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FEBRUARY 26, 2011 / VOLUME 26 / NUMBER 4
CONTENTS F E AT UR E S
34 Beyond cheerleading
COVER STORY Some liberals and neoconser vatives are pushing for elections in Egypt and elsewhere, but democracy without religious liberty will merely lead to a different tyranny
36 Illegal vacation
With a key religious freedom leadership post vacant for two years, despite a law requiring it, the U.S. government is unprepared to deal with the issue in Egypt and around the world
40 Leadership in a vacuum
Egypt’s protest movement has made a strong push for big changes, but demonstrators can’t answer the obvious next question: Who can lead us?
43 Keeping the lid on
Egyptian Christians are watchful about life post-Mubarak
44 Aid in action
In Haiti the labor is plentiful but the harvests are few. What kinds of programs work toward long-term change?
DISPATCHES 5 News 14 Human Race 16 Quotables 18 Quick Takes
48 Opposing counsel
A promising lawsuit against Obamacare has brought Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli into the public eye
52 Preferential treatment
Education secretary Arne Duncan has a record for allowing some school choice, just not for all
23
56 Uttermost parts
Humble work in remote reaches of Africa is growing despite obstacles ON THE COVER: Egyptians call for the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak at Tahrir Square in Cairo on Feb. 7 (Kyodo via AP)
44
Reviews 23 Movies & TV 26 Books 28 Q&A 30 Music
28
notebook 61 Lifestyle 63 Technology 64 Science 65 Houses of God 66 Sports 67 Money 68 Religion
61
Voices 3 Joel Belz 20 Janie B. Cheaney 32 Mindy Belz 71 Mailbag 75 Andrée Seu 76 Marvin Olasky
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Joel Belz
Peace at what price?
The years of calm in Egypt have had a cost that we should have been discussing
krieg barrie
I
f you’re a little bewildered trying to get a good handle on Egypt and its leadership, try thinking in terms of taking care of an obstreperous baby—or maybe what it’s like dealing with a fractious teenager. With both babies and teenagers, it goes with the territory to face a regular challenge to your sense of peace and well-being. Unreasonable demands to parental authority and order may seem to be only occasional. But they begin to multiply. And then, as any honest parent will admit, the temptation to compromise takes over. “I really don’t like giving the baby a pacifier,” I’ve heard more than one parent confess. “But it sure beats two hours of screaming.” “Yah, I know that I said there’d be no privileges if the room wasn’t cleaned up. But no way was I prepared to hear a nonstop whine for the rest of the day.” Peace and tranquility feel so good, and are such compelling commodities in our embattled lives, that we lose track of how easily we trade other values away just to enjoy the calm of the moment. Relatively speaking, we’ve enjoyed that “calm of the moment” now for a remarkable stretch not just in Egypt, but in a number of other heavily authoritarian cultures in the Middle East. The orderliness and dependability of a friendly Egypt (along with its minimalist support for the rights of Israel) have become so attractive to us, and appealed so compellingly to our desire for a bit of quiet, that we’ve been willing to ignore some of the higher ultimate costs. We may not be guilty of consciously having bought “peace at any price.” It’s more that we’ve relished peace so much that we just haven’t bothered to look at the price tag. Yet there comes a time, as it does with any parent who ignores the ultimate effect of permissiveness, when it all tends to blow up in your face. The screaming baby or the whining teenager suddenly turns into something a good bit
Email: jbelz@worldmag.com
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more distressing, and the ability to “buy them off” with ever-more-extravagant peace offerings simply vanishes. Less than two years ago, President Obama was the overconfident parent, all too certain in his Cairo speech of his ability to finesse a relationship with both Egypt and other repressive Islamic nations. Two weeks ago, that same brash parent was stumbling for words as reality set in and one option after another went swirling down the drain. The blame, of course, doesn’t rest entirely with President Obama. Every U.S. administration in recent history has wrestled with the same tradeoffs—and we know now that way too often Obama’s predecessors allowed an illfounded optimism to crowd out the realities of harsh and ugly behavior by those who are supposed to be our allies and friends. Want another current example? Try Iraq. All of recent history says we need to be on the side of the fragile new government there. Our investment in money and lives to achieve a delicate democracy is almost incalculable. So Baghdad is our ally—right? Yet to keep the peace that seems so essential among allies, we end up all but silent about the shameful treatment that even now continues to drive our Christian brothers and sisters out of Iraq. And this in what has become the single freest Islamic nation in the whole Middle East! I don’t pretend the answers are easy. I’ve never been an international diplomat. I doubt if the answer is typically to walk suddenly and dramatically away from a Hosni Mubarak or any other long-time friend. We need to be instructed, however, by these current reminders. Even among friends—and maybe we should say especially among friends—truth-telling is an important obligation. We need to tell the truth in love, but we need to tell the truth. That’s the case within families, within our churches, within the workplace, within political parties—and in international relations. And it’s worth remembering at this crisis point that some honest, aggressive, and even public truth-telling with our friends in Egypt over the last 20-30 years might have spared us some of our current embarrassment and loss of options. A F E B R U A R Y 2 6 , 2 0 1 1 W O R L D
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Dispatches NEWS HUMAN RACE QUOTABLES QUICK TAKES
Design flaw? NEWS: A fired NASA employee says he was let go because of his belief in intelligent design by Edward Lee Pitts
photo illustration: krieg barrie
>>
On Christmas Eve, 1968, as a Super Bowl–sized viewing audience watched on television, the crew of moon-orbiting Apollo 8 took turns reading from the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis. David Coppedge remembers that moment. He also remembers astronaut Buzz Aldrin’s quoting of Psalm 8 as the Apollo 11 mission returned in July 1969: “‘When I consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the Moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained; What is man that Thou art mindful of him?’” But it seems that times have changed. Coppedge, a longtime computer administrator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), lost his job on Jan. 24, nearly two years after he was demoted for his support of intelligent design. Coppedge grew up fascinated by space and planets. But growing up in a Christian home, his faith became conflicted with the teaching of evolution in his high school. He’d have conversations with his father, and from those sprang another lifelong passion: creation and evolution. “It is the key debate of our day,” says Coppedge, who in his spare time manages the website Creation-Evolution Headlines. About 14 years ago, Coppedge, now 59, got a dream job working with computers on the lab’s Cassini mission to Saturn. One of the most advanced outer planet missions in NASA’s history, the satellite has been sending back spectacular images since orbiting Saturn in 2004, after a nearly seven-year voyage. Back in California, where Coppedge worked, he would occasionally offer to loan DVDs about intelligent design to co-workers. “I would only approach people I was friendly with, not strangers” he said. “I tried to be sensitive, and if somebody was not interested, I stopped.” This continued once or twice a month for about a decade. Then, in March 2009, Coppedge’s manager F E B R U A R Y 2 6 , 2 0 1 1 W O R L D
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Dispatches > News
will be lighting up in Havana for the world-renowned Habanos Cigar Festival on Feb. . Despite the difficulties of traveling to Cuba, aficionados from around the world make their way to the five-day festival of cigars and smoking. This year, promoters promise to unveil a few new cigar brands created just for women.
LOOKING AHEAD Endeavour’s farewell The space
shuttle Endeavour will blast off for the final time on Feb. . Built as a replacement for the space shuttle Challenger, Endeavour first flew into space in . Now with its odometer reading over million miles traveled, Endeavour will embark on the penultimate space shuttle mission, delivering supplies to the International Space Station. On June , plans to launch its final space shuttle mission, unceremoniously ending a nearly -year era of manned space flight.
Gulf War anniversary
Twenty years ago on Feb. , the -hour ground campaign against Iraq in Operation Desert Storm ended when President George Bush declared Kuwait liberated from Iraqi forces and announced a ceasefire. To mark the anniversary, Kuwait’s Liberation Day Parade will feature air and maritime displays.
Happy birthday, Gorbachev As festivities
surrounding the centennial celebration of President Ronald Reagan’s birth subside, his Soviet counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev will celebrate his th birthday on March . As the Soviet Union’s first and only president, Gorbachev oversaw the dissolution of the Communist superpower.
Iditarod begins Sled dogs will set out for the race of a lifetime when the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race begins near Anchorage on March . And for the following eight or nine days, mushers will guide their dog teams through , miles of Alaskan wilderness before the race’s finish line in Nome. Reigning champion Lance McKay will attempt to win his fifth consecutive race, a feat that would tie him for first in all-time wins.
CUBAN CIGAR FESTIVAL: JAVIER GALEANO/AP • OPERATION DESERT SHIELD: GETTY IMAGES • GORBACHEV: SEAN GALLUP/GETTY IMAGES • ENDEAVOUR: JOHN RAOUX/AP • IDITAROD: AL GRILLO/AP
called him into his office and told him to stop. “He claimed that I was pushing my religion,” Coppedge said. “It came out of the blue.” After a heated discussion, Coppedge says he obeyed and stopped handing out s. But a month later, Coppedge was demoted and given a written warning that he had violated the laboratory’s ethics policy. Coppedge filed a discrimination suit last April under California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act. Then last month fired Coppedge. Laboratory officials say Coppedge lost his job due to downsizing made necessary by budget cuts, but Casey Luskin with the Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank, doesn’t believe that explanation. “They got rid of David Coppedge because he didn’t fit their philosophy,” Luskin said. “Employees apparently are allowed to attack intelligent design, but you are not allowed to support it.” After the firing, Coppedge’s attorney, Bill Becker, said he is considering amending the suit to include claims of wrongful termination and a charge of violating First Amendment rights. The merit of these suits likely got a boost from a Supreme Court decision on Jan. regarding another lawsuit involving : v. Nelson, a case involving background checks, suggests that Coppedge could sue (a federally funded entity) as a federal agency with First Amendment protections. “It has become pandemic in this nation’s scientific community,” said Becker, “to discriminate against people who hold views about the origin of life that are contrary to the -year-old theory of evolution.” In another case, the California Science Center is being sued for canceling a screening of a film promoting intelligent design. And the University of Kentucky recently paid , to settle a discrimination lawsuit against an astronomer who was denied a job because of his belief in creation. Becker hopes a similar victory for Coppedge will vindicate the rights of those who want to advance the public’s understanding of intelligent design. Coppedge says he mainly wants his job back: “I’m not ready to retire.” A
Cigar festival Cubans
WORLD FEBRUARY 26, 2011
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Seth Morgan ’10 is the fourth Covenant alumnus in six years to receive a Fulbright grant.
in all things christ preeminent
With a Fulbright grant to work in Tajikistan, Seth Morgan ’10 is teaching English in the cit y of K hujand. Seth majored in communit y development. “It was both career preparation and worldview transformation,” he says of his studies. “At Covenant I learned that Christians can face society’s challenges best when we are embedded in strong communit y. I learned that I need humilit y if I am to serve effectively.”
At Covenant, we equip our students to live out extraordinary callings in ordinary places. We teach students to engage culture and cultures, to examine and unfold creation, and to pursue biblical justice and mercy. Are you eager to grapple with difficult questions in pursuit of God’s calling as He redeems all things through Christ? We invite you to visit us.
In the last six years, three other Covenant alumni have received Fulbright grants, including one to the Philippines, one to Hong Kong, and another to Iceland. CREDIT
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Dispatches > News
PROTECTION NEEDED
Haiti elections
Haitian voters are set to cast ballots on March for the country’s first presidential runoff in years. But experts worry that the nation may face the same chaos and fraud that launched days of violent protests after last year’s elections. Officials announced on Feb. that President René Préval’s handpicked candidate, Jude Celestin, won’t be on the ballot. Instead, pop singer Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly will face former first lady Mirlande Manigat. The announcement ended months of intense speculation over how the Haitian government would handle international calls for Martelly to replace Celestin on the ballot after widespread fraud tainted the November elections. But a central question remains: Can election officials effectively prepare for a presidential runoff in days? Scores of Haitians complained that massively disorganized and incorrect voter lists blocked fair voting in the November contests. Haitian officials haven’t announced a detailed plan for preventing the same problems in the March runoff. One thing seems certain: If already-tense Haitian voters face another chaotic vote, the country could face another descent into worsening chaos.
Indonesian Christians increasingly are the target of angry religious mobs. On Feb. , Muslims set two churches on fire and raided a Christian school and health center, beating a parish priest who tried to stop them. The attacks occurred after a Christian received a five-year sentence for calling Islam a cruel religion—a sentence the attackers considered too lenient. The Setara Institute for Democracy and Peace found that attacks against Indonesian churches have risen from incidents in to incidents in . U.S. ambassador to Indonesia Scot Marciel noted “with concern” the church bombings and asked the Indonesian government to “protect the rights of all communities.”
Adoptions in decline
Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., surprised constituents by announcing that she plans to resign this month to become the president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Smithsonian think tank. Her solidly Democratic district means party members will line up for a spot in a June special election. Also resigning from the House: New York Republican Christopher Lee after a report that the -year-old husband and father had emailed a shirtless photo of himself to a woman in response to her personal ad on Craigslist. “I regret the harm that my actions have caused my family, my staff and my constituents,” Lee said in a statement. “I deeply and sincerely apologize to them all.”
The U.S. State Department reported in January that American adoptions of foreign children dropped last year by percent—the lowest level for international adoptions since . Americans in adopted , children from overseas, a dramatic decline from an all-time high of , in . Factors contributing to the downturn: I Guatemala, once the No. source for international adoptions, halted most overseas adoptions in . I China remained Americans’ top
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WORLD FEBRUARY 26, 2011
,
ADOPTIONS TO THE UNITED STATES 21,378
, 18,857
, ,
19,647
21,654
source for foreign adoptions in , but a series of tougher restrictions on adoptive parents cut the numbers of adoptions from , in to , last year. (Americans adopted , Chinese children in , according to .) I Russian authorities have limited international adoptions, drastically reducing the number of American adoptions since . At least one country saw an increase: Ethiopia ranked second for U.S. adoptions, placing , children last year.
22,990
22,734 20,680
19,609 17,475
15,719 12,753 11,059
,
HAITI: EDUARDO MUNOZ/REUTERS/LANDOV • INDONESIA: ZAIN FIRMANSYAH/AFP/NEWSCOM • JANE HARMAN: DAVID SNYDER/PICTUREGROUP/AP CREDIT
BOWING OUT
SOURCE: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
2/10/11 3:44 PM
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Dispatches > News
Time of prayer The 59th annual National Prayer Breakfast held in Washington on Feb. 3 included heartfelt discussions on a topic that, according to keynote speaker and Hollywood film director Randall Wallace, has sometimes been missing at previous NPB gatherings: prayer. Saying prayer “sifts our souls like sand,” Wallace, who wrote Braveheart and directed Secretariat, challenged the audience of more than 3,000 from 140 nations to “open your heart before God almighty and say I will lose my life and I will win it, loving in all the ways you lead my heart to love.” President Barack Obama then provided the nation with a rare glimpse into his own religious beliefs, describing how “my Christian faith . . . has been a sustaining force for me over these last few years.” Obama said that he “came to know Jesus Christ for myself and embrace him as my Lord and Savior” two decades ago while working as a community organizer for a group of churches in Chicago. In a speech that seemed designed to confront questions surrounding his religious beliefs,
Obama, often paraphrasing Scripture, outlined his daily prayer life in detail. He said he regularly prays for humility, wisdom, the ability to show compassion and help those who are struggling, and that he might walk closer to God. “When I wake in the morning, I wait on the Lord, and I ask him to give me the strength to do right by our country and its people,” Obama said. “And when I go to bed at night, I wait on the Lord, and I ask him to forgive me my sins and look after my family and the American people and make me an instrument of his will.”
When a Chick-fil-A franchise operator in Pennsylvania decided to provide a marriage conference with free brownies and chicken sandwiches, some gay-rights advocates had a cow. Spurred on by activist websites such as Change.org, gay-rights student groups at five universities asked administrators to ban Chick-fil-A vendors from school property, prompting the South Bend campus of Indiana University to briefly suspend the nation’s second-most-popular chicken sandwiches from its diners (they were reinstated after a review). Atlanta-based Chick-fil-A, famous for closing its fast-food restaurants on Sundays, supports traditional marriages through such programs as its WinShape Foundation marriage retreat, which offers counseling to couples. Critics say the company’s agenda—and voluntary food donations like that to the Pennsylvania marriage conference, to be hosted in February by the Pennsylvania Family Institute—makes it “anti-gay.” But some advocates of gay rights think the issue is being overblown. Chick-fil-A will serve all customers “with dignity and with dedication,” said company president Dan T. Cathy in carefully worded statements addressing the controversy. “We will not champion any political agendas on marriage and family. . . . At the same time, we will continue to offer resources to strengthen marriages and families.”
10
Looking to 2012 A Republican and a Democrat added their names to the growing list of senators who will not seek reelection in 2012. Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., on Feb. 10 said he would not run again because, after five terms in the House and three in the Senate, “it is time.” Kyl added: “Some people stay too long, and there are other things to do in life.” One day earlier, freshman Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., said he would “return to the private sector, where I have spent most of my professional life” after finishing his term. Five senators—two Republicans, two Democrats, and independent Joe Lieberman—have now announced plans to retire after 2012.
Prayer Breakfast: Charles Dharapak/ap • Chick-Fil-A: Kristoffer Tripplaar/Sipa Press/newscom • kyl: Bill Clark/Roll Call/Getty Images CREDIT
Ruffled feathers
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Remembering captives Afghan Christians linger in jail
OVERT MESSAGE
Caught on camera Live Action, a pro-life group known for its undercover videos exposing abortion providers, released a video on Feb. showing a Planned Parenthood employee advising an alleged pimp on how to get abortions and contraceptives for his underage sex workers. In the Jan. video, a man and woman posing as a pimp and a prostitute tell Amy Woodruff, a Planned Parenthood office manager in Perth Amboy, N.J., that they are running a prostitution ring involving underage immigrants. In the -minute edited video, Woodruff advises that the girls lie about the age of their sexual partners and give as little information as possible so she is not obliged to report it. She tells the man he can get a price reduction if the girls pretend they’re students, adding, “We wanna make it look as legit as possible.” Live Action on Feb. released more videos taken at other clinics. Before Live Action released the videos, Planned Parenthood issued a Jan. press release stating that Planned Parenthood centers experienced similar encounters in a single week and had notified U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder of a possible trafficking ring, but that it believed the man may be affiliated with Live Action. On Feb. Planned Parenthood fired Woodruff.
For the second time, a federal appeals court has ruled that a judge in Ohio violated the Constitution by displaying a poster that included the Ten Commandments. In , the th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Richland County Judge James DeWeese to take down a Ten Commandments poster. In , he replaced that poster with another that included the Commandments, seven “Humanist Precepts,” and the commentary, “Either God is the final authority, and we acknowledge His unchanging standards of behavior. Or man is the final authority, and standards of behavior change at the whim of individuals or societies.” DeWeese argued that the poster was about “warring legal philosophies.” On Feb. the th Circuit ruled that the poster violated the First Amendment by setting forth “overt religious messages and religious endorsements.”
WOODRUFF: LIVE ACTION • MOSSA: VOICE OF THE MARTYRS • ASSADULLAH: INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIAN CONCERN • POSTER: HANDOUT CREDIT
British advocacy group Barnabas Fund announced a petition drive on behalf of Sayed Mossa, the Afghan Christian jailed in Kabul since a May crackdown on Christian converts from Islam—after “high-level talks involving U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and representatives of the French and German governments have failed to move Afghan President Hamid Karzai to act on his behalf.” International director Patrick Sookhdeo said Mossa’s plight “can be seen as a test case for how Western governments are going to respond to the treatment of converts to Christianity in the Muslim world.” The former Red Cross worker, who is and a father of six, was held in a cell where he was tortured and sexually abused until Western pressure helped to get him moved last October (see “Justice delayed,” Dec. , ). But since that time he has been unable to obtain legal representation and has reportedly been repeatedly coerced into renouncing Christianity. Mossa (whose name is also spelled Said Mousa) is not the only Christian Afghan authorities have jailed. Shoaib Assadullah, , was arrested last Mossa Assadullah October in Mazar-eSharif after giving a New Testament to another Afghan. Like Mossa, he has been threatened with the death penalty for apostasy unless he returns to Islam, but has not been brought to trial or allowed counsel. Apostasy is a crime punished by death under Islamic law. After a report on Mossa’s case appeared in the Sunday Times of London in early February, rumors circulated that Mossa could be sentenced to death and hanged within days. A source in Kabul who has visited Mossa told me, “fortunately it was only a threat once again.”
