “accrediting associations”) will have quick and devastating effects.

Be watching what happens this year at Gordon College in Massachusetts and Erskine College in South Carolina. Neither has a history as a fundamentalist, right-wing institution. But both face ominous challenges in the immediate future.

Second, even in the general public, be ready to find a reshaping of many traditional patterns.

Study the progress in Minnesota of lobbying groups trying to eliminate all gender distinctions in high-school sports. The prohibition would apply both to team lineups and access to facilities like lockers and showers. Although temporarily stalled, the proposal has by no means gone away. If adopted by the Minnesota State High School League, it will reportedly apply not just to public schools but to all private, religious, and even home schools.

And third, pay careful attention to the hubbub over the transgender movement. Don’t mistake transgenderism merely as a minority within the wider homosexual world; there, you might possibly sympathize with many who are confused or unhappy, for whatever reason, about their sexual identity. See transgenderism, though—and properly fear it—first as an ever so much sharper rejection of that identity, and then a determination to take extreme measures to change it. It is (much too simply, for sure) an expression of rebellion against God’s order of things carried to new levels. And the media love to celebrate it.

Will those same media, educators, courts, political elite, and mainstream religious leaders continue to join that rebellion? Will you, like the granddaughter of WORLD’s reader, be challenged to pass their tests? Do you know yet how well prepared you might be to respond? A

 jbelz@wng.org

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DISPATCHES NEWS / HUMAN RACE / QUOTABLES / QUICK TAKES

MARCH 8

MEMORIAL MARCH

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GET T Y IMAGES

Thousands of persons gathered in Selma, Ala., to observe the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” the 1965 civil rights march that turned violent after state troopers clubbed and tear-gassed the freedom marchers on Edmund Pettus Bridge.

The incident spurred the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

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APRIL 4, 2015

WORLD

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DISPATCHES

NEWS March 17

Netanyahu wins big As Election Day in Israel neared, polls showed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu trailing his chief political rival Isaac Herzog.

But when the voters weighed in for the March 17 election, Netanyahu’s Likud Party was the big winner. Likud won 30 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, while Herzog’s Zionist Union party won 24.

Netanyahu, who ran on ­continued growth in settlements and opposition to Iran, dropped his commitment to negotiate a Palestinian state as he faltered in pre-election polls. Following victory, Netanyahu began efforts to form a coalition government— one analysts say may be the most conservative in Israel’s history.

NETANYAHU: Oded Balilty/AP • okl ahoma: Sue Ogrocki/ap • iditarod: Loren Holmes Al ask a Dispatch News/ap

March 12

United we stand The University of Oklahoma football team, donning all black, skipped practice to hold a silent protest against a video showing members of the school’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) fraternity reciting a racist chant. The fraternity’s national office has since shut down the university’s SAE chapter, and university President David Boren says the group is permanently banned from campus. Additionally, Boren, in a move some deemed unconstitutional, expelled two students who played a “leadership role” in the incident.

Families of the two men— identified as Levi Pettit and Parker Rice—issued statements apologizing for the behavior.

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11:41 AM

MARCH 9

DOG DAYS OF WINTER The off icial start of the 43rd Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race got underway as 78 mushers left the starting line in Fairbanks, Alaska. On March 12, Aaron Burmeister, a 15-time Iditarod racer, became the first of the teams to reach the halfway point in Huslia after warm temperatures and reduced snow on the traditional route forced off icials to modify the race trail. It is only the second time in Iditarod history that off icials have changed the route. The nearly 1,000-mile race ends in Nome after the last musher crosses the finish line.

NETANYAHU: ODED BALILT Y/AP • OKL AHOMA: SUE OGROCKI/AP • IDITAROD: LOREN HOLMES AL ASK A DISPATCH NEWS/AP

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NEWS

March 13

Ferocious cyclone Cyclone Pam plowed into the South Pacific islands of Vanuatu, flattening crops, smashing boats, flooding streets, and reportedly damaging 90 percent of ­housing and buildings in some areas. Early reports indicated the storm was bigger than expected and is likely the worst hurricane to hit the region since at least Cyclone Zoe in 2002. With a population of about 250,000 persons, Vanuatu is made up of more than 80 islands. The death toll, initially set at 11, was expected to rise as rescuers reached vulnerable island areas. Vanuatu’s President Baldwin Lonsdale said recent development had been wiped out: “So this means we will have to start anew again.”

March 10

ISIS in retreat Iraqi security forces and allied Shiite militias reclaimed large parts of Tikrit amid reports that ISIS militants had begun retreating from the city. The advance was the Iraqi forces’ biggest counteroffensive so far against the Islamic State militants, who seized control of Mosul and Tikrit last June.

Paramilitary leader Hadi Al-Amiri said he is confident Iraqi forces can succeed without help from the U.S.-led coalition: “The people of Iraq will liberate this country and put an end to ISIS.” Once Tikrit is back under Baghdad’s control, government forces plan to make a move on Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, now under ISIS control.

cyclone: Dave Hunt/ap • iraq: AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP/Get t y Images

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clinton: Dennis Van Tine/Geisler-Fotopres/picture-alliance/dpa/AP

DISPATCHES

March 10

Self-server clinton: Dennis Van Tine/Geisler-Fotopres/picture-alliance/dpa/AP

cyclone: Dave Hunt/ap • iraq: AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP/Get t y Images

Analyzing Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects began after she held a press conference aimed at squelching the firestorm over her use as secretary of state of a private email server. Clinton said her choice was for “convenience,” but many questioned that decision, which gives her control over limiting access to her email archives. Meanwhile, President Obama and many fellow Democrats declined to rush to her defense, instead distancing themselves from the controversy. Clinton says she will not turn over the private server for review.

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APRIL 4, 2015 WORLD

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DISPATCHES

NEWS

Around the globe

UNITED STATES A Black Hawk helicopter crashed during a training mission along the foggy Florida coast, killing seven Marines and four soldiers.

SOUTH KOREA A knife-wielding assailant slashed the face and wrist of Mark Lippert, the U.S. ambassador to South Korea, during a breakfast meeting in Seoul. Authorities say the attacker was a militant Korean nationalist demanding the reunification of North and South Korea.

ITALY Italian rescue vessels ferried more than 1,000 migrants and refugees from the southern Mediterranean Sea to Italian ports after a smuggling vessel capsized, killing 10 persons. The migrants— identified as Syrians, Palestinians, Libyans, Tunisians, and others— are part of a continual wave of refugees flooding out of Libya.

IRAN U.S., European, and Iranian negotiators raced to meet a March 31 deadline for an agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear program, with Iranian diplomats complaining that a letter signed by 47 Republican senators would hamper any deal.

VENEZUELA President Barack Obama signed an executive order declaring Venezuela a national security threat, issuing sanctions against seven off icials, and calling for the release of all political prisoners.

ARGENTINA The collision of two helicopters during filming for a French reality TV show in Argentina left 10 persons dead, including three French sports stars.

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NIGERIA ISIS leaders say the caliphate has expanded to western Africa after they allegedly accepted a pledge of allegiance from Boko Haram, the terrorist group operating in Nigeria.

MYANMAR Baton-wielding riot police beat back students protesting against a new education law they say restricts academic freedom in Myanmar (or Burma). The students were attempting to march nearly 400 miles from Mandalay to the commercial capital of Yangon, but authorities had blocked their way with vehicles and barbed wire barricades. The clashes ended with the arrest of more than 100 persons.

MYANMAR: GEMUNU AMARASINGHE/AP

SIERRA LEONE Specially equipped planes evacuated an American aid worker and a British military healthcare worker who contracted Ebola while working in Sierra Leone.

SOMALIA U.S. off icials confirm that a U.S. drone strike in Somalia has killed Adan Garar, an al-Shabaab terrorist who allegedly helped orchestrate the 2013 Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi, Kenya.

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APRIL FOOLS’ DAY: BOB SCOT T/GET T Y IMAGES • WRIGLEY FIELD: BRIAN CASSELL A/CHICAGO TRIBUNE/MCT/NEWSCOM • FURIOUS 7: UNIVERSAL PICTURES • SUNRISE SERVICE: CLIFF GRASSMICK/THE DAILY CAMERA/AP

MORE NEWS OF THE WORLD IS ON OUR WEBSITE: WNG.ORG

Looking ahead

MYANMAR: GEMUNU AMARASINGHE/AP

APRIL FOOLS’ DAY: BOB SCOT T/GET T Y IMAGES • WRIGLEY FIELD: BRIAN CASSELL A/CHICAGO TRIBUNE/MCT/NEWSCOM • FURIOUS 7: UNIVERSAL PICTURES • SUNRISE SERVICE: CLIFF GRASSMICK/THE DAILY CAMERA/AP

APRIL 1

Silicon Valley may be the best place on earth for April Fools’ Day pranks.

Technology companies have increasingly made April Fools’ Day an anticipated internet holiday. Last year alone, Google initiated 20 pranks on users from announcing a virtual keyboard for cats to randomly inserting David Hasselhoff into Google Plus users’ photos.

APRIL 3

The latest installment in The Fast and the Furious movie series is expected to dominate box offices around the country when it’s released. Insiders predict opening weekend sales to exceed $100 million.

Furious 7 will mark the last screen appearance of Paul Walker, an actor who has starred in the series but died in a car crash after filming in 2013.

APRIL 5

The Chicago Cubs are rushing to finish as many of their planned extensive renovations of Wrigley Field as possible before they host the St. Louis Cardinals at 8 p.m. (EDT) to open Major League Baseball’s regular season. All other 28 teams will have their first games of the season the next day.

APRIL 5

Western Christians celebrate Easter today while Eastern Orthodox Christians will celebrate the resurrection of Christ on April 12. The difference comes from adherence to two different calendars: Eastern Christians follow the older Julian Calendar while Western believers follow the relatively newer Gregorian Calendar.

APRIL 6

The NCAA will crown its collegiate men’s basketball champion today, when the tournament known as March Madness comes to a conclusion. Indianapolis, Ind., and Lucas Oil Stadium play host for this year’s Final Four. Cleveland, Los Angeles, Houston, and Syracuse, N.Y., will host the Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight rounds from March 26-29.

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DISPATCHES

NEWS

Sudden departure ONCE A RISING STAR ON CAPITOL HILL, ILLINOIS’ AARON SCHOCK RESIGNS AMID GROWING SCANDALS

by J.C. Derrick in Washington

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Over the years Schock became known more for his six-pack abs and selfaggrandizement than passing legislation. He posed in an open shirt for a 2011 cover photo in Men’s Health and frequently posted pictures of himself in exotic places, from dancing on the streets of Argentina to surfing in Hawaii.

Schock’s recent troubles began in early February when a Washington Post style reporter paid an unannounced visit to his Capitol Hill office, where he found elaborate Downton Abbey– inspired decor and an interior decorator who was only too happy to show him around. The left-wing group Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington filed an ethics complaint because the decorator said she donated her services.

The complaint sparked a flurry of media stories and accusations that came to a head on March 17. The Chicago Tribune reported a Schocklinked shell company paid a political donor $300,000 for a property in his congressional district, then took out a $600,000 mortgage on it—using a bank operated by separate donors.

Politico, meanwhile, found Schock billed both taxpayers and his campaign for some 172,000 miles on his personal vehicle between January 2010 and July 2014. According to public records, when he sold the Chevrolet Tahoe, his only registered vehicle during that time, it had less than 83,000 miles on

it. Politico previously reported Schock improperly billed taxpayers for a Nov. 14 chartered flight to a Chicago Bears game.

The Office of Congressional Ethics opened an investigation on Feb. 28— likely to disappear with Schock’s resignation, which takes effect March 31.

Rumors swirled that the Department of Justice may yet bring criminal charges.

Schock’s abrupt departure surprised his GOP colleagues—including House Speaker John Boehner—and even journalists, who called him one of the most interesting, colorful members of Congress. Many had thought he would ride out the controversy, perhaps agreeing to pay fines for breaking rules.

Fellow Illinois Republican Rep. Randy Hultgren said he was “saddened” to hear the news: “Regardless of the circumstances surrounding his departure, he brought youth and energy to Congress and was dedicated to serving the needs of his constituents.”

Ritch Boerckel, senior pastor of Bethany Baptist Church in Peoria, where Schock professed faith in Christ in 2007, told me: “I am hurting with Aaron over the deep sadness that is surely his. I am confident that Aaron loves God and that he is called according to His eternal purpose.”

Schock leaves a safe Republican district, with a special elections replacing him to be held no later than July. A

TOM WILLIAMS/CQ ROLL CALL/AP

Illinois Rep. Aaron Schock’s mom cried when she found out her son was running for Congress, because she was afraid it might turn him into a crook. Those fears now appear prophetic. “Let’s say it, aloud: Aaron Schock is a crook,” wrote National Review’s Charles Cooke on March 10.

A week later, barely into his fourth term, Schock announced his resignation from Congress after weeks of withering criticism over his lavish lifestyle—at least some of which came at taxpayer expense. Schock in a statement called his time in Congress “the highest and greatest honor of my life,” but acknowledged ongoing controversy became “a great distraction that has made it too difficult for me to serve the people of the 18th District with the high standards that they deserve and which I have set for myself.”

The resignation sent Schock, only 33, to an early retirement, although he compiled a 14-year record in elected office. He won election to a school board at age 19, the Illinois General Assembly at age 23, and Congress four years later. Then-House Minority Whip Eric Cantor immediately named him a deputy whip.

In a WORLD profile published the month he took office (“Young gun,” Jan. 31, 2009), Schock spoke freely about his new Christian faith and the importance of political ethics—the very issue that would precipitate his demise.

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11:53 AM

College of Nursing College of Pharmacy Communication Sciences and Disorders Physical Therapy Program Physician Assistant Program Premedicine

Improving spiritual and physical wellness Harding University’s physical therapy program strives to create physical therapists equipped with the ability to improve the spiritual and physical wellness of the world. Started in 2011, the three-year program leads to a Doctor of Physical Therapy. The initial graduating class had a 100 percent first-time board exam pass rate. There is a strong focus in medical missions with students traveling to Zambia where they practice what they’ve learned. Students are taught patient-centered care that ensures optimal physical therapy outcomes delivered through the highest standards of Christian service.

Faith, Learning and Living CREDIT

Harding.edu | 800-477-4407 Searcy, Arkansas

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3/13/15 4:09 PM

DISPATCHES

HUMAN RACE

DIED Medford Stanton Evans, a

IMPLICATED U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., will face criminal corruption charges from the Department of Justice (DOJ), according to leaked reports. The senator has served in Congress with little controversy more than 20 years, but a previously scrutinized friendship with a Florida eye doctor is again under the microscope. Texas Republican Ted Cruz and other conservatives questioned the rumor’s timing due to Menendez’s criticism of the president’s negotiations with Iran.

The DOJ has yet to file charges, and a defensive Menendez claimed he’s “not going anywhere.”

leading conservative activist of the 1960s-80s, died March 3 at the age of 80. An early writer for the National Review, Evans became the youngest editor of a daily newspaper at 26, with the Indianapolis News. Evans used his voice to influence the conservative movement at the grassroots level, helping revive Ronald Reagan’s 1980 primary campaign.

West Virginia legislators passed a ban on abortions after 20 weeks, overriding on March 6 an executive veto for the first time in 30 years. The House and Senate spurned Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin 77-16 and 24-5, respectively, to protect unborn children who have developed enough to feel pain. State-level efforts for 20-week bans have surged since U.S. House Republicans proved unable to pass a ban in January.

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CRASHED Actor Harrison Ford on March 4 crashed his World War II–era plane on a California golf course, dodging a neighborhood after he lost power.

MENENDEZ: JOHN MINCHILLO/AP • EVANS: HANDOUT • SORTOR: AFP/GET T Y IMAGES • TOMBLIN: STEVE HELBER/AP

OVERRIDDEN

Methodist missionary Phyllis Sortor is free after two weeks of captivity in Nigeria. Authorities believe an armed gang, not Boko Haram, abducted her Feb. 23 and demanded $300,000 for her release.

Sortor, 71, served at Hope Academy in the Koji region. Free Methodist Church USA reported her safe, but declined to comment on how a “family representative was able to secure her release.”

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9:50 AM

FORD: DAMIAN DOVARGANES/AP • BADGER: WILL SEBERGER/MCT/L ANDOV • HALL : HANDOUT • HESS: JIM PRINGLE/AP

RELEASED

By the numbers DIED Bill Badger, who ended the

2011 shooting rampage that injured former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords, died March 11. He was 78.

Ford’s crashed plane

Doctors expected Ford to make a full recovery.

TREATED

MENENDEZ: JOHN MINCHILLO/AP • EVANS: HANDOUT • SORTOR: AFP/GET T Y IMAGES • TOMBLIN: STEVE HELBER/AP

FORD: DAMIAN DOVARGANES/AP • BADGER: WILL SEBERGER/MCT/L ANDOV • HALL : HANDOUT • HESS: JIM PRINGLE/AP

Mark Hall, lead singer for

Christian band Casting Crowns, had one kidney removed on March 11 after doctors discovered he likely had cancer. The band documented the surgery and asked for prayers on Facebook, saying hospital staff members they met said they had been praying for Hall.

Doctors called it a textbook surgery, the band reported, adding that recovery has been normal yet painful.

RESCUED Eighteen-month-old Lily left a Utah hospital and was singing nursery rhymes on March 11, just days after surviving the car accident and exposure that killed her mother. The story went viral as both the child’s life and her rescue continue to defy explanation. Lily survived nearly 14 hours upside down, with frigid water flowing under her car seat after the car

veered into a river unnoticed. Four responders who found the unconscious Lily agree they heard an unknown voice saying, “Help me,” from inside the car, yet the mother was already dead.

DIED Dean Hess, a World War II and Korean War pilot who said “flying brought me ... closer to God,” died March 2 at age 97. A budding preacher beginning at 16, he joined the Army after the attack on Pearl Harbor, flying more than 300 combat missions. Hess once missed a German target and watched his bomb destroy an orphanage. In Korea, he rescued hundreds of orphans in the path of communist troops, later planted orphanages, and adopted a Korean girl. He never returned to preaching, but helped spread his motto “By faith I fly” in the movie and memoir Battle Hymn.

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The odds the Las Vegas SuperBook gave the University of Kentucky men’s basketball team to win this year’s NCAA Tournament, making the Wildcats, who entered the tournament 34-0, the biggest favorites in modern tournament history.

$2,800 The Despite a gunshot graze to the head, the retired Army colonel tackled Jared Loughner after the man had killed six and injured 13 at a Giffords’ constituent event in Tucson, Ariz.

Badger and his wife became advocates of strict background checks for all gun sales.

RETRACTED A small-town North Carolina sheriff admits he may have made mistakes in a letter he sent to his county’s 20 registered sex offenders, effectively banning them from churches.