WORLD FEBRUARY 26, 2011
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Dispatches > Human Race President Barack Obama named new members for his advisory council for the Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships Office the first week of February, including Katharine Jefferts Schori, the head of the Episcopal Church. Schori in voted to approve the consecration of the church’s first gay bishop,
countries. Bond helped the Salvation Army assist flood victims in Australia and has worked across the world in Canada, Bermuda, the United States, and London. The first female general, Eva Booth, was elected in .
INDICTED The Israeli government has indicted four Palestinian men in the December death of American missionary Kristine Luken. The indictment says the men stabbed Luken and her friend, Kaye Susan Wilson, because they thought the women were Jewish. Israeli authorities say the men are part of a cell that is responsible for multiple killings, rapes, and robberies since .
RELEASED which was a final straw for theologically conservative churches that then left the denomination by the hundreds. Schori became the first female primate (or head) of the Episcopal Church in .
ELECTED The Salvation Army has elected its third female general, Commissioner Linda Bond, as the world leader of an organization that has a presence in
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Seven Christians were released on bail on Jan. , a little over a month after the Iranian government imprisoned them for their religious beliefs. Twenty-six Christians remain in prison in Iran, including four who have been imprisoned for over four months.
SEPARATING Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, just retired, and his wife Midge,, a federal appeals court judge, announced that they are separating a few months before their th year of marriage. In a letter to family friends, the couple said their separation was
“amicable.” They have one son, who practices law in Philadelphia. Midge serves on the rd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals and Ed, a Democrat, served two terms as governor. Previously, he was mayor of Philadelphia.
INDICTED: Palestinians suspected of killing Luken (inset) arrive at court in Jerusalem.
CELEBRATED On Feb. , friends, family, and fans celebrated the th birthday of the late former president Ronald Reagan. The Simi Valley, Calif., festivities included a ,, -pound, -foot-tall birthday cake with , jelly beans and a -pound chocolate eagle as the topper.
LUKEN: HANDOUT • JERUSALEM: BERNAT ARMANGUE/AP • SCHORI: CHRIS GRANGER/THE TIMES-PICAYUNE/AP • REAGAN: BOB GALBRAITH/AP • RENDELLS: MATT ROURKE/AP • REAGAN CAKE: ROBYN BECK/AFP/GETTY IMAGES • BOND: SHAIRON PATERSON/THE SALVATION ARMY CREDIT
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2/10/11 3:02 PM
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Dispatches > Quotables
“. percent.”
“There is no question that Phil is capable of feeling empathy . . . but he is absolutely incapable of error.”
MICHAEL HOROWITZ, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
“He has less of a residency claim to Egypt than Rahm Emanuel has to Chicago.” Columnist CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, arguing against a government post for Egyptian opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei. The leader recently returned to Egypt after living outside the country for decades.
“I don’t regard my marathon year as torture. It is more like a regular job.” Belgian runner STEFAAN ENGELS, who ran marathon races in a year, a new world record. As a child, Engels suffered from asthma.
MIKE JOHNSTON, vice president of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club’s Inner Circle, defending the groundhog’s “prediction” of an early spring as much of the country recovered from the worst blizzard in decades.
“He’s adorable, but he’s also substantial.” House Minority Leader NANCY PELOSI, PELOSI commenting after the Super Bowl on pop star Justin Bieber. Bieber
SUDAN: ALAN BOSWELL/MCT VIA GETTY IMAGES • ELBARADEI: AMR NABIL/AP • ENGELS: JOSEP LAGO/AFP/GETTY IMAGES • BIEBER: BRAD BARKET/PICTUREGROUP/AP CREDIT
“Dear Egyptian rioters, Please don’t damage the pyramids. We will not rebuild. . . . Thank you, The Jews.”
WORLD FEBRUARY 26, 2011
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2/10/11 12:00 PM
CREDIT
The share of SOUTH SUDANESE VOTERS who chose for the region to separate from the north, according to official referendum results. South Sudan is set to become an independent country by July, though fighting among army units did break out in some border areas between north and south following the announcement of referendum results.
CREDIT
sudan: Alan Boswell/MCT via Getty Images • ELBARADEI: Amr Nabil/AP • ENGELS: JOSEP LAGO/AFP/Getty Images • bieber: Brad Barket/PictureGroup/AP CREDIT
2/10/11 12:00 PM
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Dispatches > Quick Takes
It was a long process, but the birds finally prevailed over a gas station awning in Vacaville, Calif. Fire department officials in Vacaville blame the Jan. collapse of an awning at a local gas station on the tremendous weight of bird droppings. Officials say a flock of pigeons created a two- or three-inch film of droppings over the entire awning, causing the structure to give way. No one was hurt in the collapse. Firefighters equipped with hardhats—and respirators—helped clean it.
With their budget too busted to buy road salt, Bergen County, N.J., authorities have come up with a briny solution to keep the county’s roads ice-free. County leaders announced a plan to use pickle juice as a cheaper alternative to de-ice roads for the remainder of the winter season. And if it works, other counties may adopt the cheap workaround: Officials say the salty juice costs just per ton compared to per ton of road salt.
Every dog has its day. And for some, that day is becoming ever more lavish. Brooklyn dog bakery owner Betty Wong told the Reuters news service that she has seen a rise in orders for dog birthday cakes over the last few years as more and more of her customers are opting to hold birthday parties for their dogs. New York City media buyer Jessica Winston has reportedly thrown two parties for her Bichon Frise named Ernie: one birthday, and one “Bark Mitzvah” party. “In dog years,” she told Reuters, “Ernie turned .”
AWNING: JOEL ROSENBAUM/VACAVILLE REPORTER • POTTER: DANNY LAWSON/PA/GETTY IMAGES • SGURR CHOINNICH MOR: HANDOUT • ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • DOG: ASHLEY M. HEHER/AP CREDIT
WORLD FEBRUARY 26, 2011
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2/9/11 11:21 PM
PIANO: JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES • HARRINGTON: WILFREDO LEE/AP • ALLAN: CENTRE PRESS/HARD EDGE MEDIA • ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • KHUKURI: HANDOUT CREDIT
When rescue workers found Adam Potter at the base of a mountain late last month, he was examining his map and trying to orient himself to his new surroundings. But when the rescue workers were called, Potter was tumbling down Sgurr Choinnich Mor (below) after losing his footing near the summit of the Scottish mountain. Despite falling from , feet, tumbling down the face of a cliff, Potter survived with just scrapes on his face and a minor chest injury.
PIANO: JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES • HARRINGTON: WILFREDO LEE/AP • ALLAN: CENTRE PRESS/HARD EDGE MEDIA • ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • KHUKURI: HANDOUT CREDIT
AWNING: JOEL ROSENBAUM/VACAVILLE REPORTER • POTTER: DANNY LAWSON/PA/GETTY IMAGES • SGURR CHOINNICH MOR: HANDOUT • ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • DOG: ASHLEY M. HEHER/AP CREDIT
When one -year-old boy needed help with his science project, he didn’t ask his parents or even his teacher. Instead, the Scottish boy, who was investigating types of rockets, wrote to the most authoritative source on the subject he could think of: . Christopher Allan needed the facts for a two-minute speech before classmates about the Solar System. Then, about two months later, Christopher received a package from a education officer with personalized answers to all of his questions as well as autographed pictures of astronauts. And despite the late response— it arrived after Christopher made his presentation—his teacher allowed him to do his speech again. His classmates, Christopher told the Scottish Sun, “were all really jealous of my letter and information.”
’ Nepal has announced it will honor a Gurkha soldier from Pokhara, Nepal, who fought off bandits during a train robbery attempt in Nepal in September. Authorities say Bishnu Shrestha killed three and injured eight when a mass of train robbers boarded the Maurya Express in between Gorakhpur and Ranchi and attempted to loot passengers. Armed with only a knife known regionally as a khukuri, Shreshtha, a passenger, used his training as a Gurkha to slice and dice his way through the robbers.
In January, a mysterious piano struck a chord with Miami residents. On Jan. , a burned-out baby grand piano appeared on a sandbar in Biscayne Bay. And for weeks, boaters riding the waves off the coast of Florida speculated on just how a piano ended up on a sandbar in the middle of the waters. With the real culprits keeping quiet, local filmmaker Billy Yeager claimed responsibility. But days later, -year-old Nicholas Harrington set the record straight, showing reporters video of him and his father torching the piano and installing it on the sandbar on New Year’s Eve. Harrington said the stunt was an art project—part of a “home test” that the Cooper Union School of Art in New York requires of applicants. Mitchell Lipton, the school’s dean of admissions, told the New York Daily News that Harrington’s idea was not what school officials had in mind: “There are lots of ways to grab our attention, and that’s not one we would necessarily condone.”
Mexican drug smugglers are apparently enlisting a very old technology as a new way to get marijuana into the United States. Tipped off by the U.S. National Guard, the Mexican army on Jan. discovered a nine-foot-tall catapult and pounds of pot about miles from the border with Arizona. U.S. officials had become suspicious after surveillance cameras had recorded several people launching packages over the border fence. The Mexican army seized a second catapult in another spot near the border on Jan. .
Some women glory in their hair. For Jazz Ison Sinkfield, her glory comes from her fingernails. For the past years, the Atlanta woman has shunned fingernail clippers and let her nails grow and grow. Now that she has accumulated more than feet of cumulative fingernails, she says she wants to share her gift with the world. “One day, I want to meet Oprah,” she told television. “And a lot of more celebrities. And I just want them to hear my story.” Sinkfield has one fingernail in excess of inches, but she will have to gain more inches to catch up with Lee Redmond of Utah, who grew one nail past inches. Despite having gigantic nails that cost about per month to maintain, Sinkfield says she can do most anything anyone else can do—besides tie shoes, type, or bowl. FEBRUARY 26, 2011
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WORLD
2/9/11 11:23 PM
Janie B. Cheaney
HERE I STAND, OR DO I? Liberal writer tries to make the case for an autonomous Bonhoeffer
W . In The New Republic, he writes about his encounter with the hero of Eric Metaxas’ excellent biography, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is an impressive subject, and the reviewer gives full credit to his faith as the source of his integrity and valor. Summarizing the pastor’s journey from eager student to restless liberal to impassioned defender of orthodoxy, Wolfe accepts Bonhoeffer’s experience as valid and affirmative (for him). The man might have lived his life in relative obscurity, his major challenges occurring in the faculty lounge, were it not for the rise of the Third Reich and the corruption of the German church. That church’s bland acceptance of “the Aryan paragraph,” requiring congregations to exclude believers with Jewish backgrounds, led Bonhoeffer to take his stand in the Barman Declaration (), laying out the necessity of obeying God rather than men. His high profile—socially, intellectually, and now politically—made him a target, and out of concern for his fellow dissenters he accepted the invitation of Reinhold Niebuhr to come to America as a professor at Union Theological Seminary. But America convinced him he was needed in Germany. Part of his dissatisfaction was disgust with the theological laxity of Union, but he also heard the clear call of God. Within a month, he secured passage back to his beloved Germany: the book-burning, soul-devouring Germany of “the final solution.” Hitler was not merely to be opposed—he had to be stopped, and Bonhoeffer’s efforts to stop him led to execution in . Alan Wolfe is a distinguished essayist and author whose wide-ranging interests include literature, culture, and politics. His tone is measured, respectful, and decidedly secular. That’s why he’s troubled: “What gives an individual the courage to act as Bonhoeffer did?” One senses he never encountered a man like this: completely sold out to God. “For him, as Metaxas writes, ‘the evilness of the Nazis could not be defeated via oldfashioned “ethics,” “rules,” and “principles.”’ . . . The best we can do in the most difficult times is not to view ourselves as free agents possessed with choices, but as subjects of a God whom we trust without reservation.” For Bonhoeffer, this was a rock-solid foundation. But what do liberals have? Those very “ethics” and “principles” and “choices” that Bonhoeffer deemed insufficient. Wolfe admits that “bringing this man—and his
WORLD FEBRUARY 26, 2011
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intransigence on all the important questions of our time—so vividly to life raises awkward questions for the liberalism in which I put my own faith.” The most awkward question: Where does a man with no fixed star find courage? Wolfe can find reinforcement, of a sort, in the historic struggle to define morality as neutral ground for individuals of all beliefs—or none. And he can find comfort, of a sort, in his own conflicted attitude: “One should come away from the Bonhoeffer story impressed by religion, but not in awe of it. The human picture is more complicated.” Indeed, humanity is complicated. But courage is simple, a matter of paring away the rationalizations. For the soldier under fire: Do I consider my preferences, or stand with my comrades? For the firefighter before a burning building: Do I calculate my odds, or do I rush in? For the Christian in hostile circumstances: Do I bargain with God, or do I believe Him? Years ago, noted atheist Sam Harris wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times in which he was forced to conclude that perhaps only a committed Christian could stand up to a committed Islamist. Alan Wolfe’s review suggests a similar moment of weakness. He concludes that, “ironically,” Metaxas’ biography “wound up persuading me of the importance of the very autonomy that Bonhoeffer believed that we do not possess. . . . It was not a humble servant of the Lord who involved himself in the resistance, but a singular human being who, for whatever reason, was able to know what to do when faced with the problem of evil.” Most of us know what to do. The problem is doing it. That’s where Alan Wolfe’s doubt remains, and why his conclusion rings a bit thin, like whistling in the dark. A Email: jcheaney@worldmag.com
2/8/11 4:17 PM
Q.
Who has been winning souls and planting churches in Russia and the former USSR since Communism collapsed?
Q.
Who provides financial support for native missionary evangelists in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet empire?
A.
Since 1991 Christian Aid has expended millions of dollars to support Slavik Radchuk and other native missionaries who conduct huge evangelistic campaigns and reach millions through radio and TV broadcasts in the Russian language which is understood in 15 countries of the former USSR.
Q. How is Christian Aid financed? A. Christian Aid is supported entirely by freewill gifts and offerings from Biblebelieving, missionary-minded Christians, churches and organizations. Q. Are other indigenous missions in need of financial help for their missionaries? A. Christian Aid is in communication with more than 4000 indigenous missions, some based in almost every unevangelized country on earth. They have over 200,000 missionaries in need of support. All Christians who believe in Christ’s “Great Commission” are invited to join hands with Christian Aid in finding help for thousands of native missionaries who are now out on the fields of the world with no promise of regular financial support.
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A.
Native missionary evangelists like Slavik Radchuk have won millions to Christ and planted thousands of new churches in Ukraine, Russia and other former Soviet states.
For more than 50 years Christian Aid has been sending financial help to indigenous evangelistic ministries based in unevangelized countries. Currently 796 ministries are being assisted in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe. They deploy over 80,000 native missionaries who are spreading the gospel of Christ among unreached people within more than 3000 different tribes and nations. Most are in countries where Americans are not allowed to go as missionaries.
Christian Aid . . . because we love the brethren.
Christian Aid Mission P. O. Box 9037 Charlottesville, VA 22906 434-977-5650 www.christianaid.org
When you contact Christian Aid, ask for a free copy of Dr. Bob Finley’s book, THE FUTURE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. 58:174 AD-W
2/7/11 12:26 PM
The best thing you can do for your business is leave it for a day.
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www.C12Group.com • (336) 841-7100 4 MOVIES & TV.indd 22
2/7/11 12:30 PM
Reviews
Simon Mein/Thin Man Films Ltd./Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
MOVIES & TV BOOKS Q&A MUSIC
Loving the lost MOVIE: Another Year isn’t interested in justice, but mercy by Megan Basham
>>
It is always fascinating when a nonChristian artist captures with almost perfect clarity a Christ-like quality we believers often struggle to grasp. Such is the case with British director Mike Leigh’s latest movie, Another Year, which, in its contemplative way, is one of the most gospel-reflective films to come along in years. Tom (Jim Broadbent) and his wife Gerri (Ruth Sheen) possess a peace that passes the understanding of their unhappy friends who are drawn to them like moths to a flame. They work hard at jobs they enjoy, they put away plenty of money, and they take pleasure in simple things, like a nice glass of wine or a
Email: mbasham@worldmag.com
4 MOVIES & TV.indd 23
rich Italian sauce, without overindulging. Married for more than 30 years with a caring, successful adult son who is clearly the result of years of responsible parentage, they are a portrait of what comes from doing life right. Forty-something, divorced, and living hand-to-mouth, Mary (Lesley Manville), Gerri’s co-worker, is a portrait of what comes from doing life wrong. Self-pitying and narcissistic, she drinks too much, talks about herself incessantly (at a party she chatters at length about her new car before acknowledging a friend’s new baby), and takes no blame for her problems. “People don’t go around with a label saying I’m married, don’t fall in love with me,” Mary says defensively of her affair with a married man. “No,” Tom replies, “they DOING LIFE RIGHT: usually wear a ring.” Tom, Mary, and Gerri. F E B R U A R Y 2 6 , 2 0 1 1 W O R L D
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Reviews > Movies & TV
WORLD FEBRUARY 26, 2011
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MOVIE
The Company Men by Alisa Harris
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, The Company Men includes the requisite shots of desolate cubicles, empty shipyards, and gutted factories. But the camera lingers less on the desolation and more on the “things” that everyone is terrified of losing: the expansive view from the beachfront property, the Porsche purring through the suburban neighborhood, the swells of the golf course at the country club. The focus is fitting for a film that shows what is left of a man when the house, the car, and the club are stripped away. Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck, above right) is a cocksure executive who loses his job at the corporation where he’s invested his life. Losing his job also costs him his pride as he goes to work in construction with his brother-in-law (Kevin Costner). Due to its occasional veering into cheap sentimentality and cliché, The Company Men (rated for strong language and sexual situations) falls short of our last recession film, Up in the Air. But its message, although simple, is solid. Both businesses and individuals react to economic hardship in revelatory ways: Will the business sacrifice its employees for short-term survival, or will its leaders give up their hefty salaries and corporate jets instead? Will you do what it takes—even drive nails—to provide for your family, or will you snatch at the tatters of your success and cling to the belief that as long as you look successful, you are? Chris Cooper and Tommy Lee Jones are perfectly cast as grizzled executives slaving for success only to see it disappear along with their self-worth. Rosemarie DeWitt, as always, brings vitality and toughness to her role as Walker’s wife, Maggie. “You have me!” she reminds her husband when he calls himself a loser. The other men don’t have someone with Maggie’s bluntness and strength, so they drift unmoored. Bobby Walker loses the “faith, courage, enthusiasm” that his career coach says will help him win. He has to face his identity as “a -year-old unemployed loser” to rediscover what will actually help him win: humility, self-sacrifice, and family. See all our movie reviews at mag.com/movies
2/10/11 10:15 AM
GNOMEO AND JULIET: MIRAMAX FILMS • BIUTIFUL: FOCUS FEATURES
ness of her fallen state cries out for pity. As Christians in a nation where sowing and reaping are so noticeably connected, it’s easy to put qualifications on Christ’s charge to love the lost. We’re happy to give the charity of our money to the anonymous poor. But what about the charity of our compassion to the bum of a brother? What about the charity of our time to the socially graceless office-mate? Aren’t these the people who should be first in line for our love—the self-centered, annoying, and undeserving? The people we were and sometimes still are? Nothing Tom or Gerri says suggests any kind of personal faith, but their behavior, which speaks far louder than their few words, will look familiar to anyone who’s read the New Testament. That said, reaching out is no guarantee of redemption, as the last, haunting scene shows. Some will confront the truth about their unhappiness and join the feast, some will continue to gnash their teeth in bitterness over the blessings they missed out on. Leigh is honest about this too. With its slow movement and at times painful portrayal of human wretchedness, it would be hard to imagine a less fun time at the movies than Another Year, but it would also be hard to imagine a more worthwhile one. A
THE COMPANY MEN: THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY • LEIGH: DAVE M. BENETT/GETTY IMAGES
Anyone in their right mind would want to avoid Mary. But Tom and Gerri not only don’t avoid her, they invite her regularly into their home and try to include her in their lives. We discover this is a pattern with them when Tom’s childhood friend, Ken, turns up drinking, smoking, and eating to such a degree it’s obvious one of the three will soon kill him. Tom tries to bear his burdens, pressing Ken to commit to a guys-only hiking trip. When Ken declines, Tom asks, “What are we going to do then? Because you can’t go on like this.” [emphasis mine]. Tom also reaches out to people he may personally dislike. Though early in the movie he describes his brother (accurately) as an alcoholic deadbeat who’s draining the life out of his hard-working wife, when that wife dies, Tom is the first to offer comfort. The sad and angry sacks who surround Tom and Gerri have earned their misery, and in another kind of movie we might relish seeing them receive their just deserts. But Another Year (rated - for language) isn’t interested in justice, it’s interested in mercy. Mary’s selfishness, envy, and gross attempts to seduce Gerri’s son are appalling (sin tends to look pretty appalling when you focus an unapologetic lens on it), yet the desperate loneli-
MOVIE
Gnomeo and Juliet by Rebecca Cusey
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THE COMPANY MEN: THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY • LEIGH: DAVE M. BENETT/GETTY IMAGES
GNOMEO AND JULIET: MIRAMAX FILMS • BIUTIFUL: FOCUS FEATURES
in the town of Stratford-Upon-Avon, two garden gnome households, both alike in plaster dignity, play out a tale as old as star cross’d lovers. The animated movie Gnomeo and Juliet bases its story on Shakespeare’s beloved tragedy, but makes it accessible to children. Feuding neighbors on Verona Street create elaborate—some would say tacky—garden displays, never realizing when they turn their backs, their garden statuary has a life of its own. The blue garden boasts a squad of blue-capped gnomes, some concrete bunnies, and a magnificent wisteria blooming from a toilet. The red garden takes pride in its red tulips, carp pond, and tower capped with a maid holding a rose. That maid is Juliet (voiced by Emily Blunt), the daughter of the red king. The rivalry between the red gnomes and blue gnomes brings the blue prince, Gnomeo (James McAvoy), into Juliet’s garden. It’s gnome love at first sight. While the two ceramic sweethearts plot their escape, the tension between the families erupts into outright warfare. This film turns the wackiness dial up high. Clever Romeo and Juliet references come fast and thick. A swooning fountain frog replaces Juliet’s nurse and a Cuban plastic flamingo loosely takes the place of the priest. Instead of swords, the hotheads duel with lawn mowers, including the fearsome “Terrafirminator,” so powerful that “your lawn will be afraid to grow.” There are poignant moments, however, including a montage of the dissolution of a once happy marriage, as seen from the perspective of the flamingo on the lawn. But a suitably happy ending to the film pleases the kiddos while nodding to the original tragedy. Rated , the film has a few wink-wink jokes aimed at adults, but doesn’t cross the line to inappropriate. The was underwhelming and not necessary, but in good old-fashioned , the family will enjoy this delightful film.