In the letter, Graham County Sheriff Danny Millsaps invited the offenders to services at the county jail instead.

He’s not the first to say a

amount of debt the federal government accumulated for every American between February 2014, when Congress suspended the federal debt limit, and March 2015. The national debt rose from $17.2 trillion to $18.1 trillion.

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The percentage of Americans who said “government” was the most important problem facing the country in a March 5-8 Gallup poll, the highest percentage for any answer for the fourth month in a row.

state law banning offenders from places children are present—namely schools and day care centers— applies to churches.

Millsaps told the Asheville Citizen-Times he has no plans to arrest anyone for attending church.

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DISPATCHES

QUOTABLES

‘I’m not scared that nonbelievers will make me feel an outcast. I’m scared that Christians will.’

‘There will be no parade.’

Boston Mayor MARTY WALSH on the city setting a new record—108.6 inches —for winter snowfall.

‘A pure ambush.’

U.S. Attorney General ERIC HOLDER on the shooting of two police off icers by “a damn punk” during a March 12 protest in Ferguson, Mo. “These police off icers were standing there and they were shot, just because they were police off icers,” added St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar.

‘Made in Russia, for Russians.’

A McDONALD’S BILLBOARD in Moscow. Anti-American sentiment is reportedly the highest in Russia since the Soviet era.

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‘So just for funsies, why don’t you let somebody who doesn’t work for you look through those personal emails?’

Comedian JON STEWART on Hillary Clinton’s deletion of 30,000 emails from her tenure as secretary of state. Clinton said they were personal emails.

‘Idolatry of the Bible.’

American Baptist College President FORREST HARRIS on what he says his critics were guilty of when they opposed his decision to allow a lesbian bishop to speak at the school.

Harris defined idolatry of the Bible as, “When people say [the Bible] is synonymous with God and the truth. We can’t be guided and dictated by a firstcentury world view.”

SNOW: STEVEN SENNE/AP • POLICE OFFICERS: L AURIE SKRIVAN/ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH/AP • RUSSIA: ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO/AP • COX: HANDOUT

Wonkette blogger and Guardian reporter ANA MARIE COX on being nervous about coming out as a Christian “because I worry I’m not good enough of one.” She said, however, that reaction across the board had been positive.

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9:53 AM

snow: Steven Senne/ap • police officers: L aurie Skrivan/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/ap • russia: Alexander Zemlianichenko/ap • cox: handout

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DISPATCHES

QUICK TAKES

Managing the succession of the Dalai Lama is a complicated subject for China’s atheistic Communist regime. But now, Chinese government officials are demanding the Tibetan Buddhist religious leader reincarnate on their terms. Party leader Zhu Weiqun told Beijing reporters on March 11 that China intends on controlling every aspect of the 80-year-old Dalai Lama’s purported succession.

“Decision-making power over the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, and over the end or survival of this lineage, resides in the central government of China,” Zhu told the People’s Daily. To prevent the Chinese government from gaining control of the powerful religious office, the Dalai Lama, who supports Tibetan independence, has threatened not to reincarnate.

No Jedi mind tricks

A 21-year-old Nebraska man’s plot to fool authorities failed when officers became suspicious of a container labeled “Not Weed.” Lancaster County, Neb., sheriff ’s deputies searched the suspect’s 16-ounce plastic sour cream container during a traff ic stop on Feb. 28. Inside, deputies found 11.4 grams of marijuana and cited the driver of the car for possession.

Lasting impression

Change of days

The top issue for the March 3 Los Angeles election: how to raise voter turnout. Voters were asked to approve a solution for the city’s pathetic voting performance by changing city elections to even years to coincide with state and federal contests.

The measure passed overwhelmingly, but according to first reports, just 8.6 percent of the city’s eligible voters made it to the polls to make the decision.

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Some fine detective work from a Lakeville, Mass., police off icer led to an arrest and the recovery of more than 300 stolen goods. Investigating a break-in of a Lakeville home in early March, police Detective Sean Joyce noticed something suspicious in the snow: the imprint of a license plate.

Cold and snowy weather in Massachusetts this winter meant that Joyce could easily make out the imprint in the snow bank at the crime scene.

After running the plates, Lakeville Police arrested Robert Beaucaire and Amy Peters, recovered the stolen objects, and charged the pair with breaking and entering and larceny.

ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • DAL AI L AMA: ANUPAM NATH/AP • MARIJUANA CONTAINER: L ANCASTER COUNT Y SHERIFF • VOTING IN LOS ANGELES: FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/GET T Y IMAGES • L AKEVILLE: HANDOUT

Power play

APRIL 4, 2015

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9:26 AM

SAGE: DINA RUDICK/THE BOSTON GLOBE VIA GET T Y IMAGES • ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • QUITO: ACCIÓN ORTOGRÁFICA QUITO • CHICKS: MUHAMMED MUHEISEN/AP

Escape deflated

On March 3, Marti Wilson noticed something suspicious at her mother’s St. Joseph, Mo., home. Not only was a strange vehicle idling in her driveway, but the side door of the house showed signs of a break-in. Knowing that no one was home, Wilson suspected a burglar was inside rifling through her mother’s belongings. Before heading inside to confront the burglar, Wilson took the car key and slashed the tires with a pocketknife. Inside, she struggled with the attacker, a man police identified as 30-year-old Casey Hueser. After Hueser took back the key, he tried to make a getaway on a blown-out tire. But police, responding to a call from Wilson, were able to catch him quickly.

Study fatigue

SAGE: DINA RUDICK/THE BOSTON GLOBE VIA GET T Y IMAGES • ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • QUITO: ACCIÓN ORTOGRÁFICA QUITO • CHICKS: MUHAMMED MUHEISEN/AP

ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • DAL AI L AMA: ANUPAM NATH/AP • MARIJUANA CONTAINER: L ANCASTER COUNT Y SHERIFF • VOTING IN LOS ANGELES: FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/GET T Y IMAGES • L AKEVILLE: HANDOUT

Written bequest

Researchers at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland, have published a new scientific study indicating that researchers publish too many scientific studies. By tracking citations to scientific papers published in research journals, lead researcher Pietro Parolo found the scientific community has a short attention span—and it’s getting shorter. According to the researchers, there are 10 times as many publications today as there were in 1960. And in the 50 years tracked by the study, the period of relevancy for each published chemistry paper, for instance, has shrunk from about 13 years of relevancy to just seven years of relevancy. “The decay is getting faster and faster,” the researchers concluded, “indicating that scholars ‘forget’ more easily papers now than in the past.”

More than two decades ago, Janice Sage won the picturesque Center Lovell Inn and Restaurant in Lovell, Maine, in an essay contest. Now that the 68-year-old innkeeper is ready to retire, she plans to hand over the historic property and business in the same way she received it. Sage announced late last year she’d give the property to the winner of an essay contest. The innkeeper told contestants to get their submissions in before May 7 and to keep the essay under 200 words.

She hopes to read all the submissions within 10 days and then turn over the stack to a pair of independent readers to pick a winner. With a nonrefundable $125 entrance fee, Sage said she hopes to get enough entries to off set the more than $500,000 she spent renovating the building since 1993.

No takers

It’s a simple job, the pay is good, but England’s chicken farmers are having problems finding workers willing to do it. The British Poultry Council said there wasn’t a single job application for the specialized position called chick sexer last year. Essentially, chick sexers examine baby chickens to determine gender. According to the council chief executive, on-the-job training can take three years, but the job pays $60,000 per year. “I think the problem is the job itself,” said the BPC’s Andrew Large. “You are spending hours every day staring at the backside of a chick. That is not seen as being attractive.”

Editors at large

South American cities are known for their graff iti. A pair of Ecuadorian professionals are hoping to make Quito known for its proper graff iti grammar too.

A group calling itself Acción Ortográfica Quito (Quito Orthographic Action) has taken stencils and spray paint to edit the grammatical errors of lovelorn graff iti poets and political vandals in the city. Known in public only as Diéresis, the creator of the group said he was appalled at the numerous grammatical errors in a love poem he saw daily on the way to his job as a lawyer. So he called a friend to help him correct the grammar in orange paint. “Grammatical errors cause stress,” Diéresis told The Guardian. “We only make texts comprehensible that otherwise would not send any message whatsoever.”

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JANIE B. CHEANEY

Year-round silly season

In unserious times, there is One who takes us very seriously

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The great irony is, while we insist on being taken seriously, God is the only One who does.

krieg barrie

In the late 1960s, women rose up and demanded to be taken seriously. We were not fluffy decorative creatures, but strong and competent human beings worthy of equal space on the world stage. A few years later, gays and lesbians demanded to be taken seriously— weary of relentless social shaming and pretending, they craved respect for who they were.

At almost the same time and for the same ­reasons, transgendered individuals demanded to be taken seriously. Then illegal immigrants, and the obese, and blatantly lying presidents who shook their fingers in the nation’s face.

Every human being is owed some respect for being human. Still, it’s tough to take seriously those whose actions are basically unserious. A few cases in point, drawn from recent headlines and social media: ` Wesleyan University sets aside housing for LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM students, because the ho-hum LGBT categories are not inclusive enough. There’s not enough space in a single column to define all these; one’s gender is now limited only by one’s imagination (or the 50-odd varieties of gender now offered on Facebook, plus one fill-in-the-blank). ` Brian Williams, the $10 million man of NBC News, is called out for making up stories about himself. Good call, but puzzling that it took so long, since he was purveying easily ­falsifiable stories for over a decade. ` Personal “drama” rules the lives of young and not-so-young people who see themselves as the stars of their own soap opera. Most are women, but men frequently and dramatically swear off drama, only to come back for more of it. ` While the Middle East burns, the internet explodes for about five hours over the color of a dress.

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` Donald Trump is thinking about another presidential campaign.

The “silly season,” formerly reserved for ­holiday weekends, seems to be going on all the time now as individuals and groups stake out their own version of reality in the public square and demand affirmation simply because they are standing and demanding. God appears in debate, if He appears at all, as an indulgent grandpa or a cosmic killjoy.

“You hate discipline, and you cast my words behind you” (Psalm 50:17). The great irony is, while we insist on being taken seriously, God is the only One who does.

Go back to “the beginning,” when He shaped a man out of dust, stamped the dust with His image, bent down to breathe eternal soulhood into him. Soon after, humans were throwing each other into the bargain bin, to be devalued, pawed over, and mutilated.

It looked like time to take out the trash, but what did He do? Tell us the truth.

Offer correction, firmly—even harshly, but to teach a wayward colt you must first get its attention. And not just once: Over and over, He brought the rebels bucking and rearing back to the starting line. Again and again, He stated the terms and gave us another chance.

It might have been wiser to shoot the unruly beast, but what did He do? Put on flesh, display righteousness, bend His own neck to the yoke, suffer the penalty. And after wrestling death itself, He returned with such radiance and power that some former rebels now reflected a little glory back.

Obviously a cue to bring down the curtain of history, but what does He do? Roll out time’s carpet, throw open the gates of heaven, and commission His Spirit to bring in more—all the way down to you and me. “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion” (Hebrews 3:15). He wants a crowd to celebrate with.

He will have a crowd, but only on His own terms. Not because He’s arbitrary and autocratic, but because those are the only terms.

He’s everything we honestly love, but also everything we’d like to avoid, like accountability. There are those who talk of God incessantly but “cast [His] words behind” them (Psalm 50:17); to them He’s the mountain peak of inspiration, not the valley of decision. The cross rebukes them: He still, and will always, take us more seriously than we take ourselves. A

 jcheaney@wng.org  @jbcheaney

3/17/15 10:43 AM

What are students saying about Life at BoB jones university?

Earlier this year our students grabbed their cameras and started recording. The resulting 13-minute documentary tells their story.

For graduation rates, the median debt of students who completed the program and other important info visit on.bju.edu/rates. (15609) 9/13

See what they have to say

www.lifeatbju.com

KRIEG BARRIE

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Lewis Jacobs/AMC

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CULTURE MOVIES & TV / BOOKS / Q& A / MUSIC

Saul’s story TELEVISION

BREAKING BAD FANS WILL LIKE ITS TOUTED SPINOFF

by Sophia Lee

Breaking Bad, which many critics call the best TV show ever, ended in such an epic blaze of glory that a spinoff prequel may seem sacrilegious to fans, like re-digging an enshrined grave. But with sharp writing, measured black humor, and frankly, more enjoyable characters, AMC’s Better Call Saul may get its own shrine.

Breaking Bad fans know him as Saul Goodman (the versatile Bob Odenkirk), the smarmy lawyer in Albuquerque who helps lead character Walter White launder his meth-earned millions. But here, “Saul” is James (Jimmy) McGill, a public defense lawyer making $700 for defending three teenage boys who broke into a morgue and did unthinkable things to a corpse’s head. Jimmy is so broke that he lives/works in a closet behind a Vietnamese nail salon and sputters over a $3 parking ticket. He’s also taking care of his older brother Chuck, a once-successful lawyer now crippled by a mental disorder.

The premiere opens with a blackand-white flash-forward: a paunchier, balding Jimmy is slapping out dough at an Omaha mall Cinnabon when he suddenly senses a man watching him.

He breaks into a cold sweat, then visibly relaxes when he realizes it’s a false

LEWIS JACOBS/AMC

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Odenkirk as Saul Goodman

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botched Jimmy’s con and insulted Tuco’s abuelita.

Stuck in an impossible situation, Jimmy unleashes his sole weapon: his mouth.

Somehow, he blabbers his way to freedom, and then cleverly barters for the skateboarders’ lives by coddling Tuco’s ego: “You show everybody that you’re the man, but that you’re fair, that you’re just!” Jimmy eventually whittles down the skateboarders’ punishment from skin-flaying to eye-gouging to one broken leg each. He and Tuco shake hands to finalize this sick negotiation of “justice.”

That’s what distinguishes Saul from Breaking Bad: Rather than facing justice for bad choices, Jimmy tinkers with his own system of justice. He finds little allure in the nihilistic power that seduced Walter; instead, he’s just a hustler trying to stay afloat in a world of sociopaths and criminals by cheating on a few rules. He’s self-aware of his faults, but he progressively accepts them through twisted logic and half-truths.

There’s a turning point when Jimmy’s counting piles of ill-gotten cash—the kind that’s stuffed into duffel bags—and he mutters, “Upon this rock I will build my church.” He’s quoting what Jesus said when Peter confessed Jesus is the Christ—except in Jimmy’s case, he’s confessing a life built upon idols and lies.

Ironically, Jimmy forgot the second part of Matthew 16:18: “and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

Saul is a tragically familiar story, one whose conclusion we already know—and not just because it’s a prequel. A

TELEVISION

Wolf Hall R

The problem with entertainment based on historical figures is that unless the film speculates to some degree about the emotions and desires behind their actions, it can be hard to feel invested in their stories. What are the stakes when we already know how their lives end?

The British series Wolf Hall, which begins airing on PBS on April 5, traces the rise of Henry VIII’s chief advisor Thomas Cromwell with impressive performances, opulent costuming, and atmospheric settings, yet there’s something lifeless about the whole affair.

With the exception of Anne Boleyn (Claire Foy), whose determination to become queen provides the show’s narrative force, we don’t understand the characters’ motives well enough to root for or against any of them.

As in the Hilary Mantel novel on which it’s based, Wolf Hall provides the British History 101 basics on Henry VIII (Damien Lewis)—he’s lustful and wants a son. But what sort of personality does it take to angle for the execution of a woman who only three years earlier he loved (or wanted) so much he upended his kingdom for her? Wolf Hall answers this question with only the broadest brush.

Mark Rylance’s nuanced performance gives more depth to Cromwell, yet the character remains enigmatic.

We’re never sure if he’s a treacherous court

manipulator or a weary political pragmatic determined to protect William Tyndale and other Protestant Reformers.

To its credit, unlike many historical dramas, Wolf Hall treats Christianity as more than a sword warring factions wield to gain power. Though we never see Tyndale, his Bible translation casts a huge shadow over events. It’s curious that Tyndale and Catholic philosopher Thomas More, who, though divided in matters of doctrine are united in refusing to sanction the King’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, emerge as the most principled players, both losing their lives for their point of agreement.

Though most of the episodes feature a smattering of foul language, the theological debates between Cromwell and More make Wolf Hall worthwhile viewing, even if we are left wondering at the deeper personalities behind the sumptuous court masks.

—by MEGAN BASHAM

GILES KEY TE/PL AYGROUND & COMPANY PICTURES FOR MASTERPIECE/BBC

alarm. Later, he’s home alone watching old VHS recordings of his infamous “Better Call Saul!” advertisements. It’s a gorgeous, detail-rich opening, a promising reminder of director Vince Gilligan’s mesmerizing cinematography—and a foreshadow of misfortunes to come.

Jimmy is Walter White’s mirror image. Unlike Walter, an overqualified, misery-swallowing highschool chemistry teacher who played by the rules until he waded into the bloodboiling Phlegethon of hell, Jimmy is an underqualified, glib-tongued scam-artistturned-lawyer who hopscotches around his own chalk-drawn squares of rules and ethics.

What makes Saul satisfying is the colorful way it connects the dots delineating familiar characters: We already know Saul, who at some point in his career changed his name because, he explains to Walter, “the homeboys want a pipehitting Jew.” We meet Jimmy as a law-abiding, bottomrung lawyer, and learn that at some point in his life, he’s banished to bun-baking in Omaha, full of regrets and paranoia. So what happened in between those dots?

Spoiler alert: In episode two, a bound-and-gagged Jimmy is in the New Mexico desert with a wire cutter clamped around his finger.

Towering over him is his captor Tuco (Raymond Cruz, still awesomely odious), whom many will recognize as Walter’s psychopathic meth distributor, and sniveling nearby are two skateboarders who’d APRIL 4, 2015

3/18/15 9:58 AM

BEYOND THE MASK: BURNS FAMILY STUDIOS • DO YOU BELIEVE?: PURE FLIX

CULTURE

MOVIE

Giles Keyte/Playground & Company Pictures for MASTERPIECE/BBC

Beyond the Mask: burns family studios • Do You Believe?: Pure Flix

Do You Believe?

R Do You Believe? has been promoted as the Christian version of Oscarwinning 2004 film Crash.

Like Crash, Do You Believe? is an ensemble drama that interweaves twelve characters whose stories intersect and climax in a literal crash at a Chicago bridge underneath a giant glowing cross. And again like Crash, its worthy message can sometimes be bogged down by overwrought emotions, overdramatic narrative, and underdeveloped characters.

I understand why Pure Flix, the same producing company behind God’s Not Dead, chose to make the movie this way. God’s Not Dead’s surprising success batted it right into the big leagues, and Pure Flix is grasping its chance to present the gospel to a broader audience—the explicit, cross-bearing, blood-shedding gospel— and not just twirl pretty ­pirouettes around it. “If anyone walks away without an understanding of the cross, then he must have been sleeping,” producer Michael Scott told me.