Movie
Biutiful by Toddy Burton
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, from writer/director Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel), deftly explores the connection between beauty and horror in this world. Juxtaposing each so the other is made more vivid by contrast, Iñárritu portrays deep suffering filmed in rich saturated color and punctuated with moments of hope. The result is a film that, while hard to watch, causes the viewer to reflect on suffering and grace in a broken world.
BOX OFFICE TOP 10 . -,
CAUTIONS: Quantity of sexual (S), violent (V), and foul-language (L) content on a - scale, with high, from kids-in-mind.com
1̀ 2̀ 3̀ 4̀ 5̀ 6̀ 7̀ 8̀ 9̀ 10 `
S V
*Reviewed by
Javier Bardem (nominated for an Oscar in the role) stars as Uxbal, a ravaged man attempting to raise his two young children in gritty Barcelona. Uxbal earns a living brokering jobs for illegal immigrants. Negotiating between the corrupt and the victimized, he scrapes a bit off the top so he can support his family. The story is broad and complex (a subplot involves Uxbal’s ability to communicate with the recently deceased) and follows multiple characters in Uxbal’s life. Early in the film, we learn that Uxbal is terminally ill with cancer. His journey thus becomes a walk to the grave and the question of how his children will survive without him rises to prominence. The children’s future seems hopeless in a world where everyone is both a victim and an oppressor. But as the center of this world, Uxbal emerges as a selfless (and flawed) hero who is generous to others. Bardem’s performance is delicate and commanding, powerfully portraying a man who is both redemptive and damaged. Biutiful is a challenging film and should be approached with caution. Rated , the film portrays explicit sex, language, and drug use. Also challenging is the unrelenting suffering endured by the characters. But the film stares wide-eyed into that suffering and retains a sense of hope. The truth is that sin is a reality and we cannot overcome it on our own. Biutiful immerses itself into that reality and emerges, both horrible and beautiful. FEBRUARY 26, 2011
4 MOVIES & TV.indd 25
L
The Roommate PG-13 ........... Sanctum R ................................. No Strings Attached R........ The King’s Speech* R ........... The Green Hornet PG-13 ...... The Rite R .................................... The Mechanic R ...................... True Grit* PG-13........................ The Dilemma PG-13 ................ Black Swan R ...........................
WORLD
2/10/11 10:18 AM
Reviews > Books
Mad mom
“Tiger mother” AMY CHUA turns a good thing, childhood success, into an idol BY SUSAN OLASKY
WORLD FEBRUARY 26, 2011
4 BOOKS.indd 26
between extraordinary achievement and just ordinary success. At the end of the day, is that what makes Chua’s life worth living? Is that what gives her children worth? Chua’s book should get us thinking about the things we long for and do anything to attain. Those things are idols. To borrow from pastor Tim Keller, we take good things (our children’s success) and make them into ultimate things that woo us and ultimately crush us. It’s a relief to put down Chua’s book, with its frenzied striving after human perfection, and pick up Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts (Zondervan, ). Voskamp invites us to slow down, to learn how to live the full life of eucharisteo (with grace, thanksgiving, joy) regardless of circumstances. With lovely word pictures inspired by everyday life in her family and on her farm, she writes about her struggle to live joyfully amid sin and sorrow and suffering. She preaches—as Chua does—the value of practice. “Practice is the hardest part of learning, and training is the essence of transformation. Practice, practice, practice.” But she’s practicing for something bigger than a concert at Carnegie Hall: “There is a way to live the big of giving thanks in all things. It is this: to give thanks in this one small thing. The moments will add up.” A
LORENZO CINIGLIO/POLARIS
talented, but would do a lot better in school if their parents applied the same intense home supplements to their classroom.” Others have accused Chua of near child abuse and entered into a furious debate about Western vs. Chinese parenting. Chua does report that she backed down when Lulu, her -year-old daughter, showed hatred for her mother and her life. Lulu gained the opportunity to drop violin and pursue a different passion, tennis, with determination and focus. I’m trying to think this through as a Christian. I’m amazed at Chua’s singleminded devotion to her goal of having her children achieve academic success to echo her own pattern (Harvard, Harvard Law, Yale Law). But academic stardom wasn’t enough. Musical success was also crucial to her: “Violin symbolized control. Over generational decline. Over birth order. Over one’s destiny. Over one’s children. . . . In short, the violin symbolized the success of the Chinese parenting model.” Maybe, as Charles Murray writes, Chua’s daughters have the genetic makeup that virtually guaranteed their success. Maybe she wasted all that yelling and screaming. But maybe she did make the difference
Email: solasky@worldmag.com
2/8/11 4:38 PM
DONALD E. CARROLL/GETTY IMAGES
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O, was first taking piano lessons, I sat with him on the piano bench while he practiced. Even after two decades I cringe when remembering how I blew up with frustration as he kept fumbling over the same several measures. If Amy Chua, Yale law professor and author of the best-selling Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Penguin, ), ever awoke with a start about her bad behavior while riding shotgun on the piano bench, she doesn’t let on. She describes her demands that her kids be top students and musicians. She brags of how she screamed, yelled, motivated, shamed, spent, drove, and hectored her children. Chua makes a powerful case that her methods in America seem over-the-top, but they work. The evidence: her two brilliant and musical daughters, including one who won an international piano competition and played at Carnegie Hall when she was . She claims such success vindicates her three- to seven-hour sessions of name-calling, threats, screaming fits, and refusal to let girls go to the bathroom: “The Chinese model turns on achieving success. That’s how the virtuous circle of confidence, hard work, and more success is generated.” Some folks have applauded Chua’s methods. Charles Murray wrote, “Large numbers of talented children everywhere would profit from Chua’s approach, and instead are frittering away their gifts—they’re nice kids, not brats, but they are also self-indulgent and inclined to make excuses for themselves. There are also large numbers of children who are not especially
NOTABLE BOOKS Four books that examine origins > reviewed by
The Grand Design Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow Since the fine-tuning of earth for human life is astoundingly improbable within one universe, the very bright authors run with the current theory that there are not only billions of solar systems but billions of universes: “The multiverse concept can explain the fine-tuning of physical law without the need for a benevolent creator who made the universe for our benefit.” Never mind that the far-fetched notion has not even a pinch of evidence: Since even Darwinians recognize the staggering odds against evolution leading to man if only one universe exists, “multiverse” is the way out for those with true atheistic faith.
Oracles of Science: Celebrity Scientists Versus God and Religion Karl Giberson and Mariano Artigas Some think a genius like Hawking must have wisdom, but the authors’ profiles of six “celebrity scientists” (Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, Steven Weinberg, and Edward O. Wilson) show how atheism twists their thinking. For example, Giberson and Artigas quote Weinberg’s famous statement that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” They then note that he means “the progress of science has not revealed a Creator with a cosmic plan for our lives.” They then ask the logical questions: “Would this have been a reasonable expectation? Why should we expect to uncover a meaning or a plan for our lives in the laws of science?” The profiles are understandable by those without technical training.
Am I a Monkey? Six Big Questions About Evolution Francis Ayala The Templeton Foundation gave Ayala its . million top prize last year, but this seventh celebrity scientist, an ex-priest, offers only conventional answers that skip past what should be the central question for Bible-believing Christians: What does the Bible say? Ayala argues that the Bible only informs us about abstract theology; in particular, its account of creation can be discarded “because the Bible contains mutually incompatible statements.” Exhibit No. for that statement: “The very beginning of the book of Genesis presents two different creation narratives.” C. John Collins undermines that reading.
LORENZO CINIGLIO/POLARIS
DONALD E. CARROLL/GETTY IMAGES
Genesis 1-4 C. John Collins Covenant Theological Seminary professor C. John Collins contends that Genesis and form one creation narrative, not two. Collins explains how Genesis : describes the initial creation of all things, and the rest of the chapter narrates God’s workdays (that are not necessarily the same length as man’s). Genesis :- shows that “in some land, at the end of the dry season, when the ‘mist’ (or rain cloud) was rising to begin the rains, God formed the first man; he then planted a garden in Eden and moved the man there. Some time after that he made the woman.” Collins’ exegesis is scholarly and careful. Email: molasky@worldmag.com; see all our reviews at mag.com/books mag.com/books
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SPOTLIGHT Pro-life and pro-biblical-creation positions bulwark each other. David in Psalm tells God, “You formed my inward parts; You knitted me together in my mother’s womb. . . . Wonderful are Your works; my soul knows it very well.” Those whose souls do not know it well will often have little concern about abortion: What does it matter, one human more or less? But those who see each human’s inward parts as intelligently designed are loath to destroy them. Books on creation and evolution continue to appear because the debate is central to the issue of who we are—and it’s too bad that young-earth and old-earth creationists sometimes fight each other. Gorman Gray’s The Age of the Universe (Morningstar) could bring together some of those on the two sides. Gray argues for a universe that could be up to billion years old but an earthly biosphere formed in six -hour days ,, years ago. Some seminaries are also using their regular periodicals to explore the intensifying debate. The Winter issue of Southern Seminary Magazine has “Ex Nihilo” on the cover and, inside, incisive articles by Al Mohler, Russell Moore, Mark Coppenger, and Gregory Wills.
FEBRUARY 26, 2011
WORLD
2/8/11 4:39 PM
Reviews > Q&A
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, Chuck Colson remains one of Christianity’s leading cultural commentators. The founder of Prison Fellowship and the Wilberforce Forum, his most famous transition was from the Nixon administration (-) to prison for obstruction of justice. He professed Christ in and since then has authored or co-authored more than books laying out a Christian worldview, along with daily BreakPoint commentaries heard by millions of people.
and Bill O’Reilly. What are your thoughts on them? They have very colorful, occasionally entertaining, more than occasionally outrageous shows. is a show. Jacques Ellul said in the ’s that media will gravitate to centers of power and people will succumb to a political illusion. Ellul was a disciple of Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher who in the s made this prophetic utterance: Someday, someone will invent a giant talking tube by which you can address the whole nation at
the law, but it would be of little effect if you didn’t change the hearts of the people. I believe that cultures change from the bottom up. Habits of the heart, dispositions of people in culture: Laws eventually reflect those. Laws become moral teachers, but only because they incorporate what is already a moral value in a society. The Christian tradition of equality before God led to Wilberforce’s anti-slavery activity and much besides, but now the egalitarian banner is being used to
reason or Scripture. It’s Utopian thinking, which always leads to tyranny. Watch out. What changes do you see coming in America over the next years? We’re going to be surprised by the economic upheavals. They’re unavoidable when you look at the debt that we are incurring and building into the system. Do you think the current emphasis on economic issues detracts from examination of social issues? Republican House members, advised by Newt
No easy answers What irritates you the most about typical conservative political positions? That many who take conservative political positions aren’t really being conservative. Conservatism starts out with modesty and humility. We don’t believe we come up with all of the answers for solving the world’s problems. The greatest enemy of traditional conservatism is ideology, because ideology is man-made. I live by revealed truth, I live by wisdom of the past. When I hear conservatives being arrogant and not civil in their discourse—that’s not my kind of conservatism. The talking heads on calling themselves conservatives . . . I cringe. The two conservative talking heads on television with the highest ratings right now are Glenn Beck
WORLD FEBRUARY 26, 2011
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once. Surely the police will arrest him, lest the populace become deranged. The talking heads are part of the political illusion? It’s the only thing they talk about, yet politics is only a small part of what makes life work. Politics is but an expression of culture. The talking heads at night think they are the arbiters of all that’s true and right and just, and the ultimate determinant is who they can get elected. Not true. So do laws lead and culture follows? Or does cultural change lead to political change? Look at William Wilberforce, who two centuries ago had two great objectives: the abolition of the slave trade and the reformation of manners—by that he meant a spiritual awakening. He understood that you could change
advance a host of nonChristian and anti-Christian understandings. Why is that happening? It’s part of our as Christians to believe that human beings are created in the image of God, so all human beings deserve to have their life protected, and they deserve dignity. The most revolutionary doctrine ever introduced into Western civilization was when Jews and Christians invaded the Greco-Roman empire, which had slaves, and said they believed in the image of God in every human being. This is why we’ve fought slavery as Christians since the seventh century. That’s being warped today by egalitarian views that say everybody is entitled to the same outcome in life. That’s an ideological proposition based neither on evident human
BY MARVIN OLASKY
Gingrich, came to the conclusion that we should just focus on economic issues because that’s all people care about: Leave out all moral issues. Emails blitzed them and they gave us a concession by affirming life, marriage, and liberty in one paragraph, out of , words. Should we separate economic and moral issues? It’s a huge mistake to separate those issues, because it’s impossible to preserve freedom without nurturing virtue. If you break down the family structure, you break down the primary vehicle for inculcating character during the morally formative years. The less capable you are of governing yourself, the more you’re going to be governed by others. What happens when the system collapses? Who steps into the void? Government. Email: molasky@worldmag.com
2/9/11 11:25 PM
JEFFREY PECK/PRISON FELLOWSHIP
CHUCK COLSON says conservatives should move beyond political illusions
Jeffrey Peck/Prison Fellowship
How do you respond to criticisms of The Fellowship, Doug Coe’s group? The Fellowship is very well-intentioned. It’s reaching out to people. I will always be indebted to Doug Coe and those who welcomed me when I was a brand new believer. They discipled me. I love them as brothers, because I think they love Jesus. But you can’t profess to be a Muslim and be a follower of Christ at the same time, which is the big thing they’ve gotten into. They have soft theology and that is a weakness almost in the nature of things: If you’re reaching out to a lot of hurting people, you may start to compromise what you believe so you won’t hurt them or drive them away. It’s a very fine line to walk. On walking fine lines, what advice do you have for students about the c hallenges they will face on the road to influencing culture? You will be faced with ethical dilemmas daily. If you don’t think you are, that’s because you’re unaware of them. If you simply say, ‘Let your conscience be your guide,’ that’s dangerous, because if your conscience isn’t informed by objective truth it will be unreliable and simply a permission slip. It should be a monitor, so your conscience needs to be well-informed. Four decades ago you were quoted as emphasizing your total allegiance to Richard Nixon by saying “when they lower me six feet under, I will go away a Nixon loyalist.” How do you want to be remembered now? I would just like to be remembered as one sinner who was rescued by God’s grace, who tried, imperfectly as it was, to do his duty and live his life faithfully. A F E B R U A R Y 2 6 , 2 0 1 1 W O R L D
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Reviews > Music
Words of the world
Hurtsmile continues a trend toward profanity in Christian music
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WORLD FEBRUARY 26, 2011
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playing fields, should singer-songwriters enjoy similar latitude? In one sense, the answer is easy: No. Depictions of the spontaneous expressions of fictional characters, the argument goes, is different from the premeditated expressions of sentiments that most listeners will perceive as issuing from the heart of the singersongwriter. And out of the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks. Besides, it’s not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out. (Or, as Billy Joe Shaver has been wont to translate it, “Drink up and watch what you say.”) On the other hand, Flannery O’Connor populated her fiction with Southern racists who freely used the “n-word,” a term whose offensiveness she was so sensitive to that she sometimes expurgated or apologized for it in oral readings of her works. Of this much one can be sure: Serious verbal artists can, more often than not, hit upon language more creative and resonant than George Carlin’s “seven dirty words”—and, given the entropic nature of cultural momentum, there will surely be more
where the songs of Cockburn, Webb, Mumford, Stevens, and Hurtsmile have come from. The case of Hurtsmile is particularly interesting. First of all, the group’s just-released eponymous debut not only picks up both verbally and musically where Gary Cherone left off with Extreme, but also ups the Christian ante of his oeuvre considerably. Indeed, a more serious, more conceptually cohesive, or harder-rocking collection of st-century, mainstream-aimed biblical meditations on the state of the world there may not be. Not that all of it rocks hard. “Just War Reprise” traverses reggae turf, and “Beyond the Garden/Kicking Against the Goads” (about Saul of Tarsus’ transformation into Paul the Apostle) revels in progressive-rock filigrees. As for the vocal lushness of “Painter Paint,” it will remind Queen fans that Extreme stole the show at the Freddie Mercury memorial concert nearly years ago. But borderline metal defines the majority of Hurtsmile’s aural template, and appropriately so given songs that address not only war in general (“Just War”—the PiL-like antecedent of “Just War Reprise” and the song with the “f-bomb”) but also war in particular (“Kaffur [Infidel],” inspired by the Daniel Pearl beheading). Spiritual warfare, however, is Cherone’s real obsession (“Love Thy Neighbor,” “Jesus Would You Meet Me”). If Hurtsmile is a reliable indicator, listening to him work out his salvation with fear and trembling should prove rewarding. A
SINGER: ISTOCK • HURTSMILE: HANDOUT
about the timeline by which profanity became acceptable in the songs of Christian musicians, it goes something like this: In , Bruce Cockburn dropped the “f-bomb” in his anti-Western-hegemony song “Call It Democracy.” Twenty-four years later, Derek Webb dropped the “s-bomb” in his anti-anti-homosexual song “What Matters More.” A few months later, Mumford & Sons dropped the “f-bomb” in “Little Lion Man.” And Sufjan Stevens practiced similar “artistic license” on “I Want to Be Well” in . Now Hurtsmile, the latest side project of Extreme’s lead singer Gary Cherone, perpetuates the trend. That the trend is gaining steam at the same time Cee-Lo Green and Pink are topping the charts with songs whose very titles transgress Western civilization’s last verbal taboo makes the issue of being in but not of the world more relevant than ever. What, as Marvin Gaye once asked, is goin’ on? Before one addresses that question, however, he must at least grant the singer-songwriters in question this: The novels of Christians such as William F. Buckley Jr. and Andrew Klavan contain characters who, for the sake of verisimilitude if nothing else, speak like the fallen humans they are. In the age of leveled
Email: aorteza@worldmag.com
2/10/11 10:43 AM
TIM MOSENFELDER/GETTY IMAGES
BY ARSENIO ORTEZA
NOTABLE CDs
Five new rock and pop releases > reviewed by
Best of Gloucester County
Danielson Daniel Smith could no more come on “normal” than he could write from a non-Christian worldview. In other words, longtime fans who’ve wondered whether his restructuring Danielson around Andy Wilson, Joshua Stamper, Evan Mazunik, Patrick Berkery, and, yes, Sufjan Stevens might portend changes can relax: The lead track recasts Corinthians , Smith still sings like a young Andy Pratt seeing visions, and the catchy songs (“People’s Partay,” the charmingly naïve “Little Norge”), are bait—the kind used by fishers of men who know whereof they angle.
The Party Ain’t Over Wanda Jackson First Loretta Lynn, now Wanda Jackson—apparently Jack White was born to mastermind comeback albums for septuagenarian roots matriarchs. The only revelation is “Thunder on the Mountain,” a recent Dylan song that Jackson makes her own and then some (and not just by replacing Alicia Keys in the first-verse shout-out with Jerry Lee Lewis). But if most of the others are vintage rockabilly-era oldies, they’re also right up her alley, especially “Dust on the Bible,” a stirring reminder of why Jackson left mainstream music in the first place. Old Angel The Lost Dogs The title of the lead track, “Israelites and Okies,” is no joke: This latest album by the equivalent of the Traveling Wilburys is a concept album likening the peregrinations of Dust Bowl stragglers straight out of Steinbeck to the progress (or lack thereof) made by Promised Land–bound pilgrims everywhere. And, unlikely though it seems, the concept works, in part because the Dogs take it as seriously as they take their country-rock and in part because they don’t: “Dead End Diner” is as funny as it is infectious.
SPOTLIGHT It’s hard to imagine why Sony would release the one-disc, -track Playlist: The Very Best of T Bone Burnett just five years after the two-disc, -track Twenty Twenty: The Essential T Bone Burnett, especially since, of the five tracks not on Twenty Twenty, Playlist includes only two of the songs Burnett has released in the interim. Maybe Sony hopes the news Burnett has made by producing the latest albums by Elton John and Gregg Allman combined with the Playlist series’ budget price will result in a modest profit. The fact remains that the “very best of T Bone Burnett” is his masterpiece Truth Decay, but it’s currently not in print, so Sony’s not wanting to steer listeners its way is understandable. Besides, haphazardly compiled though Playlist is, the songs hold up as well in this context as in any other. Here’s hoping it proves to be the album that earns this modest prophet the wider hearing he has long deserved.
SINGER: ISTOCK • HURTSMILE: HANDOUT
TIM MOSENFELDER/GETTY IMAGES
The Long Surrender Over the Rhine This album is almost too enamored of the wee-small-hours vibe it generates. When Karen Bergquist sings, “I wrestle my angel in smoky stage lights,” she’s not kidding—sometimes she’s so intent on burrowing into the heart of the mysteries about which she’s singing that she subordinates clear enunciation to her hushed intensity. On the other hand, it’s rather nice that a lyric like “Prepare ye the way of the Lord” takes awhile to emerge. Not every epiphany, after all, transpires in the blink of an eye. See all our reviews at mag.com/music
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FEBRUARY 26, 2011
WORLD
2/10/11 10:49 AM
Mindy Belz
The curious case of Raymond davis
F
It’s the wrong time for backdoor diplomacy in the Muslim world
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TARIQ SAEED/Reuters/Landov
or once the mobs in Cairo have overshadowed the protesters in Lahore. Pakistan’s second-largest city and the capital of Punjab Province has been the site of outsized antiAmerican demonstrations since the Jan. 27 detention of a U.S. diplomat named Raymond Davis. Davis stands accused of killing two Pakistanis he says attempted to rob him. Punjab authorities want to try Davis in their courts but the State Department, pointing out that Davis was granted a diplomatic visa by Pakistan’s foreign ministry, claims he is immune from prosecution and should be released. Punjab is a restive place. Lahore, once the seat of Pakistani intellectual and cultural life, is now a hub of Taliban-led bombing attacks. Asia Bibi, the Christian mother accused and sentenced to death for blasphemy, is in jail there. And when provincial governor Salman Taseer took her side, he was assassinated in December by one of his own bodyguards (see “Clash of civilizations,” Jan. 29). So it’s not surprising that there’s more than meets the eye in the Raymond Davis case. Davis, 36, was driving alone in Lahore on Jan. 27 in a privately rented vehicle when two men on motorbikes tried to rob him at gunpoint. Carrying a loaded gun himself, Davis says he shot them in self-defense—one four times and the other twice, according to autopsy reports. Then a U.S. consular vehicle on its way to the scene hit and killed another Pakistani. This is bad enough, but Davis’ role with the U.S. government hasn’t been made clear: One report said he worked for the U.S. consulate in Peshawar, another that he was on BAD TIMING: contract with the U.S. Defense Department or with a Authorities U.S. security firm, like the infamous Blackwater (now escort Davis Xe Services) whose employees killed Iraqi civilians in after he faced a controversial shootings in Baghdad that led to the judge in Lahore. company losing its license to work there. The Pakistani press has concluded Davis works for the CIA. Davis’ victims, meanwhile, also may have been intelligence operatives, according to a story in Pakistan’s Express Tribune. Then on Feb. 7, the
widow of one of Davis’ victims allegedly poisoned herself and died in a hospital, telling her doctors she planned to kill herself because “I do not expect any justice from this government.” Everyone connected with this case seems to think the less said about it the better. For Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, the case creates yet another complicating factor in Pakistani-U.S. relations. State Department and embassy spokesmen have been terse in statements on Davis—at one point they could not agree on his actual name—suggesting he’s a mere functionary, while also one deserving diplomatic immunity. At the same time, two congressional delegations—one led by California Republican Darrell Issa and another of House Armed Services committee members from both parties–traveled to Pakistan to meet with Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani to press for Davis’ release. When I contacted Congressman Issa’s office, spokesman Kurt Bardella didn’t want to talk about it much, either. Asked why Issa intervened, Bardella said the “issue came up” during the congressman’s trip to Iraq and Afghanistan. Has Issa followed up with the State Department or other U.S. officials regarding the case since his return? “No.” What should happen in the case? “International law should apply.” Does that mean Davis should be granted diplomatic immunity or tried in a Pakistani court? “International law should apply,” Bardella repeated. U.S. diplomats and politicians apparently hope the Davis case will drop from public view while they parse with Pakistanis the meaning of the Vienna Convention on diplomatic immunity. But with the Muslim world tilting at its authoritarian axis, this is the wrong time for Americans living and working in the Muslim world to be getting away with murder. And the wrong time for the U.S. government to be seen undermining justice and due process. It’s the right time for public diplomacy, for what the Obama administration likes to tell Wall Street and Congress to embrace—“transparency and accountability.” A Email: mbelz@worldmag.com
2/10/11 11:19 AM
WM0211_REDO_BestDocs_WM1004B/Bios 1/25/11 12:17 PM Page 1
The Reckoning
Our People: The Booths and The Salvation Army
KJV: The Making of the King James Bible
This is the story of how one couple took God’s love to the poor. Walking the poverty-stricken streets of Whitechapel late one night in the summer of 1865, past neglected, ragged children, drunken women, unemployed men, and prostitutes plying their trade, William Booth decided, “These will be our people.” What followed makes an enthralling story of spiritual passion, courage, and faith leading to the birth of The Salvation Army. This DVD features 11 historians and storytellers, voice artists, period music, over 500 images, rare archival footage, and recordings from two Booth grandchildren. DVD extras include a mini-featurette, “Samuel Logan Brengle: Holiness Teacher,” and more than 45 minutes of bonus interviews with historians. 74 minutes plus extras. DVD - #501342D, $19.99
The year 2011 marks the 400th anniversary of the creation of the King James Bible, arguably the greatest piece of English Literature ever produced. Award-winning director Jerry Griffith brings to life the fascinating history of this great work, along with its impact for us today. KJV: The Making of the King James Bible brings the viewer right into the heart of the translation process through specific passage examples. While exploring the varying viewpoints of the different scholars, we get a firsthand look at the immense attention to detail they used. This presentation gives the viewer a renewed appreciation for the sacred scriptures and their place in our homes and churches. 42 minutes. DVD - #501373D, $19.99
C.H. Spurgeon: The People’s Preacher
Robber of the Cruel Streets: George Müller
More Than Dreams
Here is the intimate story of one of the greatest preachers in the history of the church. We follow him from his youth where, as a young preacher, he is surprisingly called to minister in London and soon captures the love and respect of the nation. He goes on to become one of its most influential figures. This powerful, inspirational docu-dama faithfully recreates the times of C.H. Spurgeon and brings the “people’s preacher” to life as it follows his trials and triumphs with historical accuracy. Made by the award-winning Christian Television Association and filmed on location in England, Scotland, France and Germany, this film vividly captures the spirit and message of a man whose eventful — and sometimes controversial — life is highly relevant to the twenty-first century. 70 minutes. DVD - #501345D, $19.99
George Müller (18051898) was a German playboy who found Christ and gave his life to serve Christ unreservedly. His mission was to rescue orphans from the wretched street life that enslaved so many children in England during the time of Charles Dickens and Oliver Twist. Müller did rescue, care for, feed, and educate such children by the thousands. The costs were enormous for such a great work. Yet, amazingly, he never asked anyone for money. Instead he prayed, and his children never missed a meal. This docu-drama presents his life story and shows how God answered prayer and met their needs. It is a story that raises foundational questions regarding faith and finances. Also included are two special documentaries on Müller and some of the lives affected by his work. 59 minutes plus 30-minute documentary. DVD - #500939D, $19.99
In September 1939, war erupted in Europe as Germany invaded Poland. Eight months later, Hitler publicly broadcasted that he would not invade Holland due to their neutrality during World War I. Within hours, this promise became a treacherous lie that engulfed the small country in World War II. Prejudice and persecution spread. The preservation of human life became a life-and-death mission for a small minority of ordinary Dutch citizens. The Reckoning: Remembering the Dutch Resistance is the international award-winning documentary that captures the compelling story and eyewitness account of six survivors in war-torn Netherlands during World War II. With the revelation of Hitler’s “Final Solution” and the uncertainty of liberation, it reveals the intensely human aspect of the Dutch struggle against Nazi tyranny. 96 minutes plus extras. DVD - #501177D, $19.99
For decades, a phenomenon has been recurring in the Muslim world. Men and women, without any knowledge of the Gospel and without any contact with Christians, have been forever transformed after experiencing dreams and visions of Jesus Christ. Here are five stories of former Muslims who now know Jesus as their Savior, recreated in docu-drama format and produced in their original languages with English subtitles. Meet Khalil, a radical Egyptian terrorist who was transformed when Jesus appeared to him; Mohammed, a herdsman in Nigeria who found the deep love of Christ; Dini, an Indonesian teenager who became a Christian on a night that Muslims individualize their prayers to Allah; Khosrow, a young Iranian man who was depressed and without hope; and Ali, a Turkish man in bondage to alcohol. 187 minutes total. DVD - #501117D, $19.99
TARIQ SAEED/Reuters/Landov
Buy any three DVDs on this page for $29.97. Use promotional code “WMDOCS” for this special offer. Buy all six DVDs for only $49.99, #98039D. Save $70! Satisfaction guaranteed! Offer good until 3/31/11. TO ORDER, CALL:
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2/10/11 12:34 PM
Beyond
cheerleading
Some liberals and neoconservatives are pushing for elections in Egypt and elsewhere, but democracy without religious liberty will merely lead to a different tyranny by Marvin Olasky
X
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use to restrict internet access in their countries, and quickto-spend Obama bureaucrats have not spent those dollars. Some neoconservative analysis of the Egyptian crisis hasn’t been any better than that of liberals. Weekly Standard editor William Kristol is proposing that the United States “take an active role . . . to bring about a South Korea/ Philippines/Chile-like transition in Egypt.” That would be nice, but those three countries had substantial Christian influence and experience with the results. Religious liberty leads to other liberties, not vice versa. Even the American Revolution ended well only because it was the work of a century, with colonies becoming largely self-governing early in the 1700s, press and religious liberty gaining solid backing in the 1730s, and local leaders—“lesser magistrates”—asserting themselves in the 1760s. Countries that tried to rush the process—France in the 1790s, for instance—typically ended up wading in blood. Recognizing that, U.S. foreign policy for decades had national security as its primary goal, of course, but the promotion of liberty as its secondary mission. For example, the decision of British officials in India to forbid American missionaries from doing or saying anything that might offend Hindu hierarchs became a secondary cause of the War of 1812. When we make an idol of elections without liberty, we’re placing liberal and neoconservative theories over biblical discernment and conservative experience. The Bush administration was sometimes muddled on the relation of liberty and democracy, but President Bush in 2003 noted the importance of “independent newspapers and broadcast media” and stated, “Successful societies guarantee religious liberty—the right to serve and honor God without fear of persecution.” Joe Biden was wrong about the past when he said last month that Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak should not be called a dictator, but he may have been relatively right about the future. If the Muslim Brotherhood takes power, millions of Egyptians will see him as non-dictatorial in comparison with their new masters. A
MOHAMMED ABED/AFP/Getty Images
-Jump, Pencil, Tuck, Pike, Double Hook, Herkie: Those are the names of some of the traditional jumps that cheerleaders perform. Television commentators, with rare exceptions like Charles Krauthammer, have been performing those stunts and more as they’ve used their media megaphones to become cheerleaders for Middle East revolution in recent weeks. Talking heads have been stumbling over Egyptian names but confidently projecting American history into a Muslim theater: Dictatorship will end if Egyptians can freely vote, and they’ll live happily ever after. Few seem aware of last June’s Pew opinion survey of Egyptians that showed 59 percent backing Islamists. (And 84 percent support executing Muslims who change their religion.) Besides, in situations of confusion and governmental breakdown, polls matter less than organization. Vladimir Lenin’s small group of Bolsheviks seized control of Russia in 1917, and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s disciplined forces did the same in Iran in 1979. Some Egyptian moderates may be tanned, rested, and ready, but how will they fare against ruthless Muslim Brotherhood plotters? The Obama administration’s reaction to Egyptian events has changed from day to day. That’s no knock on it at a time when events move fast, but it has elevated the Bush administration’s tendency to favor democracy rather than liberty into a general principle: Our goal seems to be elections, period. And yet, elections without a free press usually produce new dictators, and democracy without religious liberty produces the tyranny of the mob. The Obama administration has shown its blindness throughout the crisis; for example, President Obama’s speech on Feb. 1 listed various freedoms Egyptians needed but conspicuously left out “religion.” Islamists have killed and persecuted Coptic Christians in Egypt, and quick-to-speak Obama has not spoken. Congress has appropriated funds for busting the firewalls that regimes in China, Iran, Egypt and elsewhere
REVOLTING: Egyptians demand the ouster of Mubarak.
2/10/11 5:13 PM
MOHAMMED ABED/AFP/Getty Images
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2/10/11 5:15 PM
With a key religious freedom leadership post vacant for two years, despite a law requiring it, the U.S. government is unprepared to deal with the issue in Egypt and around the world by Emily Belz
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n Egypt, before the protests, Christians lived under steady oppression: Permits to build a church took decades to win approval, and authorities would sometimes arrest converts. But in December the persecution escalated when an Islamic suicide bomber attacked a church in Alexandria, killing 22 and wounding 70. And now with the political uncertainty, Christians’ fears are growing. “If Mubarak is ousted, we are done. The Christian population will be annihilated,” said an Egyptian Christian living in Amman, Jordan, who asked not to be identified for security reasons. “Look what they did to us under Mubarak, imagine what they will do without him holding them back.”
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Foreign policy experts worry that if no other group fills the institutional vacuum that President Mubarak will leave, the Islamists will. And if the Muslim Brotherhood does move to establish an Islamic state, the Obama administration will be ill-prepared to fend off assaults on religious liberty. “Deer in the headlights,” is how Tom Farr, the director of the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom under President Bush, described the U.S. government’s disposition when religious actors take power. The U.S. government is ill-prepared partly because the post of ambassador for international religious freedom has been vacant for two years—and that post is the only designated advocate in the U.S. government for the issue. The
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EGYPTIANS: AHMED ALI/AP • OBAMA: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Illegal vacancy
EGYPTIANS: AHMED ALI/AP • OBAMA: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
post has been vacant for the entire Obama administration after the president’s nominee, New York pastor Suzan Johnson Cook, failed to make it out of committee in the last Congress. “When the stuff hits the fan, you want someone on the other side who you can call and have an open candid conversation, because you’ve built a relationship of trust,” said Robert Seiple, President Clinton’s ambassador for international religious freedom. The former CEO of World Vision was the first person to fill that post. “We don’t have that. We haven’t had that for a couple years.” The post “hasn’t been filled clean and simple as a statement of priority, or lack of priority,” he added. He pointed out that envoys for other special interests, like Jews and Muslims, were appointed long ago. “They have to do something to reclaim the high ground here.” John Hanford, the religious freedom ambassador under President George W. Bush, says the vacancy has not been legal because the government hasn’t been complying with the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) of 1998, which established the position. Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., who originally introduced the IRFA, joined the critique “LACK OF PRIORITY”: Egyptian Muslims and of the empty post at a recent hearChristians protest ing. “Personnel is policy,” he said. against a January The White House issued a stateterrorist attack on a ment in response to the criticisms, church in Alexandria.
saying the president had offered “a well-qualified nominee for this position last Congress—a nomination that languished for some six months before the Senate adjourned.” Then on Feb. 7 the administration renominated Cook for the post. The immediate threats to religious liberty are not just in Egypt but also in Lebanon, Tunisia and Jordan, where Islamist political groups are challenging the new government that formed at the beginning of February. “One thing I can assure you we’re not doing is talking to Tunisia about issues like this—like Sharia law. This is the kind of thing we should be doing long before,” said Farr, the former director of the religious freedom office. The U.S. government’s efforts to address religious freedom have floundered before now. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, establishing democracy was a priority. Religious freedom has not followed. Christians, a minority in Iraq, face fierce persecution and have fled the country in large numbers. When Muslim terrorists bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing 224 people and wounding more than 4,500, Seiple said that was a wake-up call to U.S. officials: Understanding religion needed to be more a part of the country’s foreign policy. Seiple recalled that after the embassy bombings he opened the international religious freedom office’s folder on Muslims, and it had one sheet of paper in it. “We didn’t think of these things in religious F E B R U A R Y 2 6 , 2 0 1 1 W O R L D
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The act ordered that the ambassador would be a “printerms,” he said. “We were woefully behind the curve on cipal adviser” to the Secretary of State, but more recently this issue.” the position has had most of its teeth knocked out: The More than a decade of having a U.S. diplomat focused ambassador for international religious freedom is no longer on this issue brought incremental progress. Hanford in charge of the Office of Religious Freedom staff, “the pointed to Vietnam, where he said his office’s work kiss of death to effectiveness,” Hanford said. And several resulted in the release of many religious prisoners, from intermediary assistant and deputy secretaries keep the Buddhists to Catholics. At the United States’ urging, too, ambassador at arm’s length from the secretary. Hanford is the Vietnamese government issued a decree banning the convinced that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally forced renunciation of faith, Hanford said. Now, even considers this an important without an ambassador, the issue. When she was first lady, State Department has continHanford said he asked her to ued to work behind the scenes raise a “sensitive religious at the and has weakened issue” with a Muslim leader, support for defamation resoand she did. Hanford wouldn’t lutions, which are essentially criticize President Obama for blasphemy laws. the lengthy vacancy, but he But one of the drafters of did say, “The key is to have a the International Religious president who values this Freedom Act, Anne Huiskes, issue. I don’t know if there who was a staffer to Rep. Wolf, will ever again be a president said she’s been disappointed like George W. Bush who with how the issue has places such a high personal “dropped off the screen” since priority on religious freedom.” the act passed. She lives in Obama nominated Suzan Portland, Ore., now, and scans Johnson Cook for the post in the news, searching for June , and the Senate statements from the State Foreign Relations Committee Department on religious freedidn’t hold a confirmation dom issues. “I never hear hearing for her until anything from that office on November, right in the midst anything,” she told me, and of the treaty debate. said that was the case under Only one senator asked her a the Bush administration, too. question, though she had no But she noted she hasn’t heard experience in international much from Christian leaders religious freedom. Sen. Jim on the subject, either. DeMint, R-S.C., put a oneOriginally, when Huiskes day hold on her in the helped draft the law on the committee because of his House side, the U.S. governconcerns about the “trunment’s religious freedom cated” hearing, but neither point-person was supposed to Senate Democrats nor the be a special adviser in the administration apparently White House, not an ambassa—R S sought to address his dor at the State Department, concerns before the end of but that changed when the Senate session, when her nomination expired. Congress finalized the bill. She doesn’t think having an “She has no idea what she’s in for at Foggy Bottom,” ambassador instead of a presidential adviser is a mistake, Farr wrote in an email after Cook was renominated. Still, but she said the original plan might have circumvented Farr has said her intelligence and her friendship with the maze of State Department bureaucracy. Indeed, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are important qualifiI asked the State Department for a comment for this artications for the office. Others in the religious freedom cle, the office took three days to obtain clearance for a community, like Open Doors USA, have vowed to do what statement essentially saying they were still working hard they can to help Cook be an effective ambassador if she is on religious freedom issues. When Seiple first became confirmed. “Yes, she’s an unknown commodity but I ambassador in the Clinton administration, he said he prefer to give her the benefit of the doubt,” Hanford said. wrote an op-ed on the importance of religious freedom: It But the post itself isn’t the central point, added had to be approved by people. Once it got through, he Huiskes: “The bigger problem is that [religious freedom] said it was a “limpy wimpy rag. Who wants to work in doesn’t get reflected in U.S. foreign policy directly.” A that kind of environment?”