Narrator and pastor Matthew (Ted McGinley) is driving one Saturday night

when he comes across an elderly man (Delroy Lindo) lugging a life-sized wooden cross, who stares intently at him and asks, “Young man, do you believe in the cross of Christ?” Matthew gives him a smile. “I’m a pastor.” The man leans in: “If you truly believe … what are you going to do about it, son?”

Struck by this conversation, Matthew immediately turns back to help the pregnant, garbage-rummaging teenager he’d passed by moments ago. The next evening, he distributes mini wooden crosses to his congregation and preaches about the redemptive, lifetransforming power of the cross. Soon, these little wooden crosses travel hand-to-hand around the city, their meaning whispered, proclaimed, and demonstrated to other seeking, broken souls.

Charged with an Acts 1:8 mission, Do You Believe? leaves no room for subtlety, though certain storylines could have been stronger with a softer touch. Still, it does two things well: It clarifies what truth to believe, and then challenges us to share it boldly with others. —by SOPHIA LEE

See all our movie reviews at wng.org/movies

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MOVIE

Beyond the Mask R There’s a lot Christian families will love about Beyond the Mask , a Christian-produced action/ adventure that gives classics like Zorro and the Lone Ranger a colonial twist.

It features strong lead performances, packs in plenty of youngster-­ pleasing swashbuckling and ­parent-pleasing history, and, most impressive of all—excepting an outlandish wig here or there—it looks really cool. Really, really cool. So cool I’m dying to find out what kind of budget brothers Chad and Aaron Burns were working with and how they managed to wring so many sweeping harbor scenes and fog-draped 18th-­ century villages from it.

As Will Reynolds, a British mercenary who finds himself at odds with the East India Company, Andrew Cheney brings to mind Dirk Benedict in his A-Team heyday. He’s as dashing as Antonio Banderas and a good deal more so than Orlando Bloom. John Rhys-Davies delivers his usual excellent work as the villain and uncle of Will’s love, Charlotte (a lovely, spirited performance from Kara Killmer.)

The performances and visuals are so good, it’s a bit disappointing the overstuffed plot doesn’t equal them. Initial setups, such as Will and Charlotte’s romance in England, drag down the pace and take up valuable time that would have been better employed fleshing out the fun in America. Likewise, an early plot turn where Will assumes the identity of a vicar has little point beyond padding out a redemptive arc.

While I appreciate the Burnses’ motives, there were subtler ways to convey Will’s change of heart and avoid an overly dramatic note in an otherwise campy romp. By all means, let’s have rollicking, romantic escapades crafted by redeemed imaginations.

Let’s have taut, sci-fi thrillers. Let’s have sweeping, period dramas and contemplative, contemporary slices of life. And let’s not feel that we must have the same serious conversion speeches in all of them.

Could a renegade adventurer like Will Reynolds surrender his life to Christ? Of course. But I’m not sure he’d stop swordfighting to talk about it so much. —by MEGAN BASHAM

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BOOKS

Wondrous women

SOME NOTABLE FEMALES, CENTURY BY CENTURY by Marvin Olasky 20th: Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman (Knopf, 2014) tracks the World War II origin of the comic book super heroine to radical movements that grew during the World War I era.

Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s 1920 book, Woman and the New Race, was required reading in 1944 for a young woman brought in to write Wonder Woman scripts.

Comic entrepreneur William Marston wrote, “Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who, I believe, should rule the world. … As they develop as much ability for worldly success as they already have ability for love, they will clearly come to rule business and the Nation and

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the world,” ushering in an era of peace.

19th: Megan Marshall’s Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (Houghton Mifflin, 2013) tells the story of America’s first female star journalist, but the book never comes alive. For example, in writing about Fuller’s work as a New York Tribune columnist, Marshall tells us about “the human interest reporting at which Margaret instinctively excelled,” but does not show us examples of excellence.

Marshall, noting that Fuller wore leather gloves, quotes the criticism she received from early animal-rights proponent Mary Greeley, wife of Fuller’s boss Horace: “Skin of a beast”—but she misses Fuller’s witty reply to

the silk-wearing Greeley, “Entrails of a worm.”

18th: Hannah More, the subject of Karen Swallow Prior’s Fierce Conviction (HarperCollins, 2014), wrote to John Newton in 1796 concerning her anti-poverty work, “One great benefit which I have found to result from our projects is the removal of the great gulf which has divided rich and poor in these country parishes, by making them meet together; whereas before, they hardly thought they were children of one common father.” More anticipated Charles Dickens’ critique of telescopic philanthropy, asking, “Is it not almost ridiculous to observe the zeal we have for doing good at a

SHORT STOPS

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JORDANMURPH

The Bill James Handbook 2015 (Baseball Info Solutions, 2014) is once again an excellent and stimulating reference source from the creator of modern hardball’s statistical analysis. The bulk of the book contains the standard career stats of every active major league player through the end of the 2014 season but also some James innovations like Runs Created and Component ERA. Features display other unusual but helpful stats such as pitcher velocity by season, runs saved, manufactured runs, productive outs, home run robberies, win shares, and replay appeal successes and failures. —M.O.

distance, while we neglect the little, obvious, every-day, domestic duties, which would seem to solicit our immediate attention?” For more on More, see my interview with Prior in WORLD’s Jan. 24 issue.

17th: Some historians have blamed the Salem witch trials of 1692 on hysterical women, but Emerson Baker’s A Storm of Witchcraft (Oxford, 2015) is a well-written, balanced narrative of Salem’s tragedy. Baker explains it as a “perfect storm” of governmental overreach resulting from political power struggles, reaction to a grim war with Indians, the arrival of a new charter, economic anxieties, leadership failures, and “conversion disorders” in which psychological upsets converted into physical afflictions. Baker overturns the assumption that backwardness and superstition led to the witch trials, and notes that leading scientists such as Robert Boyle were researching witchery: Boyle, trying to advance science beyond a naturalistic emphasis by studying the supernatural, contended in The Origine of Forms and Qualities according to the Corpuscular Philosophy (1666) that spirits and souls could interact with the physical world.

So, back to the future: The United States had witch hunts in recent decades aimed at preschool teachers accused of impossible things. Besides, the Soviet and Chinese Communist witch hunts of the past century, which led to the murder of millions, may have reduced the tendency of historians to view the Salem witch hunt of 1692, which led to 19 executions, as the nadir of history.

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Notable books

FOUR BOOKS ON MARRIAGE reviewed by Mary Jackson THE MINGLING OF SOULS: GOD’S DESIGN FOR LOVE, MARRIAGE, SEX & REDEMPTION Matt Chandler Chandler writes that contrary to the world’s assertions, God originated attraction, courtship, marriage, and sex. He designed marriage to bring us “the deepest amount of joy possible while … glorifying God at the highest level possible.”

Chandler draws tastefully from the Song of Solomon to show the stages of romantic pursuit. He explains how our selfish rebellion distorts God’s good design, making the gospel imperative. The book is helpful to both singles and married couples, who will find it deepens their understanding of Christ’s steadfast love—and its unique manifestation within the bounds of marriage.

TEAM US: MARRIAGE TOGETHER Ashleigh Slater Slater describes herself as “a bride wearing blinders” on the day she married Ted. Still, that walk down the aisle represented a move from “me” to “us.” She describes how God has used conflict, job loss, miscarriage, and parenting to strengthen the union she has with her husband. They share an admirable commitment to “team no matter what,” and her candor in recounting the low points makes the book a worthwhile read for young couples. But she often off ers best practices without connecting them to biblical wisdom—a formula likely to prove fragile apart from complete dependence on God.

YOU AND ME FOREVER: MARRIAGE IN LIGHT OF ETERNITY Francis and Lisa Chan The Chans believe that most marital issues are “God problems” arising from a “misunderstanding of God or a lack of relationship with Him.” The solution: shift focus away from the marriage and onto the eternal work couples share.

Writing with a sense of urgency, the Chans continually point married couples to Scripture and to an end goal that transcends a happy, healthy relationship. They use reflections from their own marriage but off er little practical marriage advice. Readers will find encouragement that Christcenteredness and sacrifice lead to deeper joy and satisfaction, both now and in eternity.

SPOTLIGHT Mom Enough: The Fearless Mother’s Heart and Hope (Desiring God, 2015) is an e-book compiled from popular posts on the Desiring God website. Eight mothers, including Rachel Jankovic, Gloria Furman, and Carolyn Murphy, off er short, candid essays addressing motherhood’s daily trials, worries, and questions.

Mothering blogs, research-based parenting books, Pinterest, and other social media can be helpful, but they often invite comparison.

Mom Enough pinpoints the sin at the heart of the still-present Mommy wars—pride and a desire for self-sufficiency.

Overburdened mothers will find courage in these pages to answer “Are you enough?” with a confident “no.” The real question becomes, “Is God enough?” Fear and inadequacy diminish in light of God’s infinitely enough grace.

Contributor Christine Hoover writes, “When we know God’s grace, we stop looking for validation … we are able to extend grace to others.” —M.J. Gloria Furman and family

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ONE MORE TRY: WHAT TO DO WHEN YOUR MARRIAGE IS FALLING APART Gary Chapman Chapman begins with the premise that our God-given ability to choose means change is always possible—even for couples on the brink of divorce. He details the benefits and pitfalls of separation, and off ers clear, biblical insight into repentance and reconciliation. Hope is a theme throughout, and he points weary and skeptical readers to Christ where “we find the outside help we need to do what our own resources are inadequate to accomplish.” Chapman off ers frank advice on diff icult topics like aff airs and abuse, communication and attitudes. He uses real-life stories drawn from his extensive experience counseling distraught couples.

To see more book news and reviews, go to wng.org/books

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Q&A

Nancy Pearcey

Idol inspection Finding and destroying the things we put in place of God is the first step in developing a Christian worldview

by Marvin Olasky

photo by Johnny Hanson/Genesis

Nancy Pearcey is professor of apologetics at Houston Baptist University, where she directs the Center for Christian Worldview. Her books include Total Truth, Saving Leonardo, The Soul of Science (with Charles Thaxton), and several she authored with Chuck Colson. On March 1, David C. Cook published her new book, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes.

Did you have a teenage rebellion? I gave up my Christian background when I was in high school. We were regular churchgoers, but I wanted to know whether Christianity is true. None of the adults in my life could answer that question. A Christian professor told me, “It works for me!” A seminary dean said, “Don’t worry, we all have doubts sometimes.”

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You studied the violin in Germany and went to Iowa State on a music scholarship. How did playing the violin help you to find truth? People think apologetics is for a

stereotypical, intellectually oriented person, but Francis Schaeffer showed that ideas permeate culture through art, literature, movies, and music. Cultural apologetics appeals to the whole person.

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A video of this interview in its entirety can be found at wng.org and in the iPad edition of this issue

Your rebellion was going to the library and reading widely. I literally started pulling books off the philosophy

shelf—because I thought if Christians can’t answer my questions, maybe the philosophers can. Because I had a strong Christian background, when I gave it up I understood immediately there is no purpose to life, no foundation for ethics or knowledge. I even fell into skepticism, moral relativism: I was the one in my

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group of friends in high school arguing there is no right or wrong.

I’ve read that when you were in college, your ­parents were visiting Francis Schaeffer’s haven in Switzerland, L’Abri, and you went there just to meet them. It was

very clear from the questions I asked that I was not a Christian, and for L’Abri staffers that was an appeal, so they invited me to stay. The form of Christianity I had known was anti-intellectual, anti-cultural, cold, and impersonal. L’Abri was the opposite. After a month I fled because I was afraid I would make a decision out of less than genuine conviction. I continued reading on my own and eventually became intellectually convinced that Christianity is true. A year and a half later I went back and got grounded in my understanding of the Christian worldview. It’s where I got the more ­personal/practical side of being a Christian.

How would students today have an experience like that? It’s hard. In Finding Truth I cite a survey done at

evangelical schools: Only half of the professors said they could give a Christian perspective in their field. Most of them get their higher degrees at secular ­graduate schools where they don’t have a realistic opportunity to develop a Christian worldview. They probably had to fly under the radar screen because if they did express a Christian perspective, they might be penalized.

Where should students start? The first step is find the idol: What’s in place of God as the ultimate reality?

In Romans, Paul says we all have evidence of God from the created order, but we suppress that evidence by creating God substitutes. Our personal idols might be things like success or relationships, but reason can also be an idol. The philosophy of materialism says matter is the ultimate reality, the source and cause of everything else.

Once we identify the idol, what then? Spell out some of the negative consequences—because an idol is something in creation, something lower than God, it will always lead to a lower view of the human person.

For example, MIT robotics professor emeritus Rodney Brooks calls a human being “a big bag of skin full of biomolecules” interacting by the laws of physics and chemistry. He is a materialist. Can Rodney Brooks live with that? He doesn’t treat his children as machines.

He says, “They have my unconditional love, the furthest one might be able to get from rational analysis.” If rationality is defined by a materialist worldview, then it is irrational to love your own children—so Brooks is admitting that his own worldview is too small.

But couldn’t an evolutionist say Rodney Brooks’ love for his daughter makes enormous sense in terms of the genetic imperative: He’ll protect his daughter, and his genes will advance through the millennia.

Many thinkers don’t take that step. Francis Schaeffer used the metaphor of two stories in a building;

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materialists say the lower story is real, but they have an upper story where they put things they can’t deny in their personal experience: free will, their love for their children, consciousness.

Compartmentalizing? Steven Pinker said when he’s in the laboratory he treats people as complex data processing machines, but when he goes home “we go back to talking about each other as free and dignified human beings.”

After we find the idol, what then? Test the idol against the real world. A low view of humanity is a form of reductionism, which means reducing something from a higher level of complexity and value to a lower level of complexity, like saying religion is just an expression of emotional need, or love is just a chemical reaction, or human beings are just complex biochemical machines—some things won’t fit in its box.

Let me ask about a current idol: How would you respond if you were running for president and a reporter asked, “Do you believe in evolution?” I’d say

sure I do—depending on what you mean by evolution.

Most textbooks define it as “change over time.” Who doesn’t believe living things change over time? Where ­people disagree is the cause of the change—is all of it due to natural processes, like natural selection? In public schools you should teach the scientific reasons for and against, and critical thinking: To be truly ­liberal would be to teach all of the potential answers so students can think critically.

‘An idol is something in creation, something lower than God, it will always lead to a lower view of the human person.’

The BioLogos Foundation is the new kid on the block in the Darwinist debate. What do you think of its work? When people accept

evolution, it almost always ends up affecting their theology, their view of the human person. Generally they end up giving up the Fall and the reality of sin, because after all we are moving upward, we are advancing. Sin means we just aren’t evolved enough and haven’t quite transcended the biological instincts that drive us. And what happens then? How do you define salvation? If we are not truly fallen and if our sin is redefined as “just not evolved enough,” is it a matter of moral evil or just metaphysical limitation?

Any reason for hope? Those who are truly Christian are becoming much more committed. In most of America, you can no longer sit on the fence. More people are saying, If I’m a Christian then I’m going to be a committed Christian. I’ll know what I believe and why I believe it. A APRIL 4, 2015 WORLD

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opening “Toccata and Fugue time. Only in subin D Minor”; for Catholic sequent peaceChristians, Schubert’s time decades did program-closing “Ave Maria”; they take on their and for the Eastern Orthodox idyllic-childhood Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. redolence.

Then there are The Nutcracker Nowadays, Suite, composed by a homoanything idyllic sexual (Tchaikovsky), and “A risks being looked Night on Bald Mountain,” at askance and composed by an alcoholic subjected by (Mussorgsky). revisionists to Lowbrows, meanwhile, get anachronistic, Pinocchio to discover the melody of Allan politically correct Sherman’s “Hello Muddah, schemata. By Hello Fadduh” in Ponchielli’s such standards “Dance of the Hours.” And Pinocchio will be “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” found wanting. It NEW SOUNDTRACKS MARK ANNIVERSARY OF based on a Goethe poem would take an about wizardry gone awry uncommonly WORLD WAR II–ERA FILMS by Arsenio Orteza and set to music by Paul imaginative postDukas, guarantees Germans, modernist, after Frenchmen, and maybe even all, to consider a living recordings of songs that The Disney films occultists a seat at the table. marionette, a conscientious ended up on the cutting-room Pinocchio and Fantasia Of contemporary society’s cricket, or a blue-haired fairy floor and post-Pinocchio turn 75 this year. And to mark primary special-interest as a subversive metaphor.

Jiminy Cricket songs sung by the occasion, Walt Disney groups, only Muslims and “Give a Little Whistle” even Cliff Edwards.

Records has rereAfrican-Americans get the takes its injunction to “take That both leased the cold shoulder. the straight and narrow path” soundtracks have soundtracks of Of course, to reduce from the Bible while the turned 75 is a soberboth in freshly Fantasia’s rich sampling of instrumentals “Monstro ing reminder that remastered, Western musical accomAwakes” and “Whale Chase” the films they accommulti-disc plishment to such a series of could stir up memories of panied premiered packages. checked-off tick boxes is Jonah. not in a vacuum but Discs One and silly. But these are silly times.

But by at least by one against the backdrop of Two of The Legacy Collection: To the extent that these two politically correct standard— World War II and were thus Fantasia Original Motion Legacy Collections can be “diversity”—Fantasia acquits initially experienced as a Picture Soundtrack contain said to hold a mirror up to itself well. combination of escapism and Fantasia’s original eight them, they’re doing the world For Protestant Christians, emotional solace during a Leopold Stokowski– quite a favor. there’s Bach’s programparticularly grim and trying conducted selections plus Debussy’s “Claire de Lune” and Sterling Holloway narrating “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” Discs Three and Magic and majesty Four contain the soundtrack’s Fantasias & Fugues: Music for Harp (MSR), the new album by the Canadian 1982 digital rerecording by a harpist Katrina Szederkényi, reminds the world that the word fantasia has a 121-piece orchestra under meaning preceding Disney. “The fantasia calls on the musician to express his the direction of Irwin Kostal personal artistry,” writes Alexander Rider in the liner notes, “the magic and plus Holloway narrating majesty of his vision ... it is the inner life articulated.”

“Peter and the Wolf.”