The post “hasn’t been filled clean and simple as a statement of priority, or lack of prıority.”
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Email: ebelz@worldmag.com
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mubarak poster: PATRICK BAZ/AFP/Getty Images • ghonim: DYLAN MARTINEZ/Reuters/Landov
LEADERSHIP in a vacuum Egypt’s protest movement has made a strong push for big changes, but demonstrators can’t answer the obvious next question: Who can lead us? by Mindy Belz
mubarak poster: PATRICK BAZ/AFP/Getty Images • ghonim: DYLAN MARTINEZ/Reuters/Landov
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schools, and stores opened by the second week of February— “day of rage” ON Jan. 25 turned into but swelling protests would not die. On Feb. 10, Mubarak “days” as over a quarter million people announced that he would transfer powers to his vice turned out in Cairo and other major president, a move that enraged protesters who had expected cities even as January gave way to him to step down and promised further unrest. Residents February. But rumblings of a movement know life won’t be the same again, but the shape of Egypt’s to upset the nearly 30-year rule of transition remained elusive. President Hosni Mubarak began earlier: “The reality is, there is not a logical opposition figure to Last year Facebook pages dedicated to Khaled Said drew the lead a post-Mubarak government,” said Robert M. Kerr, interest of would-be revolutionaries. A 28-year-old Egyptian chair of cultural geography at the U.S. Air War College. human-rights activist apprehended by plainclothes officers That’s why street protests continued past their effective from an internet café, Said was beaten to death (for appardate, and why political and military experts cautioned ently possessing evidence of police corruption). By midagainst the immediate ouster of Mubarak—as the Obama January the “We Are All Khaled Said” page had nearly half a administration wanted. million followers when it announced a Despite international standing, Kerr rally set for Jan. 25. does not believe ElBaradei can lead Egypt. On Jan. 27 when police arrested and The former head of the International detained for more than a week Wael Atomic Energy Agency and Nobel laureGhonim, Google’s head of marketing for ate has spent too much time outside his the Middle East and North Africa, it was own country and has not cultivated a clear there was no turning back what deep popular following. Likewise, vice technology, in part, had wrought. The next president Omar Suleiman, the seeming day, with tens of thousands continuing to pick of the Obama administration, isn’t fill the streets, the government shut down viable either: As the former intelligence internet service providers and halted cell chief charged with collecting data phone service and text messaging. Google against Mubarak’s political enemies, he devised a go-round for street protesters. isn’t trusted. And he has called protesters And Ghonim, who launched Facebook “un-Egyptian.” pages for Said along with sites for Kerr, who has held government posts Mohamed ElBaradei and other opposition in Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, does figures, became emblematic of many believe that the military offers the best protesters—a father of two, educated, LIFE WON’T BE THE SAME: Ghonim hope for leading a transition—and that tech-savvy, and 30-ish—young enough addresses a crowd in Cairo Feb. 8 Minister of Defense Mohamed Hussein never to have remembered living a day (above); anti-government protesters (left) step on a poster of Mubarak. Tantawi should succeed Mubarak in a when Hosni Mubarak wasn’t in power. military-civilian coalition. “When Authorities released Ghonim Feb. 7, Tantawi gave orders for the military not to go in [to stop but clashes between protesters calling for Mubarak to leave street demonstrations], I thought he was positioning himthe country and pro-government elements mounted. self to be the champion of the people,” said Kerr. On Feb. 4, Egyptians tried to return to normal life—banks, some F E B R U A R Y 2 6 , 2 0 1 1 W O R L D
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Blind analysis
Muslim Brotherhood defenders in the United States (which include The New York Times) don’t seem to argue about the group’s radical nature, said Leslie Gelb, a former Times correspondent himself and now Council on Foreign Relations president emeritus—“they seem to dismiss it as not important or something we can live with.” But as Gelb lists off, the Muslim Brotherhood “supports Hamas and other terrorist groups, makes friendly noises to Iranian dictators and torturers, would be uncertain landlords of the critical Suez Canal, and opposes the Egyptian-Israeli agreement of 1979, widely regarded as the foundation of peace in the Mideast. Above all, the Muslim Brotherhood would endanger counterterrorism efforts in the region and worldwide. That is a very big deal.” The Brotherhood at one time held 88 seats in Egypt’s 454-seat parliament—or about a 20 percent share—before Mubarak outlawed the group running for parliamentary elections last year. Its views on terrorism may vary, but on Israel it’s consistent: The Brotherhood advocates ending Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel. “The ideological position of the Brotherhood, which has been maintained despite intense opposition and persecution going back decades, is that the state must be ruled according to the sharia [Islamic law], and jihad must be pursued against Israel and the United States,” said Anglican theologian and human-rights activist Mark Durie. “It is truly incredible that U.S. leaders could be so foolish as to seek to embrace an organization which holds such an agenda.” Durie, author of two books on Islam, traces the departure in longstanding U.S. policy to the Brotherhood’s success in infiltrating U.S. institutions, including the White House. An “Explanatory Memorandum on the general strategic goal for the group (the Brotherhood) in North America” declares that the function of the Brotherhood in North America is to “lead” the “Islamic Movement,” that is, to direct and coordinate all “Muslim’s efforts” across the continent. Groups with ties to the Brotherhood have lobbied successfully for the White House and others to hold public dinners marking the end of Ramadan, not to mention other activities, as a way to elevate the role of Islam in American life. What many Western analysts like to gloss over is the religious ideology at the heart of the movement, said Durie, and “to de-emphasize the Muslim Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood’s religious characBrotherhood leader ter renders analysis blind.” —M.B. Mohammed Badie
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AMEL PAIN/EPA/Landov
What’s the West missing about the Muslim Brotherhood?
ELBARADEI: Amr Nabil/AP • SULEIMAN: Tara Todras-Whitehill/AP • TANTAWI: Master Sgt. Jerry Morrison/DOD/AP • ASMAA WAGUIH/Reuters/Landov
Tantawi visited the protesters in Tahrir Square and offered assurances of protection. Afterward protesters shouted over loudspeakers, “The army and the people are united.” “Washington and Europe must lean on the Egyptian military and support the rapid emergence of a transitional ElBaradei government that will pave the way to free and fair elections fully supervised by the judiciary,” echoed Saad Eddin Ibrahim, writing in The Wall Street Journal. Ibrahim, a former sociology professor at the American University in Cairo, took on the government for its failure to protect Christians from attacks by Islamic radicals. He was Suleiman sentenced to seven years in prison but freed after serving three years, and he currently teaches at Drew University. An orderly transitional government guided by the military may limit the role of radical Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood. But Kerr warns that any government after Mubarak is likely to be Tantawi more radically Islamic, and one that would restrict individual freedoms and apply Shariah law. That could limit education for women, for example, and radically alter the already diminishing role of Christians in Egyptian society. The Muslim Brotherhood, according to Kerr, is the best organized of the Islamic groups: “Even if its leaders are moderate, there are enough radicals to push them toward Shariah.” What shocked commentators, including liberal ones, has been the Obama administration’s assertion throughout the protest phase that the Muslim Brotherhood (termed “nonsecular actors”) must be part of any new transitional government. Brotherhood elements coming to power in Egypt “would be calamitous for U.S. security,” said Leslie Gelb, a former New York Times diplomatic correspondent who served in the Carter administration. U.S. calls for Mubarak’s immediate removal created strange bedfellows: Israeli and Arab leaders, alike concerned about a possible rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, opposed a rapid exit by the Egyptian president. With Mubarak pledging in his Feb. 10 announcement to stay and protesters forcefully calling for his exit, uncertainty continued to rule. A
Keeping THE LID ON
Egyptian Christians are watchful about life post-Mubarak by Jamie Dean
AMEL PAIN/EPA/Landov
ELBARADEI: Amr Nabil/AP • SULEIMAN: Tara Todras-Whitehill/AP • TANTAWI: Master Sgt. Jerry Morrison/DOD/AP • ASMAA WAGUIH/Reuters/Landov
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nside a courtyard at All Saints Church in Alexandria, Egypt, Coptic Christians can’t escape a reminder of the violent bombing that rocked a New Year’s Eve service and killed nearly two dozen churchgoers: An ambulance parked beneath a poster-depiction of Jesus stands ready for any new calamity. With a widespread revolution upending Egypt, many Christians say they fear the prospect of political upheaval. Many especially fear the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, a well-organized Islamic opposition group with longstanding ties to terrorism. Even as tens of thousands of Egyptian protesters intensified demands for President Hosni Mubarak immediately to leave office, some Christians are ambivalent about Mubarak’s three-decade rule. “He’s the best of the worst,” Sameh Joseph, a worker at a Coptic church in Alexandria, told the Los Angeles Times. “Whoever comes after him might want to destroy us.” Across town, Emad Mikhail disagrees. In an email interview nine days after the Egyptian protests erupted, the president of the evangelical Alexandria School of Theology said the New Year’s Eve bombing had forged reconciliation among many Muslims and Christians in the city. He believes protesters’ insistence that the political upheaval is secular, not Islamic: “It will pave the way for more, not less, religious freedom.” If Christians disagree on Egypt’s prospects, one thing is certain for the minority group that comprises 10 percent of the country’s population: Oppression is a steady reality, and crimes against Christians often go unpunished (see “’Tis the Season,” Jan. 29)—and that impunity encourages more crimes against Christians. Even as protests raged in Egypt and the government crippled internet service, Islamists attacked two Christian
families south of Cairo on Jan. 30, killing 11, injuring four, and looting the victims’ homes, according to the Assyrian International News Agency (AINA). The dead included four children, ages 3 to 15. A local bishop said the murders didn’t reflect animosity between local Muslims and Christians but a breakdown in police protection during the chaos. Coptic activist Hanna Hanna told AINA the Muslim attackers “know that with Copts they can literally get away with murder.” Habib Ibrahim fears that dynamic could grow worse if the Muslim Brotherhood gains political power in Egypt. The chairman of United Copts of Great Britain said many Christians initially participated in the protests—believing they were secular—and that some remain active in the demonstrations. But Ibrahim says the Muslim Brotherhood’s increasing participation in the political negotiations is ominous: “We worry about them taking over because if they take over it will be another Hamaslike government . . . persecuting Christians more openly.” Tom Doyle of e3 Partners Ministry, a Texas-based Christian organization that works with Egyptian churches, says his group’s Christian contacts in Egypt have long faced harassment and trouble: Police arrested nine of the group’s workers last year. Egyptian Christians have told him that “life with Mubarak wasn’t great, but at least he did keep a lid on the violence by radicals.” Despite the growing fears, Christian groups say Egyptian Christians are also expressing a deep-rooted faith in God’s providence, and even enthusiasm over the prayers of Christians around the world. Doyle says one Egyptian worker told him: “Probably WILL IT LAST? right now we have more people praying Christians and for Egypt than ever before in our history. Muslims unite . . . And we know that God is going to in protest Feb. answer those prayers.” A 6 in Cairo. F E B R U A R Y 2 6 , 2 0 1 1 W O R L D
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AID IN ACTION
In Haiti the labor is plentiful but the harvests are few. What kinds of programs work toward long-term change? -- Haiti, foreign faces in the back of an open pickup truck draw attention. Some children shout the common moniker for a foreigner—“Blan!”— and others display their English skills: “Hey you!” But some Haitian children display something else they’ve learned about foreigners, as they stretch open their arms and cry in Creole: “Give us something!” 4 Short-term workers sometimes toss toys and other trinkets to children from the back of trucks. The well-intentioned gesture has an oftendamaging result: It leads Haitians to equate missionaries and other foreigners with immediate, free-flowing goods.
JAMIE DEAN FOR WORLD
After last year’s .-magnitude earthquake in Haiti, immediate goods were critical. One year later— with close to a million living in tents and thousands suffering from cholera and other diseases—overwhelming needs fester in a complex system of deeprooted problems that span generations, and raise the big question: What kind of help does Haiti need most? Steve Corbett, co-author of When Helping Hurts, says the best help among Christian groups has a common thread: Helping Haitians to be productive over the long term instead of continually focusing on immediate needs. Good help also emphasizes vital lessons about God’s design of men and women as workers made in His image, and waits patiently for change that sometimes takes years—not months. Efforts that fail in these areas often fail to produce lasting change. With thousands of non-governmental organizations (s) operating in Haiti, here’s a look at just two of the Christian groups applying a long-term philosophy to a race for Haitian recovery that’s less of a sprint and more of a marathon.
I H, the laborers are plentiful, but the harvests are few. A nearly percent unemployment rate cripples the economy, and a radically deforested landscape leaves hillsides barren and Haitians dependent on imported food. But on a recent Friday morning in a series of lush, green fields less than miles east of the dusty streets of Port-au-Prince, handfuls of Haitians bent over long, straight rows of beans and spinach, reaping what they had sowed. The workers are local, and the fields belong to Double Harvest, a Christ-centered, agricultural project serving Haitians since . The organization, which has projects in eight other countries, maintains nearly acres of land in Haiti and a work-driven philosophy. “We don’t like handouts,” says director Frantz Angus. “So we have the people participate.” Nearly Haitians work LONG-TERM HELP: Crepsint directly for the ministry, cultiClaibime likes to vating and caring for crops like show people sorghum, corn, carrots, and they can plant tomatoes. Others tend to a series and harvest for of tilapia tanks that hold over themselves. , fish. The organization sells the produce and fish to locals at reasonable prices, and the locals often resell the food at market, allowing the ministry to bolster local economies instead of compete with them. Crepsint Claibime is a Haitian who has mastered all the stages of planting and harvesting and now teaches others how to produce crops. Standing near a
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On a recent afternoon in the adjacent village, Eva Benu stood outside mixing cement for her Double Harvest home with local construction workers. The earthquake destroyed her house, along with the homes of nearly 40 percent of the village residents. Benu’s makeshift shelter leans sideways next to her developing concrete home. A small door is the only opening in her squat, temporary structure built with pieces of salvaged metal. A single mother, Benu looks at her new home and smiles widely: “I like the windows best.” Though the ministry does offer other relief efforts through a medical clinic and a cafeteria that serves hundreds of meals to workers each day, Angus says that fostering productivity instead of dependency is central: “If people want to help Haitians, we have to stop thinking about short-term improvements, and start thinking long-term.” Art Spalding is also thinking long-term. Spalding— the only American on staff—is a missionary who helps oversee a church and a school with 500 students. Teaching Haitian workers and church members a biblical view of work in a country where work is undervalued by low wages and a struggling economy is central to Spalding’s efforts. “We have to go teach this: that God has put me here to accomplish a job, and that’s to glorify Him—whether that’s working out in the fields or producing fish or fixing a tractor. . . . Let that be the goal of my life: ministry in whatever vocation to which God calls me.”
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Nearly two hours southwest of Port-au-Prince, along Haiti’s southern peninsula, signs of widespread agricultural efforts are scant. Small-scale rice farmers tend plots of low-lying paddy fields, but most Haitians in the rural community of Cadiac focus on modest efforts that drive the market economy: small gardens, handfuls of animals, buying and reselling goods like clothing or sandals. Beyond the hand-to-mouth lifestyle, hundreds of local residents are doing something counterintuitive to many Haitians with few resources: saving money. In a busy outdoor market teeming with clothing, bread, chickens, shoes, eggplants, cooking oil, and candy, Janin Trismesin stands behind a long table full of butchered pork, talking about how saving money has improved the business she’s operated for years. Nearby, other sellers with long machetes chop fat from freshly slaughtered pigs, and line goat heads along wheelbarrows full of the fresh meat. Animals can be a form of currency, and Trismesin says saving money has allowed her to buy and sell more. “It’s not easy to save money,” she says. “Only with the group.” Trismesin’s group is a local savings group organized by HOPE International, a Pennsylvania-based Christian organization that helps Haitians and thousands of poverty-stricken workers in 14 countries worldwide use the resources God has already given them. Though the organization sometimes uses a mission compound in Cadiac, it doesn’t maintain official WORLD FEBRUARY 26, 2011
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Jeremy Cowart
“I LIKE THE WINDOWS BEST”: Eva Benu mixes cement for her new home.
row of workers moving through the deep green fields, Claibime holds up a full, leafy bunch of fresh spinach: “I like to show people that they can do this for themselves.” Plenty of locals do just that: The ministry allows nearby residents to use plots of land on a rotating basis to grow food for selling or eating. Workers at the group’s vast seed bank have also begun the process of distributing some 300,000 trees for planting this year—one tree for each victim killed in the quake. Helping reverse the catastrophic deforestation in Haiti is critical to the country’s ability to produce food on a large scale, says Angus, the director. Poverty-stricken Haitians have felled the country’s trees for fuel and building material over the last two decades, making the soil far less viable for growing crops. Angus says early efforts to make 2010 “the year of reforestation” quickly changed into “the year of rebuilding” after the January quake. With rebuilding efforts moving slowly in Haiti, Double Harvest has launched a project to build at least 200 homes in nearby villages, already com pleting more than 75 houses, and allowing village committees to decide who gets the homes. Unlike the thousands of temporary structures built by other groups, these houses are permanent: Haitian construction workers build the 350-square-foot structures with reinforced concrete.
Jeremy Cowart
jamie dean for world
headquarters, vehicles, full-time staff, or even signs in the small town. “It’s a success for us if they don’t even know who our organization is,” HOPE staffer Katie Straight says of the villagers. Instead, HOPE sends staffers to meet with local pastors who agree to promote the program in their churches and identify community members able to teach courses and facilitate meetings. HOPE supplies material and training for the facilitators, using a curriculum from the Chalmers Center for Economic Development that emphasizes the centrality of the gospel for addressing material and spiritual poverty. The result is an effort organized and executed on a local level by local churches and residents. (HOPE provides oversight with periodic visits and with Esperanza, a Christian development organization with offices in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.) In northern Haiti, the group conducts microfinance programs, offering small loans of $50-$100 to local residents at a reasonable interest rate. But in Cadiac, where many residents live on a more subsistence level, that kind of loan doesn’t make sense if Haitians may be unable to repay, says Straight: “Microfinancing gone wrong is putting another burden on the backs of the poor.” Here the approach to finances is simpler: Each member of a rotating savings group brings a fixed amount of money each week. A weekly payout of the group’s full amount rotates between each member Email: jdean@worldmag.com
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until every member has been paid. Accumulating savings groups save money over a longer period of time, with the option of making loans to members of the group. Group members save anywhere from $.25 to $2.50 a week—admittedly miniscule results by North American standards, but substantial savings for low-wage Haitians who have often never saved money. Off Cadiac’s main road, in a one-room rental house with no plumbing or electricity, Marimat Batis arranges chairs near two single beds and talks about saving money for the first time in her life. Batis, who lives here with her four children, sells clothes in the market. She’s using her modest savings for a long-term goal. “I’m buying sand,” she says with a smile. “I will build a house.” Owning a home will allow Batis to stop paying rent and eventually save more money. She says she’s committed to continuing, though the process could take a long time: “Only God knows.” Luisfils Molisin is accustomed to lengthy ordeals: To reach the home of the 45-year-old father of seven, visitors must wade across a river and cut through a field of tall corn. Near a tarnished pot over an open fire for outdoor cooking, Molisin talks about his role as president of a savings group that meets at a local church. Members of the group learn about how to live in relation to God, themselves, and the community—even in the uncertainties of Haitian life: “I’ve learned that prayer is the key.” (Paul Vital, pastor of the local church, says Haitians need more biblical teaching about finances. Vital says though some locals originally thought they might get outside aid from the effort, he’s now seen the reverse: Church members’ giving has increased.) On a rocky hillside outside of town, Jean Mack operates an outdoor bakery, producing basketfuls of bread each day in a large, brick oven. Mack says his ability to buy flour and produce bread has increased since he started saving. So has his confidence: “Before this I was nothing.” Mack says he enjoys his savings group, but not just because of the financial teaching: “They show me how to live in the community.” Mack shows his appreciation for community when a visitor asks to buy bread before leaving. The baker proudly wraps two dense triangles of bread in a crisp sheet of paper, and smiles broadly as he presents the gift: “From me.” A
PAYING OFF: Marimat Batis and her daughters (top), Janin Trismesin (bottom), and Jean Mack (below) learn how to live in the community.
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Opposing A promising lawsuit against Obamacare has brought Virginia Attorney General K C—and his Madisonian outlook—into the public eye BY EDWARD LEE PITTS IN RICHMOND, VA. PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROY M. BURROUGHS/GENESIS PHOTOS
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C the black Reebok shoes he just bought at a Dick’s Sporting Goods in Richmond, Va. He found the pair of shoes hidden in a row of shoes. Despite this deal, he claims they are the most expensive pair of athletic shoes he has ever owned. The attorney general of Virginia is readying to take the court, but not the one you might think. Tonight, Cuccinelli, , is facing off with members of the Virginia General Assembly at a basketball gym near the city’s Capitol Square. And he’s a little nervous, mostly because he didn’t have the best pregame meal—a couple of McDonald’s hamburgers washed down with sweet tea. “It is not the smartest thing I’ve done today,” he admitted. “I don’t usually do two of those in a day.” Wearing a red Roanoke Tea Party T-shirt, Cuccinelli, with dark eyes and dark hair atop a frame that remains thin despite his fast food choices, warms up with a couple of air balls before sinking two shots in a row. “I’m done,” he says. When the game starts, Cuccinelli, who spent more than a dozen years refereeing youth basketball, is not too afraid to take risky shots. In three out of the four games tonight, he takes the game’s opening shot. His team finishes with a - record after he sinks the game-winning shot in the final contest. “Cuccinelli knows how to close it out,” one of the players shouts. It’s nearly p.m. on Jan. , and President Barack Obama is about to give his State of the Union speech. Cuccinelli merely glances at a television screen while exiting the gym. It is time for him to head home: two hours away in a Northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. Cuccinelli’s first year as attorney general ended about a month ago, and it was a little like his evening basketball game in Richmond. He did not waste time easing himself into his new position, and his fearlessness in taking on the federal government brought instant controversy. (He jokes that the swearing at him began the day after his swearing in.) But the year in office has made him one of the nation’s highest-profile attorneys general. “We have not been bored,” he admits. Last February, Cuccinelli filed a legal petition to the Environmental Protection Agency—an organization he likes to call the Employment
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counsel Prevention Agency—asking it to reconsider its decision to regulate certain emissions and questioning its global-warming findings. Then on March , the same day that years earlier another Virginian in Richmond named Patrick Henry uttered the words, “Give me liberty or give me death,” Cuccinelli filed suit to stop the new federal healthcare law. The attorney general argued that the law’s individual mandate to force everyone to buy insurance or face penalties violates the U.S. Constitution. Healthcare supporters called the lawsuit frivolous. But in December a federal judge from Virginia thought otherwise, ruling in favor of Cuccinelli and striking down the mandate that many consider the overhaul’s tent pole. Cuccinelli makes no apologies for his aggressiveness. He argues that the nation is in the midst of the “greatest erosion of liberty in my adult lifetime.” His state, he says, is “not a wholly owned subsidiary of U.S. Congress, Inc.” Attorneys general from around the nation seem to agree: Twenty-six states filed a similar suit against the new healthcare law, and on Jan. a Florida judge delivered a bombshell ruling when he sided with those states and declared the entire law unconstitutional. With the Feb. legislative defeat of congressional healthcare repeal efforts in the U.S. Senate, the focus of the fight against Obamacare is shifting to the nation’s courts. Cuccinelli now is asking the Supreme Court to waive the normal appeals process and fasttrack his Virginia healthcare lawsuit. While the other states banded together, he decided to have Virginia go after Obamacare alone. As a result, he is fast becoming the face of the healthcare debate. This makes Cuccinelli a hero to some but a villain to others. Why fly solo against the federal government? The answer likely is found in his love of history. He calls Virginia the perfect place, thanks to its rich history, for defending the Constitution. “This lawsuit is about liberty, not healthcare,” he says. “If they can order you to buy this, they can order you to buy anything. Frankly, the federal government ought to be knocked back here. It has overstepped its boundaries.” FEBRUARY 26, 2011
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uccinelli was tea party long before there was a Tea Party. He grew up reading about Revolutionary War heroes and now comfortably refers to James Madison’s Federalist Papers as if they were written yesterday. He says that by being Washington’s foil, he is only doing what Madison intended—providing the institutional tension between state and federal governments that keeps both powers in check. On a recent cold Monday morning in Richmond, Cuccinelli stood before a “proclaiming Christ in the heart of the city” banner and addressed a room full of Christian students visiting the state capitol. Inside Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church at Capitol Square, a place where Confederate President Jefferson Davis was a member during the Civil War, it didn’t take long for Cuccinelli to explain the present by delving into the past: “The king of Great Britain that we rebelled against acknowledged that he didn’t have the authority to make the colonists buy British goods,” he lectured the students. “But our president and the last Congress think they can. The power of the federal government after the American Revolution and the Constitution was less in all respects than the British Parliament. Otherwise, why rebel?” Cuccinelli’s conviction in these principles began during his own high-school days while attending a private Jesuit school in Washington, D.C. There lots of reading gave him clear ideas of what government should and shouldn’t do. (He didn’t only study: Cuccinelli, who says he has “a whacky side,” spent time in costume as the school’s eagle mascot. Nowadays he hosts annual fundraisers at a paintball course, and his “Don’t Tread on Me” baseball cap sports numerous paintball stains.) At the University of Virginia, the attorney general seemed to reject a career in politics by becoming an engineering major. But he served on the university’s judiciary committee for three years. The experience of helping to govern the students led him to law school. As a lawyer Cuccinelli worked pro bono on hundreds of mental healthcare cases. Still he nourished his passion for politics: volunteering to put up signs during elections, collecting inch-thick files on topics like school choice, and developing his recruiting pitch. Soon he became the Republican membership chair for his Northern Virginia county. But he always assumed that would be as far as he would go politically. His wife, Teiro, had bad memories of the time her mother ran for a county board seat, and her disdain for politics made Cuccinelli reluctant to discuss the topic. Then one night in April 1999, Cuccinelli came home from work late. “Guess what I did at the grocery store today?” Teiro asked. “I signed somebody’s petition to run for office.” Taken aback, Cuccinelli asked her for the name of the candidate. When she responded, Cuccinelli exploded: “He is pro-tax. He breaks his word. He backstabs pro-lifers!” he recalls ranting. Then out of the blue Teiro said: “Well, why don’t you run against him?” After Cuccinelli overcame his shock, he did some research and found that the deadline to file a petition to enter the race had passed just four hours earlier. “I missed that. But I started planning for the next race.” Having paid his dues as a recruiter gave Cuccinelli a wealth of local contacts. Those relationships, his pro-life position, and
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“I don’t mind knife fights. As long as the knives come from the front.”
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a lot of miles on a -year-old Isuzu Pup to plant signs all over the county helped him eke out a primary win in August by a mere votes. In the general election Cuccinelli won again, despite being outspent by more than -to-. At , he became a freshman state senator. Serving for eight years, he would go on to win even closer races—gaining reelection in by a margin of just votes out of , cast. Despite tight elections, Cuccinelli did not apologize for being a conservative Republican from traditionally liberal Northern Virginia. In the Senate he quickly bemoaned the fact that many of his fellow Republicans seemed to favor big government aggressively. He became known for the many -to- votes in which he was the lone dissenter. His personal favorite: trying to remove , earmarked for the budget committee chairman’s district and replacing it with , for the brain injury foundation. “It is more tiring to fight with the people who are supposed to be on your team than it is to fight with people who are supposed to be your opponents,” he said. “But by the end, I was giving as good as I got. I don’t mind knife fights. As long as the knives come from the front.” When he ran for attorney general in , newspapers like the Virginian-Pilot bashed his conservative morality, warning that he would be an “embarrassment” to the state if elected. But he won by a sizeable percentage points in November —one of the early indicators of the larger conservative victory to come one year later. “I recognize that the founders built this nation on the foundation of natural law,” Cuccinelli said when talking about his conservative crusades. “The Founding Fathers would have never believed that you would debate abortion or that you would debate marriage.” He calls himself a cradle Catholic, having been raised in the faith. But four years into his marriage Cuccinelli and his wife had a significant reawakening. Their exploration, spurred on by the mother’s group his wife joined at their church, led to what he calls the “most important change in either of our lives.” Faith became their top priority. That led to a passion for protecting family values that has, ironically, led him to spend long hours away from his own family. The couple has seven children ages to , including daughters. Wanting to remain near both their older daughters’ schools (the younger ones are homeschooled) and their church, Cuccinelli and his wife decided to stay in Northern Virginia. That is why, roughly two hours after the end of his basketball game, with the clock nearing p.m., Cuccinelli is finally turning into his family’s rural neighborhood in Prince William County. “Oh my gosh, tonight’s a trash night,” he exclaims after noticing that all the other houses have the cans already pulled to the end of driveways. “All right girls, way to go,” he adds after seeing that his own cans have been rolled down the long driveway that leads to the home on his -acre plot. His wife is there to greet him at the door. At least one child is still awake, waiting behind the curtains to hug her father. Cuccinelli will head back to Richmond at : the next morning. “We are not doing this for fun,” he tells me before disappearing inside. “We are fighting.” A Email: lpitts@worldmag.com
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Education secretary Arne Duncan has a record for allowing some school choice, just not for all
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by Photograph by Paul Martinka/Polaris
, President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are for it and against it. They’ve been proponents of charter schools but have opposed allowing parents to use tax-funded vouchers to enroll their children in private schools. In Duncan and Obama allowed a voucher program for , low-income students in Washington, D.C.—the first federal program of its kind—to expire, although a U.S. Department of Education analysis last year found it had improved graduation rates by percentage points. Now House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, is pushing a bipartisan effort to resurrect the program. On Jan. , Boehner introduced a bill with Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., to open the D.C. voucher program to new students. As debate over schoolchoice measures moves forward, Duncan’s views are likely to receive fresh scrutiny. The education secretary has suggested that vouchers would ultimately be unfair: “Vouchers usually serve to percent of the children in the community,” he said in . “I don’t want to save or percent of children and let to percent drown.” But a newly released report by James Sullivan, the inspector general of Chicago Public Schools (), indicates that during Duncan’s tenure as of Chicago’s schools—from to —he allowed school choice of another kind. As chief of the district, Duncan stopped short of using his power to abolish the practice of state and local officials lobbying to get favorite students into elite schools through Chicago’s political network. Duncan claims he tried to reform clout-based admissions, but in practice he channeled it. After years of allegations, Sullivan’s report is the first clear admission from the school district that the entry process into the city’s top high schools was swarming with “political clout, favoritism, preferential treatment and violations of selection and enrollment practices and policies.” Chicago’s nine elite high schools, known locally as selective enrollment schools, are the pride of the city’s otherwise troubled public-school system. They offer an advanced education to Chicago’s top-scoring students, with an average percent graduation rate in a district where half of students normally drop out. Competition to enter the schools is so fierce that in
the - school year, about , students applied for admission, with only one-fifth as many seats available. With admission so tough, some parents looked for back channels into the schools, calling selective enrollment principals to explain the merits of their child—or asking an alderman or official to put in a good word, regardless of whether a student had passed the regular admissions exam. Alan Mather, principal of Lindblom Math and Science Academy, one of the selective enrollment schools, last year told me Chicago aldermen used to call him seeking admission for particular students. Mather said he believed they were contacting him out of a sense of obligation to constituents, and said typically nothing would result from the inquiries: “It just afforded them the opportunity to go back and say, ‘I made the call.’” Sometimes Mather forwarded requests he received to Duncan’s office. A spokesperson for Secretary Duncan, Peter Cunningham, who was also a communications director for Duncan in Chicago, told me the pattern of officials pressuring principals to admit students was a situation Duncan inherited: “And so what we tried to do was control it so that the principals didn’t feel this pressure from people. Because they were getting the calls directly. So we said, ‘Well, let’s bring this downtown.’” Duncan’s office began maintaining a list of calls that came in on behalf of students from a spectrum of sources, including the offices of Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley, former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun (now a Chicago mayoral candidate), and at least two dozen aldermen. Cunningham said Duncan recognized the calls were a problem and reformed the admissions process by . Asked if Duncan would have done anything differently in retrospect, Cunningham said he probably would have made the reforms sooner. Duncan pushed through a new admissions policy in February , seven years after becoming its head, giving the selective enrollment principals the right of “principal discretion,” in which they could handpick percent of their students (as some were already doing), but only within certain guidelines: Principals were allowed to enroll students who failed the entrance exam if they had demonstrated other special abilities or had overcome hardship.
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CHARTER FLIGHT: Duncan visiting Kings Collegiate Charter School in Brooklyn.
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TRIED TO CONTROL IT: Duncan at Chicago’s Talcott Elementary School in ’.
students—could foster the same problems as in Chicago, with parents or politicians trying to game the admissions system. That doesn’t mean that selective enrollment programs are all bad, but that they need consistently proper oversight: The admissions policy adopted after Duncan left Chicago, for instance, added rules to eliminate political influence. Charter schools, many of which do not require admissions testing, have played a big role in local school reform across the nation in the last decade, and Duncan’s pro-charter policies (he C quadrupled the number of them in Chicago) have earned him M praise from school-choice advocates and ire from teachers Y unions. Unlike Chicago’s selective enrollment schools, which are managed by the school district, charters are privately run CM but with district funding and oversight, and often without MY C union pressures. As a school-choice option, charters remain a point of con- CYM tact between the Obama administration, Republicans, and the CMY Y broader public. In a survey last year, the Indianapolis-based K Foundation for Educational Choice found that voters in six CM states were three times more likely to support charters than MY oppose them. Most favored vouchers as well. A —with reporting by Emily Belz in Washington, D.C. CY
DUNCAN: AMANDA RIVKIN/POLARIS • BOEHNER: DOUGLAS GRAHAM/CQ/ROLL CALL/GETTY IMAGES
Sullivan’s report indicates admissions abuses still occurred under Duncan’s new policy in and afterward, with instances of preferential treatment “too numerous to mention.” Last year the Chicago Tribune revealed that Duncan’s office not only tracked calls, it forwarded the requests to principals—and Duncan was sometimes listed as a sponsor for students. The inspector general’s report concludes the admission of at least six students in “can be directly attributed to influence exerted by the ’s office.” The report recommends abolishing principal discretion altogether, but that’s unlikely to happen. Principal discretion remains popular among Chicago parents and principals because it creates a way for siblings or disadvantaged kids to get into a top school. It seems Duncan gave principals permission to handpick students because he believed some disadvantaged students could excel if given a shot at a better school. And that’s what voucher proponents say the D.C. voucher program can offer. The argument that vouchers are unfair because they only benefit a few students, the proponents will argue, seems disingenuous in light of what Duncan allowed in Chicago. A bigger problem: giving politically connected kids an advantage. Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Springfield, Ill., and Senate Majority Whip, crafted the legislative language in to kill the D.C. voucher program. That did not stop him from successfully lobbying to get a staffer’s relative into a selective enrollment high school in Chicago. School districts in some other cities, such as New York and Washington, have established a network of high-school choice like Chicago’s selective enrollment program—using a mix of charter, public, and elite public schools that only admit topscoring students. Some critics say this multi-tiered approach— with regular schools and selective schools competing for
CMY
K
It’s not just the administration pushing education reform; House Speaker Boehner has staked his ground, too U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has spent the past year trying to drum up support for a rewrite of No Child Left Behind, George W. Bush’s education policy. The administration’s “blueprint” for reforming the policy aims to improve teacher accountability, measure student growth more accurately, and among other things, expand charters. In his State of the Union last month, President Obama called on Congress to “replace No Child Left Behind with a law that’s more flexible and focused on what’s best for our kids.” But it’s unclear to what extent legislators will cooperate: Neither political party has
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complete internal agreement on education reform and school choice options, and even the nation’s two major teachers unions are divided on Duncan’s policies. The ’s “A Pledge to America” last year made no pledges about education. Many Republicans agree No Child Left Behind is flawed, but some, like Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., the new chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, prefer to deal with its problems incrementally, in separate bills instead of a sweeping overhaul. Kline and some other conservatives say they want less federal involvement in education policy, not more, leaving more decision-making power in the hands of local officials.
Democrats face an uphill battle already to persuade lawmakers to spend more money on new education policy. The administration already has on the table . billion for its Race to the Top program and million for Investing in Innovation programs, which offer federal grants to states and districts that meet reform goals. Obama and Duncan want Congress to provide funding to the programs through —but they may have to concede on issues like vouchers to get it. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, was one of the chief architects of the No Child Left Behind and isn’t likely to see Congress abandon it easily. Boehner has Democratic support on the D.C. city council, and demonstrated the level of priority he assigned to the voucher plan when he invited several District students in the program to be his State of the Union guests. They sat on the front row of his box. —D.J.D.
Email: ddevine@worldmag.com
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arsabit is less than 300 miles from Nairobi, but by truck the drive takes 14 hours. The town in the north of Kenya’s East African Rift is the center of a district populated by about 120,000. Most of them are pagan tribespeople who are largely unreached by Christian teaching and prey to Islam in a region sometimes called “the devil’s walk,” the border between Islam and Christianity in Africa, where in the case of Marsabit, both Sudan’s Islamic regime and Somalia’s radical terrorist groups surround the region. Faith-based work to reach these tribes meets many obstacles. Lack of funds recently halted an effort by Africa Inland Mission workers to teach primary school to over 1,000 children of the Rendille tribe. But none of that stops Pastor John Hirbo from hosting teams of medical workers from the United States in the Rendille area and Marsabit regularly. Hirbo, a former Muslim from Ethiopia, said he wept the first time he saw the level of poverty and illness among the tribal families. “Most of the women were
ermost parts Humble work in remote reaches of Africa is growing despite many obstacles by mindy belz | photographs by robert h. morris F E B R U A R Y 2 6 , 2 0 1 1 W O R L D
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beautifully adorned, but underneath their colorful beads, emaciated,” reported nurse Linda Grosskopf after she visited the area as part of a team with Partners for Care. “Nearly every child had pneumonia, bronchitis, and bacterial and fungal infections on their hands, feet, and scalp.” And life is hard, said the Petoskey, Mich., resident, who has made another medical trip to Kenya but never to this tribe. Women leave the village at sunrise in search of water, leaving their children largely unattended. They walk on average six hours, digging for springs at the bottom of dry river basins. Water is so scarce, said Grosskopf, that when clothes become soiled and worn out, villagers burn them rather than use up water to wash them. The area has all the components for a mission field, reports Partners for Care president Connie Cheren: “starvation, drought, unreached people groups, extreme poverty, HIV/AIDS, and a heavy Muslim influence.” So Hirbo moved with his own family to Marsabit and began a church there built and funded entirely by locals. Its walls are made of rocks and mud, with old grain bags for reaching the unreached: inside wall coverings. Members Hirbo (center) and Cheren of nine tribes now meet there pray with representatives of to worship, and in the past nine local tribes; Grosskopf month the chief of the Rendille treats a Rendille boy with diseased hands and feet; the tribe has offered land to Hirbo church in Marsabit (from top to build a church closer to his to bottom); a Rendille woman; village. Over 60 people there, children in an internally about an hour from Marsabit, displaced-persons camp; have made professions of Cheren treating Rendille Christian faith. A children (previous spread).
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LIFESTYLE TECHNOLOGY SCIENCE HOUSES OF GOD SPORTS MONEY RELIGION
Where’s your name? LIFESTYLE: Website shows the frequency of family names in various countries, states, and counties BY SUSAN OLASKY
>>
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A will allow you to find out how common or uncommon your last name is, and where those who have it live. World Names (worldnames.publicprofiler.org) holds in its database million unique surnames and million unique first names, from countries in Europe, America, Asia, and Oceania. The maps indicate relative frequency of a name in different countries. For example, when I type in Olasky, a world map pops up showing the United States colored turquoise, indicating a “moderate” number of Olaskys—actually, only / of an Olasky for every million Americans. No other country has Olaskys, and if I click on Michigan I can learn of some slight Olasky incidence in two counties, Wayne and Oakland. Belzes, on the other hand, are more numerous in the United States—nine per million Americans—and are present in such abundance in Germany that the country is colored dark blue. If we press on the United States we see Belz clusters
Email: solasky@worldmag.com
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in the Midwest and several other states, but Alaska has the greatest number in proportion to the population. And if we press on North Carolina we find a Belz center in Buncombe County. Smiths, on the third hand, make the map dark blue in England and Australia, lighter blue in the United States and Canada, and pale yellow through much of continental Europe and India. The U.S. distribution shows 9,000 Smiths per million Americans spread throughout the country, with the greatest concentrations in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Arkansas. The maps also bring out curious facts: For example, cold-weather Canada, Norway, and Sweden have more Ethiopians as a
ercentage of the population than the p United States has. Name mapping can be fun but also helpful to policy analysis and evangelism when it shows ethnic patterns. For example, London geographer James Cheshire produced a map (names.mappinglondon.co.uk) that lists the 15 most frequent surnames in each neighborhood of London: Among them are Smiths and Taylors but also Sidhus, Patels, Cohens, Kahns, and Singhs. Each name is color-coded to indicate where it originated. The map allows users to see at a glance that Smith is the most widely distributed name but that London is sprinkled with distinct ethnic enclaves where other names predominate.