Judging by her taste in composers and her skill at burnishing the magic and Disc One of The Legacy the majesty of their compositions, Szederkényi must have a particularly rich Collection: Pinocchio Original inner life. One need only compare her touch on Joaquín Turina’s Tocata y Fuga— Motion Picture Soundtrack Ciclo Pianístico I, Op. 50, to the recordings of Spanish composers by the late-great Nicanor contains Pinocchio’s original Zabaleta to hear how faithfully she’s extending her instrument’s noble tradition. —A.O. 25 songs, Disc Two new

Classics remastered

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Notable CDs

RECENT CLASSICAL ALBUMS reviewed by Arsenio Orteza 1865: SONGS OF HOPE AND HOME FROM THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR Anonymous 4 with Bruce Molsky

Why, after a lengthy career establishing their mastery of the Great Medieval Songbook, would these four singing women choose to collaborate with a folksinger-musician (Molsky) on an 18-song tribute to a 150-year-old hit parade that they’ve declared will be their farewell? The liner notes imply some answers: that pathos knows no spatial-temporal bounds, that the War we will always have with us, etc. The concluding a cappella selections—“Abide with Me,” “Shall We Gather at the River?”—imply a good deal more.

BACH MASS IN B MINOR Arcangelo/Jonathan Cohen

Read up on the history of this magnificent work and you’ll discover a mixture of motivations not uncommon to an age such as Bach’s, in which conflicting, post-Reformation manifestations of the Christian faith and the necessity of rendering unto the Caesars for whom one composed occasionally made strange bedfellows. Repeatedly absorb this thrilling reproduction from beginning to end, and something like optimism regarding the unity of all believers that Christ Himself prayed for will give new meaning to “on earth as it is in heaven.”

COMPLETE CONCERTO RECORDINGS Martha Argerich / Claudio Abbado

GOLDBERG VARIATIONS Philippe Thuriot AHO: MA ARIT K Y TÖHARJU • FRÄKI: HANDOUT

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There will never be one definitive version of these piano concertos by Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Mozart, Prokofiev, Ravel, and Tchaikovsky. But this economically priced five-disc collection—documenting over 40 years of collaboration between the Argentine pianist Argerich and orchestras conducted by the recently deceased Abbado—comes close. Whether in the studio or on stage, a passionate precision in keeping with the composers’ original intent seems to be the duo’s goal. And, thanks to commensurately gifted engineers devoted to perfectionistic audio standards, their achievement lives on.

Ambrose Bierce famously, and more or less accurately, defined the accordion as “an instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin.” Then again, it’s unlikely that Bierce ever heard it put to the service of this or any other Bach masterwork. Admittedly, the accordion’s dynamic range is limited compared to the piano, the organ, or the harpsichord. But in the hands of the Brussels-born Thuriot, it proves capable of intelligibly translating these 32 interrelated melodies into a fresh musical language.

To see more music news and reviews, go to wng.org/music

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SPOTLIGHT Short of actually visiting the place, perhaps the quickest way to experience the turbulence and serenity unique to Finland is to listen to the music of its most celebrated living composer, Kalevi Aho. A believer in music’s universal capacity, Aho is nevertheless aware of his music’s nationalistic character. How else to explain his prominent participation in Finland’s official artistic endeavors?

Or that the musicians featured on BIS Record’s latest recordings of his compositions—Carolina Eyck (theremin), Annu Salminen (horn), Sonja Fräki (piano), and Jan Lehtola (organ)—are all Finnish?

Fräki’s Works for Solo Piano comprises 31 mostly brief pieces composed between 1965 and 1993, many of which could serve as a Finnish counterpart to the 19th-century Americana of Edward MacDowell’s Woodland Sketches. Lehtola’s Ludus Solemnis: Music for and with Organ demonstrates breathtaking emotional range. Most breathtaking of all: Theremin Concerto/Horn Concerto, in which Eyck’s Lorelei-like theremin playing and singing point the way to heretofore undreamt-of vistas.

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A bird in winter Holding fast, Kara Tippetts comes to these final days

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I can be a million times grateful for the almost three years of days [we] have had with her since a sober diagnosis.

And at the same time I am full of a choking grief that they are coming to an end. Here.

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When I see my friend Kara Tippetts these days I think of a bird, delicate and vulnerable to the harshness of this life. A bird huddled against a winter storm, its feathers fluffed out in beauty and for warmth, eyes alert to the falling snow, feet clinched to that one fixed branch that itself is swaying in the wind, gathering cold.

Her body, now nearly three years battling cancer, is succumbing, losing. Her long leg bones protrude beneath the blanket, and you can watch her jawbone work over a coming sentence.

But in the bedroom where she spends most of her time now, there is no air of defeat. Kara’s smile and her eyes shine bright in magnet-like interest in just about anything that has to do with her people, hold the center of the room— actually, the house. She and her husband Jason pull friends and family in, even from far away, making conversation instant, cheerful, easy. We embrace long and she pulls at my sweater. “I love that sweater. You should give it to me because I have cancer.”

These days life happens on a quieter plane.

There’s a note taped by the front door: “Please do not ring doorbell. A tap is good.” There’s a schedule, actually, for friends to come in pairs and not stay long. Time with Ella, 13, Harper, 10, Lake, 8, and Story, 5, is precious. But there’s no bar on normal life, and the kids move in and out of the bedroom easily, with noisy news of the day. Story wants to show off her mom’s new hospital bed, Lake wants to play games on a phone, Harper has plans with friends, and Ella is getting ready to start rehearsals for a school play. Kara pauses to make a firm rule with Lake, then calls him over soon after to thank him for quick obedience.

As Kara talks, she sometimes takes the ­oxygen tube from her nose then forgets to put it back until her breath comes in short heaves.

She drifts off, dozes, mid-conversation. But

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throughout the day she snatches at good moments to sit up in bed, legs crossed beneath her laptop, and write. This too is the work of her cancer. Once she began to recount with remarkable transparency that battle carried on amid family life, Kara gathered hundreds of thousands of readers to her blog, Mundane Faithfulness. It led to a best-selling book, The Hardest Peace (David C. Cook, 2014). She is working on a second book, a book about making the most of the moments, writing fast in what moments of energy come, wanting to finish. It’s hard to write, she says, as pain medicine gives her double vision, and the cancer may be again at work in her brain.

Lord, teach us to number our days, we say. And it’s a hard lesson.

I can be a million times grateful for the almost three years of days Kara’s kids, her husband Jason, and we the rest of us have had with her since a sober diagnosis. And at the same time I am full of a choking grief that they are coming to an end. Here. I won’t get her take on kids growing up, Ella heading off to college, or Harper’s ­wedding frenzy. I won’t have her wisdom on a husband’s sickness, or her prayers over the next mundane thing that’s eating at one of us. I won’t have her counsel and kindness in the days ­following her death. I miss these all already.

The end of the book of Acts is a strange, sad account as Paul is mobbed, chained, and shipwrecked. Time after time he gets a reprieve only to be beaten again. If Paul’s were a cancer journey, it would look something like Kara’s. He spends two years in a kind of house arrest before his execution. But as the ESV Study Bible notes: “In God’s sovereignty, Paul’s time in prison was not wasted, for it was during his Roman imprisonment that he wrote the letters to the Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon.”

Kara’s “time in prison” has overflowed with productive, lasting ministry. All through it is a Heavenly Father who does not let a sparrow fall to the ground apart from His care. And at the end, she will fly like a bird in spring. A

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DRAWING A RED ED L Will NATO defend the Baltics if Russia attacks? As signs of imminent warfare grow, the Ukraine example breeds fear and frustration B Y J I L L N E L S O N photo by Petras Malukas/AFP/Getty Images

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Lithuanian soldiers take part in a NATO field training exercise at the Rukla military base.

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sizable Russian minorities and have watched with alarm as Russia has redrawn its neighbors’ borders through “hybrid warfare.” Russian snap military exercises are on the rise, rattling Eastern Europe and forcing NATO to bolster its presence in the region.

“Lithuanian history was always a little nation in the path of big nations. Whoever goes through tramples it,” said Masek, adding, “Lithuanians survive, so we are resilient.”

Lithuania has real reason to fear a Russian invasion: This young democracy of 3 million spent much of the last century under the control of the Soviet Union. Memories of oppression are fresh. Masek remembers her patriotic father hanging the Lithuanian flag in his bedroom where it had little chance of being spotted.

“After Ukraine, we will be next,” Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite warned in February. The government is reinstating compulsory military service for young men and is considering a bill that would require bomb shelters in new buildings.

The Russian enclave of Kaliningrad borders Lithuania and is home to Russia’s Baltic Fleet. Large-scale naval exercises in December featured 9,000 Russian soldiers and more than 55 naval vessels—a daunting presence for a country with little military might.

Lithuanians walk with a national flag during a parade in Vilnius March 11 to mark the 25th anniversary of their independence from the Soviet Union.

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IMA MASEK has lived in Orange County, Calif., for more than two decades. But she still proudly flies her Lithuanian flag on Independence Day and offers chocolates from her motherland to guests. Deeply disturbed by Russia’s growing aggression, she chooses her kvass carefully. “I almost didn’t buy this because I thought it was from Russia,” she explains as she shows me a bottle of the fermented rye drink with a monk on the label. To her relief, the beverage—called Monastyrski—was bottled in Ukraine and poses no risk of supporting the Kremlin’s imperialistic ambitions, she said.

All Lithuanians are worried. A 96-page wartime survival manual recently published by their government tells citizens to avoid panic and keep a sound mind if their country is invaded. “Gunshots just outside your window are not the end of the world,” it says. Other tips: Use social media to organize protests, and if all else fails, “do your job worse than usual.”

As tensions between the West and Russia reach their highest level since the Cold War, concern is growing that Moscow’s ambitions may not end with Ukraine. The former Soviet Baltic nations—Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia—have APRIL 4, 2015

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Hostilities with Moscow increased when Lithuania sent military aid to help Kiev fight Russian-backed separatists in its eastern Donbas region. Now Russia is dusting off history books from the Cold War era and threatening to prosecute Soviet-era desertions. Lithuania was the first to declare its independence in 1990 and absolve its soldiers from serving in the Soviet army.

Masek’s 22-year-old niece lives in Lithuania and says her friends and family aren’t panicked, but they are nervous. The school her 16-year-old brother attends recently held wartime preparedness training, and social media conversations have turned toward the Russian threat.

When her grandmother goes to market to buy food now, said Gabija Lukoseviciute, she asks the price and the shopkeeper answers her in Russian. “My grandmother doesn’t speak Russian and she gets real angry about that.”

“If Russia attacks Lithuania, is NATO really going to help us fully, like 100 percent?” Lukoseviciute asked.

According to Article 5 of the NATO treaty, it should. An attack against any of NATO’s 28 members is an attack on all.

Lithuania joined NATO in 2004, along with Estonia, Latvia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania. For Moscow, that moved NATO’s borders from over 1,000 miles away to within 100 miles of St. Petersburg. For Lithuania, it meant an active military alliance: Its air base at Siauliai, taken over by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II, now hosts 400 NATO military personnel.

From Siauliai, NATO Eurofighter jets defend the Baltics already, with crews from two countries monitoring Lithuanian airspace at all times. NATO commanders say they need NATO allies to: In 2014, NATO scrambled planes 400

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times to intercept Russian planes flying too close to NATO airspace—the Russians actually violating Baltic airspace at least eight times last year—a marked increase over 2013.

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HE REAL QUESTION is how NATO members would vote in situations involving ambiguous attacks such as cyber warfare or “little green men” with unmarked uniforms, as Russian-backed fighters appeared in Crimea, and later eastern Ukraine. Article 5 has been invoked only once in NATO’s history: after the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

“I am sure [Russian President Vladimir] Putin wants to destroy our alliance, not by attacking it but by splintering it,” U.S. Army Europe Commander Ben Hodges said to military and political leaders in Berlin in early March.

The three Baltic states and Poland have taken a strong stance against Russia’s involvement in Ukraine, but other countries in the region are showing signs of allegiance to Moscow. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban—called “little Putin” by his critics—signed a gas deal with Russia last month, and Cyprus recently agreed to allow Russian Navy ships to dock in its strategic Mediterranean port.

Lithuania isn’t the only country on edge. Latvia and Estonia have sizable Russian minorities—28 and 25 percent respectively. Latvia’s capital city of Riga is nearly 50 percent ethnic Russian, and the government is working together with its Baltic neighbors to launch a Russian-language television network to counter the onslaught of Kremlin propaganda on its airwaves.

Few skirmishes have occurred among the Baltic states’ ethnic Russians—but Baltic residents are quick to note: Crimea and Donbas were relatively quiet prior to Russian-backed separatists taking up arms last spring and launching Ukraine into an ongoing war that has left more than 6,000 dead.

Estonia may be the most prepared of the three Baltic countries. Martin Hurt, deputy director of Estonia’s International Center for Defense and Security, says Lithuania and Latvia should have spent more money on national defense during the past decade.

Estonia is one of four NATO countries that spends the recommended 2 percent of its GDP on defense, and much of that has been used to bolster NATO bases on its turf.

Hurt, who has worked for Estonia’s Ministry of Defense as well as for the armed forces of both Estonia and Sweden, says Estonians are not surprised by Russia’s aggression and never assumed the country was making great strides toward democracy during the past 10 to 15 years. “What we see now is not a different Russia. It’s just wealthier and has more resources than it did 10 to 15 years ago. And because it’s richer, it’s also more aggressive,” he said.

Russia has increased its defense spending by 80 percent since 2010, while NATO on average has decreased defense spending by 20 to 40 percent.

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N DECEMBER 2013, Russia expelled an American journalist for the first time since the end of the Cold War. David Satter, a former Moscow correspondent and author of several books about Russia and the Soviet Union, traveled to Kiev to renew his visa and was informed by the Russian embassy that “his presence on the territory of the Russian Federation was no longer desirable.” This was a common Cold War tactic but a surprising move for a country preparing to host the Sochi Olympics.

The risk for Russian correspondents is far greater. Russia is the fifth most dangerous place in the world for journalists, and any truth-tellers risk their lives. The recent murder of Boris Nemtsov, Russia’s liberal opposition leader, has brought these alarming statistics into the spotlight once again as questionable circumstances point to the possibility of a government-sanctioned kill.

Satter, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, says we give Russia the right to control events in Ukraine at our own peril. “We reinforce a corrupt regime in Russia, which in the long run is a danger to everybody,” he said. “It’s a danger to the Russians and it’s a danger to the world because it is so completely criminalized.”

Putin portrays Russia as the victim of Western encroachment in its backyard and as the innocent party in a Russia-Ukraine war he says doesn’t exist.

“Russia has engaged in a rather remarkable period of the most overt and extensive propaganda exercise that I’ve seen since the very height of

Putin (above) enters a hall for a meeting of the Collective Security Treaty Organization in Moscow’s Kremlin; Masek and her niece, Gabija, fly the Lithuanian flag (below).

PUTIN: MAXIM SHIPENKOV/AP • MASEK: HANDOUT

FSB (the KGB’s successor) has been actively trying to recruit politicians and people in the defense sector and has become “more and more active as a result of their more aggressive behavior” and increased resources, he said.

That aggressive behavior reached Sweden, which is not part of NATO, during a submarine hunt in the Baltic Sea last October. Multiple reports claim a Russian submarine surfaced just kilometers away from Stockholm’s city center, leading the country’s prime minister to create a national security council.

Russia’s provocative snap exercises near NATO’s eastern and northern borders have increased in size and frequency, along with incursions into NATO airspace running more than double the 2013 rate. Russian pilots fly with transponders switched off and don’t file flight plans, creating several close calls: Russian warplanes nearly collided with Swedish passenger jets twice last year.

Europe is beginning to sound the alarm. British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said Russia poses a “real and present danger” to Europe and called Putin “as great a threat to Europe as Islamic State.”

the Cold War,” Secretary of State John Kerry said during a February Senate hearing. “And they have been persisting in their misrepresentations—lies, whatever you want to call them—about their activities [in Ukraine] to my face, to the face of others, on many different occasions.”

At the same time, the Russian leader— who could potentially be in power until 2024—boasts of Moscow’s might: Russian troops could take Kiev in two hours, he said during a September conversation with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, and reach the capitals of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, and Romania—all NATO members—in equal time.

PUTIN: MAXIM SHIPENKOV/AP • MASEK: HANDOUT

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PRAYING FOR PEACE In Ukraine, war is driving a wedge between friends, family members, and fellow believers, as polarized political views ruin relationships. Now Baltic believers face similar challenges as ethnic background and political alliances are suddenly magnified by Russia’s hybrid war in Ukraine.

“What isn’t fully realized in the West is that the information and propaganda war which preceded the military action against Ukraine is very much underway here, too,” Archbishop Gintaras Grusas, president of the Lithuanian bishops’ conference, told Catholic News Service. “There’s a high degree of tension, and everybody here knows how dangerous the situation has become.”

This tension reached a prominent Christian university in Klaipeda, Lithuania, last December when a college student hung a Russian flag from his dorm window.

A neighbor reported the incident and within hours the largest Lithuanian online news portal made it front-page news.

Marlene Wall, president of LCC International University (formerly known as Lithuanian Christian College), said readers posted a thousand comments within two hours of that post, including many that were hostile. The university hosts students from 27 different countries—including 71 from Ukraine and 53 from Russia—and tries to avoid political entanglements.

As the university scrambled to craft a response to the media firestorm, students created their own political statement by hanging a variety of flags from their dorm windows. One particular window, Wall said, portrayed the unity the campus is striving for: Students hung both a Ukrainian and a Russian flag with a heart in the middle. “LCC exists for Ukraine and for Russia and for the region,” Wall said. “This region needs a new generation of leaders. May we continue to be a Christ-centered institution that can help make a difference in Ukraine and beyond.”

Archbishop Grusas emphasized the importance of praying for peace in the region but also the need for being well-informed. “The Cold War may be a part of history, but we shouldn’t be naïve or allow ourselves to forget about the past. One of the greatest dangers is being lulled into complacency, thinking we no longer have to work for peace.”

Catholics comprise 79 percent of Lithuania’s population, 20 percent of Latvia’s, and less than 1 percent of Estonia’s population. Estonia is labeled one of the leastreligious countries in the world, with 54 percent claiming no religious affiliation. —J.N.

HILE SOME DISMISS Putin’s comments as intimidation tactics (and a full-scale invasion is unlikely given NATO’s strength), world leaders are troubled by the growing Russian land and air patrols in Eastern Europe and Moscow’s undeniable involvement in Ukraine’s war.

Hodges, the U.S. army commander in Europe, believes Russia has around 12,000 troops in eastern Ukraine and could be making a push south to create a land bridge to Crimea and then west to the mouth of the Danube river, threatening southeastern Europe. Moscow could also have its sights on Zaporizhia, Ukraine, home to the largest nuclear power station in Europe and the fifth largest in the world.

Western leaders are mobilizing for response: The United States will deploy 3,000 troops to the Baltics for NATO exercises over the next three months both to reassure its allies and to send a clear message to Moscow. At the end of February, U.S. and British NATO contingents paraded through Estonia—a mere 300 yards from the border crossing with Russia and Moscow’s own gathering of troops. The display of force was symbolic: It took place on Estonia’s Independence Day. Sanctions are beginning to take their toll on the Russian economy—but not on Putin’s approval ratings. This could change. The Kremlin says Russian citizens fighting in eastern Ukraine are “volunteers,” but stories of soldiers returning home in body bags, secret burials, and unexplained deaths are seeping into Russia’s state-controlled media. Eventually they will be hard to deny.

So will the effects of sanctions. “If we really believe that the sanctions eventually will work, it is a long-term mission, so we need to buy time,” Hurt said.

“The West does not have a clear long-term strategy to address Russia, and I think what we see here is a bad strategy. It is made up of politicians hoping that Russia, after taking its next step, will be completely satisfied and

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will not become more and more aversive,” said Hurt.

The best way to buy time, he said, is by arming Ukrainians with lethal weapons. What’s needed are “relatively high-tech but still simple weapons like anti-tank missiles and communications equipment,” he said. It’s not possible to train military personnel to use modern sophisticated weapons systems in one or two days, said Hurt: “It takes months and years, and there’s no time to do that.”

One of Masek’s most vivid memories of her three decades living in Soviet-controlled Lithuania is the long line of people snaking out the stores, down the street, and around the block. When she asked what they were in line for, they would reply, “We have no idea, but whatever it is, it will be gone soon. Just get in line.”

Moscow has assumed its neighbors should be within its sphere of influence. What it seems to have forgotten is that many countries next door prize their independence and want nothing to do with Russia’s autocratic kleptocracy.

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Terri+10 A DECADE AFTER THE STARVATION OF PATIENT TERRI SCHIAVO, MEDICAL ADVANCEMENTS ARE HELPING OTHER PATIENTS WITH DISORDERS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

BY J.C. DERRICK IN ELKINS PARK AND NARBERTH, PA.

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awareness about disorders of consciousness and the potentially heartbreaking consequences for families. Now 10 years later, researchers and advocates are touting the increasingly positive outlook for such patients. Specialists are discovering new ways to identify consciousness and developing advanced treatment options that offer hope to a generation of patients and their families who would have previously had little.

MOSSREHAB OPERATES one of less than 10 programs in the country that specialize in disorders of consciousness. Dr. John Whyte, the unit’s mild-mannered, 62-year-old director, has always liked tough cases, and he gets a steady stream of them.

The MossRehab Responsiveness Program treats patients who are either in a vegetative state or a minimally conscious state— often after motorcycle wrecks, auto-pedestrian collisions, and an increasing number of heroin-related medical events.

Although experts and specialists have made significant advancements over the last decade, Whyte said most people who suffer a serious brain injury never see an expert. Once stabilized, many quickly transition to a nonspecialized nursing home, where a family practitioner or general internist will likely oversee their care. That leads to a high rate of misdiagnosis: “The fact that many patients, maybe a majority, get discharged directly from an acute care hospital to families or nursing homes—without passing through the hands of a specialist—is a problem,” Whyte said, pointing to two studies

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AT MOSS REHABILITATION RESEARCH INSTITUTE on Feb. 24, a physical therapist stretched out the legs and arms of a military veteran who lay motionless on a hospital bed. Seven months earlier the 30-year-old had crashed his motorcycle and suffered a traumatic brain injury. He returned home for several months, but now rigid muscle contractions exhaust him.

In and out, up and down, side to side the therapist worked his fingers, arms, and legs under the watchful eye of the man’s mother, who quit her retail job to care for her son. “I used to hate going to work, but now I get to get up every day and take care of him,” she told me with a Bible and a book titled Examining Scripture Daily sitting on the table beside her. She called the last few months “an emotional roller coaster,” but, “He’s not depressed, so I can’t be either.”

MossRehab sits about five miles from the Huntingdon Valley, Pa., community where Terri (Schindler) Schiavo grew up. Following a 1990 heart attack that left her severely brain damaged, doctors diagnosed Schiavo as being in a persistent vegetative state. Her family fought the diagnosis and Schiavo’s husband, Michael, who sought to withdraw care upon receiving a large settlement intended for rehabilitation. The disagreement sparked an international controversy and political activism, but a Florida court eventually ordered Schiavo’s feeding tube removed on March 18, 2005. She died 13 days later.

Schiavo’s condition was not medically unusual, nor did the legal fight set new precedents, but the case’s visibility raised

Schindler Family Photo/ap

conducted years apart that found some 40 percent of all patients diagnosed as vegetative are minimally conscious.

The difference between a vegetative and a minimally conscious state is crucial: In all 50 states it’s legal to withhold food and hydration from persons doctors believe are permanently unconscious—but not if they’re minimally conscious. Most insurance companies don’t consider someone a candidate for rehab unless the person regains consciousness. It may take only occasionally wiggling a finger on command to establish minimal consciousness, but it can open a world of opportunities.

Coexisting impairment causes many misdiagnoses—meaning a patient has, for example, both a language comprehension problem and vision loss. If someone fails to point to a cup when directed, it could be because he doesn’t understand the question, or it could be because he can’t visually find the cup.

Much of the rehab work entails isolating problems and mining for the ultimate prize: a way to communicate.

The work is tedious. During my visit to MossRehab I watched an occupational therapist help a wheelchair-bound, minimally conscious man choose yes or no on an iPad. He repeated the exercise again and again, marking on a sheet each response. The patient kept dozing off—attentiveness is a common problem.

Across the room, another occupational therapist guided one dedicated mother through the process of transitioning her son

from his wheelchair to a rehab mat. Her face betrayed the exhaustion of a mother whose son was hit by a motorcycle last year. She bumped his tracheotomy as she positioned to lift, causing him to throw up. Then he was exhausted, too.

Elsewhere I observed a test called a CRS-R (coma recovery scale-revised). It won’t document things like laughing or crying— which may or may not be considered reflexive—but it will gauge baseline skills and how they change over time.

“Point to the hairbrush,” a female physical therapist said to a middle-aged man who fell through a roof last summer. She held up a hairbrush and a handheld mirror. He didn’t move.

After a few tries she placed the brush in his hand and asked him what to do with it. He slowly raised it to his ear. “I think I’ll count that,” she said, glancing at a colleague in the small room and noting he has trouble raising his arm any higher.

After marking an evaluation sheet, she moved on to another exercise: “Take the toothbrush,” she instructed, leaning down to put her face in his line of vision. “Take the toothbrush.” The man paused, then gingerly wrapped his beefy fingers around the toothbrush without shifting his gaze. She took the toothbrush back and asked him to grab it again. He did. Then he did it a third time. And a fourth.

“Way to go!” she cheered, beaming with excitement as she scribbled on the evaluation sheet. It was significant progress: The day before she hadn’t been able to get him to open his eyes.

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Pistorius was completely aware of his surroundings. He remembers the relentless care of his parents, and also their frustration: “I hope you die,” his mother said one day, looking straight into his face. She had no idea he understood every word.

Eventually, a massage therapist named Virna became convinced Pistorius could improve, and she convinced his parents to take him to another facility for an evaluation.

Even after they knew he was awake, doctors insisted he had the intelligence of a 3-month-old. They didn’t realize he had learned to tell time by watching the shadows and was exceedingly bright.

Today Pistorius is married, runs a web design company, ­communicates via speech computer, and is learning to drive. His story, which he recounted in a 2013 book, Ghost Boy, isn’t new, but its recent retelling sparked renewed interest—and some reevaluations. “I now wonder how many patients with this kind of locked-in syndrome were allowed to die over the years,” Rivka Livni wrote in response to the NPR story, identifying herself as a nurse of 28 years who often saw staff encourage families to make a loved one “DNR” (do not resuscitate). “It will haunt me now.”

Whyte hopes his work will cause more people to reconsider their preconceived notions about disorders of consciousness. He and his staff don’t make moral judgments about what families should do, but they insist everyone should have proper information before making long-term choices. He said that takes time: “The tremendous dilemma we have right now is those critical decisions happen early, but our ability to reliably predict longterm prognosis does not happen early. We cannot predict three days into an injury what the long-term prognosis would be.”

Research has shown traumatic brain injury cases have a better prognosis than those who experience a medical event, such as a

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Why te: Isa ac Brekken/The New York Times/redux • Pistorius: Debra Hurford Brown/CAMERA PRESS/Redux

From left to right: Bobby Schindler in his office at the Terri Schiavo Life and Hope Network in Narberth, Pa.; Whyte; Pistorius.

Peter Tobia/Genesis Photos

A dozen miles southwest of MossRehab sits Narberth, Pa., a small, Mayberry-like community outside Philadelphia, where the Terri Schiavo Life and Hope Network operates out of a wood-shingled house converted into office space. Inside, the 700-square-foot office barely has enough room to display the mementos Schiavo’s family has collected over the past two decades: letters, awards, handmade quilts, photos with Pope Benedict, even a Purple Heart.

The Schindler family will never know what intense rehabilitation could have done for Terri, but they’re working to ensure other families get the chance to find out with their loved ones.

Last year the organization was involved in almost 150 cases, providing support and information for families in difficult ­situations. “We do everything we can to protect those who are vulnerable,” Bobby Schindler, Terri’s brother, told me, noting that many times no one is helping patients improve.

Most often the Life and Hope Network’s assistance comes in the form of legal referrals—in its own network first, then to Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and the Life Legal Defense Foundation. Although sometimes cases involve intrafamily ­disagreements, usually families are battling hospitals and e­ thics committees to continue care.

ADF attorney Catherine Glenn Foster told me such conflicts are on the rise: “We used to get a couple of calls a month, now we get a couple of calls a week.” Foster said legal precedent allows some families to withdraw care, usually with a court order, but that’s different from an outside party deciding it’s time to give up. Sometimes more time is all they need.

In January National Public Radio profiled Martin Pistorius, a South African man who contracted an unknown illness, became locked in a fetal position, and spent a dozen years in what d ­ octors thought was an unconscious state. But for the last decade

PETER TOBIA/GENESIS PHOTOS

WHY TE: ISA AC BREKKEN/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX • PISTORIUS: DEBRA HURFORD BROWN/CAMERA PRESS/REDUX

‘It seems we spend tons of money, no questions asked, at the beginning, but then we give up when someone doesn’t make immediate progress.’ —Dr. John Whyte stroke or heart attack. Whyte said that’s why treatment progress is slanted toward traumatic injuries, but there is reason for optimism among all serious brain injuries. Starting with a random discovery in 1999, patients with disorders of consciousness have been known to awaken with, of all things, the sleepinducing drug Ambien, even many years into their illnesses.

From 2008 to 2011, Whyte led a four-year, 84-patient national study—the largest of its kind to date—to determine how patients may be able to benefit from zolpidem (the active ingredient in Ambien). He found more than 5 percent respond to the drug, but research hasn’t revealed the biological reasons why. Some patients also developed tolerance to the drug, if taken frequently. Whyte said the study left him less optimistic that zolpidem could be a super treatment, even for 5 percent, but the key takeaway is that some patients possess a reversible mechanism in their brain circuitry.

While it’s relatively cheap and easy to try a drug like Ambien, expert-administered rehab remains elusive for the vast majority of the roughly 200,000 to 300,000 Americans (there is no national registry) living with a disorder of consciousness. MossRehab’s

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responsiveness program handles about 25 patients a year. There are only a handful of other facilities that will take the most difficult cases, and convincing insurance companies to pay for it is almost always a challenge.

“It seems we spend tons of money, no questions asked, at the beginning, but then we give up when someone doesn’t make immediate progress,” said Whyte, citing a study that found as many as 20 percent of traumatic brain injury patients who receive early, aggressive rehabilitation may eventually live on their own. “The notion that there’s no potential for recovery, or if it doesn’t happen in the first few years we can close the door on it ever happening—those things are exaggerations.”

STAFF MEMBERS AT MOSSREHAB gather for 15-minute, afternoon meetings to discuss patient progress. On this day, some 10 health professionals provide updates and plan care for each patient: Whyte, an attending physician, a resident physician, an occupational therapist, a physical therapist, a speech therapist, a nurse, a neuropsychologist, one or two social workers, and a research assistant. Several staff members rotate in and out of the room as the conversation shifts to a new patient.

Some of the reports are grim. One patient isn’t making progress. Another has regressed. “How much more can we do for him?” someone asks. “How long will it take to train his mother?” says another.

The mood lifts for the final patient, who was hit by a car last November. He’s making notable progress: “Two times over the weekend he said, ‘Good morning,’” a physical therapist said, reading an email from a colleague who couldn’t make the meeting.

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Parents vs. doc In the treatment of children with severe genetic disabilities, the interests and opinions of parents and doctors aren’t always the same—and hospital futility policies may become the flash point of the fight

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told the Allisons he wouldn’t spend healthcare dollars on Abigail for a blood test.

When the Allisons took Abigail to the hospital again for a virus three years later, the doctor treating her said he wouldn’t resuscitate her if she stopped breathing. Doctors placed a “do not resuscitate” (DNR) order on Abigail’s chart without her parents’ knowledge.

“It was my understanding that you had to have written consent if you’re going to put a DNR on their chart,” Dawn Allison said. “I never imagined this would happen in the United States.” The doctor removed the DNR from Abigail’s chart at her father’s request. But Rex Allison believes the doctor

Courtesy of the Allison family

hen doctors diagnosed Abigail Allison with WolfHirschhorn syndrome in 2004, they said she wouldn’t live beyond two years. They told parents Rex and Dawn to take Abigail home with ­hospice care. WolfHirschhorn ­syndrome, caused by deleted genetic material associated with the fourth chromosome, affects 1 in 50,000 infants and causes delayed growth and intellectual development as well as seizures. About one-third of those who have it die within two years after birth, depending on the severity of the disorder.

But Rex, a school psychologist, and Dawn, a physician, wanted to do more than hospice care for their daughter. The trouble was, they had a hard time finding doctors who agreed. They often had to fight against the medical community to get the care they thought their daughter deserved.

When Abigail suffered a seizure at 11 months old, the emergency room doctor delayed treating her, eventually informing her father he wasn’t obligated to provide medical care. Another doctor

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octors agreed only because of the couple’s medical knowledge and understanding of Abigail’s disability.

For years, the Allisons and other parents of children born with severe The Allison disabilities have battled family (left); Abigail Allison futility policies common (right) at many hospitals across the United States. If doctors consider a treatment “futile,” according to a ­hospital’s policy, they are not obligated to provide it. That can leave parents feeling as if they have no control over what happens to their children. But ­doctors also face a dilemma when treating incurable and fatal genetic ­disorders: How do they balance the parents’ wishes with what’s in the child’s best interest?

Courtesy of the Allison family

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t least two state legislators believe ­ ospitals should be more clear with h parents about their futility policies and obtain parental c­ onsent before issuing DNRs or withholding treatment.

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From passive to active euthanasia

refused conclusive testing due to the miscarriage risk. After he was born, Simon was labeled “incompatible with life,” his mom Sheryl Crosier told LifeSiteNews.

Doctors changed his treatment options, abandoning most aggressive measures. They fed him sugar water instead of the breast milk Crosier pumped for him. And they placed a DNR on Simon’s records without the Crosiers’ knowledge.

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Doctors who provide inadequate care for babies with genetic disabilities are participating in “passive euthanasia,” Dawn Allison told me. But in the Netherlands, doctors’ approach to disabled infants has surpassed passivity to become active euthanasia.

In a position paper recently released by the Royal Dutch Medical Association (RDMA), the organization announced doctors may stop administering nutrition and fluids artificially if they determine treating a baby is medically futile. According to RDMA, treatment is futile if it doesn’t extend a short life expectancy, if the prognosis and quality of life are poor, or if the baby faces a life of unmitigated suff ering.

Under “good palliative care,” RDMA also outlines three cases when euthanasia by administering muscle relaxants is justifiable for these infants: If the baby is visibly suff ering, if a prolonged dying process is distressing the parents, and if the baby is already receiving muscle relaxants for his or her treatment.

The new directive will aff ect about 650 of the 175,000 babies born in the Netherlands annually. —C.C.

The doctors also stopped giving Simon medication to help his Simon Crosier heart, although he did undergo with mother Sheryl and reparative heart surgery. father Scott “We wanted the doctors to look at our precious son as if he didn’t have that label,” Crosier said of the “incompatible with life” designation. “We wanted them to treat Simon with their God-given talent and leave the rest in God’s hand.”

When a child is born with a genetic disorder, doctors often don’t know the severity, said Robert Orr, a retired physician ethicist and Christian ethics consultant. Before determining treatment options, doctors wait for the condition to “declare itself.” If parents want to support the child initially, doctors should oblige their decision, Orr said. If the child’s life expectancy is short and parents simply want to cuddle their child, doctors should support that as well.

But if parents and doctors continue to disagree as time progresses, then begins the delicate task of balancing doctors’ knowledge, the parents’ wishes and grief, and the best interests of the child. “Often times, it’s a major conflict,” Orr said.

When conducting an ethics consultation, Orr discusses the situation with all the parties involved and examines relevant literature. Then he evaluates the best interest of the child: Is the child in pain? Will the treatment alleviate pain?

Will the treatment heal?

Sometimes Orr’s consultations involve difficult choices when babies are dying, parents insist on treatment, and nurses are crying at the infant’s bedside because that treatment causes more pain.

“We must respect the right to life, but we also have a duty to alleviate suffering,” Orr said.

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Knopp

parents of their futility policies. The bill, which is awaiting a committee hearing, also mandates parental consent for withholding treatment and food from minor patients and for issuing DNRs. He crafted his bill after the Allisons brought the issue to his attention.

Dawn Allison had discovered how difficult finding a hospital’s futility policy can be when she attempted to determine whether her local hospital, where she has courtesy staff privileges, had one. It does, but she could only confirm it after several days of phone calls. She eventually had to contact a palliative care physician to get an answer.

“If it is this difficult for a physician affiliated with a hospital to find its futility policies, I would suspect it would be more difficult for someone else to get this information,” she said.

In Missouri, state Rep. Bill Kidd filed a similar bill, known as “Simon’s Law,” at the end of last year. It’s named for Simon Crosier, who died three months after being born with Trisomy 18 in 2010.

Doctors suspected Simon had the genetic disorder before he was born, but his parents

can. They’re also obligated “to make sure that when we’re prolonging life, we’re really prolonging life and not prolonging dying,” Levine said.

No blanket criteria exist for making those decisions. Even in the midst of all the complexity and grief, Levine said, “we have to make decisions that help our patients—not just dispense with an ugly situation.”