Somber site
THIS OLD STREET Have you ever wondered what a particular street looked like in days gone by? Sepiatown.com is a website designed to collect and map historical and vintage photographs, prints, film, audio and other media uploaded by registered users. It’s in an early stage, so currently New York seems to have the most photographs, but the site invites users to upload for free old photos of streets and buildings in their own cities, which are mapped using Google Earth. —S.O.
The old and the restless “Young and growing, to old and stagnant”: That’s how a presentation by the Center for Strategic and International Studies describes the demographic transformation facing the world over the next 30 years. CSIS came up with a Global Aging Preparedness Index (GAP) that ranks 20 countries on two measures: the fiscal sustainability of their public programs for the elderly and the income adequacy of those programs (gapindex.csis.org/home.html). The United States is No. 3 in income adequacy but only No. 11 in fiscal sustainability: Italy, France, Brazil, The Netherlands, and Spain make up the bottom five in sustainability. The Netherlands and Brazil are first and second in income adequacy. Some of this analysis is dry but important stuff for policy makers or business planners trying to get a grip on the challenges facing us over the next 30 years. There’s no inevitability here and cash is not always the differencemaker; for example, if more adult children take in elderly parents, sustainability increases. Many businesses are making product decisions based on an aging population. According to the magazine Fast Company, General Electric simulates the functionality of its ovens for elderly people by having designers “tape their knuckles to represent arthritic hands, put kernels of popcorn in their shoes to create imbalances, and weigh down pans to simulate putting food into ovens.” But don’t expect companies to publicize what they’re doing. GE designer Marc Hottenroth says, “Boomers won’t buy something made specifically for the aging population because that’s not how they see themselves.” —S.O.
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holocaust: Sebastian Scheiner/ap • times square: library of congress/ap • couple: Jaroslaw Wojcik/ISTOCK
Google and Jerusalem-based archive Yad Vashem are partnering to make available online the largest historical collection of Holocaust materials, including 130,000 photographs that are now available (collections.yadvashem.org/photosarchive/ en-us/photos.html). People will be able to search the collection, identify photos, and add stories and thoughts about the material. The photos are arranged in groups of 12 tiny thumbnails. A descriptive sentence appears when you move your cursor over the group: For example, “15 family photos. Most of them are of the Pretzelmayer family in Velke Kostolany, Czechoslovakia before the war.” Click on the group and larger thumbnails appear. You can click on any picture to see it larger. Descriptive information, identifying people, places, and contributors, appears on the right. —S.O.
Times Square, ca. 1905
WORLD FEBRUARY 26, 2011
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2/10/11 12:35 PM
en tune & prius: handout • verizon iphone: Chris Hondros/Getty Images
Notebook > Lifestyle
Notebook > Technology
Network news
Users and bloggers celebrate Verizon’s iPhone announcement BY ALISSA WILKINSON
>>
HOLOCAUST: SEBASTIAN SCHEINER/AP • TIMES SQUARE: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/AP • COUPLE: JAROSLAW WOJCIK/ISTOCK
EN TUNE & PRIUS: HANDOUT • VERIZON iPHONE: CHRIS HONDROS/GETTY IMAGES
-J, the longanticipated event finally happened: Verizon announced that in February, it would begin offering the iPhone on its network in the United States. iPhone users in other countries have long been able to choose their service provider, but Apple and AT&T signed contracts that restricted users in the United States to the AT&T network. Technology writers and Apple aficionados had vigorously speculated about the announcement for months, especially after Verizon introduced its version of the iPad. While the device itself costs the same for both AT&T and Verizon customers, and the data and calling plan fees are roughly equivalent, there are some significant differences. The Verizon version can act as a “hotspot,”
allowing nearby devices, such as laptops, to use it to connect to the internet wirelessly. However, the technology Verizon uses does not allow a user to make calls and receive data simultaneously—so a Verizon iPhone customer could not talk to someone and look at a map on the device at the same time. Additionally, while AT&T’s network technology is used around the world, Verizon’s is mostly used in the United States and Asia, making it more difficult to use the Verizon version abroad. But even given the potential drawbacks, the news was enthusiastically received by technology bloggers, current Verizon customers looking to upgrade, and users in areas where AT&T coverage is spotty or nonexistent, and Verizon expects to sell at least million iPhones in .
Car tune The newest sign that smart phones are pervading our lives: Toyota will ship select models of their cars with their new EnTune system later this year. Using an app on a driver’s smartphone, EnTune connects to Toyota’s servers to receive information and entertainment, then transmits that information to a screen in the car via Bluetooth. The system will offer a number of services: sports, stocks, weather, and traffic information, plus Pandora internet radio, the OpenTable restaurant reservation site, MovieTickets.com, Microsoft’s Bing search engine, and iheartradio. To quell concerns about the safety of operating the system in a vehicle, certain functions—such as making a new restaurant reservation—will only be available when the car is not moving. Toyota plans to continue making new services available on EnTune, but there will be no app store for customers to choose which applications they want— everyone will get the same services. And because EnTune connects through a smartphone, there are some drawbacks: Listening to Pandora radio for long stretches of time could be costly for those without an unlimited data plan, and the system will only work when the phone has service. But it’s likely that EnTune is a sign of things to come, as mobile devices become more tightly integrated into daily life. —A.W. FEBRUARY 26, 2011
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2/9/11 11:47 PM
Notebook > Science
War on execution drugs
Death penalty opponents effectively blacklist sodium thiopental By daniel james devine
>>
A national shortage of sodium thiopental, a drug widely used for lethal injections, has sent some states scrambling for alternatives and given inspiration to opponents of the death penalty. The only FDA-approved maker of sodium thiopental in the United States, Hospira Inc. in Lake Forest, Ill., announced in January it would quit selling the drug after a plan to manufacture it in Italy was challenged by Italian authorities, who demanded assurances that the drug wouldn’t be used for executions. The American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) said in a statement that its members were “extremely troubled” by the shortage, since sodium thiopental, a longtime surgical anesthetic, is used in certain cases to avoid complications that may accompany newer anesthetics. Now state officials, many of whom have run out of the drug, must find other suppliers or change their lethal injection protocol. Two have already taken the latter option: For three recent executions, Oklahoma substituted pentobarbital, another anesthetic, for thiopental in its standard three-drug lethal injection procedure. Ohio has abandoned the three-drug combination in favor of a large dose of pentobarbital exclusively. Its first pentobarbital execution is scheduled for March, but as a novel procedure, the method could face a legal challenge from inmates arguing it constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment.” An underlying factor in the shortage is that few want to be associated with execution: Both the ASA and Hospira formally oppose the use of thiopental in executions, and Lundbeck Inc. in Deerfield, Ill.—the maker of Ohio’s pentobarbital formula—has written to the Ohio corrections department protesting the use of its product.
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death chamber: Eric Risberg/ap • Egyptian Museum: Tara Todras-Whitehill/ap
As pro- and anti-government demonstrations in Egypt turned violent in late January, looters took advantage of the chaos to target museums and historical sites. Nine looters broke through the skylight of the 109-year-old Egyptian Museum in Cairo, where the largest collection of Pharaonic artifacts in the world is housed, including the mummy of Ramses the Great and treasures from Tutankhamen’s tomb. The criminals broke two mummies and damaged about 70 artifacts in an apparent search for gold, but antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said nothing valuable was stolen and the damaged items could be restored. Elsewhere in Egypt there were conflicting reports of looters raiding tombs and damaging stone reliefs, but Hawass said any damage was minimal, and many sites were being protected by either soldiers or citizens. Though gunmen stole hundreds of ancient objects from a storage facility at the Qantara Museum, near the Suez Canal, someone returned many of the items within a few days. Whatever their view of President Hosni Mubarak’s government, Egyptians in general have a high regard for their national treasures. After the Cairo museum break-in, citizens linked arms to form a chain in front of the building. On a Facebook web page that sprang up to provide a hub for Egyptian looting reports from the field, a person listing herself as a Cairo resident said her neighbors had organized themselves to lock down the neighborhood each night, guarding homes and a nearby museum. —D.J.D.
Email: ddevine@worldmag.com
2/10/11 1:27 PM
Henry A. Barrios/The Californian/zuma/newscom
Tomb raiders
death chamber: Eric Risberg/ap • Egyptian Museum: Tara Todras-Whitehill/ap
Henry A. Barrios/The Californian/zuma/newscom
Notebook > Houses of God
The Church Inc. in Oildale, Calif., is only a year old but has outgrown its first building, a former tattoo shop, and is expanding to the building next door while keeping its mission of reaching out to the area’s homeless and drug addicted. “When I was on the streets before I got saved, I did not understand or identify with your typical church setting. I know what many of these people in Oildale deal with. I have been there myself and we preach the message of forgiveness through freedom in Christ,’’ said Pastor Eddie Houghtaling.
F E B R U A R Y 2 6 , 2 0 1 1 W O R L D
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Notebook Notebo N Noteboo otebook > Sports
Dotes & goats
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The best and worst from both on and off the field at this year’s Super Bowl BY MARK BERGIN
>>
, Super Bowl was a good one. As a transcendent cultural phenomenon, it failed, as usual, to live up to the hype. Still, the event managed to deliver more than a few off-field moments worth doting over. And the on-field action, for all its brilliance, had its share of goats, too. Here’s a look at the dotes and goats from the Green Bay Packers - victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers:
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DOTE: Aaron Rodgers (above) turned in one of the best performances in Super Bowl history, connecting on of passes for yards and three touchdowns. GOAT: Ben Roethlisberger continued his record of poor play in the big game, firing a pair of interceptions and missing badly on a number of throws to open receivers. In three Super Bowl appearances, Roethlisberger has piled up five interceptions, and his struggles finally translated to a Super Bowl loss.
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DOTE: A Snickers spot provided the best advertising comedy, depicting a whining Roseanne Barr getting clobbered by a swinging log. GOAT: Groupon, the consumer coupon giant, delivered the greatest marketing fail with three ads attempting to spoof politically correct activism. Besides being unfunny, the worst of the efforts made light of political realities in Tibet and managed to offend Chinese and Tibetan viewers.
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DOTE: Joe Philbin, the Packers offensive coordinator, made an unconventional move in scrapping any pretense of a run game. The Packers handed the ball off just times, but the gamble paid off to the tune of yards and three touchdowns against one of the best defenses in football. GOAT: The Pittsburgh Steelers two-minute offense needed yards and a touchdown in the closing moments of the game, but managed just yards and a stall. The last chance drive looked anything but elegant as receivers ran incorrect routes, players broke huddles in the wrong direction, and time ticked away for lack of decisive play calling.
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DOTE: Clay Matthews, Green Bay’s passrushing specialist, hit Roethlisberger’s arm on a pass attempt late in the first quarter, sending the ball fluttering into the arms of teammate Nick Collins, who returned the interception yards for a touchdown. In the fourth quarter Matthews forced a fumble, setting up another Packers touchdown. GOAT: Troy Polamalu, Pittsburgh’s hard-hitting safety, was beaten on a number of big plays and finished with just three tackles for the game.
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DOTE: Cowboys Stadium proved a fortuitous choice as its enclosable roof spared the venue from the preceding week’s snowstorm. And the -foot-long, . million pound, high-definition screen hanging over the field guaranteed that even fans in attendance wouldn’t miss the game on .
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GOAT: Cowboys Stadium workers could not get , temporary seats secured in time. Staffers were able to reseat fans but initially barred ticketed fans from entering the game. These were later invited to watch in standing room areas or on monitors in a club level. The reimbursed the displaced three times the value of their tickets and offered free invitations to next year’s big game.
RODGERS: JAMIE SQUIRE/GETTY IMAGES • ROETHLISBERGER/AL BELLO/GETTY IMAGES • MATTHEWS/GARY A. VASQUEZ/AP • AGUILERA: FRANK MICELOTTA/PICTUREGROUP VIA AP IMAGES • BARR: AP • COWBOYS STADIUM/CHRIS O'MEARA/AP
DOTE: The Black Eyed Peas delivered an overthe-top cameo-laced half-time act worthy of the stage. Oh to have been among those back-up dancers: “You’ve made the cut to dance at the Super Bowl halftime show! There’s just one thing: any objections to wearing a giant glowing cube on your head?” GOAT: Christina Aguilera wanted to put her own spin on the national anthem, but hadn’t planned to rewrite the song. Things got a little awkward when the pop star mistakenly replaced the song’s fourth line with a slightly altered repeat of the second line.
Email: mbergin@worldmag.com
2/10/11 12:54 PM
THOMAS: CLIFF OWEN/AP • DOLLAR SYMBOL: ISTOCK
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Notebook > Money
DANGER AHEAD
Picking up steam BY JOSEPH SLIFE
>>
C upward climb that began in September, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above , in early February, a mark not hit since the before the financial crisis. Though rattled briefly by Middle East unrest in late January, investors chose to focus instead on strong earnings reports. “Corporate earnings are very strong with no sign of that letting up,” Marc Stern, chief investment officer at Bessemer Trust, told The Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, U.S. consumer confidence reached its highest level since November , according to a consumer-spending index from Discover Financial Services. That reading came on the heels of a Commerce Department report showing that consumer purchases for all of rose at their fastest pace in three years, aided by stronger-than-expected Christmasseason spending. Fourth-quarter economic growth was . percent, according to an initial estimate from the government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, up from . percent in the July-September period.
DOW JONES INDUSTRIAL AVERAGE Feb. 2011
12,000 10,000 8,000
2008
2009
2010
SOURCE: CNN MONEY.COM
—J.S.
A crisis studied THOMAS: CLIFF OWEN/AP • DOLLAR SYMBOL: ISTOCK
RODGERS: JAMIE SQUIRE/GETTY IMAGES • ROETHLISBERGER/AL BELLO/GETTY IMAGES • MATTHEWS/GARY A. VASQUEZ/AP • AGUILERA: FRANK MICELOTTA/PICTUREGROUP VIA AP IMAGES • BARR: AP • COWBOYS STADIUM/CHRIS O'MEARA/AP
Wall Street looks to a long-awaited recovery
“The United States faces a daunting fiscal outlook, both for the next few years and for the long term,” the Congressional Budget Office said in report examining economic trends and federal budget policy. The said the government would likely incur a record deficit of . trillion in fiscal year , causing the “debt held by the public” to rise to . trillion. Within a decade, the report said, the debt is expected to nearly double, to . trillion. “With such a large increase, along with an anticipated rise in interest rates as the economic recovery strengthens, interest payments on the debt are expected to skyrocket”—rising to just under billion a year by , according to the report. By comparison, in the government spent billion on interest.
After reviewing millions of pages of documents and holding days of hearings, a commission investigating the causes of the financial crisis concluded the crisis was “avoidable.” The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, created by Congress in , cited “widespread failures in financial regulation . . . dramatic breakdowns in corporate governance . . . an explosive mix of excessive borrowing and risk by households and Wall Street . . . [and] systemic breaches in accountability and ethics at all levels.” The final few pages of the group’s -page report featured dissenting views from the four Republicans on the -member commission. A dissent signed by three of the commis-
sioners (including Vice Chairman Bill Thomas,, a former congressman from California) said the leading cause of the crisis was an international credit bubble fueled by cheap investment capital coming from Middle East oil producers and China. A second dissent by Peter Wallison, a Treasury Department official during the Reagan administration, argued that “sine qua non of the financial crisis was U.S. government housing policy, which led to the creation of million subprime and other risky loans . . . [that] were ready to default as soon as the massive - housing bubble began to deflate.” —J.S.
Joseph Slife is the assistant editor of SoundMindInvesting.com
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WORLD
2/10/11 3:47 PM
Notebook > Religion
Fertility or fidelity?
Alarmist video highlights Muslim growth, but “Christians” may be their own worst enemies By Tim Dalrymple
>>
Are you among the millions who watched the “Muslim Demo graphics” video? It launched a thousand online and church discussions, but a new report from the Pew Forum gives a more measured take on the growth of the world’s Muslim population. The controversial video, first posted on YouTube in March 2009 and viewed over 12 million times since, sounded an alarm over declining Christian fertility rates: It predicted that Islam would become the world’s dominant religion in five to seven years. Some denounced the video as racist. Others, even if they saw the video as a wellintentioned attempt to spur
evangelism, merely found it alarmist and exaggerated, delivered as it was with an ominous soundtrack and a stream of dubious research. The Pew Forum’s report is also being used politically: The New York Times trum peted it as a direct repudia tion of the “hysteria” propagated by “far-right political parties” in the United States and abroad. The Pew scholars, though, used state-of-the-art data and demographics to show that the number of Muslims is likely to rise from the current 23.4 percent of the world’s population in 2010 to 26.4 percent in 2030. That puts the number still well behind the number of those who identify with
Christianity (strongly or loosely). Pew expects to release data on the world’s “Christian” population later this year, but other studies estimate it at 30 percent to 33 percent of the world. In the United States, the num ber of Muslims is likely to grow in the same period from 2.6 million to 6.2 million, or from 0.7 percent to 1.6 per cent of the population. The most questionable part of the Pew report is its assumption that forces of modernity will slow fertility rates among Muslims in the same way they have for nonMuslims. Pew projects the number of Muslims world wide to grow in the next 20 years at twice the rate of
non-Muslims, but then to level off due to improvement of living standards, migration to cities, and the education and professionalization of women. Maybe—but in any event, the Pew study strongly suggests that the “Muslim Demographics” video was exaggerated. If Europe becomes “Eurabia” anytime soon, declining faithfulness rather than fertility rates will probably be the major cause. According to Britain’s Office of National Statistics, just 32 percent of self-identified Christians in England and Wales “actively practice” their faith, compared to 80 percent of Muslims.
Web connections
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illustration: krieg barrie • warren: internet video
Christians have set aside times for prayer and fasting ever since the early church, and even Moses fasted for 40 days before receiving the Ten Commandments (Exodus 34:28). But it never looked quite like this before, with online collaborations of large numbers of churches growing increasingly common. Celebration Church in Jacksonville, Fla., has made a habit of praying and fasting each January for the year to come. Last year, the church invited other congregations to join it through the internet for a 21-day “Awakening Initiative.” This year the initiative linked over 1,000 churches representing over 1 million people around the world, with speakers such as Rick Warren and Craig Groeschel streamed every day. The Initiative’s goal is to help pastors and leaders develop a culture of prayer in their congregations and ministries—but it’s also one example of the way that church leaders are using the internet to share material and resources, and to mobilize large numbers of congregations simultaneously. —T.D.