Levine’s own approach to treating genetic disorders has grown with experience. As a young doctor, he helped a family whose child was born with a genetic disorder. He saw how Katie filled her family’s life with love, despite her disorder. And though Katie died from complications several years later, caring for her “made such a difference,” Levine said. “It changed my whole When conducting an attitude.” ethics consultation, Doctors’ medical knowledge of genetic disorders also is Orr … evaluates the changing. For example, Down syndrome, which affects the 21st best interest of the chromosome, was grossly misunver the past 20 years, the approach to child: Is the child in derstood for many years. In the medical treatment has changed, said David early 1900s, doctors didn’t expect Levine, a Christian neonatologist and pain? Will the persons with Down syndrome to director of Newborn Services at Columbus treatment alleviate live beyond 9 years. Now, most Regional Health in Georgia. Before, parents live to 55 years and older, thanks usually were content to allow doctors to control pain? Will the to improved care and better their children’s treatment. And medical professiontreatment heal? understanding of the disorder. als saw themselves as protecting the patients Doctors said Abigail and parents from ugliness, particularly Allison wouldn’t live the suffering experienced by babies beyond two years, but with genetic disorders. she’s now 11 years old.

But now, parents want more She can walk on her involvement in the decisions surown with assistance from a walker. rounding their child’s medical And though she can’t speak yet, she care. Many think they can demand can communicate with her family. any desired treatment, but Orr Levine Abigail impacts everyone around her, said that is not the case in every Rex Allison said. situation.

“If we had listened to the information given Still, doctors need to carefully consider when she was born,” he said, “she wouldn’t be parents’ wishes while guiding them toward decihere to do that.” A sions in the best interest of the child, Levine said.

Doctors should seek to provide aid where they —Courtney Crandell is a writer in Virginia

Although Simon Crosier and Abigail Allison both had doctors place DNR orders on their charts without their parents’ consent, such drastic measures aren’t common. But they do happen, even over family objections in limited circumstances, Orr said.

In Orr’s experience, doctors issue such orders when the patient suffers without relief and is unlikely to survive, but the family insists on treatment.

Many of those policies require approval from a second physician and familial notification.

“From an ethics perspective, I believe such an order should not be written without notification of the family that it is being done and why,” Orr said.

KNOPP: DON RYAN/AP • SIMON: COURTESY OF SHERYL CROSIER

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The fight for Baby K Tension between parental wishes and medical authority is nothing new. In 1992, a Virginia mother made national headlines when she took her fight for her daughter’s life to federal court.

Shortly after baby Stephanie Keene was born with anencephaly, her mother began a long battle with a Fairfax, Va., hospital for the care she wanted the child to receive. After months of disagreement, the case landed in court when Stephanie returned to the hospital for a tracheostomy to treat respiratory problems. The hospital sought a court order for an appointed guardian and palliative care.

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The case eventually went to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The hospital argued any life-sustaining treatment was futile. But a year and four months after Stephanie’s birth, the appeals court ruled in the mother’s favor. The hospital could not decline care for Stephanie’s respiratory distress because hospitals provide care for other patients with terminal diagnoses, the court said.

Stephanie survived in a pediatric intensive care unit until about a year after the ruling, living to almost 2½ years old.

—C.C.

3/18/15 11:14 AM

In an increasingly hostile culture, pastors and Christian ballplayers both face brushback pitches.

Will they stand up to the pressure?

H L A R U T L U C

by MARVIN OLASKY

photo by Stacy Revere/Getty Images

I

n baseball terminology, a brushback is a pitch, often used for intimidation purposes, thrown near a batter’s head. …

Brushbacks can result in warnings, ejections, or even bench-clearing brawls.” —Urban Dictionary Does life imitate baseball or does baseball imitate life?

Two Christians—one a second baseman, one a pastor— faced brushbacks as winter turned to spring.

Baseball’s high inside fastball came in Port St. Lucie, Fla., where a little-known 50-year-old ex-player, Billy Bean (not the famous Moneyball general manager, Billy Beane) found himself sitting on the New York Mets bench. The Major League Baseball (MLB) hierarchy last July 15 made Bean, who sells real estate in Miami, its first “Ambassador of Inclusion” and tasked him, according to MLB.com, with developing “educational training initiatives against sexism, homophobia and prejudice.”

Bean, a career .226 outfielder with an average of 18 hits per year during his six seasons, was the subject of a one-hour documentary hosted by Bob Costas that premiered on Feb. 10 on the MLB Network. The reason: Bean after his career ended announced that he is gay.

New York General Manager Sandy Alderson invited Bean to talk with players, and Bean, wearing a Mets cap and windbreaker, did so on March 3.

Mike Vorkunov of NJ Advance Media then asked Mets second baseman Daniel Murphy, known as a devout Christian, to

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comment on Bean’s visit. Murphy forthrightly responded. “I do disagree with the fact that Billy is a homosexual. That doesn’t mean I can’t still invest in him and get to know him. I don’t think the fact that someone is a homosexual should completely shut the door on investing in them in a relational aspect.

Getting to know him. That, I would say, you can still accept them but I do disagree with the lifestyle, 100 percent.”

Vorkunov also quoted Murphy’s observation that Christians haven’t been “articulate enough in describing what our actual stance is on homosexuality.

We love the people. We disagree [with] the lifestyle.” Murphy expressed some self-criticism: “There are aspects of my life that I’m trying to surrender to Christ … like my pride.” The quotation concluded, “just because I disagree with the lifestyle doesn’t mean I’m just never going to speak to Billy Bean every time he walks through the door. That’s not love.”

Murphy wasn’t looking for trouble: MLB was paying Bean to provoke discussion. General Manager Alderson was

sending him to hang with players. A reporter asked Murphy to respond.

Nevertheless, some gays vociferously attacked Murphy not only for his opposition to homosexuality but for calling it a “lifestyle.” Many of the more than 300 Google-listed media reports on the dustup followed that line: Bean himself wrote that Murphy “spoke his truth.” A Mets spokesman quickly told ESPN that Murphy “will no longer address his religious beliefs and will stick to baseball.”

Ironically, last year Murphy missed opening day to be present at the birth of his child. He spoke out about the importance of doing that and received an invitation to the White House. No one then told him he should just talk about baseball. In a complimentary article, Slate writer Jessica Grose even quoted Murphy’s reason for ordering his priorities that way: He tries “to take Jesus Christ and put him in the center of everything.”

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ome 50 miles south of the Mets ballpark sits Lake Worth, a city of 36,000 snuggled against the Atlantic Ocean. One of Lake Worth’s five city commissioners is Andy Amoroso, owner of the downtown Studio 205, which he advertises as “the only Pride store in Palm Beach County. Unique gifts, vintage items, adult humor, and Florida style!” Behind the dresses and trinkets in the front of the store is a room with DVDs

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Daniel Murphy waits for a pitch during a spring training game against the Miami Marlins at Roger Dean Stadium on March 11 in Jupiter, Fla.

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Olive at the Common Grounds Coffee Bar in Lake Worth

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telephone calls—nor did Lake Worth city manager Michael Bornstein. William Waters, Lake Worth’s “Director for Community Sustainability” (which means he oversees building, zoning, and code compliance), did call back. Waters last fall sent associates an email saying of Common Ground Church, “We need to watch it as it has a lot of downtown people concerned.” Waters admitted Amoroso (and others) had talked with him about Common Grounds. Early in February a code enforcement agent, Gerald Coscia, wearing a black hoodie, videotaped the Common Grounds service.

Coscia then filed a report “for future court proceedings” stating the church was operating without a business license and describing what he saw: “An overhead TV or projection with scripture

verse on it. … People holding what appeared to be bibles or religious books as one had a cross on it.” Pastor Olive, pointing out that the coffee bar does have a license, said he had “a Twilight Zone moment “ when he saw Coscia’s statement, which “reads like a KGB report.” The city then sent a letter to the owner of the property that houses the coffee bar, threatening fines of $200$500 per day and possible foreclosure.

Brushback.

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n the week following Murphy’s response to Billy Bean and his sub­ sequent silencing, I tried to gauge reaction within baseball and among fans generally. I spoke with St. Louis Cardinals manager Mike Matheny, author of an excellent new book, The Matheny Manifesto, which includes a

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bean: Dario Cantatore/Get t y Images • Alderson: Seth Wenig/ap

‘We’ve been very careful with our message: Repent. Fall in Love with Jesus.

That changes everything.’ —Mike Olive

Tom Mills/Genesis Photos

titled Amateur Playthings, Guys Going Crazy, Transexual Road Trip, and other names too gross to be listed here, along with homosexual full frontal nudity magazines for $1.99. Two piles of T-shirts are also for sale: One has a drawing of a pitcher, the other a drawing of a catcher.

Mike Olive, pastor of Common Ground, a Southern Baptist church, late last year bought Coastars, a downtown coffee bar three blocks from Studio 205.

Coastars had sometimes packed in audiences to hear bands, so Olive thought it made sense for his congregation of 100 to meet there: He renamed the coffee bar Common Grounds, with an s. Olive heard that Amoroso was saying Common Ground Church was anti-gay, so he went to Amoroso’s store to say that wasn’t true. Olive told me, “We’ve been very careful with our message: Repent. Fall in Love with Jesus. That changes everything.” Olive says Amoroso told him, “You better not have a church there. That better not be a church.”

Amoroso was not in his store when I visited, and he did not return my

BEAN: DARIO CANTATORE/GET T Y IMAGES • ALDERSON: SETH WENIG/AP

TOM MILLS/GENESIS PHOTOS

chapter titled “Stand Your Ground.” In it, Matheny wrote, “I am, without apology, a Christian.” He also noted that some people wear “their religious beliefs on their sleeves. … While I may admire their boldness, I am simply not that type of person.” True to his book, Matheny responded to my questions cautiously: “A lot of guys have agendas, things they like to talk about. Hasn’t been an issue with our fan base, hasn’t been an issue inside our clubhouse, so that’s not something we’ve had to deal with.”

Murphy of the Mets, though, had to deal with it—and he respectfully but boldly responded. After his Mets visit Billy Bean talked to Yankees, Phillies, and other players: None talked back to reporters on the record. The sounds of silence spoke loudly in much of the baseball world. I sampled Twitter accounts of several hundred players who tweet about all kinds of subjects and did not find any commenting on Billy Bean.

Only retired pitcher Curt Schilling tweeted the Murphy news: “Reporters ask outspoken Christian MLB player about homosexual teammates, here’s his honest answer.”

A chilling effect was also obvious when I contacted the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which stipulates that “neither heterosexual sex outside of marriage nor any homosexual act constitute an alternative lifestyle acceptable to God.” Deborah Hamilton of Hamilton Strategies, FCA’s public relations firm, told me that FCA would not comment on the silencing of Murphy, who was a student FCA member and has run an off-season FCA camp in Jacksonville. Hamilton said, “FCA would like to maintain a friendly position in the sports world and being a Christian organization, they have a firm, biblical foundation, but they would prefer not to get involved at this level on this issue at this time.”

Several baseball reporters told me they have seen a chilling effect in recent years. Stan McNeal of FOX Sports Midwest said, “Players used to be guarded before the camera, but afterward they’d open up. Now it doesn’t make any difference: They

know you always have to be careful.”

Other journalists also lamented the reduction of free speech. When I told a group of white, black, and Hispanic pastors in Lake Wales, Fla., about Ambassador of Inclusion Bean and the silencing of Murphy, John Kimbrough asked, “Why exclude someone who thinks differently?” Another said, “Sounds like an intolerant message of intolerance.” Many web commenters took Murphy’s side, stating, “There is a double standard. … There’s something asymmetrical about all this.”

W

hile the New York Mets were establishing a new standard regarding freedom of speech, Lake Worth city officials were coming up with a new standard regarding freedom of worship. Olive felt the brushback pitch whiz by his ear, but he did not back off the plate. Early in March he organized two prayer rallies in front of City Hall. At the one I attended, about 60 persons, many wearing Love>Hate T-shirts, sang “Amazing Grace.” They then prayed in groups of five or six. Later, pastors— black, Hispanic, white—prayed publicly from the City Hall steps. The rally concluded with all saying the Lord’s Prayer.

Olive stated, “This is about Bean at the 8th annual Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network Awards Gala in New York City (left); Alderson speaking to the media.

Christians living with the light on, unashamed, living and loving Jesus in public. The Truth can never be silenced. … We are not mad at the city.

We are here to see a positive change come to our City.” One African-American pastor, Francis Bruno of the Rock of Salvation Church, said, “Fear should not be a part of the Christian’s life.” Coming to Olive’s support was a 2-month-old weekly newspaper, The Lake Worth Tribune, put out almost single-handedly by an aggressive young editor-publisher, Margaret Menge, an occasional contributor to WORLD in 2000 during Florida’s hanging chad controversy.

Also on Olive’s side was the public interest law firm Liberty Counsel: Attorney Richard Mast sent a no-nonsense demand letter to city officials showing they had swung and missed three times.

He said they were violating the city code by telling churches they needed a business license. He said they were violating Florida law by imposing a tax on churches and requiring a license. He said they were violating the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by restricting freedom of religion: “Any attempt to require a license for public assembly on private property is an unconstitutional prior restraint on the freedom of assembly. When the gathering is for political or religious purposes, the offense against the Constitution is even greater.”

With the Lake Worth brushback not working, city officials quickly talked of a “misunderstanding” and said they only

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wanted the coffee bar/church to pay $160 for a safety inspection. Olive told me officials were “trying hard to change the narrative,” since an attack on freedom of religion did not play well: The city’s original case report said nothing about safety, and the city’s emphasis was on church licensing, even though the coffee bar already had a license. Liberty Counsel’s Mast said city officials “are hiding the ball here, and not answering a basic question, because they know that they will lose.”

Waters told me on March 12 that he had just met with Pastor Olive, and a meeting of the minds seemed on the way. Waters said the coffee bar has two exits, which safety rules require, so Olive probably would need only to install another exit sign and have the path of travel to the back door clearly demarcated. Later, Olive told me it wasn’t quite that easy— “Waters talked about fire department approval. I hope he’s not just kicking the can down the road”—but the pastor said the tone of city officials “has definitely changed.”

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CIT Y HALL : MARVIN OL ASK Y • STUDIO 205: TOM MILLS/GENESIS PHOTOS • MURPHY: JEFF ROBERSON/AP

he New York Mets game in Port St. Lucie on March 12 began with the traditional singing of our national anthem. Fans started applauding at the last line: “the land of the free, and the home of the brave.” But will teens hoping for a baseball career have to start thinking like judges hoping for Supreme Court consideration: Don’t leave a paper trail? Don’t talk about anything controversial? I had good relations with Mets management when I interviewed knuckleballer R.A. Dickey three years ago (Dickey now pitches in Toronto); but this time Mets officials avoided discussion, even when I sat in their ballpark’s executive offices.

That refusal even to deal with objections shows how evangelicals (and Orthodox Jews) face a major problem, particularly in places that aren’t far from a segregationist past.

Mets officials and many other Americans apparently see today’s gay movement as the continuation of yesterday’s civil rights movement.

Having celebrated Jackie Robinson’s

heroism and brilliance, they don’t want to be accused of dragging their feet in what is portrayed as a parallel drive for freedom. Christians can stress how different the two are, but the contrast often doesn’t register.

Down the coast in Lake Worth, officials were planning a March 28-29 “Pridefest 2015” gay celebration with the slogan “#We are winning.” The gay lobby is certainly on a roll, but is it overplaying its hand? A dozen miles from Port St. Lucie my wife and I kayaked into a surprisingly jungly part of Florida. The kayak business owner, Tom Wright, flew in Afghanistan for three years. He bemoaned a loss of freedom of speech on many issues, then mentioned his sister is a lesbian, “and I love her. She also does not go out of her way to advertise it or go after special treatment or considerations. … If somebody wants to be lesbian or gay, that’s fine but don’t force it on me. Don’t throw it in my face.” Stop the brushbacks.

Fans could still cheer an announcement at a Grapefruit League game in Fort Myers (temperature 81) that the temperature in Boston was 19.

And yet, if fans like me thought we could escape the political and cultural arguments that roil America by immersing ourselves in baseball, we were wrong. A

(1) Olive leads a prayer rally in front of City Hall.

(2) Studio 205.

(3) Murphy.

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3/18/15 8:23 AM

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rendering: cade museum • cade: Lynn Pelham/Sports Illustrated/Get t y Images

NOTEBOOK LIFESTYLE / TECHNOLOGY / SCIENCE / HOUSES OF GOD / SPORTS / RELIGION

LIFESTYLE

RENDERING: CADE MUSEUM • CADE: LYNN PELHAM/SPORTS ILLUSTRATED/GET T Y IMAGES

Remembering a Renaissance man THE CADE MUSEUM SEEKS TO EVOKE THE CREATIVE AND QUIETLY CHRISTIAN SPIRIT OF ITS NAMESAKE by Joel Belz

Folks here in Gainesville, Fla., who knew Dr. J. Robert Cade recall him as an intensely practical man—a goodnatured but no-nonsense problem solver, they say, who drove hard to find solutions to puzzles others either ignored or had given up on.

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An artist’s rendering of the Cade Museum (above); Cade in 1968

So such folks tend to be surprised to learn that Cade was also an avid collector of classic Studebaker automobiles and that an old barn just outside Gainesville is home to 60 of his cars. Or that the first thing you see when you step into the home where he lived until his death in 2007 is part of a collection of violins arrayed high on the facing wall.

Cade had played them all.

This very practical man was also a poet. He could recite long passages of the Psalms and other biblical literature, of Shakespeare, and of Tennyson. He wrote his own poetry as well— vivid, passionate, lilting, but realistic.

Yet there’s probably nothing more fascinating you’ll learn about Robert Cade than this: that 50 years ago this year, he led a small band of scientists

who invented Gatorade, the sports drink now sold around the world. In 1961, Cade had joined the faculty of the school of medicine at the University of Florida.

Especially because he was a kidney specialist, he developed an early concern for the dehydration that regularly afflicted the Florida Gators football team.

Others helped develop the winning chemical concoction, but it was Robert Cade (and his wife Mary, who suggested making the drink palatable by adding lemon and lime juice) who introduced it in such a creative and practical way that coach Ray Graves made it a part of the team’s regimen. It was so crucial an achievement that opposing coaches, like Bobby Dodd of Georgia Tech, openly credited Gatorade in those days for APRIL 4, 2015 WORLD

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In the “Creativity Lab”

approach,” Lipka told WORLD. Other kid-friendly classes advertised on the intriguing schedule include “Is It Music or Is It Noise?,” “Rocket Building Camp,” and “Zombie Laser Tag.” Most of these activities take place now in cramped, temporary quarters right across Main Street from where the museum is slated to be built. “Some consultants told us to ‘build it, and they will come,’” said Phoebe Cade Miles, daughter of Dr. Cade and a driving force for the big project. “But we thought it was better to demonstrate the validity of the programs themselves, and have a program ready to move into the new building as soon as it’s completed.”