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the world market Classifieds are priced at $23 per line with an average of 33 characters per line and a minimum of two lines. Bold text and uppercase available for $5 per line; special fonts and highlighting available for an additional charge. You will receive a 10 percent discount with a frequency of four or more. All ads are subject to the approval of world. Advertising in world does not necessarily imply the endorsement of the publisher. Prepayment and written confirmation will be required of all advertisers. contact: Dawn Stephenson, world, P.O. Box 20002, Asheville, nc 28802; phone: 828.232.5489; fax: 828.253.1556; email: dstephenson@worldmag.com
the Presbyterian Church in America, seeks to fill the position of Financial Planning Advisor (FPA). The FPA’s primary function is to provide confidential financial planning advice to PCA employees participating in the PCA Retirement Plan. The FPA will be a seasoned expert in all areas of personal financial planning and is expected to acquire detailed knowledge of all PCA retirement planning products and services. Please visit our website www.pcarbi.org and look under the “latest news” for a complete job description. Submit your resumé to Chet Lilly at clilly@pcarbi.org.
business opportunities
PUBLICATIONS I For intelligent, Biblically accurate, refreshingly helpful books on a believer’s conflict with real yet unseen “powers of darkness” please visit: Victory4You.net. I EVOLUTION NEEDS AN ADJECTIVE: Tossing Darwin Out of Science. An E-book by F.P. Nelson, M.D.; w ww.evolutionneedsanadjective.com.
school employment I CONO CHRISTIAN SCHOOL seeks Parent-Educator staff. See our ad in this issue. Thomas Jahl, Headmaster. thomas.jahl@cono.org. I Portsmouth Christian Academy, a 600-student, nondenominational Christian school located in Dover, NH, anticipates openings for the 2011-2012 school year. To submit an application, visit our website at www.pcaschool.org and select Employment Opportunities under the Contact tab. I Help prepare future leaders of Iraq! Join our team working with students and families at English-speaking Christian schools in secure northern Iraq. Visit www.csmedes.org today to learn more. I WHEATON ACADEMY AVAILABLE POSITIONS for 2011-2012 school year: Professional full-time: English teacher, Bible teacher, Spanish teacher, science teacher and graphic arts/visual arts teachers; part-time: French teacher; Staff part-time: Development assistant; Coaching: football, wrestling, girls’ basketball and drama instructor. The mission of Wheaton Academy, to nurture growth in students through excellence, relationships and service, to the Glory of God, has remained the centerpiece of everything that has gone on at our school since 1853. The most important element in making a WA education effective is the strong leadership of Living Curriculum TeachersSM. We believe LCTs must have a growing and dynamic relationship with Christ, must be excellent in their field, must hold high standards, and be capable of inspiring a range of students to reach their potential. If WA sounds like a good fit for you, please check our website www.wheatonacademy.org for current openings, or contact Christine Heubner at: employment@wheatonacademy.org.
college employment I Houston Baptist University, currently ranked third in “Schools on the Rise, Filled with Excitement” by First Things, is enjoying unprecedented revitalization and growth in many of its academic programs. In response, HBU is pleased to announce full-time faculty openings, as Assistant, Associate or Full Professor, in: History, English Literature, Philosophy, Rhetoric, Music, Print Making, Theology, Psychology/Christian Counseling, Education, Finance, Management, Marketing, Mathematics, and Nursing. Additionally, the university is pleased to offer post-doctoral positions in Pauline Theology. Finally, the university has open positions for the Dean of the Graduate
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School, the Dean of the School of Education, an Associate Dean for the School of Business and the Director of the School of Theology. For more information and to apply go to www.hbu.edu/jobs.
church employment I Executive Director: First Baptist Leesburg Florida seeks person to lead the Christian Care Center ministries and Medical Center for the indigent. Email aaayris@fbcleesburg; www.fbcleesburg.org.
opportunities I OPEN YOUR OWN READING CENTER: Make a difference in the lives of others. Operate from home. It’s needed. It’s rewarding. Great results. NOT a franchise. Earn $30-80/hr. We provide c omplete training and materials. www.academic-associates.com; (800) 861-9196.
ministry opportunities I Web Developer-Python: Would you like to work for a Christ centered ministry? Answers in Genesis/Creation Museum is looking for a dynamic person to fill our Web Developer-Python position. Here is what we are looking for: A Web Developer to coordinate with other developers on all current projects and willing to work on a diverse set of web applications for multiple platforms, juggling both large projects and urgent quick tasks. You must be proficient in: e XML: SOAP, RSS e AJAX, JSON e HTML5, CSS3 e JavaScript libraries (e.g. jQuery) e Web-oriented languages (e.g. Python and PHP) e Dynamic content with dynamic URLs and database-generated web pages Here is what you need to have to be considered: e Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related field e Practical experience developing in Python (ideally experience in Django) e Practical experience developing specifically for the web e Experience in JavaScript/jQuery a plus (procedural & OOP) e Experience with Flash/ActionScript a plus Do you think you are a great fit for our Web Developer-Python? If so, go to our website at www.answersingenesis or www.creationmuseum.org and review the entire job description on line. I Financial Planning Advisor: PCA Retirement & Benefits, Inc., an agency of
I Proverbs 31 Women and Others: Solid Ethics, Solid income. From Home. www.HomeBased4You.com. Call Beth (800) 867-1560. I Do You Want To Earn More Money? Call now and listen to what these people have done. Toll Free (866) 282-9890.
business for sale I International Christian Book Publishing House for Sale: This is one of the most recognized publishing companies in the world. Titles cover wide range of theological issues. This company is extremely well known with a WORLD-WIDE DISTRIBUTION NETWORK! Third party vendor handles all warehousing, shipping, customer service and ARs. The new owner can thus run the business from ANYWHERE! Potential buyer must have some knowledge of publishing and the publishing industry! Company has stable of FAMOUS authors, and is poised to be taken to the next level. Please! Serious inquiries only! Contact publish4sale@hotmail.com.
education I Homeschool Online Classes - 4th-12th Grade, Christian Worldview: Math, English, Bible, Science, Art, History, Business, Computer, Foreign Languages, Geography, Music, and unique electives. www.LandryAcademy.com. I Homeschooling? Need help with math? DIVE into Math with Interactive Video Lessons on CD-ROM that teach every lesson step by step in Saxon Math. Available for Math54 thru Calculus and Physics; $50 per title. Call us at (936) 372-9216; www.diveintomath.com.
journalism education I CU majors in journalism— www.cornerstone.edu/journalism.
church plants I US Military: Active, Reserves, and Retirees. P&R Church Plants Globally. Info: www. ministrytothemilitaryinternational.com.
real estate I Maine Properties. Recreational, woodland, investment & residential. Owner financing; w ww.themainelandstore.com; (207) 290-2901. I Moving? Get home listings, community info, connect with churches & schools. REALTOR of integrity. Biblical values; (800) 395-8556; www.ExodusNetwork.com. I NEED A CHRISTIAN REALTOR in the PHOENIX area? Call Dan or Carol Smith with Dan Smith Realty; (480) 820-6833; www.dansmithrealty.com.
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conferences I Greenville Seminary Theology Conference: Register now for the 2011 GS Spring Theology Conference on the Person and Work of the Holy Spirit, Mar. 8-10, Simpsonville, SC. www.gpts.edu/conference. See our ad on p. 4 of the Jan. 1 issue of WORLD; (864) 322-2717; info@gpts.edu.
camps I Summer Camps: Christian Worldview for 8th-12th graders: Theatre, Civil War, Politics, Christian Music Jam, Computer Programming, Biology, Journalism, Anatomy and Physiology, Law, Broadcasting, Physics, French, Spanish, Architecture, Voice, Photography, Missions, Art, C.S. Lewis, Violin: www.LandryAcademy.com.
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worship resources I DO YOU NEED A CHURCH PIANIST? We have piano CDs for churches to sing by! Hymns, Easter, Choruses, Praise - Call Worship Service Resources (877) 9776800. FREE DEMO! Special Church Pricing! www.wsrpianocds.com. Are you a mature C hristian 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? Do you believe Christ is Lord, the Bible is true, God has an eternal plan for each believer’s life, & this plan includes their business? 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!
2/7/11 3:32 PM
Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary www.rpts.edu • info@rpts.edu
200 YEARS IN 2010
Study under pastors.
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MAILBAG
“A bold venture” (. )
“The mule and the lamb” (. ) Marvin Olasky’s article about George Friedman’s new book presents a chilling analysis of our country’s past and present foreign affairs incompetence. Since our egos and arrogance have shown us to be international dunces rather than diplomats. Increasingly spoiled Americans vote according to “what’s in it for me” rather than what’s best for the country. Friedman’s book may well provide this country’s epitaph if we can’t bring ourselves to consider seriously the world’s real issues. , Edmonds, Wash. “Ending the fibbing” (. ) Having recently retired from the military, I believe that the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” will have dire consequences. Now gays can serve “openly.” What does that mean? How many additional hours of sensitivity training do the troops need now? Instead of combat training, we will conduct classes on how to tolerate straights, lesbians, homosexuals, cross-gendered, and those who are questioning. Where will this lead?
gender identity” to its policy defining offensive conduct. This year it decided to provide benefits to same-sex partners. So, now gays can be open about their sin even if it is offensive to Christians, Jews, and Muslims, but it’s not to make statements about it. Why does this not make sense? .
Chantilly, Va.
Duncanville, Texas
After reading “A bold venture,” my wife and I read from our favorite devotional book by Fredrik Wislof, in which he says: “Dear God, grant that the tapestry of my life may be properly woven. I give Thee the shuttle. Do with me as Thou wilt, if only Thy image may some day be the design in my tapestry when the threads of my life are cut off and the tapestry is judged.” From that I made the following mission statement: To have Christ’s image as the design in the tapestry of my life each day. . Lynnwood, Wash.
Zeway, Ethiopia /
.
Palatine, Ill.
Many thanks for your most recent article about a New Year’s mission statement. These seem to be very exciting times to be a Christian. As I read, listen, watch, and think, it seems that God is moving deeply in His church to help us do what you advocate: Step into those waters before they have parted.
around the world
Conduct in the military should be totally devoid of any sexual concerns. Troops need to react instinctively to commands, with implicit confidence that there are no ulterior motives in those commands. When David saw to it that Uriah was assigned the most dangerous position on the battlefield and then killed, surely the troops took notice and David’s credibility as a commander was destroyed. Our nation’s survival is not a social experiment.
St. Charles, Ill.
Two or three years ago my company added the phrase, “showing aversion toward an individual because of . . . sexual orientation, Send photos and letters to: mailbag@worldmag.com
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“Swearing off pork” (Jan. 15)
“Tron: Legacy” (Jan. 15)
The article by Emily Belz and Edward Lee Pitts was very enlightening. I pulled out my old four-function calculator to figure out the per “porkchop” price for those 9,000 earmarks in 2010, but it didn’t have enough digits to enter the entire $17 billion. Using my daughter’s school calculator, I came up with $1.9 million per pop. If Congress can’t cut down on earmarks, we’re in for continuing rough waters. Tim Sizemore
Freehold, N.J.
This was a great article highlighting the untiring efforts by a determined minority to stop the earmark gravy train, but you didn’t mention Sen. Jim DeMint’s heroic efforts. It was he who challenged the Senate last November to a two-year earmark ban. His persistence persuaded Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell to have a change of heart on the issue.
I had to groan when Rebecca Cusey stated that the reason to see Tron: Legacy “is for the experience. Lights flash. Radiating discs hurl through the air in 3D. The music pounds. In the end, you’re left exhausted and satisfied.” I couldn’t help but draw the parallels to Huxley’s Brave New World, in which people regularly go for entertainment to “the feelies,” sensational movies designed to satisfy the viewer with experience, not substance. In the end, the Savage says, “You’re . . . making works of art out of practically nothing but pure sensation. It all seems to me quite horrible.” Stephanie Webb
Plymouth, Ind.
“The pilgrim’s progress” (Jan. 15) The three wishes Andrée Seu suggested for the new year resonated with me. I’ve already begun to pray over each of them.
John Hutcheson
Megan Centers
Greenville, S.C.
“Choice denied” (Jan. 15)
Quotables (Jan. 15)
It is truly shocking that nurse Catherina Cenzon-DeCarlo was pressured to participate against her conscience in a late-term abortion. Shame on Mount Sinai Hospital. At the same time, she was not “forced” to participate. She was “pressured” to participate and she chose to give in. She could have refused and accepted the consequences, probably losing her job. But the value of human life far surpasses the value of one’s career. Geoffrey L. Willour
Brick, N.J.
“Worthy western” (Jan. 15) I was glad to see WORLD give a positive review of True Grit, but I have to point out that the film’s “comic gore” cannot be laid at the feet of the Coen brothers. The scene in which one bandit cuts off the fingers of another comes straight from the source, Charles Portis’ excellent novel, which is well worth reading even if you’ve seen the movie. Jordan M. Poss
Tiger, Ga.
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Tallahassee, Fla.
The comic implying new House Speaker John Boehner cries too easily is ill- conceived and insensitive. Anyone who does not become emotional about some things (especially patriotism or the achievement of a long-sought goal) should check his pulse. Thank goodness that Boehner does not control his emotions like an actor. We already have quite enough of those in Washington. Don Crawford Kirksville, Mo.
“Remaking a religion” (Jan. 15) Daniel Pipes suggests that yes, we should install faucets at airports to accommodate Muslim cab drivers. He compared it to establishing houses of worship, but I don’t think that is a reasonable comparison. If a cab driver needs water for ritual washing, he can carry a couple of gallons in his vehicle. He must not expect support for personal rituals to be integrated into society’s infrastructure. Brian Schwartz
Portland, Ore.
2/8/11 4:59 PM
“Not getting any younger” (. ) While I heartily agree that the retirement age must rise now (this Gen Xer plans on working to at least ), I still think that we need to increase immigration, a fundamental part of the building of this country. Perhaps fertility rates are falling in Mexico, but there are many other “prospects” in India, China, Africa, and elsewhere. A collaboration between industry and government would help both by drawing new talent for industry and new taxpayers for the government.
There’s still
health care for people of faith after health care “reform”
Simpsonville, S.C.
Dispatches (. ) Your brief item mentions Chatroulette as “the dubious and random video-chatting website.” I must say that “dubious” is far too mild a description. It is quite simply “pornographic.” Everyone I know who has gone to this site (children and adults) has been exposed to nudity and inappropriate sexual activity. How sad that it is such a popular site.
Blowing Rock, N.C.
“Long hours and little thanks” (. )
You mentioned Dr. Roland Stevens, a surgeon working in Zimbabwe at the Karanda Mission Hospital. We just visited this amazing hospital with a team from our church. We saw Jesus in the wards, in the children’s ward, in the faces of every caregiver. We are not the same.
Pittstown, N.J.
Correction Genesis : establishes marriage as the foundation of civil society (“A vanishing breed,” Jan. , p. ).
LETTERS AND PHOTOS Email: mailbag@worldmag.com Write: Mailbag, P.O. Box , Asheville, - Fax: .. Please include full name and address. Letters may be edited to yield brevity and clarity.
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For more information call us toll-free 1-888-268-4377, or visit us online at: www.samaritanministries.org. Follow us on Twitter (@samaritanmin) and Facebook (SamaritanMinistries). * As of January 2011
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Andrée Seu humdrum cohabitation, it is not God’s idea. Put away from you the fatalists who say: “Romance is a flame that dies but companionship is its consolation.” Put away those who believe that “letting yourself go” after the ring is on is normal. Not from heaven does such counsel come. “At your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm :). The Shulamite brings warning: “I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, . . . that you do not stir up or awaken love until it pleases” (:; :; :; :). She is so very much in love with this man that she doesn’t want her friends to forfeit this experience by forcing love prematurely, by taking matters into their own hands. (Also, note the emotional price tag for love—:-; :-.) The “daughters of Jerusalem” are cheerleaders, for our sakes. This love affair S S , through the centuries, as an enjoys the approval of objective onlookers and immovable testimony to God’s intention for man and is not some tawdry tryst that must keep a woman. It is a rebuke to our tiny loves, a constant goad to nervous lookout from men and from the light. our lackluster marriages. It calls drifting and depleted Tend your marriage, even if you think it is too couples back to the Creator’s ideal: Do not settle for less late. There is wonder-working healing in a touch, than joy. It is far from a manual, and yet in its poetry it a look, a word, an unexpected embrace. Nor is it shows how the secrets of connubial bliss are found in the artificial to work on love. C.S. Lewis reminds us readily available commodities of openness, verbal that a garden is not less beautiful for needing to affirmations, playfulness, occasional getaways, committed be weeded and fussed with (The Four Loves). oneness, and working through trials. “Catch the foxes for us, the little foxes that We thought we had made too much of love when we spoil the vineyards” (:). What are the little had made too little of it. We thought our songs too charged foxes but our with passion inconsiderateness, when they had laziness, resistance, fallen short. Our hard-heartedness, and honeymoons are a mere two weeks above all, unbelief? when God had suggested a year: Believe in love, for love “When a man is newly married, he is of God. Everything shall not go out with the army or in the universe is be liable for any other public duty. arrayed on its side. He shall be free at home one year The world has had to be happy with his wife whom he many songs since the has taken” (Deuteronomy :). world began, but this The ancients, embarrassed by one is the Song of the Song, stripped it clean of Songs. The Hebrew scents and touches. It is no shabby construction in the proof of divine inspiration that superscript indicates when the smoke cleared on the LOVE SONG: Painting by Domenico Morelli depicting the Song of Songs. the superlative. Tell me canon in the mid-third century, what is more superthe Song was still there. Cyril of lative, if you know. Whatever you propose, the Alexandria (-) made the two breasts of the Shulamite the Old and daughters of Jerusalem will spurn it and will say: New Testaments. The bearded ones were right that the Song is about Christ, “Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon but it is about Christ via the erotic love of husband and wife (“This mystery your arm, for love is strong as death, jealousy is is profound”—Ephesians :). fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, For some of us, the Song is not only helpful but essential. It gives the very flame of the Lord. Many waters cannot permission to be as in love as you want to be. It destroys the notion that quench love, neither can floods drown it. If a God grants romance as a concession but holds His nose. It debunks the man offered for love all the wealth of his house, notion of lovesickness as a brief biological agitation for the prosaic purpose he would be utterly despised” (:-). A of perpetuation of species. If your marriage passes from intoxication into
SUPERLATIVE SONG
Scripture has a powerful response for those who think that God dislikes romance
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Email: aseu@worldmag.com
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Marvin Olasky younger say abortion is wrong even if pregnancy is the result of rape, compared to percent of their elders. Only one in evangelicals, whether young or old, says abortion is right if a family can’t afford another child. Despite Washington temperatures in the s on Jan. , tens of thousands of younger evangelicals put their legs where their hearts are by joining the annual March for Life. Even the usually snarky Washington Post admitted that “more young people appeared to be participating than in previous years.” A decade ago many pro-life leaders worried about the graying of the movement: Those concerns are now gone. create lines in our On Feb. , -year-old Lila Rose threw foreheads? With and internet reports around the Planned Parenthood into a tizzy by showing with clock, it’s easy to become manic-depressive news an undercover video how a New Jersey branch of junkies—and that’s why I’m often called to be a America’s largest abortion provider was happy contrarian. Are you feeling good about “revolution” in to help a supposed pimp grow his sex-trafficking Egypt? See p. in this issue. Are you feeling bad about business with - and -year-old victims. Take domestic trends? Read on for good news concerning a look at her sensational work on YouTube. young Christians and pro-lifers. The abortion lobby, of course, is fighting back First, let’s take on pundits and pollsters who with attempts to discredit Rose and pro-life purportedly provide answers to the age-old question, crisis pregnancy centers. What’s the matter with kids today? Attacks on crisis pregnancy You’ve probably heard a typical moan: centers by abortion’s media They’re leaving the church, so gotta allies are nothing new: My wife become relevant, gotta take up liberal and I confronted one in Austin positions—or else the kids are gone. years ago, and we’ve seen You may even have seen shows answering to the the same smear attempts every question of “Are Young Evangelicals Skewing More five years or so elsewhere. We Liberal?” () and “Are Young Evangelicals Leaning played Austin AmericanLeft?” (). Statesman editors a tape that Hmm. Baylor University researchers Byron Johnson showed how their hatchetand Buster Smith, after crunching polling data about woman twisted quotations and evangelical political identifications and attitudes, have facts, but most reporters aren’t concluded that () younger evangelicals hold views so sloppy. similar to older evangelicals on most issues, and () So we need to keep fighting. young evangelicals remain significantly more Happily, a judge late last month conservative than non-evangelicals on those issues. SENSATIONAL WORK: Lila Rose. declared the Baltimore City Johnson and Smith found that age, among Council’s attempt at harassing non-evangelicals, is an important predictor of political crisis pregnancy centers () there to be a stance: percent of the young are liberal but only percent of those violation of freedom of speech. That decision older. Among evangelicals, though, percent of the young are conservamay give pause to the Washington state tive, percent of the older: No big deal. Maybe non-evangelicals have to legislature and the New York City Council, both learn from hard experience that liberalism doesn’t work, and evangelicals considering anti- bills. A Bronx Rally to Save know that from the Bible. (Only about one of evangelicals, young or old, the Life Centers on Feb. drew pastors and calls himself “liberal.”) other Christians, including leaders from The conservatism of young evangelicals is apparent issue by issue. Some predominantly black churches angry that percent say the use of marijuana is always or almost always wrong, abortionists kill most African-American babies. compared to percent of older evangelicals. You may have heard that “So we beat on, boats against the current, young evangelicals accept homosexual marriage, but the survey says borne back ceaselessly into the past.” That’s the otherwise: The old ( percent) oppose it, but the young ( percent) oppose concluding line of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great it even more. Only on issues like “global warming” is there a young/old Gatsby, and Christians always beat against the divide among evangelicals, with the young much more concerned. current—but some worried two years ago that we And here’s the particularly good news: Younger evangelicals are more might be swamped. No way. Thanks be to God. A pro-life than older ones. To take the hardest case, percent of the
NO LEFT TURN
H
Young evangelicals are pro-life, not pro-liberal
WORLD FEBRUARY 26, 2011
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