Still another dimension to this Renaissance man’s legacy is the rugged Christian faith that quietly tended so much to shape his personal agenda. The gifted physician, inquisitive inventor, and expressive artist is not remembered by those who knew him best as

an in-your-face proselytizer.

Instead, and in keeping with his early Lutheran roots, he was a believer who found it easy and natural to spell out his God-centered view of life in simple, sometimes indirect declarations.

Right in the middle of a technical medical explanation, for example, describing the research leading to the formulation of Gatorade, Cade wrote—without affectation—“… God knew more sugar would be needed by the working muscles, so He built in several mechanisms to be sure enough sugar was available.”

In similar fashion, the new museum will not go out of its way to serve as an explicit or dogmatic ­apologetic for a Christian worldview. That simply wasn’t the Cade style. The museum’s worldview will instead be quiet, unforced, and implicit. If the emphasis on innovation and ­creativity notes that such qualities spring from the truth that humans are made “in God’s image,” the assertion is likely to be as gentle

and unargumentative as Cade’s reputation is here in Gainesville.

Funding for the $9 ­million museum is not yet fully committed. Some in the Gainesville-university ­community suggest that the Cade family, amply blessed through the years

by Gatorade royalties, ought simply to get on with the project on its own. But others agree with the argument that the community will value more deeply a project in which it has added its own investment.

The community debt to the Cades is substantial.

Following tough litigation in the late 1960s, the University of Florida itself gets some 20 percent of all Gatorade royalties. Last year alone, that 20 percent amounted to $17 million.

The university, of course, values such a relationship— and has even tried to enhance it. Phoebe Miles told WORLD that the museum had turned down an offer of acreage for the museum right on the university campus. “Our saying ‘no’ had mostly to do with our eagerness to be closer to the needier part of Gainesville on the east side of the city,” she said. “But it also had to do with our desire to keep our independence and freedom to shape the museum’s message however its board wants.”

Not that anybody in Gainesville seems too ­worried about being embarrassed by the new Cade Museum. Most communities would dearly love a chance to live in the long shadow of a man like Robert Cade. A

photo courtesy of the Cade Museum

Florida’s growing success on the gridiron. Dodd was quoted in the Miami Herald as saying bluntly that “the Gators won because they had Gatorade and our team didn’t.”

That was 1965. Now, in 2015, the Gainesville– University of Florida ­community is getting a new 50th anniversary exposure to this very favorite son.

Plans for a strikingly designed and highly visible science museum—named for Robert Cade—are moving ahead on the historic Main Street site where Gainesville’s train station used to stand. Billboards on the city’s major thoroughfares highlight the museum.

One of Cade’s adult daughters is featured on the cover of a recent Gainesville ­magazine as one of the town’s “Spirit of Gainesville” award winners.

Central in the thinking behind the project is the goal of instilling in visitors—and especially among children— the same creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial spirit that throughout Cade’s 80 years kept spilling over to improve and enhance the lives of others. “They obviously want this place,” says the museum’s program director Patty Lipka, “to reflect Dr. Cade’s creative, outlandish spirit, and his zest for life and new ideas.”

With that goal in mind, for example, Lipka coordinates a monthly “Living Inventor Series” through which real-life inventors are brought to the museum’s “Creativity Lab” to lead young students through the creative process. “It’s an obviously contagious

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Parking photo illustration: rachel beat t y • tat too photo illustration: rachel Beat t y • Falkenham: Bruce Bot tomley • parking diagram: handout

NOTEBOOK

photo courtesy of the Cade Museum

Parking photo illustration: rachel beat t y • tat too photo illustration: rachel Beat t y • Falkenham: Bruce Bot tomley • parking diagram: handout

TECHNOLOGY

Space navigator

Searching for a parking spot goes high tech by Michael Cochrane Sure, your fancy incar navigation system will find the quickest way from point A to point B, but will it find you an open parking space once you get there? Maybe not today, but the next generation of smart vehicles could help drivers avoid the frustration of searching for a parking space.

Ford Motor Company, in partnership with Georgia

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Tech, is focusing on improving the parking experience by leveraging in-vehicle parking systems and a crowdsourced real-time database of occupied and empty parking spots across the country. The project, called “Parking Spotter”— part of a larger program at Ford called “Smart Mobility”—is an effort to find novel ways of reducing vehicle carbon emissions.

Ford’s own data show that searching for parking spaces in cities can account for between 20 and 30 ­percent of a vehicle’s emissions. “Nothing’s really changed in more than 80 years,” said Ford’s Mike Tinskey to the tech website Ars Technica, pointing out that the problem feeds on itself as drivers hunting for a parking space cause congestion. “They’re going slow, and they’re distracted,” he said, “so people behind them have to go slower too.”

Parking Spotter uses the existing technology found in vehicles equipped with Ford’s Parking Assist package, which allows a car to parallel park itself through the use of ultrasonic sensors. As ­vehicles equipped with these or other sensors, such as cameras or radar, drive through urban areas, their sensors can be employed to detect open parking spaces.

That information, along with the GPS coordinates of the parking space, is sent to a cloud data center, where

NOTEBOOK

it updates in real time a crowdsourced map of parking spaces.

“What we’ve done is purchased a database of all the known parking spaces in the U.S. and geomapped it, so we know if a vehicle crosses the right GPS coordinates we know it’s moving into a parking lot or a parking space,” Tinskey

said. Drivers searching for parking spaces can then use the cloud database app to find available parking spaces in the area of their request.

Tinskey said the company plans to equip a small fleet of test cars with the technology this year to determine whether there is a real business case for the idea.

Clear coat Tattoos for many people can become a regrettably visible and permanent reminder of an often impulsive act. While it is possible to remove some tattoos using lasers, the process is painful, expensive, and potentially damaging to surrounding skin.

Now, an easier and pain-free method of tattoo removal may be on the horizon. Alec Falkenham, a Ph.D. student at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, is working on a cream he believes will remove unwanted tattoos.

Falkenham’s process, called bisphosphonate liposomal tattoo removal (BLRT), uses a topically applied drug that kills macrophages, giant white blood cells generated as part of the immune response to the ink. Tattoos are visible because not all the macrophages are able to get rid of the ink—some remain trapped just under the epidermis. Just as the macrophages originally consumed the ink particles, they will absorb the chemicals that then kill them off. —M.C.

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NOTEBOOK

SCIENCE

Constructed babies

A new technique may create artificial sperm and eggs—and enormous risks by Julie Borg

no mother necessary except, of course, as a womb for rent.

Scientists at Cambridge University in England and the Weizmann Institute in Israel have used skin cells from five adults to artificially create germ cells, or stem cells, which can make human sperm and eggs. They believe they could use the technique to make a baby in as little as two years, Jacob Hanna, lead Israeli

disease. But “it has already caused interest from gay groups because of the possibility of making egg and sperm cells from ­parents of the same sex,” Hanna said.

This technique crosses the boundary between procreation and the ­construction of a child, said Paige Cunningham, executive director of The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity.

“Everything is about the

parent, what they want, what they need, what they desire; it’s not about the good of the child.”

There are many safety issues involved, Cunningham added. Primordial germ cells may look like an egg and a sperm but they are not, and it is not clear if they will function like an egg and a sperm. The results are unpredictable and genetic manipulation is irreversible.

“Children are a gift from God,” she said, “not a commodity to create for our own wishes.”

The process, Cunningham said, intentionally subjects children to risks of harm: “Parents are called to sacrifice for their children, children are not called to sacrifice for their parents. But it is still two years away, we still have time to say, ‘No.’”

Friendly skies?

For years experts have been concerned about the decreasing honey bee population, attributed to new pathogens, nutrition issues, and possible effects of ­pesticides. The pollinators are crucial to agriculture.

Keeping beehives on airport green space may be one small part of the solution. Airport beehives use field space that cannot legally be used for building and is not treated with pesticides. The trend began in Germany and spread to Sweden, Denmark, and Canada. In the United States, Chicago, Seattle, and St. Louis have all welcomed beehives, The New York Times reported. —J.B.

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Muscle in a dish A team of researchers from Italy, Israel, and the United Kingdom has engineered mouse cells, cultured in a dish, to produce a mature, functional leg muscle. The cells were genetically engineered to stimulate blood vessel and nerve growth. Within weeks after the team implanted the graft into the mouse, mature muscle fibers formed a complete, functional muscle nearly indistinguishable from natural skeletal muscle.

Previous attempts to create functional muscle have been unsuccessful because the host does not create the necessary nerves and blood vessels to supply adequate oxygen for survival and growth.

The researchers admit that using the technique for humans will likely be much more complicated.

“While we are encouraged by the success of our work in growing a complete intact and functional mouse leg muscle we emphasize that a mouse muscle is very small and scaling up the process for patients may require significant additional work,” said author Giulio Cossu.

Researchers will try the procedure with larger animals before moving into clinical trials with humans. —J.B.

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Scot t Stra zzante/genesis photo

researcher, told the Daily Mail.

Researchers hope the technique could help men and women who have become infertile through

illustration: Krieg barrie • mouse: JacobStudio/istock • bees: ROD HATFIELD

Same-sex couples may soon be able to have a biological child. For example, two men could have a child that carries the DNA of both of them;

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ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • MOUSE: JACOBSTUDIO/ISTOCK • BEES: ROD HATFIELD

SCOT T STRA ZZANTE/GENESIS

HOUSES OF GOD

NOTEBOOK

CHICAGO, ILL. Gospel Life Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

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SPORTS

Kick-started

Ready to play

It’s no match for European football, but American soccer is growing by Andrew Branch

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Kaká surrounded by fans at Orlando International Airport.

Southampton, which is fighting for a prestigious berth in the European championships after years relegated to the minor leagues. Continent-wide, just eight teams remain in that prestigious UEFA Champions League, which will crown a titan in June.

Back down to earth, if you will, in the United States, former Brazilian superstar Kaká has relentlessly promoted his new allegiance, Orlando City SC. A raucous 62,000 saw the franchise’s inaugural game at the Citrus

Bowl, beating 1994 World Cup numbers. The club’s Brazilian part-owner saw potential in the growing South American populations of Florida and Georgia. Fellow newcomer New York City FC also won new fans, with 60 percent of season ticket holders making their first such commitment in any sport.

As the MLS grows, the global trend is certainly against more “Galaxy” and “Dynamo,” but fans are still choosing between the terms “Soccer Club” and “Football Club.” But the Europeanization of American soccer seems able to birth both together.

McAuliffe

K ak á: John Raoux/ap • McAuliffe: Steve Helber/ap • Tebow: Steve Helber/ap

Curious where ­soccer ranks in the European imagination?

One in five British children in a Christmas survey thought Jesus played for Chelsea Football Club, the runaway favorite of the Barclays Premier League. When Spanish rivals Barcelona and Real Madrid play, well over $1 billion in salaries compete on a single field.

In other words, it’s a tad more intense than Major League Soccer in the United States, which kicked off in March with two new expansion teams.

Instead of names like the Los Angeles Galaxy, European teams and fervor seem to rise straight out of old city-state pride.

It’s “FC Barcelona” (or Football Club Barcelona).

It’s “FC Bayern Munich” (Munich of Bavaria). It’s simply “Roma.”

Perennial powerhouses are succeeding, such as Munich with just one loss in German play.

Yet its latest continentwide Champions League victim, Ukraine’s FC Shakhtar Donetsk, reached Europe’s Top 16 despite its nomadic status, banished by soccer authorities from its ­war-damaged stadium.

London’s Chelsea FC is poised to win the English title, with a revived Manchester United ­displacing surprise

R

Homeschoolers could soon play sports at public schools in Virginia as a so-called “Tim Tebow” bill sat on Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s desk. Virginia’s bill had failed before, as in Texas and several other states with ongoing grassroots movements to pass “Tim Tebow” bills.

It’s not a new movement, and depending on whom you ask, roughly half of states allow homeschoolers some access to public classes or activities. But more recently, would-be NFL quarterback Tebow became the face of the movement. A homeschooled Tebow played at a Florida public high school and went on to be one of the greatest NCAA quarterbacks in history.

The bills are controversial, with concerns ranging from the benching of enrolled students in favor of homeschoolers to academic eligibility or even academic cheating. Some homeschoolers wonder whether athletics programs like East Coast Homeschool Basketball Championships in Lynchburg, Va., which has ­doubled in eight years to 100 teams, could be damaged by such a bill. —A.B.

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more g Visit our website—wng.org—for breaking news and3/18/15

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11:34 AM

Francis: GABRIEL BOUYS/AFP/Get t y Images

NOTEBOOK

RELIGION

A pope and a people FRANCIS IS IMPORTANT EVEN TO U.S. HISPANICS WHO REJECT HIS AUTHORITY by James Bruce

Nine out of 10 U.S. Roman Catholics have a favorable view of Pope Francis, according to a recent national survey by the Pew Research Center. At the time of Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s election to the papacy, CNN reported that “news of a Latino papa has sent a jolt of euphoria through Argentina and throughout Latin America. Imagine winning the World Cup Championship times 10.

There also will be a lot of excitement among Latinos in the United States, perhaps enough to reignite their passion for the Church and bring them back to Mass.”

R

Poverty and creativity

FRANCIS: GABRIEL BOUYS/AFP/GET T Y IMAGES

K AK Á: JOHN RAOUX/AP • TEBOW: STEVE HELBER/AP • MCAULIFFE: STEVE HELBER/AP

Maybe. The question is an important one for individual lives and for Roman Catholics generally. Hispanics are likely to dominate American Catholicism because young generations are considerably more Hispanic than older ones.

The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University reported in 2010 that Hispanics comprise 54 percent of the U.S. Roman Catholic population born in 1982 or later, in contrast to only 15 percent of those born before 1943.

Though Hispanics comprise an everlarger part of U.S. Roman Catholicism, Hispanics themselves identify less and

Long before the 1978 publication of Ron Sider’s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, evangelicals thought about the relationship between their faith and helping the poor. A bevy of new work aims to broaden the conversation.

“The church is not the church if it’s not deeply concerned about the poor,” says Greg Forster of the Kern Family Foundation. He insists that churches should consider poverty relief within both a cultural and an economic context.

Kern recently sponsored the Acton Institute’s video curriculum on the gospel and culture, For the Life of the World, and launched the

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NOTEBOOK

less as Roman Catholic. Pew Research Center in its National Survey of Latinos and Religion identified a 12-point drop in U.S. Hispanics identifying as Roman Catholic, from 67 percent to 55 percent, in just three years ending in July 2013.

The report says “a day could come when a majority of Catholics in the United States will be Hispanic, even though the majority of Hispanics might no longer be Catholic.”

Many U.S. Hispanics leave Roman Catholicism in order to become evangelicals. What do they make of Pope Francis? Though Hispanic evangelicals can applaud “the collective cultural significance of a Latino Pope,” said Samuel Rodriguez, Pope Francis president of the waves from the National Hispanic popemobile in Christian Rio de Janeiro.

Leadership Conference, doing so does not undermine their commitment to doctrine: “Our people want a personal relationship with Christ not based on what we do for God but rather on what God already did for us.”

Nevertheless, Rodriguez highlighted three areas of agreement—life, marriage, and religious liberty—adding, “In essence the Latino Pope serves as an inspiration for Hispanic Evangelicals to cooperate with Catholics without sacrificing doctrinal truth.”

—James Bruce is an associate professor at John Brown University and a graduate of the World Journalism Institute mid-career course

foundation’s own Oikonomia Network, a consortium of pastors and local churches.

Founded in 2011, the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics (IFWE) emphasizes freedom, fulfillment, and flourishing, according to IFWE vice president Art Lindsley: “The more people are free to use their own creativity as image bearers of God the more they’ll be fulfilled and, as more people are doing that, there will be flourishing.” One recent IFWE book, For the Least of These: A Biblical Answer to Poverty, includes chapters by Brian Griffiths, Peter Greer, and others. “Only God creates something out of nothing,” Lindsley said. “We are called to create something out of something.” —J.B.

APRIL 4, 2015 WORLD

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the world market CHURCH EMPLOYMENT B Pastor of Student Families: Christ Covenant Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Matthews NC is seeking a godly man to lead our Student Families Community (youth and their families) and the Student Ministries Department. Additional responsibilities include oversight of the Small Group Ministry and Men’s Ministry. For more information visit www.christcovenant.org/employment.

The position is open until filled.

B The consistory of Faith United Reformed Church, Beecher, IL, and the El Pacto Joint Venture Committee are searching for a bilingual man to take up the church planting work of El Pacto de Gracia in Chicago Heights, Illinois.

We are open to Reformed ordained men, ministerial students, etc. For more information please contact Martin Nuiver, martin_nuiver@ yahoo.com, (219) 227-6740, www.elpactodegracia.org.

SCHOOL EMPLOYMENT B Whitefield Academy, Kansas City, www.whitefieldacademy.org, seeks an Upper School Science Teacher for 2015-16. Contact qjohnston@ whitefieldacademy.org.

B TEACHERS URGENTLY NEEDED IN CAMBODIA! ELIC has an urgent need for teachers of English in Cambodia.

This is an outstanding opportunity for singles, couples, families and secondcareer adults. Two-year commitment.

Opportunities to return to North America. Serve on a vibrant team. Teach at the university level to future leaders in every sector. Previous teaching experience not required. Complete training provided. Thirty years of sending and caring for teachers in Asia. Additional strategic opportunities in Mongolia, China, Vietnam & Laos. We can get you there; www.elic.org; (888) 475-3542.

B Mars Hill Academy, an ACCS accredited classical and Christian school in Mason, Ohio, is seeking an upper school Physics and Math teacher. Please contact headmaster James Albritton at james.albritton@ marshill.edu for more information.

COLLEGE EMPLOYMENT B Boyce College, the undergraduate institution of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is seeking a business professor to serve as coordinator for the Business Administration program to promote globally minded business. Must have DBA or PhD in

Business related field and aff irm the Seminary’s Abstract of Principles and Baptist Faith and Message. Visit www. boycecollege.com. For consideration, send a letter of application and curriculum vitae to lharding@sbts.edu.

B The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary seeks a Professor of Church Music and Worship to teach 18-24 hours per academic year and develop innovative curricula in the area of biblical worship. Required qualifications: Terminal research degree in Church Music, Worship Leadership, or a related field, as well as subscription to the seminary’s Abstract of Principles and the Baptist Faith and Message. Visit www.sbts.edu for more information. If interested, please send letter of application and curriculum vitae to provost@sbts.edu.

B BELHAVEN UNIVERSITY teaches each discipline on biblical foundations and seeks faculty with terminal degrees in the following areas: Jackson, MS – Biology, Communication, Health Administration, Mathematics, International Studies, Nursing; Memphis, TN – English; Atlanta, GA – Business. See www.belhaven.edu/belhaven/ employment.htm for details.

CHURCH PLANTS B Christ the King Presbyterian Church - Naples, FL, a church plant of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Joyfully reverent worship, practical Reformed Bible teaching. www.naplesopc.com.

RETIREMENT B Quarryville Presbyterian Retirement Community is a continuing care retirement community in Lancaster County, PA. You can retire the ordinary things in life—the lawn mower, the snow shovel, and the rake. But you never retire from your calling in life.

Quarryville’s maintenance-free living frees you to engage in the things that matter most. Choose from spacious apartments or stunning cottages. Enjoy activities and amenities to make your retirement extraordinary. Quarryville’s affordable senior living campus is located a short drive from Philadelphia and Baltimore. Visit Quarryville.com or call (888) 786-7331. Retire the Ordinary. Live the Extraordinary!

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PUBLICATIONS B Avoiding Armageddon and Relieving Disasters: A Devotional Guide to the Prophecy Puzzle—Amazon.com, kindle & paperback.

WRITING CAMPS B Hands-on, H.S. writing camp, save $, register now–cornerstone.edu/ cornerstone-journalism-institute.

APPRENTICESHIPS B Hands-on, Christ-focused training for 13- to 18-year-old students.

Located in Tennessee and attended by students from throughout the U.S.: Home Building, Culinary, Blacksmithing and Welding, Homesteading, Girls-Only Creative Blacksmithing and Welding, and more. www.LandryAcademy.com.

HOMESCHOOL ONLINE CLASSES B We offer over 250 Live, Christian Worldview online classes for homeschooled students. All the core subjects and lots of great electives taught by believers who are

passionate about the subject they teach. www.LandryAcademy.com.

HOMESCHOOL STUDY ABROAD B A Christ-focused month in a small town in Italy (on the Adriatic coast) immersed in the culture, language, food, history, and geography. We spend time among the town’s people, in local schools and businesses, and we take day trips to places like Pompeii, Naples, Rome, and Venice. www.LandryAcademy.com.

CHRISTIAN CEO’S Are you a mature Christian who has enjoyed a successful business leadership career as Owner, CEO, President or Executive Coach/ Consultant & are now called to use these gifts to help other leaders fulfill their God-given calling & potential?

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Would you be excited to build a high-impact professional practice to equip, encourage & inspire like-minded Christian leaders based on this truth?

If so, you may be called by the Lord to be an Area Chair for The C12 Group, America’s leader in helping Christian CEOs & Owners Build GREAT Businesses for a GREATER Purpose.

If you’re in a position to investigate a great franchise opportunity, visit www.C12Group.com to learn more!

BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES B At Home, Solid Income! Solid Ethics!

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SUMMER CAMPS B Our Christ-focused summer camps in the mountains of North Carolina are attended by students from throughout the U.S. and seven countries: CSI, Christian Music Jam, Biology, Pre-Vet, Rocket Science, Mock-Trial and PreLaw, Art, Engineering, Self-Defense, Servant Leadership, Leonardo da Vinci, Biotechnology, Man Camp, and more. www.LandryAcademy.com.

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Apply Today 616.222.1504 alan.blanchard@cornerstone.edu cornerstone.edu/cornerstone-journalism-institute

3/17/15 9:10 AM

MAILBAG SEND LETTERS AND PHOTOS TO MAILBAG@WNG.ORG

FEBRUARY 21

‘Black & blue’

, I have run into Chaplain Jim Bontrager, Chief Randy Brashears, and Michael Williams at various Fellowship of Christian Peace Officers events. It’s always a blessing to know people like these are reaching out to the law enforcement community as well as the civilian population.

RICHARD COLE / FULTON, N.Y.

‘Coal’s kill fee’ , The EPA’s war on coal isn’t the only

factor pressing Northeastern electricity prices higher. Anti-nuclear activists and Vermont politicians finally succeeded in shutting down the Vermont Yankee nuclear power station last December, increasing carbon dioxide emissions and electricity prices.

 We should never excuse this kind of

behavior, but neither should we write off authors like Jeremiah and Mark Driscoll. Cleaning our house should not require us to set it on fire.

DAVID RASMUSSON / RUSSELLVILLE, ARK.

BARRY REEL ON FACEBOOK

‘Faith is the thing’ , It felt like Andrée Seu Peterson was writing directly to my family. Many thanks for her vulnerability and for encouraging me to live in faith.

L AURA MAUSER / MARQUET TE, MICH.

, Peterson is right that “God is not a theory.” He is working in history in ways I cannot comprehend, and He asks for faith from me.

BET TY HUDGINS / MACON, GA.

‘Free for all’ , We strongly disagree with Joel

Belz’s perspective on free speech. We agree more with the French policies described in “Clamping down on speech” (Feb. 21), except that hatred should not be a criminal offense.

RON & BILLIE WALES / HOUSTON, TEXAS

Mutare, Zimbabwe submitted by Kathleen Macosko

, The right to free speech is not absolute, and never will be. Is Belz sure he wants people to have the

, This article explains how federal energy policies increase the cost of electricity, but for perspective you should consider how much coal-related pollution increases public health costs because of premature deaths, heart attacks, asthma attacks, and other problems.

ALLEN JOHNSON / DUNMORE, W.VA.

‘Buying a bestseller’ , David Jeremiah has been one of my

favorite Bible teachers for many years, so I was disheartened to read about his questionable book marketing techniques. I would like to see him restore trust by apologizing, terminating this practice, and returning to ECFA membership.

JOHN HUBER / MYERSTOWN, PA.

, Mail/email g Website

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APRIL 4, 2015 WORLD

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MAILBAG freedom to speak the filth that is in their minds, even before his grandchildren?

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As we embark on an exciting 2015, God’s Big WORLD, WORLDkids, and WORLDteen are excited to continue in our first school year on a journey of learning, adventure, and truth—including all-new magazines, websites, and mobile apps— helping preschoolers, elementary age children, and young teenagers sharpen their skills and, most importantly, grow in faith.

As the second half of the school year is getting underway, we urge you to act immediately to get the most from these beneficial new offerings.

Secure your membership today to prevent your children from missing out on the important introductions to big ideas, enlightening stories, and engaging discoveries that will fuel their faith and captivate their imagination.

om

feet 5 inches his arms were long enough to do it without hitting himself in the face. Thanks for the memories.

HOLLY JOHNSON / KAWARTHA LAKES, ONTARIO

‘Ignoring the children’ g If Congress doesn’t care that abor-

tion violates God’s will, can our representatives at least explain why anyone needs 20 weeks to figure out she was raped or was a victim of incest?

L ANEYGIRL ON WNG.ORG

 I was apoplectic when this happened, and reading the details makes it worse. This sacrifice of principle for the party’s good has brought me to the nuclear option: I will not vote for any Republican who does not vehemently disavow this capitulation, and I don’t want to hear any “working behind the scenes” horse hokey. I want them to do something.

NATHAN CARPENTER ON FACEBOOK

‘Smart isn’t cheap’

 When the new “smart” appliances can order milk and have it delivered, I’ll be more impressed.

MICHELLE KAISER WEISLER ON FACEBOOK

 I guess thinking is going out of style.

TOPDRIVE ON WNG.ORG

‘Half-baked reporting’ g To those who would criticize Bill

Jack for stirring up a hornet’s nest, I say he’s not to blame. The world will always leap at an opportunity to paint us as bigoted. We cannot concern ourselves with that but with spreading the gospel.

VORTEXSPIN ON WNG.ORG

‘Anatomy of a media mugging’ g The more I contemplate this story,

the more miffed I feel. Bill Jack stuck his hand into a snake pit and the entire Christian community got bitten. More ill will from the cultural left is the last thing we need.

HAWAIICHARLES ON WNG.ORG

Dispatches , It is unfortunate that WORLD used

the ISIS-provided image of the murder of the Jordanian pilot. You could have noted the news item without advertising for the terrorists, and it is disrespectful to the memory of a young officer.

LINDA SCHIERKOLK ON FACEBOOK

‘The 150-year-old identity’

 God does not categorize people as

“heterosexuals” or “homosexuals” but as human beings created in His image and dearly loved. That is our true identity.

JAMES AIST ON FACEBOOK

For more information, or to Get God’s Big WORLD, WORLDkids or WORLDteen, visit wng.org/children

g A great interview. My generation (20s) needs to hear this. A “race” that is only 150 years old? No, such things are lies.

RRM ON WNG.ORG

‘The Rifleman’ g I too grew up watching The

Rifleman and loved it. Lucas McCain was a virtuous adult who did the right thing, a hero, as my dad was to me. All the boys admired how Connors spun that tricked-out Winchester, but at 6

7 MAILBAG.indd 68

JULIE AKERS / AUSTIN, TEXAS

‘Greek tragedy’ , I am very concerned about America’s changing culture fueled by handouts, as Mindy Belz described. I see paradoxes all around me, from churchgoing WIC recipients driving new minivans to my former students expecting high incomes without hard work or discipline. Something must change, and I pray it involves balanced budgets both in American homes and in Washington.

LINDSAY JONES / COLUMBUS, IND.

FEBRUARY 7

‘Terror by the minute’ , Christians are facing a fearsome

enemy in Islam and its adherents. It’s easy for me to imagine defending against physical danger, but as Christians we are bound to love our

3/16/15 9:02 AM

Lana’s story: Heel injury

enemies and present the gospel. Are these mutually exclusive? How do we meet our responsibilities on both fronts and be faithful to the Lord?

Member for fourteen years

Echocardiogram

Go to: mysamaritanstory.org

TOM SANDLIN / LIBERTY HILL, TEXAS

, I shouldn’t have been shocked when I learned that ISIS had kidnapped so many Christians. We need to be more active in what’s happening in the Middle East, but until then let’s pray for those being tortured and killed.

NATHAN WOLF / WHITE HAVEN, PA.

‘The serpent’s egg’ , The column makes some fasci-

nating generalizations about recent French history, but equating imams with serpents is not a good way forward. I doubt any Christian missionaries in France would want his neighbors to think this is how Christians view God’s providential movement of Africans to Europe.

The snake we must kill is our own pride and failure to embrace strangers as image-bearers of God.

Lana “We’re going to give up on this concept of insurance and trust God and His people?!

Yeah, of course! That’s a no-brainer!”

STEPHEN P. LEWIS / L AFAYET TE HILL, PA.

, The expression, “virtual laboratories of cancerous forces that would ultimately engulf the nation,” says so much. Will we make the same mistakes? If Barack Obama has his way, we will. I tremble for our nation.

DICK MULLER / OAK RIDGE, TENN.

Correction

The “closed coal-burning power plant” in the photo (“Coal’s kill fee,” Feb. 21, p. 55) will be replaced with a natural gas power plant.

LETTERS & PHOTOS , Email: mailbag@wng.org , Mail: WORLD Mailbag, PO Box 20002,

For more than twenty years, Samaritan Ministries’ members have been sharing one another’s medical needs, without using health insurance, through a Biblical model of community among believers. Samaritan members share directly with each other and do not share in abortions and other unbiblical practices.

• More than 39,000 families (over 130,000 individuals)* • Sharing over $10 million* in medical needs each month • The monthly share has never exceeded $405 for a family of any size*

Asheville, NC 28802-9998

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Come see what our members are saying and start your Samaritan story today at: mysamaritanstory.org

Please include full name and address. Letters may be edited to yield brevity and clarity.

Biblical community applied to health care

samaritanministries.org 888.268.4377 facebook.com/samaritanministries twitter.com/samaritanmin * As of December 2014

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ANDRÉE SEU PETERSON

Mental blocks

WE MAY BE LOSING MORE THAN WE KNOW WITH THE DEATH OF CURSIVE WRITING I attended the deposition hearing of a 16-year-old neighbor. As we were leaving the juvenile justice facility, his mother told me that if I want to write letters to him at his new school, I must not write in cursive because he can’t read it. “Every time he receives letters in cursive, he’s running around trying to get a translation,” she said.

Cursive, from the Latin currere,, “to run,” has been employed in personal correspondence and formal documents for centuries, for its beauty. It was used before the Norman Conquest. William Shakespeare’s will is written in “secretary hand,” the European cursive style.

But the same generation that casually did away with thousands of years of traditional marriage between a man and a woman has just as lightly cast off the tradition of penmanship you and I grew up on, like so much bothersome lint on a jacket. We have computers now, they grunt.

End of discussion.

In a moment of sarcasm Job said to his know-it-all comforters, “No doubt you are the people, and wisdom will die with you” (Job 12:2). He may as well have been talking to the Common Core creators who in breathtaking historical hubris dispensed with the wisdom of the ages without so much as a field test by which to defend their experiment.

The year I was born, 1951, was the lowest year on record for breast-feeding in America.

My mother told me that nurses fanned through the maternity wards handing out pills to dry up people’s milk. It was scientific and modern, you know. In subsequent years we learned that colostrum, that unduplicatable first secretion from the breast, is a super-rich cocktail of over 95 compounds benefiting the immune system, cell growth, fat utilization, DNA synthesis, and intelligence. Oopsies.

What could possibly go wrong with dropping cursive from your second-grade lesson

KRIEG BARRIE

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 aseupeterson@wng.org

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Does it matter to anybody but me that people won’t be able to read the Declaration of Independence in the original?

plan (to make room for, say, tolerance and diversity training)? Well, for one thing, Sherby can’t read his mail from Aunt Bette in reform school, if anybody cares about that. Moreover, what if we have an electrical blackout someday and our computers are useless? What if we are on the road without our digital device and want to dash off a postcard with speed? Is anybody out there running algorithms on unintended consequences?

Does it matter to anybody but me that people won’t be able to read the Declaration of Independence in the original? Or that Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address will soon be like hieroglyphics that only a few octogenarians can decipher? Try doing a genealogy search of your family if you don’t know cursive.

Baptismal documents, census notes, marriage licenses, cemetery records, naturalization papers, and pension applications will be Greek to you.

On the third floor of the dental school where I’m getting my teeth fixed is a museum. Behind a wall of glass there are shelves of gruesome primitive dentures and archaic operatory chairs, but also the Civil War–era letters of dental student John Foster Brewster Flagg to his sister expressing disappointment at not striking it rich in the California gold rush. Next to that are yellowed medical school notebooks on bacteriology. Do we want to give all that up for a mess of potage?

OK, so you don’t care about 19th-century orthodontists. But maybe you do care about your kids being smarter. Psychologist Stanislas Dehaene of the College de France in Paris concluded from his studies that “when we write, a unique neural circuit is automatically activated” (The New York Times, June 2, 2014). There are regions of the brain (the fusiform gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, and posterior parietal cortex) that are dormant when you type or block print but are activated by the intensely collaborative effort of hand, eye, and brain in the small motor operation of forming continuous letters with your pen. Could that be the equivalent of the colostrum bonus in mother’s milk?

In August I sent a card to my granddaughter at her summer camp. As I was starting to address the envelope in the script that has been the matrix of social intercourse for centuries, I stopped in my tracks and switched over from cursive to block print. After all, what if a kid in the office assigned to delivering mail to the cabins is cursive-illiterate? A APRIL 4, 2015

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MARVIN OLASKY

A perfect day for needlefish

Where can we find true contentment?

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Consider the needlefish. …

Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed all in silver like one of them, on a perfect day.

Vl ad61/shut terstock

In Guam recently my wife and I taught a writing course and then went snorkeling.

Near coral reefs we fed, underwater, hundreds of 6-inch-long needlefish. Slender with little teeth, they appeared infused with light. So many sped around our hands that they formed a silver streak amid the blue-gray waters of Tuman Bay. We became fond of them.

Later, I read for the first time in 45 years a story that influenced me as a teenager, J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” The main character is a troubled veteran, Seymour Glass, surrounded at a hotel by the materialism Salinger despised. He meets a 4-year-old girl, Sibyl, on the beach and tells her about fish that swim into holes and eat so many underwater bananas that they cannot leave the holes: There they die.

Sibyl plays along with the pretense and tells Seymour she sees a fish that has stuffed six bananas into its mouth. She marvels at the sea and its denizens, viewing them rightly as magical and mysterious. The problem, though, is that adults do not play along and do not marvel.

Seymour tells a woman she is staring at his feet.

Rather than saying as in a fairy tale, “My, what big feet you have,” the woman haughtily denies any impropriety.

The last two paragraphs of the story show Seymour returning to his hotel room, which smells of his wife’s “new calfskin luggage and nail-lacquer removal.” He sees her asleep, pulls a handgun from his suitcase, and fires a bullet through his right temple. The ending shows the irony of the title, since self-stuffing bananafish are the enemy, and the day is most imperfect.

J.D. Salinger is most famous for The Catcher in the Rye, sometimes called “the Bible of teenage angst.” The novel has sold perhaps 65 million copies in the 64 years since its publication. Over

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the decades many high-school teachers have assigned it—and many parents have protested that assignment because of the book’s coarse language and nihilism. Mark David Chapman, who carried a copy when he assassinated John Lennon, and sat reading it as police arrested him, said Salinger’s novel explained the shooting.

Bizarrely, Catcher has also been prominent when police caught other assassins like Lee Harvey Oswald and John Hinckley Jr. That coincidence has led movie protagonists like Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory and Will Smith in Six Degrees of Separation to conjecture about Salinger’s work as part of some giant plot. That’s silly, but Catcher is a teenage working-out of Ecclesiastes, with its cry that all is meaningless.

Those who see no purpose in their lives might try to manufacture drama by killing a prominent individual, or themselves, or doing something else evil, like joining the Communist Party.

Salinger did not kill himself, but he did kill his career: Born in 1919, he became a recluse in the 1950s, except for occasional affairs with literary-star-struck teenagers. He published nothing after 1965. His paternal grandfather was a rabbi, his father became wealthy selling ham and cheese, and Salinger (after his bar mitzvah) abandoned Judaism and eventually cycled through Zen Buddhism, several variants of Hinduism, Islamic mysticism, Scientology, Christian Science, Taoism, and more. He cycled through diets, sometimes eating frozen peas for breakfast and drinking his own urine.

Salinger in his book Franny and Zooey describes a character I loved, Franny, saying over and over again, like a mantra, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Sadly, Salinger did not explore what that sentence really means. He lived to be 91 and tried everything but biblical Christianity. Salinger died five years ago, but this year he may begin a second authorial life. He apparently left specific instructions for publishing from 2015 to 2020 two novels and a sheaf of stories he had worked on during his solitary years.

Puritan author Jeremiah Burroughs, in The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, noted that contentment comes not by shooting others or ourselves, or obsessing about what others have and misuse, but by thanking God for all the magic of this world. Consider the needlefish: Our heavenly Father feeds them, and sometimes uses us to do the same. Observe their splendor: Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed all in silver like one of them, on a perfect day. A

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